The Origin of the Research University
Universities have existed for more than a thousand years — and for almost all of that time, they weren’t centers of research. What changed in 19th century Germany?
by Clara Collier
If you were alive in 1800 and someone asked you about the future of research, it wouldn’t occur to you to mention the university. Real scholarship happened in new, modern, enlightened institutions like the British Royal Society or the French Académie des sciences. Universities were a medieval relic. And nowhere was it more medieval, hidebound, and generally dysfunctional than in the German-speaking world.
But something happened to German universities at the turn of the 19th century — they developed a new system that combined teaching with research. Within a few decades, everyone in Europe was trying to copy their model. German scientists dominated chemistry and revolutionized modern physics. They came up with cell theory, bacteriology, the whole laboratory-based model of scientific medicine, and I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that they invented the social sciences in almost full generality. By the end of the century, they were the greatest engine of organized knowledge production the world had ever seen — and if they’ve since been surpassed by the American university system, that’s mostly because we copied them.
I think we don't properly appreciate how surprising this is. It’s odd that the research university exists at all. Universities have been around for a thousand years, but for most of their history, they were not seen as institutions for producing new knowledge. It’s even stranger that it came to be in a land which was politically fragmented, lacked a strong scientific community, and had very limited interest in creating one.
So I can’t help but ask: Why Germany? Why universities? Why does the entire modern institutional research ecosystem look the way it does? Does this history have anything to tell us about how to navigate an era of intense hostility and pessimism towards academia? (No promises!) Who made this thing? Were they even trying to? And why does it work so well?
German universities in the age of Enlightenment
Scholars at early modern universities did research — but it was on their own time. Universities in early modern Europe were teaching institutions. Their primary purpose was to produce priests, lawyers, and doctors. To this end, they had four traditional faculties: theology, law, medicine, and what the Germans called philosophy. This last included everything that might be part of a modern arts and sciences education — any subject, from poetry to physics, which wasn’t directly pre-professional. Of the four, it was by far the least prestigious and worst attended. Professors were paid exclusively for lecturing, usually not very much, and professors of the arts and sciences were paid the least of all.
Starting in the 16th century, these factors tended to push the people most interested in advancing human knowledge outside of universities. The trend started in astronomy. Copernicus, Brahe, and Galileo all began their careers as university professors, and all left for positions as civil servants or court astronomers which offered more money and more freedom. (Kepler, because of his heterodox approach to Lutheranism, was never able to secure a university chair at all.) Some universities tried to invest in experimental facilities — an observatory at Utrecht, a chemical laboratory at Altdorf — but these couldn’t compete with the great private or government-funded facilities being built in England and France. While many intellectuals stayed in academia, leading scholars were more and more likely to take up better offers elsewhere. The intellectual center of gravity shifted from universities to the international republic of letters.
German universities in the Age of Enlightenment shared all of these problems and more. Their curriculum was, quite literally, medieval. So were their endowments. Hiring was rife with nepotism — and even when it didn’t involve replacing a professor with someone’s son or son-in-law, it was loosely related to any modern conception of academic merit. Specialization was non-existent. It hardly mattered if a professor of oriental languages could read Hebrew or Arabic, so long as he had adequate seniority, and a poetry professor who wanted a raise might well be handed an additional chair in mathematics. The students were menaces, given to drunkenness, gambling, dueling, and chronically skipping class.
Everyone agreed that German universities needed to change. But very few people thought that this should involve making them centers of free intellectual inquiry. Instead, Enlightenment critics wanted them to be useful. A scholar of the 17th century might have called the university an intellectual res publica, an independent body politic. By the second half of the 18th, he was much more likely to use the word factory. Even Immanuel Kant — in an essay defending the pursuit of pure knowledge! — called universities places where scholars were gathered fabrikenmäßig: as if in a factory. At the time, this was a good thing. Factories, unlike universities, were efficient and modern. Above all, they were beneficial to the state.
