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The impact of higher education reforms on teaching at faculty level in Germany has seldom been explored. Research on teaching at university so far centres on how to teach. Yet, before any (best) practice can take place, teaching requires a specific site where a specific teacher meets a specific number of students. To bring about teaching, teaching loads have to be matched with student numbers, which to a large degree depends on how existing policies interact. Drawing on actor-network theory, we show that due to a peculiar entanglement of the products of present as well as past policies – staff planning charts, curricular norm values, student numbers, block grants, etc. – in several cases administration defines teaching loads higher than the actual teaching staff at faculty level can provide. In order to close this gap, faculties have to accommodate a teaching load that is true to administrative calculations but fictional in reality. Paradoxically, the only way to do so within the given policy entanglement is to use academics for teaching on the premise that they explicitly do not count as teachers: they have to remain disconnected from the teaching faculty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article does not follow the widespread assumption or even conviction that the Bologna process is the most important reform of higher education in Europe in modern times. Instead it analyses the Bologna process in the context of previous and ongoing programmes, measures and activities by European bodies and national governments aiming at mobility, exchange and cooperation in European higher education like 'Bologna' does. The attempt by the national ministers of higher education to establish the Bologna process as an intergovernmental process explicitly outside the EU is scrutinized. In assessing the achievements of the Bologna process it is argued that it is defeating its own aims by over-expansion and programmatic overload. The concluding assessment of the implementation of 'Bologna' in Germany looks at the inconsistencies and problems of the process rather than supporting the official success story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]