In 2008, the Academic Society suspends the awarding of its research prizes in order to support the university’s efforts in the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal Government with its financial resources.

From 1970 onwards, the Academic Society begins to make regular use of research prizes awarded to emerging scholars for the purpose of furthering their careers. It consistently awards prizes for outstanding academic work, usually in the form of dissertations. From 1974 to 1983, an annual prize is also awarded for a “scholarly sound presentation of research results in a generally understandable form.” From 2002, the Academic Society awards only one annual prize. It is awarded for “outstanding research work or a significant discovery or invention.”

The Academic Society celebrates its first half century: Its balance up to this point shows that over two thousand research projects have been funded to the tune of some 1.1 million Deutschmarks. The jubilee is celebrated in the crowded Aula of the KG I building (pictured along with the new KG II building inaugurated in the same year). The society is now in a position to distribute funding of more than a hundred thousand Deutschmarks annually. Its first half century has been characterised by a blossoming of research and scholarship in the 1920s and 1930s, but also by two world wars and drastic currency devaluations. The Academic Society funds the publication of the “Freiburger Universitätsblätter” journal
together with the Friends of the University of Freiburg im Breisgau Association (Verband der Freunde der Universität Freiburg e.V.).
It is still published quarterly today.

More people are involved in the Academic Society than ever before. Its register of members has 306 entries, and they include 33 local authorities from around the region and numerous well-known enterprises like the broadcasting company Südwestfunk and the publisher Herder. The contribution of the Academic Society of the University of Freiburg to the university’s five-hundredth anniversary celebrations in 1957 includes the printing of a four-volume work, “Die Matrikel der Universität Freiburg i. Br.” that lists and analyses enrolment at the university from its beginnings. It also funds the celebrations with a donation of fifty thousand Deutschmarks. The anniversary fundraising campaign under the patronage of Federal Chancellor Dr Konrad Adenauer receives donations from all over Germany: Its initiators are able to add around half a million Deutschmarks to the society’s assets.

In May 1945, the Academic Society provides a loan of four hundred thousand Reichsmarks – a third of its assets at the time – for renovations to the University Hospital (picture). Its pool of assets has swelled to more than one million Reichsmarks thanks to donations received from numerous members until well into the thirties. They included the City of Freiburg, the brewery Ganter, and the companies Rodiaseta AG and Gütermann. Soon, however, the Academic Society will lose almost all its assets again in the currency reform of 1948.

The Academic Society, founded a mere nine years ago, already holds assets of 2.1 million Goldmarks. Since its founding, it has supported numerous research projects at the University of Freiburg, worked to support the university library, and funded archaeological excavations in Egypt together with the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. But then the hyperinflation crisis strikes, and its assets shrink dramatically. The benchmark of one million Marks – now Reichsmarks – is not reached again until 1937. In addition to various smaller projects, the society uses its income to fund the expansion of the Department of Physics, repairs to the KG I building after fire damage, and the KG1 extension.

The University of Freiburg needs a new main building at the beginning of the 20th century. That is reason enough for members of the university, former students, and other committed individuals to collect donations – which then reach such a volume that the “Academic Society in Freiburg im Breisgau” is founded. Its purpose is to ensure that the funds that have been donated are used wisely over the long term. More than half a million Goldmarks in donations form the initial capital that generates revenue used to support research at the university. The official founding of the society is announced during the ceremonial inauguration of the new university building now known as KG I (picture) on October 28, 1911. Privy Councillor Dr Albert Bürklin is its first chairperson.