In the influential 1783 novel Carl von Carlsberg by education reformer Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, one character remarks to another that the university’s problems can’t be blamed on professors being incompetent (though they are), but on the impossibility of trying to adapt an institution founded in the time of the Crusades for the modern world. This was a pretty typical opinion: the structure of the university, with its odd ceremonies, independent faculties, and clerical distance from worldly affairs, was a relic — and professors, like priests, were defending the old order from necessary reform. Some radicals wanted to abolish universities altogether and replace them with specialized colleges in practical subjects. More often, reformers wanted to keep them around but break their traditional independence. An ideal university was not so different from the Royal Porcelain Manufactory, established at Berlin in 1763 — an institution using the best modern technical expertise to produce high-quality goods, whether those goods were civil servants or coffee services.
This strain of enlightened university critique dovetailed neatly with the native German tradition of cameralism: the science of public administration.1 The cameralists who staffed 18th century German ministries of education had very clear goals for universities. They should attract rich students who would spend money in the local economy. They should produce competent civil servants, doctors, and ministers. Cameralist reforms involved finding new ways to monitor university activities, standardizing qualifications, and ending professorial nepotism — which also meant bringing those hiring decisions under much tighter state control. Often, they tried to leverage divisions within a faculty through private correspondence with a few chosen favorites — a practice actively recommended by the enlightenment journal the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1795.2 Enlightenment reformers and cameralist bureaucrats didn’t agree on everything, but they were united in their desire to impose some kind of meritocratic rationale on professorial hiring.
As we’ll see, they mostly failed. The rights of traditional university faculties were protected by ancient laws (and ancient lawyers). It wouldn’t be accurate to call these professors defenders of academic freedom in the modern sense, because almost everyone involved accepted state control over what could be taught. Still, they fought fiercely for the ability to make their own hiring decisions. Without the ability to place their own people, liberal intellectuals and utilitarian bureaucrats alike didn’t do much to change university culture.
The exception was when states founded universities themselves. In the 1730s, George II of Britain and Hanover decided that the academic situation in his German domains was unbefitting a great power. The result was the crown jewel of 18th century German academia: the University of Göttingen. Because Göttingen was funded directly by the government instead of relying on a complicated medieval system of tithes and land rents, the state played a much stronger role in appointments. It hired famous professors and allowed them to teach non-traditional subjects like modern history or applied mathematics. It had a modern academic research library, the largest in the world, which featured brand-new innovations like organizing books on shelves by subjects with reference to a catalogue. The university also had a knight school (Ritter-Akademie) to teach subjects like riding and fencing, because that’s what got students from rich families excited, but even with the medieval flourishes, Göttingen came to define the Enlightenment university.
Göttingen and the birth of modern academia
If you’ve ever been personally victimized by the need to publish or perish, you can blame one man, and his name was Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen. As prime minister of Hanover, Münchhausen was the sponsor of Göttingen university, and probably the single person most responsible for introducing a new criterion for academic advancement: the publication record.
Münchhausen insisted that Göttingen professors write, but he was less interested in what exactly they wrote. They might produce traditional academic dissertations, but textbooks were just as good. Best of all was contributing to journals, like their own Göttinger gelehrte Anzeigen. The GGA, like most mid-18th century German publications, was somewhere between a book review journal and a collection of summaries of everything the editors considered noteworthy from the past year. It wasn’t always original, and it wasn’t trying to be.
To understand why it mattered, we need to remember what Göttingen was for: training ministers and attracting rich students from other German states who would come to spend money in Hanover. (Johann David Michaelis, a famous Göttingen biblicist, once calculated the state’s expected profit per student down to the thaler.)3 Göttingen professors were prolific journal contributors, because journals had wide circulation, which made them famous, which helped their university attract more students. “We do not demand that we be regarded as gatekeepers of the temple of scholarly honor, and our judgment as that of the learned world,” the editors wrote in the preface to a 1744 edition of the GGA. I think that they protest too much. This was exactly what they demanded! At least, it was what they were trying to achieve. Göttingen was the cameralist university par excellence, and the currency of the cameralist university was fame.
Göttingen’s reforms worked very well for their intended purpose. Wealthy students increasingly chose to study in Hanover. Prussia adopted a publication requirement for professorships in 1749 (although they still didn’t mandate that the publications be in the subject the professor was ostensibly required to teach). Today, we’re used to complaints that modern academia is fallen because promising young scholars now have to spend their time burnishing their resumes with useless publications instead of doing real research. This is precisely backwards. Promising young scholars had to burnish their resumes with useless publications long before anyone thought of asking them to do real research.
