History of Higher Education Annual: 2000

Roger L. Geiger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000677409
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

A collection of articles and review essays from the year 2000 that make up Volume 20 of the annual publication by The Pennsylvania State University.

BEFORE AND AFTER HUMBOLDT: EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES BETWEEN THE EIGHTEENTH AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURIES

ROBERT ANDERSON

In traditional accounts of European universities, the period around 1800 is seen as one in which a decadent institution was given new life, but in the form of two rival traditions: the Humboldtian or Berlin model, and the specialized French system. This paper argues that the centralized, state-directed, utilitarian university was a powerful form, which survived more or less intact from the Enlightenment to the later nineteenth century. It was an invention of the enlightened absolutist state, and Napoleon’s University was just one form of it, though an influential one. In post-1815 Europe the model retained its attractions for both neo-absolutist governments and liberal ideologues, and it was only the advance of secularization, industrialization, and political democracy that concluded a century-old phase. And what then emerged, and has survived, was a fusion of the Humboldtian and the state-directed ideals.

It is a common assumption about the origins of the modern European university that there was a marked discontinuity around 1800. The universities of the ancient regime were in decay, and many of them disappeared unlamented as a result of the upheavals of revolution and war. According to Lawrance Brockliss, “as the nineteenth century dawned, the university looked a doomed species,” but it was to survive because of the phoenix-like emergence of the Humboldtian model at Berlin.¹ As recent scholarship has emphasized, and as Brockliss would be the first to acknowledge, the name of Humboldt should now really be seen as a useful symbol for a complex series of changes in which the foundation of Berlin university was only one phase. On the one hand, Halle and Gottingen paved the way for reform in eighteenth-century Germany, and on the other the Humboldtian ideal was partly a late nineteenth-century construct, which has been used to justify the modern research-oriented university despite its deviation from the “unity of knowledge” envisaged by Humboldt and his contemporaries. Nor was the German model without competitors, for a rival phoenix rose from the ashes in the centralized, state-dominated system of Napoleon, with its sharp division between research institutions and vocationally oriented teaching. It became commonplace in the nineteenth century to contrast French specialization and centralization with the relatively autonomous German universities, which combined teaching and research, almost always with the implication that the French model was less satisfactory and less intellectually fertile.

The aim of this paper is to suggest that we can only fully understand these two models in the light of their common context, and the argument has three parts.² First, that historians have underestimated the significance of the Enlightenment for university reform, and that eighteenth-century rulers pioneered the centralized state university. Second, that French and German models both derived from this, but diverged in directions determined by their national contexts. And third, that this model of the state-directed, utilitarian, centralized university remained very attractive and powerful in the early nineteenth century, so that the “modern” university, which emerged at the end of that century, was a compromise rather than a simple triumph of the research ideal. Perhaps there is nothing very new in this, but it does provide a different way of thinking about familiar patterns.

It might be assumed that if the Enlightenment was an intellectual movement based on the concept of Reason, and if universities are intellectual institutions devoted to critical and rational thinking, universities would be key Enlightened institutions, both as sources of original thought and as instruments for diffusing new ideas. But it is striking how little is said about universities in general histories of the Enlightenment, even those which focus on its social history or on the diffusion of ideas—by Peter Gay, for example, or Daniel Roche, or more recently Thomas Munck.³ This may be because university history is a specialty which has yet to make its impact on the authors of general syntheses,⁴ or because Enlightenment historiography traditionally concentrates on France, where the universities notoriously failed to absorb Enlightenment ideas, and in return the Enlightenment thinkers and educational theorists of the revolutionary period, had little use for universities.

In terms of student numbers or intellectual vitality, the eighteenth century was certainly an age of relative stagnation.⁵ But this was often perceived as a problem at the time, and one that enlightened rulers began to tackle. This was true of small countries like Savoy in the early eighteenth century, or Portugal under Pombal in the 1760s-1770s, where a single university (Turin, Coimbra) served the needs of the state. But the most far-reaching reforms were those in the Habsburg lands under Maria Theresa and Joseph II: far-reaching in two senses, because the large number of universities coming under the same political control allowed thinking in terms of a single system, and because of the tendency of Joseph II to push reform to radical and sometimes disastrous lengths. In no European country in the eighteenth century, Grete Klingenstein has said, did university reform have such radical consequences.⁶

In reforming the University of Coimbra, Pombal had learnt from his spell as ambassador in Vienna. It was the new rector of Coimbra, Francisco de Lemos, who said in 1777:

One should not look on the university as an isolated body, concerned only with its own affairs as is ordinarily the case, but as a body at the heart of the state, which through its scholars creates and diffuses the enlightenment of wisdom to all parts of the monarchy, to animate, and revitalize all branches of the public administration, and to promote the happiness of man. The more one analyses this idea, the more relationships one discovers between the university and the state: the more one sees the mutual dependency of these two bodies one on the other, and that science cannot flourish in the university without at the same time the state flourishing, improving and perfecting itself.⁷

With a few changes in vocabulary, this could equally have been said a hundred years later. For in looking for the dynamic of change between around 1750 and 1870, it is difficult to avoid focusing on the state, whether absolutist or national, and on the formation of the elites which served it. The social history of the university, and the constant debates over its curriculum, owed as much to this practical demand as to any inner-directed development arising from the nature of universities or to a clash of bloodless ideal types. As public institutions of intense interest to governing elites, the history of European universities cannot be detached from the wider political, social, religious, and intellectual currents of the age.

