Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities

The German research university in context

The research ethos, already displayed at the larger eighteenth-century German universities, became rooted in nineteenth-century academic life. Germans believed, along with the poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), that the promotion of culture through education was the path to national regeneration. Eighteenth-century courtly life, lacking the means to indulge in the profligate dissipation that characterized Paris and London, was nothing if not intellectual. The courtly ideal of Bildung – an appreciation of the world combined with self-realization – was achieved by serious study.

Education became a German passion early in the nineteenth century, and the university reforms were connected with a new system of primary and secondary schools. The guiding light for educational curricula was a romantic invocation of classical antiquity which was known as neohumanism. The path to Bildung, then, required a large detour through Greek and Latin, the knowledge of which (attested by a diploma, the Abitur, issued by a classical secondary school, the Gymnasium) was held to be a prerequisite for study in any university faculty. This much was also true of French and English education, although to a lesser degree. The signal characteristic of the German educational synthesis lay in grafting research on Bildung.

Accomplishment in research, certified especially by having received a doctorate from a philosophy faculty, signalled that a man was the right sort for instructing German youth. By extension, the battery of examinations instituted to certify young men as customs agents, mine inspectors, and Gymnasium teachers went far beyond the practical knowledge necessary for the job. Gymnasium mathematics teachers, for example, had to acquit themselves in many subjects not taught in the secondary schools, such as celestial mechanics. The requirement is less bizarre when it is recalled that the examiners for civil-service ratings were university professors, whose material interests included persuading future civil servants to attend their rather arcane – not to say useless – lectures. In this way, professors circumvented the inconvenient tradition by which philosophy faculties awarded no diploma except the doctorate; the civil-service rating examinations defined a kind of undergraduate degree (comparable to the licence in France or the ordinary BA at a Scottish or English university).

Bildung, like Wissenschaft, was practically irrelevant. A cultivated person was unprepared for greasing the wheels of commerce and industry, just as a master of Wissenschaft had no sense of how to turn his knowledge to lucrative gain. University learning, at least in the philosophy faculties, was intentionally abstract. As the German states required engineers and manufacturers, notably for their armies, they looked to France and adapted her solution. They set up civilian copies of the Ecole Polytechnique. By mid century these schools evolved into institutes of technology, independent of universities, called technische Hochschulen. Although these institutes did not create the German industrial revolution of steel, chemicals, and electricity (sometimes called the Second Industrial Revolution), they provided thousands of unusually well-prepared engineers (among them Albert Einstein’s uncle, Jakob Einstein [1850–1912]) who stewarded the revolution into the twentieth-century age of gigantic industrial firms.

Institute professors, like those who taught Albert Einstein in Zurich, were infected with the research ethos of their university counterparts. Publishing brilliant work was one way to move up from institute to university, a common career move for many scientists (Einstein bucked the trend, resigning a professorship at the German University of Prague for one at the Zurich Institute of Technology). An institute diploma, however, had nothing of the cachet of a university doctorate. The Zurich Institute of Technology in fact had a special arrangement with the local university, whereby institute alumni could become university doctoral candidates (Einstein twice failed to obtain a doctorate in this way). The engineers clamoured for parity with university graduates to achieve respect at dinner parties and to obtain state privileges bestowed on cultured university alumni. This they progressively (and slowly) achieved. The right to award a doctorate of engineering came in 1900, and more than fifty years later came the honour of calling themselves technische Universitäten.

In the nineteenth century, German education was generally a battleground between practical studies, or Realen, and impractical Wissenschaft. Chemistry provided the first demonstration that pure learning, left to its own devices, could turn a profit. The demonstrator was Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), who mass-produced chemists from his laboratory at Giessen. He revived the felicitous notion that certain kinds of science, especially chemistry, were teachable less by magisterial lectures than by hands-on experience. He expanded on the lecture-demonstrations of the Enlightenment by extending to natural sciences what had been common for Sanskritists or Provençalists – the seminar. Liebig’s students, at first instructed in his home, were largely apothecaries. He taught a technique, synthesizing chemical compounds, that could apply to all nature. He retailed the technique with a goal that no government could dispute, increasing agricultural production. State authorities showered riches on him: a title of nobility and a well-appointed laboratory for teaching and research. The disciples of organic chemistry established themselves across Germany when the great boom of synthetic dyes began, guaranteeing the discipline an independent home in the philosophy faculties. We shall see later that a similar evolution characterized nineteenth-century physics.

The idealism of the Gymnasium movement did not completely extinguish an eighteenth-century emphasis on secondary instruction in Realen – notably modern languages and mathematics. Municipalities and occasionally states also sponsored a variety of trade and commercial schools designed for people who could not afford the luxury of higher learning. Following a natural tendency among academic institutions to seek greater privileges for their graduates, some of the trade schools developed a curriculum and a diploma to rival the Abitur. These advanced trade schools took the name Oberrealschule, and their graduates (having learned French and English in place of Greek and Latin) could go on to study at the technischen Hochschulen. To satisfy practical students who wanted a bit of classical gloss, as well as impractical students disabused of the significance of Greek for modern times, a third school emerged at mid century, the Realgymnasium, which offered Latin and modern languages and whose diploma (after much soul-searching on the part of university professors) allowed entry to certain professional studies.

