It's not your great-great-grandmother's university

Once upon a time, in a faraway land called academia, all professors were equal and received the same salary. Their university president came from within their ranks, and had to be chosen by a faculty vote.

Nobody really wanted that job because it came with an augmentation of pay so ridiculously low that most professors thought it was a waste of valuable research time. Only those who were willing to sacrifice, and noble-minded enough to work for the common good of the university, threw their hat in the ring.

And no, this wasn't the Soviet Union or some other communist dystopia. This was the original concept of research universities, designed as classless academic republics where new knowledge was considered priceless — no matter what the field or discipline. The department of philosophy was valued just as much as the department of economics.

Funny that this egalitarian model of higher education, more or less persisting in Europe to this day, was invented in Berlin, capital of the Prussian kingdom, which is better remembered for its merciless military discipline than its anti-authoritarian impulses. Academic freedom was also invented there. It meant that while the king was the namesake of the new Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, his majesty wasn't allowed to mess with its faculty or students and had to stay out of the academic republic's business.

The University of Minnesota is not a classless republic. It is actually run by its king (or queen), who doesn't answer to his/her subjects — let alone get elected by those lowly folk — but only to the campus nobility aptly named regents. "Regent" can be best translated from Latin as "kingmaker" or "elector" since their main task is to select the president and spare the university community the trouble of a democratic vote.

This and the monarch's royal remuneration of roughly $1 million — which recently was set by the campus nobility and sounds like a number from a medieval fable — has a truly feudal ring and reminds one more of the Holy Roman Empire than a modern research university.

Here is something else that's changed. The Prussian research university didn't rely on tuition, nor does its modern European offspring. The king donated the buildings and financed faculty salaries and laboratories. Once the monarchy was gone and the rest of the country became a republic, the taxpayer became the main sponsor of universities.

This is why, to someone from continental Europe, fees and tuition at the U sound just as obscenely high as the president's compensation. But I guess the money for the royal household must come from somewhere.

And when I think about it, if the U went fully feudal with its financing model, it might actually be to the advantage of today's students. After all, royal subjects had to relinquish only one-tenth of their personal income to the crown.

Henning Schroeder is a professor at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic and Dutch. His e-mail address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.