The Transformation of the World (173 page)

The development of higher education in China was parallel in time and similar in substance. The first universities appeared there after 1895, the Imperial University (embryo of the future Beijing University) in 1898. Traditional institutions of learning had all but disappeared by the time of the 1911 Revolution, but—again as in the Ottoman Empire—many of the values and attitudes associated with classical scholarship had survived. There was great resistance to subject specialization, for instance, and until the abolition of the state examinations system in 1905 the Confucian scholar had to demonstrate his competence in nearly every branch of knowledge. It must be said that a critical spirit was not absent from Imperial China: philological methods fostered doubts about the written tradition, and there was a right to criticize the highest dignitaries, including the emperor himself, if their policies were thought to be deviating from the principles of the classical teachings. However, the cultural authority of the top bureaucracy, which set the tasks for the state examinations until the system was wound up, was considered unassailable. The frank criticism voiced outside its ranks—for example, in local private academies—first had to gain entry to the public space of the newly emerging universities.
⁷⁶

Chinese universities drew on a variety of sources. The Imperial University of 1898 was founded with an eye to Tokyo University, itself shaped by French and German examples. When Japan intensified its aggressive policy against China during the First World War, parts of the new Chinese academic intelligentsia turned more toward European and North American models; mission universities—some considered excellent, even for the sciences, after the First World War—had the same horizons already. Only in the 1920s did the landscape become more diversified and give birth to a real academic community. The main impetus for reform came from the important scholar-administrator Cai Yuanpei, who from 1917 built Beijing University into a fully fledged research institution along German lines, while also observing the principle of the unity
of research and teaching (scarcely a feature in colonial universities). Under extremely difficult external circumstances, China in the Republican period developed an academic life (including the Academia Sinica, founded in 1928) that was capable of top-class achievements. Despite ancient traditions of scholarship, it was only the early Republic that laid the foundations for China's present-day status as a major player in the world of international science.

Japan was the only country in Asia that evolved differently. Its premodern conditions were not necessarily more favorable, but the reception of European knowledge was not broken off as dramatically as it was in late-eighteenth-century China, when the flow of information via the Jesuits came to an abrupt end. In the early nineteenth century, “Holland studies” became a wider opening to European science, and from the 1840s it was possible to study Western surgery and medicine in Edo (Tokyo). After 1868, the Meiji leadership set out to make systematic use of Western knowledge: Tokyo University, founded in 1877, was completely oriented to Western sciences and refrained from giving courses in Japanese and Chinese literature. Although private initiatives should not be overlooked, the state stood more solidly than anywhere else in Asia behind the building of universities. A decree of March 1886 explicitly stated that the planned new crop of imperial universities should “teach those arts and sciences essential in the nation.”
⁷⁷
After the First World War, with a group of well-developed universities at its core, Japan's diversified system of higher education was surpassed only by the United States and a few European countries. Despite the unusually strong role of the state, university professors in the late Meiji period (from roughly 1880 on) were by no means spokes in a wheel happy to take orders from above. Along with French and German forms of organization had come an ethos of the university as a free space for research and debate. The academic elite of the Meiji period linked up with two different mandarin traditions and their related role models: on the one hand, it could identify with the self-confidence and autonomous tendencies of classical Chinese scholars; on the other, it took up the authoritarian habits, but also the pride, of German academic “mandarins,” as Fritz K. Ringer memorably called them.
⁷⁸
However, they were paid more like Chinese than German mandarins: badly.
⁷⁹

Ideal and Model of the Research University

The ideal of reliably funded research, free of immediate utility pressures and provided with the necessary material trappings (laboratories, libraries, external research stations, etc.), was essential to the nineteenth-century European conception of a university, though much more difficult to export or import than its general framework as an
educational
institution. A few premodern universities—most notably Leiden in the Netherlands—had already thought of themselves as research universities. But today's conception of it as a “total package” first emerged during the Age of Revolution, or, to be more precise, between the 1770s and 1830s in Protestant Germany: in Göttingen, Leipzig, and eventually
the Berlin of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher.
⁸⁰
By no means were all German universities research universities. However, they were examples of the few high performers that echoed around the world. The research university model had as its core a centralization of tasks that until then were scattered around in the “republic of scholars.” Even if other places of research continued to exist in Germany, and even if new ones were added toward the end of the nineteenth century (the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, etc.), a basic idea of German reformers was to move research out of the academies into the universities and to bring various “schools” under their roof as institutes and seminars.

The university thus acquired much wider objectives than before. Initially existing alongside academies and learned societies (such as the Royal Society in Britain), museums, and botanical gardens, it became the dominant scientific institution and the decisive social space in which academic communities developed.
⁸¹
It also offered opportunities to conduct research without an eye on how it could be turned to account. Only in this way was it possible to separate theoretical physics (a new field whose great age began at the turn of the century) from the hold of experimental physics.
⁸²
Together with classical and Romantic music (in which Austria, too, was involved, of course), the research university model became Germany's most important cultural export since the Reformation—a complex with a global, though highly varied, impact. Nor should its disadvantages be overlooked: since school qualifications such as the
Abitur
exam guaranteed access to higher education, a danger of overloading was built into the university system. In Imperial Germany, the fact that the educated middle classes and technical specialists were products of an educational system completely run by the state (albeit decentralized at
Länder
level) contributed to an illiberal fixation on state authority among large sections of the German elite. The nonvocational “liberal education” that in Britain or America is still seen as a task of the tertiary phase of the education system ended in Germany when students graduated from the gymnasium. The Germany university trained people in a particular subject and did not care for character formation. Nowhere was specialization taken so far in both research and teaching.
⁸³

Delayed Adoption of the German Model in Europe

The German formulas did not at once find enthusiastic imitators elsewhere in Europe. In 1800, with individual exceptions, the advance of science was concentrated in Britain, France, and the German lands. Italy and the Netherlands had failed to keep up. Breakthroughs in linguistics and archaeology came from Scandinavia, and Russia later contributed major achievements in the natural sciences (e.g., Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements, in 1869). It seemed to many observers that the relative weight of the countries in the Big Three shifted in the course of the nineteenth century. Important scientific discoveries continued to be made in France and Britain too, but to a much greater degree than
in Germany this happened outside university structures. Under Napoleon, the Grandes Écoles had developed into sophisticated, authoritarian training centers for the state bureaucracy and civil engineering, with inadequate emphasis on the “pure” natural sciences and the humanities. In England, Oxford and Cambridge—traditionally geared to training the priesthood—long steered clear of the sciences and showed no interest in building laboratories. As in China, it seemed self-evident that higher education should proceed through the study of texts, in sharp contrast to practical education in hospitals, law courts, or museums. Appropriately enough, the first science to take up residence in the universities was geology: the science of reading the stone “book of nature.”

Gentlemen scholars such as Charles Darwin, the son of a wealthy doctor and speculator (and grandson of Josiah Wedgwood, one of the great pioneers of industrialization), continued to play a role in English science that was no longer possible in Germany after the death of Alexander von Humboldt in 1859. (A special case was Gregor Mendel, whose brilliant discoveries in genetics, made at the secluded Augustinian abbey in Brünn [Brno, Czech Republic], had no impact on the scientific public for more than three decades.) Scientific societies, many newly founded in the nineteenth century, retained special importance for a long time in France and Britain. As in the early modern period, London was a much more important center for the sciences than Oxford or Cambridge and the location of all the learned societies active on a national level. Modern developments in higher education emanated mainly from particular institutions within the University of London or from later foundations in cities such as Manchester (1851).

There were not yet any Nobel prizes; the first were awarded in 1901. Nor did quantified rankings form part of academic life. Reputations had to be built up through individual work within webs of exchanges with other scholars, which from the beginning had an international as well as national dimension. Decades before the unification of Germany as a nation-state, its scientists formed a community which, thanks to its own performance and the diplomatic efforts of Alexander von Humboldt, was well integrated with the rest of Europe. From roughly midcentury on, academic communities in different countries kept a close watch on one another's activities. Science became a public arena of international competition—for example, between the microbiologists Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. When Wilhelm Röntgen's recent discovery of X-rays became known in 1896, Emperor Wilhelm II sent a telegram to the later Nobel laureate, in which he thanked God for this triumph of the German fatherland.
⁸⁴
At the same time, the links between science, technology, industry, and national power became more apparent. In Britain, an impression spread among the public that the country had come off badly at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1867. In France, the military defeat of 1871 at the hands of the new German Reich was put down to a backwardness in education and science. But demands that the state should build large “German-style” universities yielded results only after the
political consolidation of the Third Republic in 1880, the legal foundations for a new system finally being laid in 1896.

Even then, however, the research imperative had less force than in Germany.
⁸⁵
A modern system of higher education developed in France no earlier than in Japan, while in Britain the decentralized structures of academic life made it difficult to speak of a university system at all until far into the twentieth century. Oxford and Cambridge, which after the turn of the century modernized their teaching methods, stopped giving grades without written tests, and ended the requirement that fellows remain single. They converted themselves only after the First World War into research universities with a strong scientific component, following the lead of Imperial College in London, established in 1907 and soon acknowledged as one of the top research institutions in the world. The high costs of modern laboratory work required central financial planning beyond the budgets of traditional colleges and individual faculties. Specialized technical colleges have continued to play a lesser role in Britain than in Germany, France, Switzerland (where the prototype of such an institution, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich dates back to 1858), or Japan. The PhD, initially awarded for science subjects too, was not introduced in Cambridge until 1919, by which time it had long been customary in Germany and the United States.
⁸⁶
It also took many years before restrictions on internal appointments of teaching staff in Oxbridge allowed fresh ideas to penetrate from outside.

The Rise of Universities in the United States

The German research university was thus adopted in modified form by other European nations with an important scientific life, though only after an extraordinary delay of at least half a century. Its influence was felt earlier outside Europe. However, the performance of American universities should not be exaggerated, either in colonial times or during the period up to the Civil War. One of their principal historians speaks of the years from 1780 to 1860 as a “false dawn” and dates the real hegemony of the American research university to the period after 1945.
⁸⁷
Only in the two decades after the Civil War did academic communities take shape in the main scientific disciplines, whereas similar trends had been operating in Britain, France, and Germany since the 1830s. The German model of the research university was then comprehensively studied in the United States, and in 1876 the founding of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore signaled the emergence of the full university on the other side of the Atlantic. It is true, though, that it spread only slowly elsewhere; in many cases, research was seen as a prestigious luxury, not as the very essence of a university.
⁸⁸