A History of the University in Europe: Volume 3, Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1800-1945)

by Walter Rüegg

Overview

By focusing on the freedom of scientific research, teaching and study, the medieval university structure was modernized and enabled discoveries to become a professional, bureaucratically-regulated activity of the university. This opened the way for the victorious march of the natural sciences, and led to student movements—resulting in the university being ultimately cast in the role of a citadel of political struggle in a world-wide fight for freedom. Also available: Volume 1: Universities in the Middle Ages 0-521-36105-2 Hardback $140.00 C Volume 2: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800) 0-521-36106-0 Hardback $130.00 C

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521361071
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/16/2004
Series:	A History of the University in Europe , #3
Pages:	776
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.06(h) x 2.09(d)

About the Author

Walter Rüegg is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Berne, Switzerland.

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Cambridge University Press
0521361079 - A History of the University in Europe - Volume III, Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1800-1945) - by Walter Rüegg
Excerpt

PART I
THEMES AND PATTERNS

CHAPTER 1

THEMES

WALTER RÜEGG

INTRODUCTION

The political upheavals of the French Revolution and Napoleon's conquests devastated the university landscape in Europe. In 1789 it was filled with 143 universities. In 1815 there were only 83. The 24 French universities had been abolished and in twelve towns these were replaced by special schools and isolated faculties. In Germany, eighteen of the 34 universities had disappeared, and in Spain only ten of the previous 25 had any life in them. After fifteen new foundations, Europe had 98 universities by the middle of the nineteenth century. On the eve of the Second World War, this figure had doubled. In around 200 universities, 600,000 students were taught by 32,000 professors, while during the 1840s when university statistics began to be compiled, there numbered around 80,000 students and 5,000 professors; this means an increase over one hundred years of 500 per cent for professors and 700 per cent for students.¹

This extraordinary expansion in number and strength is all the more astonishing because the replacement of the universities by specialized and professional institutions coincided with the dominant trend in the Age of Enlightenment to orientate higher education towards practical knowledge and useful careers for the public good. Indeed, the 200 universities existing in the 1930s were surrounded by some 300 institutions of higher education in the military, technical, polytechnic, commercial, medical, veterinary, agricultural, educational, political and musical fields. But they had not replaced the universities and were attended by a relatively small minority of students.

In France, the universities were restored in 1895, and the new nation states in Eastern Europe were eager to set up their own universities, thus allowing the concept of 'the university as the European institution par excellence'² to take on its full meaning. With the exception of France, where the grandes écoles were placed at the apex of higher education thanks to their rigorous systems of selection and training, the special colleges struggled to obtain university privileges and certification - which they succeeded in doing in Germany and Austria - or to be assimilated into the universities - as was the case in Great Britain and Italy. Most of the special institutions of higher education are today among the 670 members of the European Universities Association. Universities spread beyond Europe, too, where, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, except for Latin America, there were only colleges, academies, seminaries, madrasahs or other schools for the training of the intellectual, political or spiritual elite. How can the upturn in the fortunes of the modern university be explained? This is the basic question asked in the third volume of our History of the University in Europe. I will try to summarize some of the results by starting with the competition between the university models that opened the way to the modern university.

Until the French Revolution, European universities, although divided by their dependence on Catholic or Protestant sovereigns, were organized in the same way and taught more or less the same branches of knowledge in four or five classical faculties. The structure and content of higher education converged to such a point that Rousseau complained in 1772: 'Today there are no longer any French, Germans, Spanish or even English, in spite of what they say: there are only Europeans. They all have the same tastes, the same passions, the same morals, because none of them has received a national moulding from a particular institution.'³

THE FRENCH AND GERMAN UNIVERSITY MODELS

At the beginning of the nineteenth century two new university models appeared which opened the way to a fundamental reform of the traditional university. The first was the French model of special colleges subjected to severe, often military, discipline, strictly organized and controlled by an enlightened despotism that governed to the last detail the curriculum, the awarding of degrees, the conformity of views held concerning official doctrines, and even personal habits such as the ban on the wearing of beards in 1852.

