European Graduate School

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European Graduate School
*Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien*

Established	1994
Type	Private Institute
Rector	Paolo J. Knill
Students	ca. 600
Location	Leuk, Switzerland
Campus	Saas-Fee
Faculty	1 (full-time), ca. 100 (part-time)
Website	egsuniversity.org

The European Graduate School (EGS) in Switzerland is a privately funded graduate school founded by the non-profit European Foundation of Interdisciplinary Studies. Its German name is Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien ("European University for Interdisciplinary Studies"). It is governed by a presidential board that includes a representative of the Swiss canton of Valais. Instruction is in English.

1 History
2 Faculty
3 Intercollegiate connections
4 Controversy
5 See also
6 Notes and references
7 External links

[edit] History

EGS was established in 1994 for the purpose of providing continuing education for professionals. It is a postgraduate degree-granting school with two divisions: Media and Communications and Arts, Health and Society.

[edit] Faculty

EGS has only one faculty in residence, Wolfgang Schirmacher, the dean of Masters and Ph.D. programs in Media and Communication. Visiting faculty typically come during the 3 week summer seminar to give a 1-6 day course. Visiting faculty have included Judith Butler, Jean Baudrillard,^[1] Yve-Alain Bois,^[2] DJ Spooky ^[3], Christian Marclay, Sandy Stone^[4] Donna Haraway, Klaus Ottmann, Tracey Emin, Christopher Fynsk, John Waters,^[5] Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell^[6] and Caveh Zahedi.^[7] Studies are primarily via the internet; students attend two three-week summer seminars in Switzerland, during which they attend 2-3 day classes with visiting lecturers^[8] and spend their final year writing a thesis or dissertation.

Jean-Luc Nancy and students at EGS, June 11, 2006

Slavoj Žižek described his involvement in EGS in an interview with Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche:

There is an international summer school, the European Graduate School. It's for professionals who only have a few weeks per year for their continued education. They go there for two or three seasons, pay and get a speedy certification, a master's or doctor's. What's interesting with this school is the selection of the lecturers – there are somewhat well-known philosophers and artists from the whole world, including the filmmakers Peter Greenaway and Volker Schlöndorff and the philosophers Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and I. We three are friends. We meet there each year, are engaged for three weeks. I can bring my wife, do a 90 minute lecture each morning and am free afterwards.^[9]

[edit] Intercollegiate connections

EGS has established curricular cooperation with the Graduate School of Music and Theater, Hamburg as well as Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. and the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

In addition, EGS is engaging in an international collaboration with Beit Berl College and Resling Publishing House for the publishing of the translation of the book “Stupidity” by Prof. Avital Ronell. Beit Berl describes itself as "the largest academic college in Israel".

[edit] Controversy

In 1999, Swiss business magazine CASH reported that Schirmacher had misleadingly labeled the school "fully Swiss-state approved" and "fully recognized" at a time when the federal accreditation law was still being passed, and the canton had only approved the Ph.D. and M.A. degrees, but not the school itself. As of 2006, the Swiss federal Center of Accreditation and Quality Assurance [1] has not listed the EGS among its accredited universitites, but only lists the school having concluded the preliminary examination for accreditation.^[10] The magazine also claimed that Schirmacher had listed chaos theorist Mitchell Feigenbaum and artist Pipilotti Rist among its roster of faculty, even though both denied involvement in and knowledge of the school.^[11]