If we were to draw up an ideal model of the Enlightened reform programme, its components would include all or most of the following. First, control by the state, seeking to impose rational and uniform reform, usually under the direction of a permanent bureaucratic body; sometimes this body was also responsible for other levels of education, and saw universities as one element in a coordinated policy of Nationalerziehung—the Habsburg term, though “national” here did not yet have its nineteenth-century connotations. Second, reforming rulers sought to eliminate corporatism, particularism, municipal control, local kinship or professional networks, and self-appointing and nepotistic professorates. Reform might involve a radical revision of the university map, with the closure or downgrading of the smaller institutions. Again, the Habsburgs provide the chief example: Joseph II wanted only one university for each political unit of his domains, and those at Graz and Innsbruck, among others, lost their university status in the 1780s.

Third, university education was to be useful and modern, promoting the interests of the state by training bureaucrats—but also doctors, village priests or pastors, and in some cases schoolmasters who would promote economic progress and welfare at the grass roots. Sometimes there was an emphasis on merit in recruiting these professional men, but reform could also mean squeezing out poorer students and attracting back aristocrats by restoring the fashionablity of university education and offering courtly as well as intellectual skills. The progressive landowner could be an important agent of economic and social change, and as elite institutions universities were well placed to diffuse Enlightened ideas to the impressionable adolescents on their benches.

This new mission meant major changes in all four traditional faculties. In medicine, the “birth of the clinic” and the development of university-associated hospitals. In law, the promotion both of natural law and of the study of local legal systems and codes, to replace or supplement the traditional emphases on Roman and canon law. Notker Hammerstein’s work has emphasized the centrality of law in Enlightened reform, first in Halle, but then through the spread of new ideas from northern Germany to the Catholic universities of the south and then to the Habsburg Empire.⁸ In the arts faculties Gottingen had a similar role, at least in the German-language areas, and here the full package of reforms would include dismantling scholasticism, teaching in the vernacular, and the introduction of a range of practical and scientific subjects. The Humboldtian reformers were to use “utilitarian” and “specialized” as terms of condemnation, and this has made historians too ready to underestimate the vitality of innovation in eighteenth-century universities. Sometimes this bypassed the traditional university and resulted in the creation of specialized, vocational schools. These too were denigrated by Humboldtian champions of the unity of knowledge, but should really be seen as a distinctive new form of higher education; a development lying at the origin of the French grandes écoles, which remain immensely powerful today, can hardly be written out of the picture.

Finally there was secularization. Throughout Catholic Europe, reform was linked with the dissolution of the Jesuit order. Catholic rulers generally supported a variety of Gallican, Febronian, regalian, or Josephinist doctrines, which preached the subordination of church to state. In both Catholic and Protestant countries, universities were expected to turn out clerics loyal to the state, who would be good parish pastors teaching enlightened, rational morality to their flocks. Faculties of theology were modernized accordingly, and Joseph II’s attempt to substitute the university faculty for the Episcopal seminaries at Louvain showed the hostility that such policies could arouse. In Protestant universities one can see this new emphasis in the reformed Lutheranism of Halle,⁹ in the Moderatism of the Scottish universities, and in the kind of natural theology, which made Paley a set author at Oxford and Cambridge.

Although rulers were now abandoning their sixteenth and seventeenth century obsession with religious unity, the imposition of these modified forms of religious orthodoxy showed that there was still a marked desire to maintain some kind of official doctrine, and this idea, as we shall see, was slow to die. Although Enlightened reforms were in many countries a decisive stage in the shift of power from church to state, secularization did not yet involve a break with religious faith, and this might limit the degree to which the reformed universities promoted intellectual progress and free inquiry. In Spain genuine reforming efforts under Charles III in the 1770s ultimately proved ineffective because of the fear of unleashing new or foreign ideas. And in Austria itself, professors were kept under narrow political surveillance and required to lecture from approved texts. By later standards, therefore, the universities of the Enlightenment were not always enlightened universities.

Although university reform was commonly one aspect of enlightened absolutism, it was not necessary to have absolute rulers to have enlightened university reforms. They could be carried out by national elites intent on political and economic regeneration, as in Scotland in the mid-eighteenth century, with notable success, and in Poland in the 1790s, in an unsuccessful attempt to resist partition. But where there were neither reforming governments nor committed elites, universities were likely to remain unreformed, as in England. In this dynamic commercial society, the universities, not being in London, had little connection with the intellectual life of the capital, with the world of literature, the press, the coffee houses, the inns of court, scientific societies, and salons.

It is less easy to explain why in France, where the most important university was in the capital, the monarchy failed to initiate reforms, despite the stimulus of the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1762. The local elites, the leaders of the Parliaments, did draw up reform plans, but were not allowed to carry them out.¹⁰ As Brockliss has pointed out, reform did not necessarily seem as urgent to contemporaries as to critical historians. Despite their intellectual stagnation, the French universities’ social function of turning out lawyers, clergymen, and officials had not lost its validity, and they worked, as everything else in the ancient regime worked, somewhat chaotically but with the force of tradition and inertia.¹¹ The absence ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Series Page
• History of Higher Education Annual 2000 Volume Twenty
• Copyright Page
• Articles
• Recent Dissertations in the History of Higher Education