This model was implemented thanks to the tabula rasa of the Revolution and completed by Napoleon, but some essential traits, such as a centralizing state control, the isolation of the faculties and the establishment of special colleges, had already been evident in the Age of Enlightenment. The French model remained in force under successive regimes, and it was only in the last third of the nineteenth century that it was eroded under the influence of the German model. Some French historians believe that it was not abandoned until 1968 by Edgar Faure's loi sur l'orientation de l'enseignement supérieur,⁴ which was inspired by the reform programme drawn up on 6 January 1968 by the Rectors of the West German universities.

The German model bears the name of the Humboldt University. The credit must indeed go to the scholar and statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt, brother of the great naturalist Alexander, for persuading the King of Prussia, who favoured the French model, to found a university in Berlin in 1810 built on the liberal ideas of the theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. According to the latter, the function of the university was not to pass on recognized and directly usable knowledge such as the schools and colleges did, but rather to demonstrate how this knowledge is discovered, 'to stimulate the idea of science in the minds of the students, to encourage them to take account of the fundamental laws of science in all their thinking'.⁵

The manner of study, the content of the teaching, and the relations of the university with the authorities were to be characterized by 'freedom'. According to Humboldt, the state only had two tasks to fulfil with regard to the universities: to protect their freedom and to appoint professors. This idealistic model did not lend itself to implementation as easily as Napoleon's interventionist model. Humboldt's plan to provide the new university with a large amount of land in order to ensure its financial independence was abandoned by his successor; freedom of opinion was hampered in 1819 by control and censure measures, following student demonstrations, and was not restored until after 1848.

Similarly, the introduction of students to scientific research through seminars and laboratories only came about slowly.⁶ However, liberal reform bore fruit. While, at the beginning of the century, Paris had been a Mecca for scholars and scientists from all over the world, from the 1830s the French Government sent representatives to Germany to enquire about progress in higher education. In the same way, young French people, as well as Americans later on, trained at German universities in the new scientific methods. From the end of the nineteenth century, the German model represented the modern university not only in Europe, but also in the United States and Japan.

SECULARIZATION, BUREAUCRATIZATION, SPECIALIZATION

This could not have occurred without the secularization and bureaucratization of nation states. The charts in the second volume of our 'History of the University in Europe', which stops at the end of the eighteenth century, distinguish between Catholic and Protestant universities. Although some countries had begun to be secularized during the Enlightenment, most universities remained essentially ecclesiastical institutions, to the extent that they were either directly supervised by the respective churches or strongly connected to them through the importance of religious profession for the appointment of teachers, the admission of students, and the ideological orientation of academic studies and careers. During the nineteenth century, public universities were transformed into lay institutions everywhere. The few faculties of Catholic theology reintroduced into France and Spain could not survive and disappeared from public education. 'Theology had taken refuge in the seminaries, while the state university continued for a decade with the studies which, for several centuries, had dominated and filled the auditoria.'⁷

At the same time, the universities became increasingly subjected to state bureaucracy, which managed university affairs as part of a national education policy. At the beginning of the century, the sovereign continued to be directly involved with the help of a trustworthy person and a rudimentary administration. When in 1806 Napoleon set up 'under the name of the Imperial University, a body exclusively responsible for teaching and public education throughout the Empire',⁸ the official who ran it reported directly to the emperor and enjoyed great independence. Two years later he was the head of a central administration, and this was maintained, or even expanded, by later political regimes, to become the Ministry of Education in 1828.⁹ After sixteen months of successful activity, Wilhelm von Humboldt resigned his position as Director of the Section for Ecclesiastical Affairs and Education at the Ministry of the Interior in 1810, just before the opening of the University of Berlin, because the King did not want to upgrade the Division into a Ministry of Education, which would have given it the necessary political clout.

