That Time I Worked So Hard To Become A Tenure State University Lecturer But My Most Passionate Student Turned Out To Be A Retired German Mathematician Who Doesn't Even Want A Diploma

Muhammad Nida' Fadlan, M.Hum.
(Doctoral Student at the University of Cologne, German)

Moving to Germany on a government scholarship brought a lot of changes, but nothing prepared me for the sight of white-haired grandmas and grandpas casually sitting in university lecture halls. Back home in Indonesia, this just doesn't even make sense for me. If you see elderly people gathering in my hometown, they are usually at the neighborhood mosque listening to a religious sermon, not sitting behind university desks as actual, enrolled students.

Yet, here they were in Germany, officially working toward their bachelor degrees.

It all started when my doctoral supervisor asked me to fill in and teach some of his undergraduate classes. The course was on Islamic studies, focused on Indonesia. As a former santri who grew up in a traditional Islamic boarding school, my immediate instinct was to say big YES. You just don't turn down a request from your teacher.

Even so, I spent days over-preparing my slides. Having gone through the Indonesian school system my entire life, I was terrified of the legendary, razor-sharp critical thinking of European students. My supervisor noticed how nervous I was and laughed it off, telling me not to worry because they were just freshmen who didn't know anything yet.

His words gave me some comfort, but the moment I stepped into the classroom, my cultural assumptions went out the window.

Right there, scattered among the teenagers, were several elderly faces. After class, I quietly went up to my professor and asked if they were retired faculty members just dropping in out of curiosity. He smiled and said that they were just regular undergrads.

What blew me away wasn't just that they were there, but how incredibly invested they were. They listened with absolute focus, scribbled down pages of notes, and threw out brilliant, challenging questions, completely unbothered by the fact that the person teaching them was young enough to be their grandson.

By the end of the semester, about seven senior citizens were regularly attending. After the final lecture, I ended up chatting with one of the women. Judging by the deep wrinkles on her face, she had to be at least seventy. On her desk, right next to a laptop and a thick stack of books, was a bicycle helmet. She had ridden her bike to campus.

I was packing up my bag when she walked up to me. She thanked me for the class, telling me she found my lecture on Indonesian Mysticism fascinating. She then casually mentioned that she had traveled to the Sultanate of Oman a few times just to see how Muslims live.

I looked at her, completely baffled, and asked how on earth she managed the scorching Middle Eastern heat at her age.

Her answer stopped me in my tracks. She told me she was a retired mathematician. For decades, her life had been entirely about numbers because of her job. But the moment she retired, she decided to spend her free time mastering Arabic. To prove it, she immediately switched languages and started talking to me in basic, conversational Arabic.

When I asked if she was stressed about getting her degree, she just laughed. She told me she was enrolled as a regular student but didn't care about the diploma at all. She was doing this purely to keep her mind alive during retirement.

I stood there in a daze, watching her walk away. This woman had literally flown across the world to the Middle East for research, yet she couldn't care less about a piece of paper.

That encounter left me with so many questions. What keeps that intellectual fire burning so bright when you are seventy? And what is the German government doing right to make universities a place where elderly people actually want to hang out?

From a social standpoint, Germans have a deep culture of lifelong learning. For them, retirement isn't a waiting room for old age, nor is it a phase where you are expected to just stay home and babysit the grandkids. It is seen as a new chapter of absolute freedom. It is their chance to finally chase the hobbies and interests they had to shelf when they were younger because of career and family pressures. They know that keeping the brain active is the best way to stay sharp and beat loneliness.

But a beautiful mindset means nothing if the system doesn't back it up. The only reason that seventy-year-old grandma could casually bike to campus is because Germany treats higher education as a basic right, not a business.

The biggest game-changer is that public universities don't charge tuition. Whether you are an eighteen-year-old fresh out of high school or a seventy-year-old retiree, college is free. Students only pay a tiny semester contribution fee of a few hundred euros, which is nothing compared to the local wages.

On top of that, that small fee doesn't go toward fat executive bonuses. It pays for student services and includes a universal transit pass that lets you ride trains and buses across the entire country for free.

Academically, the system is built to welcome seniors through audit programs and guest-student tracks. Universities throw their doors wide open for anyone who wants to sit in on regular lectures without the crushing anxiety of exams, heavy assignments, or GPA targets.

Unlike the high-stress regular admissions, this guest track doesn't care about entrance exams or age limits. You register based on pure curiosity. This simple policy completely strips away academic snobbishness. The campus stops being an exclusive club for ambitious young career-hunters and becomes a true, multi-generational community space.

Sitting there in Germany, my mind kept drifting back home, and I felt a deep ache for our own universities.

In Indonesia, higher education has fallen into a transactional trap. Culturally, we train our kids to see college purely as a job factory. We pass down the same old script to study hard, graduate fast, get a corporate job, and secure the future. Even university social media accounts are flooded with brag posts about rich alumni, as public campuses obsess over international rankings while their internal systems are falling apart.

Policy-wise, our universities are surrounded by massive walls of discrimination. The most frustrating one is the strict age limit. If you want to take the national university entrance exams, your high school graduation year is policed. In Indonesia, your right to learn comes with an expiration date.

Worse yet, the system throws absurd hurdles at people with disabilities, like forcing visually impaired students to navigate complicated websites just to upload a physical medical certificate proving they are blind, completely ignoring how user-unfriendly the technology is for them in the first place.

And then, there is the financial wall. The recent, massive protests over skyrocketing tuition fees prove that higher education in Indonesia is turning into an elite luxury.

If our own young people, the actual future of the nation, have to bleed financially just to keep their seats in a classroom, how can we ever dream of giving our retirees the luxury of learning?

As I write this, I can still picture that retired German mathematician’s smile. It feels like a quiet reality check for my own identity as a santri.

Theologically, every Muslim child in Indonesia is taught the famous saying 'to seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave' and our cultural traditions are full of beautiful words about learning throughout life. The bitter irony is that these sacred principles remain trapped as empty talk, used only for Friday sermons or cheap political campaigns.

That German grandma isn't a symbol meant to make us blindly worship the West. She is a mirror showing us how deeply Indonesia is sleeping. We need to wake up and do the hard work of building an education system that is genuinely fair, human, and open to every single citizen, no matter how old they are.

This article was published on Media Indonesia in July 3, 2026.