“Things that are impossible elsewhere are possible at the Justus Liebig University,” said Joybrato Mukherjee after his election as President of the University of Giessen. In July of last year, the linguistics specialist from India – then 35 years old – became the youngest president of a state university in Germany. Yet the seemingly “impossible” is actually not that surprising. For Joybrato Mukherjee has had a stunning career. He was a high flyer at school. As a student his outstanding performance quickly attracted attention. Full of determination, he did his degree and doctorate, qualified as a professor and – at the age of 29 – was appointed to the Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Giessen. He became the university’s first vice-president in 2008. Now he is its president.
Joybrato Mukherjee is not very interested in all the fuss people make of him. In fact, he says, he had re-ally wanted to be a secondary-school teacher. That was his dream. He had never worked towards his present position. But then a few “coincidences” brought him to where he is today. For example, during his internship (the second part of his training as a teacher) an assistant position became vacant at the university, giving him an opportunity to write his post-doctoral thesis. Later, as first vice-president at the University of Giessen, he soon had to take over the duties of the president, who was seriously ill. But before that, after the long-term president Professor Stefan Hormuth announced that he would no longer be available for a third period of office, he realized that he would have to think about his future in the university administration. He considered it, ran for the job as Hormuth’s successor, and was elected.
Jürgen Esser, Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bonn, has been his academic patron, his doctoral and postdoctoral supervisor. He discovered Mukherjee early on at RWTH Aachen University. “Joybrato already struck me as intelligent and well-organized in an introductory lecture on phonetics.” Esser quickly made him an assistant even before the intermediate examination. He was particularly fascinated by the fact that Mukherjee was actually always doing two things at once: “He did his community service (the alternative to military service) during his studies. He worked on a supermarket checkout during his time as a student assistant. And he wrote his doctoral thesis during his internship. That’s phenomenal!” Yet Esser stresses that Mukherjee was never a careerist, but always linked the intellectual side of life with the human side and placed a lot of emphasis on social contacts.
Mukherjee is aware of his special role, but doesn’t make much fuss about it. “I know I’m in the spotlight as a second-generation immigrant. But my immigrant background has never been an issue in my academic career.” His father had come to Düren in the early 1960s as an trainee for a farm-equipment company, he explains with a slight Rhineland accent. There, Mukherjee grew up according to the principle that “you have to be embedded in the culture where you live”. To this extent, although he also has an Indian side to him when it comes to culture, he says his home is Germany and his preferred language German. At the age of 18 he opted for German citizenship. It was not until after becoming a professor at Giessen that he had any professional contact with his parents’ home country. Again this happened by chance. Today, “Indian English” is one of his main areas of research.
Does he still have any time for research and teaching these days? “I still want to offer students at least one lecture or seminar per semester,” says Mukherjee. His talent of being able to do two things at once is quite useful in this context, of course. Although his work as president takes up most of his working time, he doesn’t want to lose contact with his own specialist field. As university president, he is currently pushing forward with the preparations for the second round of the German higher education Excellence Initiative. Moreover, the process of internationalization begun by his predecessor is also very high on his agenda. “We must agree strategic partnerships in all the regions of the world. This is dear to my heart, as I’m sure you can tell.”
Mukherjee believes that the University of Giessen in the state of Hesse has an excellent starting position. It is a comprehensive university, and a national and international leader in several fields, e.g. in parts of cognitive and perceptual psychology, lung research, veterinary medicine, the agricultural sciences, and not least Englisch studies, his own field. “We have a unique profile in the whole life-sciences complex, putting us in a top-class position Germany-wide,” Mukherjee says. “And in cultural studies we are ahead of our time in some areas. For example, from 1997 to 2009 we took part in the Collaborative Research Centre on Cultures of Memory, focusing among other things on traumatic war memories. These topics are becoming increasingly topical.” Anyone who knows Mukherjee realizes that he won’t stop there, and that he will continue making things possible that seem impossible.