Seven years later the upgrade took place. During the nineteenth century, all over the Continent, similar ministries were set up to cope with the growing importance that public education on every scale had assumed in the general policy and budgets of nation states. The ministerial administration decided on the type and composition of the whole higher education of the country, as was the case in Spain or Italy after unification; it governed access to the universities, and controlled their curricula and exams. It provided the universities with modern buildings and laboratories, as the French Government did after the defeat of 1871 - which a large section of public opinion attributed to the superiority of higher education in Germany.

In the end, however, the most important consequence of this process was the professionalization of university careers. On the European Continent the professor became a civil servant of the lay and bureaucratic state. The most significant example is the institution intended to train the elite of higher education teachers in France, the École Normale (Supérieure). Its students, 'at least seventeen years of age', selected 'from secondary schools by examination and competition', agreed to serve in public education for at least ten years after graduation.¹⁰ Public education was therefore run as a branch of state administration. The academic degrees and the means of selection by competition and examination, which had been established under the old regime, were integrated into a hierarchy: the baccalaureate was essential to obtaining a post in a college, the license allowed for promotion to college chairs and higher offices, the agrégation, a competitive examination, gave 'access to careers in administration . . . and chairs in higher education'.¹¹ The proof that this system of merit was linked to bureaucratization and secularization is provided by the reactionary elements that regained power in France between 1822 and 1830: they closed the École Normale and entrusted 'numerous posts . . . to members of the clergy, often without degrees'.¹²

From the inception of the universities, the doctorate attested that the holder had mastered his academic discipline to such a point that he was qualified to teach it at university level. At the end of the eighteenth century, the examination consisted of the presentation and discussion of a thesis that developed a subject without scientific originality and value over several printed pages. After 1830, the theses defended before the faculties of letters and sciences in Paris began to give way to more extensive research and were often distinguished by having real scientific value.¹³ The man chiefly responsible for this change of direction was Victor Cousin who, after losing his chair in philosophy because of his liberal ideas inspired by Kant and Fichte, became the head of the re-established École Normale following the revolution of July 1830. He undertook a journey to Germany to study the state of public education there and published a report on his findings.¹⁴ Although the reforms which resulted met the combined opposition of the clerics and the leftists, Cousin, because of his key position in the training of professors, was able to introduce scientific criteria into doctoral theses¹⁵ as they were applied in Prussia. There scientific education, which had been the founding idea behind the University of Berlin, needed to be reflected in a 'masterpiece'¹⁶ that inaugurated a career characterized by the scientific spirit.

The German university professor was also a state functionary. But there were several German states, and he was free to accept the best position offered to him. His career did not unfold, as in France, among a hierarchical body of functionaries who remained subordinate to their superiors. In general, the German professor began his university career as a Privatdozent who, after demonstrating to the faculty his ability to teach his discipline, was entitled to do so at will, but also at his own expense. He thus learned and earned with great difficulty to practise the libertas docendi and, if lucky, persisted in it when he became a professor.

The French model, based on scientific merit in the framework of a closed and centralized body, gave as much power and prestige to the professor as the German model, based on competition and freedom. He was entrusted by the state with a public office, the importance of which for the common good continued to grow, and he won increasing power through the monopoly for awarding diplomas and degrees that allowed access to the professions. On the other hand, his personal prestige depended increasingly on the collective prestige of his professional or scientific specialization.

In France, the polytechnicien, the normalien and graduates of other grandes écoles referred to themselves by their school, taking advantage of its reputation. In the university systems of the German model it was the specialization of the scientific disciplines that introduced new forms of communication, identification and reputation for the professors. The sancta quaedam communitas eruditorum, set up in the Middle Ages under the protection of the papacy and preserved throughout the denominational scission by the humanist dialogue in the exchange of letters as well as in scholarly academies and their journals of general interest, was increasingly divided in the nineteenth century into a number of scientific disciplines. The professors began to exchange their ideas and their work in specialized journals, to meet at national conferences (even international conferences after the end of the century) and to organize societies by discipline.¹⁷ Consequently, it was no longer only individual performance and glory, but also belonging to a recognized discipline that first and foremost endowed the professor with his social prestige. The specialization of scientific disciplines, accompanied by the modification of their rank in the academic and social hierarchy, characterizes the modern university.

