Grünberg positioned the Institute against universities as mandarin-training factories

Evidence

On Sunday, 22 June 1924, at 11 a.m., the academic ceremony celebrating the opening of the Institute of Social Research was held in the hall of Frankfurt University. The Institute was a square building designed to be functional both inside and out. Grünberg took the occasion to make a speech outlining his programme. The Volksstimme, the SPD newspaper, described the speech as fine, deeply felt, clear and courageous', and in the view of the middle-class liberal paper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, the speech was vivid and self-critical’. These descriptions of the speech scarcely mentioned that Grünberg spoke of the universities as teaching institutes, as institutes for the education of mandarins, and as factories providing society with mass education for its future officials. Nor did they mention that he emphasized this aspect in contrast with the significance of research institutes, among which the Institute of Social Research stood out in view of its particularly broad research character. Nor did these descriptions of the speech make any particular mention of the fact that Grünberg contrasted institutes which had a collegial constitution with the Institute of Social Research, in which `a dictatorship of the director, so to speak’, had been laid down. The newspaper reports referred, above all, to the part of the speech in which Grünberg provided information on how he intended to exploit the advantages of the Institute: However that may be, in our Institute it seems to me that sharing the directorship, especially with individuals of other ideological or methodological viewpoints, is quite out of the question. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 85

Categorization

• CANDY: The founding director explicitly called the university a ‘factory providing mass education’ and the Institute a ‘dictatorship of the director’ — a delicious founding-myth contradiction for cocktail conversation.
• ADDENDUM: Ties to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s theme of institutional offshoots, and more directly to the Frankfurt School’s self-understanding as an institution distinct from the university it sat within.
• XREF: connects to: Grunberg’s directorship gave the Institute institutional solidity and Weimar footing — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 160

Broader Connections

• Grunberg’s directorship gave the Institute institutional solidity and Weimar footing #corroborates (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 160