Here's my summary on this interesting article:
The author, Clara Collier, sees these old universities as relic, contrasting research centers which were separate institutes from the universities at the time (pre-1800).
Early modern universities have four traditional faculties: Theology, law, medicine, and philosophy. The last one just means: everything from modern arts to sciences, from poetry to physics. And this last category was the least prestigious and worst attended: Professors were the least paid in this and only for lecturing. Research was done in their own time. For the sciences, one needs to go to the British Royal Society or the French Académie des sciences.
From the 16th century, starting with astronomy, such interest was pursued outside of universities. Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo all left their teaching job in universities for civil servants or court astronomers which paid more. Kepler had it worst as devout Lutheran yet excommunicated by Lutherans for taking Calvinistic view on the Eucharist, so he was never able to secure a university chair at all. Government-funded facilities were more successful than universities which became less popular in this field.
German universities were seen as factories during the second half (18th century) of the Age of Enlightenment. From an intellectual res publica to Immanuel Kant's fabrikenmäßig (in a factory). Cameralism (the science of public administration) was the goal. But this system eventually failed because professors (of whom many are incompetent) prefer their own hiring politics rather than handing the meritocratic decision to outsiders. This results in the state founded universities such as the University of Göttingen by George II of Britain and Hanover in the 1730s. These universities hired famous professors and were liberal in non-traditional subjects like modern history or applied mathematics. Göttingen had a modern academic research library, the largest in the world at the time, featuring breakthroughs such as organizing books on shelves by subjects with reference to a catalogue. Göttingen came to define the Enlightenment university.
Hanover prime minister, Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen, was most responsible for introducing a new criterion for academic advancement: the publication record: Professors either publish or perish. Göttingen was for training ministers and attracting rich students from other German states who would come to spend money in Hanover. Fame was its cameralist currency and it worked very well.
Kant in his 1786 book The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, “A doctrine/system is a complete understanding organized according to principles, then it's called science (Wissenschaft = science, systematic knowledge: [a German-language term that embraces scholarship, research, study, higher education, and academia]).” With the classicists, we get the seminar (in the field of classical philology, 1738, at Göttingen). The first seminar was state-funded specialized institutes for teacher training, following Prussia's pedagogical seminars. Teachers were trained to teach Latin and Greek at Gymnasien (advanced secondary schools). Then seminars evolved into collegia (introduced by classicist and archeologist Christian Gottlob Heyne) — private classes professors would teach to small groups of students for extra fees. Unlike formal university classes which were just lectures, collegia demanded active student participation. traditional practice of disputation was done as written assignments and critiqued by class peers. This novel approach in 1763 became the standard practice in Germany academia by the 19th century. More universities established philology seminars on the Göttingen model — Wittenberg, Erlangen, Kiel, Helmsted, and Halle.
Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar was a modern, enlightened ruler with a passion for acquiring famous intellectuals (at this point, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of his ministers). Around 1798, he started to recruit a new crop of brilliant young scholars to his university: the playwright Friedrich Schiller, theologian Ernst Schleiermacher, philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, and F.W.J. Schelling, and the polymathic brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel. There's up and down (i.e. Schiller was bad at lecturing, Fichte was popular but resigned for being an atheist, etc.).
In the Romantic worldview, the goal of education was not to memorize facts but rather to train the capacity to notice connections between them and incorporate new information into the same systematic framework. As Schelling wrote, “knowledge of the organic whole of all sciences must therefore precede a particular education focused on a single specialty.” Thus, the university which spread the universal pursuit of knowledge was to be preserved over specialized schools. Fichte's central idea was that universities should foster personal self-development (Bildung) as thinkers and scholars, but also as moral beings.
The university, Fichte’s friend Schleiermacher, the theologian wrote, “forms the transition between the time when a young man is first prepared for systematic knowledge, by his own studying and by acquiring a knowledge base, and the time when, in the prime of his intellectual life, he expands the field or adds on a beautiful new wing to the edifice of knowledge through his own research.” To Schleiermacher, academies of science are centers of research production, not universities.
By the end of the 18th century, the Napoleonic wars (subjugation of Prussia by Napoleon Bonaparte) killed off the old university system with all things French (utilitarian over medieval institutions). half of all German universities shut down. Halle, the centerpiece of Prussian academia, closed in 1806. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Prussian educational administrator, from 1809 to 1810, developed a plan for an institution (synthesizing universities and seminars) to be built in Berlin, modeled on the pedagogical vision of Schelling, Fichte, and Schleiermacher, but also inspired by his own alma mater, Göttingen. Thus, the University of Berlin was founded in 1810. It was like Göttingen but with philosophy, one of the four faculties, elevated to a more central intellectual role, however, students in the career-oriented law, theology, and medical faculties still outnumbered the philosophers.
Berlin also marked an important transition: from fraternity violence to paeans to the life of the mind. The Romanticism era. Berlin Ph.D.: Fichte not only insisted on offering the degree, but added two novel requirements: candidates needed to write their own dissertations — and they needed to be works of original research. This was a very big change. Like seminars, dissertations have their roots in the medieval disputation. Starting in the 16th century, German doctoral candidates would hold a disputation as part of their graduation ceremony. In these disputations, they would defend a set of theses — written by the presiding professor. Professors would produce tens of thousands of these — before journals were common, they were the predominant form of academic publication. However, they typically weren’t new contributions to human knowledge. The dissertation was a test of a candidate's ability to defend their mentor's work. The work itself didn’t have to be new.
True Bildung happened in lectures or seminar discussions where students and teachers could learn together directly. Schleiermacher was even opposed to writing down lecture notes in advance, since this would get in the way of the students “directly observing the activity of intelligence producing knowledge.”
The Americans: The founders of Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago were explicitly built on German models. Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, was a committed Germanophile, and reformed Harvard’s graduate school along German lines. The whole institutional structure of American graduate education is German, from academic departments (an outgrowth of the seminar) to doctoral dissertations. It’s Humboldt’s world, and we’re just living in it.
Without [this history], German universities might well have been hollowed out and replaced with professional schools, as they were in France.
My conclusion: So basically, the Germans were responsible for universities/colleges today for not turning into mere trade schools. But I don't agree with the author that it is a good thing that the research university's real contribution is a world where scholars don’t have to be originals or geniuses to add their bricks to the edifice of human knowledge (though I’m sure it helps), as this actually degrades the research university: everyone gets an A as long as you put in the time, nobody will fail even if you are not mentally capable of it. True, there was greater reliance on unique few scholars outside of universities, and synthesizing specialization with such is a good introduction of great researches into universities; However, emphasizing system over individual risks encouraging mediocrity and bureaucracy. The author does, as Deepseek AI concurs, appear to be a pragmatic anti-elitist. Nevertheless, this is a good history lesson overall.