I’ll go further: all this resume-building was an important precondition for the development of an academic research culture. And it is a research culture that we should be interested in. 18th century German bureaucrats didn’t invent the idea of making new contributions to human knowledge. Their great contribution was to institutionalize it: They created a system where original scholarship was rewarded by professional advancement. This system didn’t quite exist in the 1740s. At new universities like Göttingen, academics were rewarded for what they wrote. It wasn’t yet important that this writing be research.
Which raises an important question: what is research? Of course, originality is one requirement. Research should tell us something we didn’t know before. But novelty alone isn’t enough. William Clark, whose Academic Charisma is easily the best book on early modern German academia, has a wonderful list of “erudite dissertations:” treatises about academics who didn’t publish anything, or who made pacts with the devil, or had wicked wives. This was a popular microgenre. There are dozens of them. (My favorite is the one about academics who died of studying too much.) You can’t say they didn’t require original scholarship — someone had to root around in an archive — but it’s also difficult to call them research. Today, research papers are almost never plausibly-deniable high effort practical jokes. You can’t always say the same about 18th century academic writing.
Again: it’s not that nobody in German universities did research. It’s that they lacked the incentives to prefer it to sterile intellectual virtuosity. The erudite dissertations aren’t just useless — research doesn’t have to be useful. For Clark, the real problem with them is that they don’t lead anywhere. They’re a way of showing off, not part of a broader scholarly dialogue. "Works of research usually provide a basis for further research and/or relate to other, related works in a complementary and supplementary manner. They add up to something positive." I like this as a definition of research. It is also very German. Specifically, I think it goes back to Immanuel Kant. Kant was very much not a cameralist. Instead, he argued that the philosophy faculty required independence — from the government as well as the "higher" faculties of law, theology, and medicine — in order to carry out its real business, pursuing truth.
The suggestion that the part of the university devoted to pure knowledge might exist on equal footing with the professional schools was itself revolutionary. But Kant also had opinions on what the structured pursuit of truth should look like. "If a doctrine is a system," he wrote in his 1786 book The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, “that is, a complete understanding organized according to principles, then it's called science (Wissenschaft).”4 In this case, he is talking about the natural sciences specifically, but the concept of Wissenschaft is much broader. The Germanists Paul Reiter and Chad Wellmon translate the word as “systematic knowledge,” which is more accurate, but in this case, it would be burying the lede: the key idea here is that it's important for knowledge to be systematic at all. What makes a discipline scientific — that is, worthy of study — is its internal order, through which disciplined, methodical investigations combine into a single, coherent whole. In other words: they add up to something.
In this respect, Kant's first and best disciples were the classicists. Classical philology was the first academic field in Germany to organize itself around the idea of Wissenschaft — the collective pursuit of systematic knowledge. This development in turn grew out of yet another Göttingen institution: the seminar.
The first seminar in classical philology was established at Göttingen in 1738. It was most directly inspired by Prussia’s pedagogical seminars — specialized, state-funded institutes for teacher training. Like them, it was a budgeted institution funded directly by the government. It also existed to train teachers (in this case, to teach Latin and Greek at advanced secondary schools, or Gymnasien). And for about 30 years, that’s all it did. Things changed in 1763 when the famous classicist and archeologist Christian Gottlob Heyne took over as director. Under Heyne, the philology seminar borrowed elements from other institutions, most notably collegia — private classes professors would teach to small groups of students for extra fees — and extra-curricular classics societies. (Heyne had previously taught a popular collegium on archeology.) Formal university classes were lectures, full-stop. This seminar was different. It demanded active student participation. Here’s Heyne in 1765 talking about how it worked:
There's a lot that's traditional here — the practice of disputation, for example, goes back to the middle ages. But there is also a lot that is new: most notably, the requirement that students produce written assignments. And not just any written assignments! Heyne's seminarists were required to present arguments for their own positions, which other students would critique and dispute. Instead of (well, in addition to) absorbing their professors’ opinions, they practiced the skills of grammatical analysis and historical source criticism which would eventually let them make their own contributions. This would become standard practice in German academia by the 19th century, but in 1763 it was entirely novel. And it proved popular. Over the next few decades, more universities established philology seminars on the Göttingen model — Wittenberg, Erlangen, Kiel, Helmsted, and Halle.
