Novel Campus

Just as it seemed the Germans were beginning to emerge from the more onerous weight of their historical guilt-complex, historian William Clark reminds us of another scourge for which they can be blamed: the modern university system.

Anthony Grafton's review at The New Yorker of Clark's new book, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, makes for fascinating reading if you have more than a passing interest in that 'odd, unstable compound of novelty and conservatism' which characterises academic life. ('Odd' and 'unstable' being the operative words here.)

It may surprise many readers (those in the US in particular) that the contemporary institution of higher learning was very much shaped by its historical development in Germany (or, more precisely, in that crazy patchwork of micro-states which preceded the modern German nation). This story is laid out very nicely in Grafton's review, which also contains some very fine anecdotes, such as those about historian Theodor Mommsen:

Mommsen's fantastic energy and work ethic-he published more than fifteen hundred scholarly works-had made him a hero, not only among scholars but to the general public, a figure without real parallels today. The first three volumes of his "History of Rome," published in the eighteen-fifties, were best-sellers for decades and won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902. Berlin tram conductors pointed him out as he stood in the street, leaning against a lamppost and reading: "That is the celebrated Professor Mommsen: he loses no time."

(He certainly sounds wonderfully efficient and everything, but I hope it's not just envy speaking if I suggest that Mommsen might have been a bit...exhausting? ... to be around. I bet he was a lot of fun at departmental meetings.)

There is also the following inspiring story, which might be confidence-building for any doctoral candidate facing their oral exams:

When Dorothea Schlözer, the daughter of a professor, underwent her examination for a doctorate at Göttingen in 1787, she confronted a committee of seven examiners. In deference to her sex, she was seated not at the far end of the table, facing the professors, but between two of them. The examination-which was interrupted for tea-allowed for masterly displays of professorial snideness. One professor "pulled a rock out of his pocket and asked her to classify it. After a couple more questions, he said he was going to ask her one on the binomial theorem, but, as he reckoned most of his own colleagues knew nothing of it, he decided to skip it." The student calmly outperformed her masters. When another professor asked about art history, she noted that she had not listed this topic on her résumé, and thus should not be asked about it-but then she answered anyway. After about two hours, a professor who had been silent until then interrupted a colleague to note that "it was 7:30 and time to quit." Schlözer passed.

Yet beyond explaining the origins of some of the more eccentric legacies of university life (and, to be honest, the professors in Schlözer's story doesn't sound all that distant from today's), even Grafton's much-summarised version of Clark's book makes another useful point: 'the university' has always been an institution in flux, constantly renewed by shifting political, social and economic realities.

Although I'm far from an expert on this, I have had my own inside experience with the functioning (or, more often, malfunctioning) of present-day German universities, and I think Clark's work may provide a useful antidote to the contemporary national Angst about reforming these venerable institutions.

Now, just to make clear, there is a great deal of excellent research and teaching in German universities. It is, furthermore, being done in financial and institutional straits which, even in the grim 1990s, I never experienced in the US. (If you're not so familiar with Germany, its universities -- which are mostly still 'free', although modest fees are starting to be introduced in some states -- are presently undergoing an agonising funding and identity crisis.)

However, there is also an unbelievable amount of ossified administrative nonsense as well as a stubborn reluctance to stop thinking things can still be done as they were back in the good old days, when there was plenty of money and enough jobs for everyone. There are efforts at reform; however, as in any large institution, they are often hindered by the usual mix of personal vanity and departmental politics. There are also occasional signs of breathtaking naivety.

This happens even (or especially) on a large scale: concerned about German universities' international reputation, for example, the national government recently put into motion a selection process to name a group of 'elite' universities, which -- along with getting to throw their new 'elite' label around -- would also receive some (relatively paltry, all things considered) additional funding for a period of years. Of course, it is about as likely that a panel of experts can conjure up an 'elite' university as it is that a great novel will ever be written by a committee.

The (comparatively simple) idea that universities themselves should be given more freedom in designing their programs, organising their funding, rewarding their high-performance staff and selecting their students does not seem to have occurred to anyone at the ministry.

This may be in part because there's a widespread opinion that reforming the universities along more competitive lines is some kind of scary, neo-liberal import from the brutal capitalists and cultural philistines on the other side of the Atlantic. This is profoundly mistaken. As Clark's book points out, in a curious way, a reforming spirit was already present at the birth of the modern university, implicated as it was in the intricacies of the Holy Roman Empire's political map. As Grafton notes:

This complex assembly of tiny territorial states and half-timbered towns had no capital to rival Paris, but the little clockwork polities transformed the university through the simple mechanism of competition. German officials understood that a university could make a profit by attaining international stature. Every well-off native who stayed home to study and every foreign noble who came from abroad with his tutor-as Shakespeare's Hamlet left Denmark to study in Saxon Wittenberg-meant more income. And the way to attract customers was to modernize and rationalize what professors and students did.

Thus, opening up the education system to more institutional independence and competition would, in a strange way, be a quintessentially traditional and German thing to do. I would suggest that the architects of German university reform take a careful look at the above paragraph and that, much like Prof. Mommsen, they lose no time.

German scholarship has been vastly influential in the West over the last few centuries. For it to remain so -- and I, for one, hope it does -- the institutions which produce it will have to transform themselves into something very different. What results will be something which does not fully resemble the typical university of 2006.

But as Grafton's review makes clear that, in the history of the university, change (along perhaps with strange clothing and irrational rituals) has been one of the only continuities.