Interview with Sigrid Metz-Goeckel

Abstract

Sigrid Metz-Goeckel was born in 1940 in Upper Silesia and moved to West Germany in 1950. She is professor emerita at the Center for Collegiate Teaching at the Technische Universität Dortmund [Technical University of Dortmund], where she spent her 40-year-career in higher education. She credits her widowed mother’s recognition of the importance of education for her success in academia. Growing up in wartime Upper Silesia, postwar Poland and then Eastern Frisia in West Germany, Metz-Goeckel moved around frequently and attended both German and Polish schools. She studied sociology in Mainz, Frankfurt, and Gießen, with Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Helge Pross among her teachers. The latter, who was the second woman to become a sociology professor in West Germany, was her PhD advisor. Pross’ encouragement was instrumental in convincing her to pursue an academic career. In 1976, Metz-Goeckel accepted a call to the Technical University of Dortmund, where she established the Center for Collegiate Teaching and the Women’s Studies program. She has led multiple large research projects on gender, parenting, and academic success as well as migration to Germany, particularly on Polish migrants in care work, and has published widely. Another focus of her work has been establishing networks among female academics and building relationships with decision makers in politics, such as the education ministers of North Rhine-Westphalia. Metz-Goeckel has held visiting professorships in Berkeley, Paris, Cracow, and Wellesley College. Over the course of her career, she has advised almost seventy PhD students. In the interview, she describes this aspect of her work as “the most beautiful part of my academic work.”