Ironically, Göttingen’s most important philology student never attended Heyne’s seminar. (Heyne disapproved of his views on Homer). Still, Friedrich August Wolf managed to graduate and eventually lead his own philology seminar at the university of Halle. There, he began to develop a new approach to the study of antiquity which he would eventually lay out in his book, Darstellung der Altertumswissenschaft. His goal was nothing less than to elevate his field to “the dignity of a well-ordered philosophical-historical science.” This new science of philology was to be clear, ordered, and coherent. It would have 24 subdisciplines, ranging from grammar to numismatics. And every contribution, whether it was a seminar paper on a rare Lydian coin or a dissertation on a fragment of Archilochus, would be part of the same project: building a holistic understanding of the classical world.
Wolf was deeply influenced by Kant’s understanding of Wissenschaft. (One contemporary called him the “Kant of philology.”) But that’s not surprising; everyone was influenced by Kant. There’s another reason why classical philology was the first field to truly reorganize itself on Kantian lines. Remember, this is before any kind of institutional academic specialization. The classicists were early to understand themselves as a field in the first place, and this was because of the seminar. Wolf did his best to bar theology students from attending his seminar at Halle. He wanted philology majors only, because he saw his work as training practitioners of philology. The idea of a holistic science of antiquity went hand-in-hand with giving that science its own disciplinary identity.
Like everyone else, philologists had to publish or perish, and the work they published was shaped by a new sense of intellectual unity and purpose. This is the start of the era of major collective research projects — things like biographical dictionaries or catalogues of attestations which future classicists could use in their own work. (And they have. Some of this material is still cited today.) By 1800, the study of antiquity was looking a lot more modern than anything else happening in German academia. Our next question is how the ideal of Wissenschaft reached everyone else.
The Romantic turn
Let’s step back and take stock: German universities were in a state of crisis. Enrollments had dropped from 4,400 in 1720 to just under 3,000 in 1800 (while the population of the German states doubled). The reformed universities — Göttingen, and to a lesser extent Halle — had healthy student bodies, but everywhere else was struggling badly. Most had fewer than two hundred students.
When the governments of the smaller German states tried to bring reforms to their own, more established universities, they still faced intense faculty opposition. The University of Jena is a typical, if unusually star-studded, case. Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar was a modern, enlightened ruler with a passion for acquiring famous intellectuals (at this point, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of his ministers). Around 1798, he started to recruit a new crop of brilliant young scholars to his university: the playwright Friedrich Schiller, theologian Ernst Schleiermacher, philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, and F.W.J. Schelling, and the polymathic brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel.
The result was a cold war between the faculty and the Weimar government: the duke couldn't impose full professors on the university, but he did have the right to appoint Extraordinarien, or extraordinary professors. Extraordinarien usually didn’t draw salaries and had to support themselves entirely on lecture fees, which depended on the number of students they could attract. Some of the duke’s new finds, like Schiller, were simply bad lecturers. Fichte was popular with students, but had to resign after being accused of atheism. Others left for more stable positions. Soon, the whole group dispersed.
But the experiment wasn’t a total failure. The golden years of Jena didn’t last very long. There were four of them. But from 1798 to 1802, the town was the place to be. It was the center of post-Kantian Idealist philosophy and the birthplace of the Romantic movement in literature. The Jena circle included the young lecturers as well as poets and dramatists, drawn to Weimar by the presence of Goethe and Schiller. They wrote. They attended salons hosted by Caroline Schlegel.5 They lectured. And one of their favorite subjects to lecture on was the purpose of the university.
Schiller, Fichte, and Schelling’s Jena lectures didn’t share a precisely identical idea of what that purpose was, but they agreed on the important points. All of them were vicious critics of what Schelling called the Enlightenment “utility gospel.” University studies weren’t about anything so crass as preparing for a profession (Schiller’s inaugural lecture is ostensibly about universal history, but he keeps breaking off into tangents about how careerist students are ruining the life of the mind). Universities existed to serve Wissenschaft. And all of them had a distinctly Romantic view of what Wissenschaft should be: not the sterile accumulation of individual facts — another Enlightenment pathology — but pursuing the true understanding of reality as a unified and organic whole.
