316 Kant: A Biographywriting. Kant did not especially distinguish himself in this regard. Not that he con¬
sidered these matters as unimportant. No! But they required a kind of statutory knowl¬
edge that he never had the desire to acquire in its full extent. They also required a kind
of business-like life that he was incapable of living. This was the reason why in such
cases he dealt with these matters routinely when he had to act on his own. But when it
was a matter of the academic community, he went along with the plurality vote."^180
Kant, according to this view, did not assume a leading role in the univer¬
sity. Hippel, who said that Kant and Kraus might be great scholars but that
they were incapable of "ruling a land, a village, or even a chicken coop - not
even a chicken coop," clearly believed that this was the case.^181
This is an exaggeration. To be sure, measured by Hippel's own organi¬
zational talents, Kant fell short. Yet even if Kant did not know how to rule,
he knew how to influence people within the university context; and if he
never "contradicted the plurality vote," it was perhaps because he was at
least to some extent responsible for the way the vote went. It was no acci¬
dent that most of the major appointments to the faculty of philosophy at
the University of Königsberg after Kant's promotion to full professor
were such that he either did or could have endorsed them. It was no acci¬
dent that his students Kraus and Pörschke were later his colleagues. It was
not an accident that the court preacher Schulz, his staunchest defender,
received a professorship in mathematics, and that the entire philosophical
faculty thus acquired a more and more Kantian outlook. Kant took an ac¬
tive interest in this outcome. He pulled strings to get the results he de¬
sired, and he knew what he was doing.
He also took an interest in other matters, such as the status of the poor,
the relation of the university to the military offices, and in the role of the fac¬
ulty of medicine in the university.^182 Administrative matters, without doubt,
were of secondary concern to him. Yet this does not mean that they were
unimportant as far as he was concerned. As we will see, they were a signifi¬
cant part of his life, not only because they took up much of his time, but also
because some issues were important from his enlightened point of view.^183
Hamann, Kraus, Hippel, and others called him "the theoretician." Fred¬
erick William II thought highly of the "theoretician" at this point. He not
only arranged through the count of Herzberg to meet Kant, but he also
gave him a yearly bonus of 220 Thalers from his own account.^184 At the
end of 1786, Kant became a member of the Academy of Sciences in Ber¬
lin.^185 Some of Metzger's frustration had to do with just this.
Rink, who was a student of Kant from the summer semester of 1786 on,
described Kant's relation to his colleagues as follows: