Historians of higher education are members of a small subfield of an increasingly neglected discipline within the contemporary academy, but their topic should be of interest to all of us. For good or for ill, the chief scientific, technological, economic, and cultural currents that have shaped the last hundred years have all passed through, and often emanated from, the modern research university.
The Rise of the Research University is a welcome product of the institution it documents, offered as a stimulus to self-reflection during what some already view as the age of the decadence or decline of the research university. The editors have helpfully documented the conception of the distinctively modern research university in Germany, its migration and adaptation to the United States, and its emergence as our dominant educational institution. Some documents were previously untranslated, others difficult to track down. Even those that were readily available are now conveniently gathered together and put into dialogue. The editors have kept their editorializing to a minimum, except to argue that many of the debates involved in the rise and reception of the research university are echoed by the enduring debates about higher education today.
The collection falls into six parts. Parts 1 and 2 describe the origins of the modern university in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany and the impressions it made on Americans who went abroad in search of models to import. The editors emphasize that the “German research university” was more than a little mythical; but little is more powerful than a myth, and the myth became a model for American reformers.
As the editors point out, the main traits of the fabled German university were the integration of teaching and research, the doctrine of academic freedom, and the unending nature of academic inquiry. The German model offered a stark alternative to the teaching-centered, denominational, and classical colleges of colonial and early-republican period America (to say nothing of the premodern university). Wedded as it was to an emerging cultural, economic, and military powerhouse, the German model proved positively tantalizing to the American reformers who saw the old colleges, and the classical heritage and religious faiths to which they were wedded, as obstacles for the development of the United States into a modern, progressive nation.
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