This was why, for all its faults, the university had to be preserved. It was the only institution which could spread the universal pursuit of knowledge. The specialized schools advocated by Enlightenment reformers could not serve this purpose. Nor could scientific academies, since they didn’t have students. In the Romantic worldview, the goal of education was not to memorize facts but rather to train the capacity to notice connections between them and incorporate new information into the same systematic framework. As Schelling wrote, “knowledge of the organic whole of all sciences must therefore precede a particular education focused on a single specialty.”6
In other words — specifically, Fichte’s — the purpose of the university was “the formation and development of the capacity to learn.” Of all these men, I think Fichte had the best understanding of how Romantic educational ideas would work in practice. His central idea was that universities should foster personal self-development (Bildung) as thinkers and scholars, but also as moral beings. In fact, these were the same thing. Through a carefully constructed program of seminars and socratic dialogues, students would be encouraged to cultivate the faculty of scholarly reason which would guide them through the world as fully-realized individuals.
The capacity to learn would serve students far beyond their university days. It was the same capacity that would allow them to discover new things about the world. Fichte’s friend Schleiermacher, the theologian, who shared many of his opinions, framed the same statement slightly differently. The university, he wrote, “forms the transition between the time when a young man is first prepared for systematic knowledge, by his own studying and by acquiring a knowledge base, and the time when, in the prime of his intellectual life, he expands the field or adds on a beautiful new wing to the edifice of knowledge through his own research.”
Schleiermacher didn’t want universities to be centers of research production. He still thought academies of science would serve that role. Still, for the Romantics, research was an essential part of being a professor — not because of their outputs, but because it was the only way they could model holistic intellectual inquiry for their students. The professor's job was to embody endless curiosity and dedication to the systematic pursuit of pure knowledge, which was, after all, man's highest calling.
Berlin, and beyond
This all sounds very nice. Probably none of it would ever have been implemented if not for a fortunate turn of events: the humiliating subjugation of Prussia by Napoleon Bonaparte. In the short term, the Napoleonic wars killed off the old university system. Within a few years, half of all German universities shut down. Halle, the centerpiece of Prussian academia, closed in 1806. After Prussia made peace with France, there was widespread agreement that they would have to build something to replace it — but it was not at all clear what, or if it would even take the form of a university.
In the end, it did, mostly thanks to another man — the linguist, liberal philosopher, and (briefly) education bureaucrat Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt didn't shape the public debate around the role of the university in the early years of the 19th century. What he did was synthesize it. In his short tenure as a Prussian educational administrator, from 1809 to 1810, he developed a plan for an institution to be built in Berlin, modeled on the pedagogical vision of Schelling, Fichte, and Schleiermacher, but also inspired by his own alma mater, Göttingen. Today, Humboldt gets a lot of credit for the core values of German academia: the unity of teaching and research, the freedom to teach or study whatever you choose, the primacy of the philosophy faculty and its dedication to pure knowledge. As we’ve seen, he didn’t come up with any of these ideas, but he did play a key role in giving them an institutional home.
There were also less Idealistic motives at play. Napoleon's invasion had sparked a backlash to all things French, and there was nothing more French than abolishing crippled medieval institutions and replacing them with modern, utilitarian ones. France had already abolished its own universities and replaced them with specialized schools for training civil servants, so Prussia was determined to keep them. It also helped that building a university in Berlin was cheap. Most German universities at this time weren't built in large cities, out of concerns that urban life would be distracting to the students (or that the students would be hazardous to the townsfolk). But Berlin already had an academy of sciences, whose members could be enlisted as professors, a royal library, which could be appropriated, and a hospital — Charité — which could serve as a medical school.
In May 1809, Humboldt wrote a letter to the Kaiser requesting the establishment of this new university. This document spends less time on the value of academic freedom than it does on the advantages to the state: the cost savings from locating the university in Berlin, the necessity of restoring national pride after years of war, the boost to Friedrich Wilhelm's own reputation. It also gives you a sense of the political uphill battle the very concept of the university was facing: “Even the name ‘university,’ if I may say so, will not require me to offer an excuse to Your Majesty. It is meant simply to signify that no field of knowledge is excluded, and that the teaching institution will also grant academic titles. Everything else about the university that is antiquated or detrimental will, of course, be avoided.”
