Goethe University Frankfurt - History

History

The University of Frankfurt has at times been considered liberal, or left-leaning, and has had a reputation for Jewish and Marxist scholarship (or even Jewish-Marxist). Thus, during Nazi times, "almost one third of its academics and many of its students were dismissed for racial and/or political reasons—more than at any other German university" (University homepage). It also played a major part in the German student riots of 1968.

The University of Frankfurt is historically best known for the Institute for Social Research (founded 1924), institutional home of the Frankfurt School, a preeminent 20th century school of philosophy and social thought. Some of the most famous University of Frankfurt scholars are associated with this school, including Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin. Others include the sociologist Karl Mannheim, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, the philosophers of religion Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich, the psychologist Max Wertheimer, and the sociologist Norbert Elias.

In recent years, Goethe University has turned its attention especially to law, history and economics, creating new institutes, such as the Institute for Law and Finance (ILF) and the Center of Financial Studies (CFS). One of the university's ambitions is to become Germany's leading university for finance and economics, given the school's proximity to one of Europe's financial centers. Therefore, Frankfurt University's Goethe Business School developed a new M.B.A. program, in cooperation with Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Today the university's Business School offers a number of programs including a Full Time MBA. Goethe university has established an international award for research in financial economics, the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics.

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