The project discusses university calendars and their time regimes as individual constructs of social groups. The Academic Year is understood as an institutionalized and objectified form being constitutional for the identity of those groups. The main thesis is that calendars did not only conduce to the arrangement of dates and the division of years and months, but created a hub for a corporate spirit by the distinction of times according to certain qualities. Every university and faculty obtained a characteristic profile—a symbolic order—by its individually formed cycle of the year. This so-called Academic Year is examined concerning its genesis, ordering efforts, and performance. With its praxeological approach intersecting Historical Chronology, Historiography, Historical Anthropology, Cultural Philosophy, Theology, and Liturgy Sciences, this project aims to be an interdisciplinary contribution to pre-modern academic culture.
Furthermore, it is intended to critically illuminate the widely discussed structure and identity crisis of the European universities, especially concerning the Bologna Process, and the adaptation to concepts and strategies from economics for the creation of identities. As far as the supporters of the Bologna Reforms are concerned, the Academic Year would have already been synchronized and harmonized. In Germany, for example, since the decision of the “Association of Universities and other Higher Education Institutions” (“Hochschulrektorenkonferenz”) to adapt the lecture periods to the dominant model of Europe and the US until September 2010, and thereby following a demand of the Glasgow Declaration, nothing has fundamentally changed concerning the temporal organization of German universities. The lack of sensibility for a historically grown and thus culturally achieved diversity in this still ongoing discussion is addressed by this study.