The university of Berlin was founded in 1810. How radical was it in practice? Formally, it looked a lot like Göttingen: it had the same academic ranks, the same financial model, and the same four faculties — though with philosophy elevated to a more central intellectual role. Fichte, the most radical of the reformers, left in 1812, while the more accommodating Schleiermacher remained. Humboldt's own replacement as minister was a traditional bureaucrat in the enlightened-cameralist mode. And for all the talk about the primacy of pure knowledge, students in the career-oriented law, theology, and medical faculties still outnumbered the philosophers.
Students who cared about education for its own sake might have been a minority, as they have been at every university everywhere approximately always. Still, the best of them flocked to Berlin. In addition to the famous professors, they were drawn in by important pedagogical innovations. There were no compulsory classes or compulsory assignments. Students were only examined at the end of their studies, leaving them free to construct whatever curriculum they liked. Most intellectual work happened in seminars, which proliferated. I think there was another inducement here, too: Romanticism made studying — for lack of a better word — romantic. The dominant cultural image of the university student before the Jena circle got to it was a particularly vicious frat boy. (Which was accurate. Fraternity violence was a significant social problem.) After Jena, you start to see a lot more paeans to the life of the mind. It’s hard to disentangle the structural changes in university policy from the broader cultural impact of Romanticism, but here, they come together. Berlin was an exciting place to study, but a generation of students who grew up reading Schiller or Novalis were just more excited about scholarship.
One important structural change was the Berlin Ph.D. Partly, it was that they had one at all: the idea that the “lower” faculty of philosophy could grant doctorates was highly controversial. As university rector, Fichte not only insisted on offering the degree, but added two novel requirements: candidates needed to write their own dissertations — and they needed to be works of original research.
This was a very big change. Like seminars, dissertations have their roots in the medieval disputation. Starting in the 16th century, German doctoral candidates would hold a disputation as part of their graduation ceremony. In these disputations, they would defend a set of theses — written by the presiding professor. Professors would produce tens of thousands of these — before journals were common, they were the predominant form of academic publication. However, they typically weren’t new contributions to human knowledge.7 The dissertation was a test of a candidate's ability to defend their mentor's work. The work itself didn’t have to be new. It wasn’t unusual for professors to recycle the same dissertations for multiple defenses, and the contents might as easily reflect Aristotle or Melanchthon as their own studies.
It is not a coincidence that almost every single doctorate granted by the university of Berlin in its early years was in the field of classical philology. Fichte’s conception of the PhD was a natural extension of the Romantic view of the university: If the university existed to train researchers, then naturally a student’s education should culminate in proof of their ability to produce research. But in 1810, the only field with an established practice of training students to do original work was classics.
Slowly, the ideal of scientific education developed in classics seminars spread to the natural and social sciences. Fields from anthropology to zoology got their own seminars or institutes. As it had in classics, this led to the birth of new disciplinary identities. Through the 1820s, this curricular expansion spread to other universities — Münich, Giessen, Kiel, Göttingen, and Heidelberg. Scientific research was migrating back into academia.
This led to a problem the Romantics had not anticipated: specialization. The ideal of Wissenschaft had encouraged academics to build up institutions to train future generations of scholars. But, naturally and inevitably, these networks of seminars and institutes acculturated students into the research practices of particular fields of study. The ideal of the unity of all knowledge got lost very early on in this process, if it ever took hold to begin with. Another area where the Romantics lost out was academic publishing. This was an Enlightenment thing and they resented it. Their ideal university culture was oral/aural: true Bildung happened in lectures or seminar discussions where students and teachers could learn together directly. Schleiermacher was even opposed to writing down lecture notes in advance, since this would get in the way of the students “directly observing the activity of intelligence producing knowledge.”