THE EUROPEAN ADOPTION OF THE TWO MODELS

In the states annexed by Napoleon, the universities that had not been abolished but rather replaced by faculties were re-established after 1815, but they kept the division between the faculties of letters and sciences. Special colleges, écoles normales, écoles supérieures, and professional colleges, which spread throughout these countries, did not reach the level and rank of the French grandes écoles or the German Hochschulen and were only integrated into the universities in Italy, and not until 1933-37. The French model, which Napoleon imposed on the annexed countries, did not leave deep traces; the centralizing tendencies characteristic of this model were the inheritance of an enlightened absolutism which had affected higher education in the eighteenth century in France, Spain and Austria. Outside Napoleon's ephemeral empire, only Romania, a small country with a Latin language, adopted the French model in its organization of studies and the route from university office to public office. The main university in the capital of the new state, founded in 1861, trained the ruling class.

One of the jewels of the French model, the Ecole Polytechnique, which was set up to train engineers and officers of the artillery, had a widespread and significant influence through its theoretical orientation. The mining and civil engineering colleges, founded in the eighteenth century by the German, Austrian, Hungarian and Russian governments, and intended for the practical training of civil servants, were transformed in the nineteenth century into Higher Polytechnical Schools by introducing advanced theoretical teaching in mathematics and the physical sciences. But they did not adhere to the other aspect of the French model, the military and meticulous control by the state. On the contrary, they aspired to the basic rights of the universities. First they received the corporate autonomy of internal organization, then the right to accredit Privatdozenten, and, by the end of the century, the right to confer the title of doctor, which put them in the ranks of the universities.

Quite another form of influence arising from the French model characterized the development of the Russian universities. They rejected the French college model and adopted the German university model, a choice reinforced by the appointment of German lecturers or Russian lecturers trained in Germany. But at the same time, the state assigned these universities, which were dedicated in principle to science and enjoyed at least theoretical autonomy, the function of training its bureaucracy, as the French grandes écoles did. This antagonism between the two models marked the alternating phases of liberalism on the one hand and repression and militarization on the other. After the revolutionary events of 1830, the authorities made the students wear uniform, thus integrating them into the administrative hierarchy. After 1848 they reacted with the ministerial appointment of rectors, purged the teaching body, suppressed dangerous disciplines such as constitutional law and philosophy, and introduced strict educational control of studies and students, measures that typified the Tsarist university model throughout the liberal periods. It was to be taken up again and perfected by the Soviet regime, which in 1930/31 tried to dissolve the universities into specialized institutes. Two years later they re-established the universities with the task of offering the more theoretical disciplines alongside numerous professional training institutes, all higher education and research being governed and strictly controlled by the state.

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

Foreword Walter Rüegg; Part I. Themes and Patterns: 1. Themes Walter Rüegg; 2. Patterns Christopher Charle; Part II. Structures: 3. Relations with authority Paul Gerbod; 4. Resources and management Paul Gerbod; 5. Teachers Matti Klinge; 6. The diffusion of European models outside Europe Edward Shils and John Roberts; Part III. Students: 7. Admission Fritz Ringer; 8. Student movements Lieve Gevers and Louis Vos; 9. Graduation and careers Konrad H. Jarausch; Part IV. Learning: 10. Theology and the arts Walter Rüegg; 11. History and the social sciences Asa Briggs; 12. The mathematical and the exact sciences Paul Blockstaele; 13. Biological and geosciences Anto Leikola; 14. Medicine Antonie M. Luyendijk-Elshout; 15. Technology Anna Guagnini; Epilogue: universities and war in the twentieth century Notker Hammerstein.

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