The real, lasting contribution of Romanticism was to make originality and the pursuit of knowledge a source of academic status — but this directly contributed to an explosion of writing. Young scholars wanted to show their devotion to Wissenschaft. Meanwhile, 19th century academia was getting much more competitive. Extraordinarien and the even lowlier Privatdozenten had always outnumbered full professors, but now the ratios started to become extreme. There were ever more candidates for every chair, which led faculties and educational ministries to raise their standards for full professorships, which meant requiring even more publications. This research ratchet was helped along by a new generation of Prussian bureaucrats. Johannes Schulze, a key Prussian educational administrator — and admirer of Wolf's seminar at Halle — instituted research stipends for young professors and prizes for original student work. Administrators also came to value research as a professional qualification.
By midcentury, the culture of German universities looked a lot like that of modern academia. Professors split their time between research and teaching duties, but found research ever more relevant for their own professional advancement. They considered themselves members of distinct fields with their own practices and methods. They published in specialized journals. They wrote their own dissertations, which contained original contributions to human knowledge. Everyone agreed that there were way too many adjuncts.
Every university in the world today has incorporated at least some element of this model. States like Russia and Greece, without strong university systems of their own, were quickest to adopt it. The French educational reformer Victor Cousin was an admirer of Kant and Fichte and pushed for some German-style reforms, if not the same institutional support for research. (As late as 1868, Louis Pasteur was doing experiments in his attic). Of course, nobody took to the German university ideal more eagerly than the Americans. The founders of Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago were explicitly built on German models. Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, was a committed Germanophile, and reformed Harvard’s graduate school along German lines. The whole institutional structure of American graduate education is German, from academic departments (an outgrowth of the seminar) to doctoral dissertations. It’s Humboldt’s world, and we’re just living in it.
What have we learned?
I don't think that Fichte and Schleiermacher would have been happy about the state of German academia on the eve of unification in 1871. It was more positivist than Romantic, and marked by extreme and growing specialization rather than deep intellectual unity. The cameralists might have been more satisfied with the way things worked out — at least, the ones from Prussia — but they came no closer to anticipating it. In fact, the really remarkable thing about the research university is how different it looks from anything any of the leading lights of university reform expected or wanted.
The birth of the research university was contingent. It took a crisis. I don't think the German universities of the 19th century would have been so good if the 18th century hadn't been so bad. It took an enlightened, cameralistic push for a meritocratic professoriate, and a Romantic devotion to knowledge for its own sake. It took idealism and it took crass commercialism. And let's not forget the stodgy, medieval university faculty who spent a hundred years fighting reform at every step. They’re important too. Without them, German universities might well have been hollowed out and replaced with professional schools, as they were in France. It’s largely thanks to them that universities were able to maintain their corporate independence, and with it a surprising degree of academic freedom.
In 1800, everyone expected that the core engine of research production would be scientific academies. These academies still exist today, but their members are almost all professors. The universities ate them alive. Having seen how it happened, this isn’t that surprising. The problem with an institution staffed entirely by leading lights of the international republic of letters is that one’s members first have to become leading lights in the international republic of letters. This worked well for scholars who were independently wealthy or already had another stable career — and who, more importantly, were able to figure out the skills and mindset for doing research largely on their own. The research university owes a lot to the Romantic valorization of originality and genius, but its real contribution is a world where scholars don’t have to be originals or geniuses to add their bricks to the edifice of human knowledge (though I’m sure it helps). Then again, they might have appreciated that. The German Romantics loved irony.
Once cameralism was incorporated into academia, it became the modern fields of political science and statistics (in German, Staatistik — the science of the state).
For the anonymous author, this is a half-measure – he prefers abolishing faculties and academic degrees altogether.
300, if you’re curious.
The translations in this essay are my own unless otherwise indicated, and I apologize for this one (I promise it’s worse in German)
Caroline is the superconnector of this story. The daughter of Michaelis, the Göttingen biblical scholar, she married August Schlegel, and then left him for Schelling — which is not unrelated to why the group broke up when it did.
This and the next few translations are drawn from The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook, ed. Louis Menand, Paul Reitter, and Chad Wellmon (The University of Chicago Press, 2017).
There were a handful of exceptions. The great anatomist and physiologist Albrecht Haller required his doctoral students at Göttingen to do their own animal experiments in his laboratory, which would then form the basis of their dissertations. But Haller was unusual, and when he left Göttingen for his native Bern in 1753 nobody else adopted the practice.
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