The absurdity of preventing future organic chemists from learning modern languages and advanced mathematics before the age of nineteen continued to the very beginning of the twentieth century, when the privileges of the Abitur (including university entry and preferential treatment generally by the state bureaucracies, including the army) extended to graduates of all three kinds of secondary school. But the prestige and unifying force of Gymnasium education – experienced by everyone from Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche to Otto von Bismarck and Max Planck (1858–1947) – has continued to the present day.

The reputation of the Gymnasium, the great scientific engine of the doctorate of philosophy, the vaunted emphasis upon professorial research, the fabled encouragement of independent thought – all these things produced imitators and adaptations around the world. Not everyone, however, accepted the German model uncritically. Boston’s Henry Adams graduated from Harvard University in 1858 and headed for Berlin. He found the university law lectures there depressing and useless. To work up facility in German, he then spent a number of months as a special student with thirteen-year-olds at a Berlin Gymnasium. Of this experience he recalled half a century later:

The arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strain that the memory endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the boys performed without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government did not encourage reasoning.

All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. The German machine was terribly efficient.2

That inhuman efficiency, flying the colours of neohumanism, found many theatres of operation over the next century.

The Gymnasium also had unabashed admirers. One of the most illuminating accounts of science at nineteenth-century German universities comes from John Theodore Merz, the British-born and German-educated entrepreneurial and intellectual wonder. He recalls of his Gymnasium days in Darmstadt during the 1850s:

All my teachers, with perhaps one exception, were, in my opinion, very superior and earnest-minded men, who performed their duties very conscientiously and certainly did not shirk work. They expected the same from the boys, and I believe succeeded largely in securing this. I remember only few instances of serious punishments either for laziness, insubordination, or untruthfulness. Only twice during the six years of my attendance was a boy caned before the class for telling an untruth.

Merz, a polymath in an age of specialization, flourished in Darmstadt’s neohumanism. Latin and Greek poetry,

which we were expected to commit to memory, made the greatest impression on me, and I learnt many passages and whole poems without any special effort simply by hearing them read and repeating them to myself. Many of them I have carried with me through my whole life, and they have been sources of great enjoyment to me in lonely hours.3

The nineteenth-century German university is known for its principles of Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit – the freedom of staff to teach whatever they liked and the freedom of students to attend any course they desired. Tenured instructors called Privatdozenten (because their income derived only from student fees, not state salaries) did indeed lecture on subjects of arcane interest (Merz attracted an audience of three when he was a Privatdozent at Bonn). Though salaried professors could do the same, they generally gave large introductory lectures to supplement their income. Students moved freely from one university to another and attended lectures ranging from philosophy to physics. A doctor of philosophy could apply to become a Privatdozent. This process of Habilitation meant submitting a dissertation for the right to teach, the venia legendi of medieval origin that allowed a professor to teach at any institution of higher learning. University faculties, controlled by tenured professors, were naturally extremely careful not to dilute their ranks (and their earning power) with a large number of Privatdozenten.

Rules were meant to be broken. The venia legendi could be revoked by the corporation (the university faculty) that issued it. From time to time professors and Privatdozenten were unceremoniously dumped as political or social liabilities. The most famous of these were the Göttingen Seven, removed from their posts in 1837 for associating themselves with political reform, although other causes célèbres included the exclusion of physics Privatdozent Leo Arons (b. 1860) from Berlin in 1898 for his membership in the Social-Democratic Party and the firing of Berlin physiology professor Georg Friedrich Nicolai (1874–1964) for his pacifist activity during the First World War.

Despite the refrain of academic freedom that resounded everywhere in Germany before 1933, university lecturers, much less professors, had to be the right sort of people. Jews, as Max Weber (1864–1920) noted, might take their cue from the motto written over the gates to Dante’s hell (‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’), but they became part of academia anyway. Women, although by the twentieth century not formally excluded, were almost completely absent as German university professors. This situation was not unusual in western, continental Europe, where women professors were phenomena. Physicist Marie CurieSklodowska (1867–1934), one of only two women professors at the Sorbonne before 1940 (the other was the organic chemist Pauline Ramart-Lucas [1880–1953]), obtained an appointment as a foreign-born, Nobel laureate, professor’s widow; Emmy Noether (1882–1935, daughter of a university mathematics professor) taught mathematics at Göttingen during the First World War only because most young men were serving as soldiers. Discrimination extended to neighbouring lands. In the Netherlands, where women had been earning medical diplomas since the middle of the nineteenth century, the first woman university professor did not begin lecturing until 1917. She was Johanna Westerdijk (1883–1961), who occupied the chair of plant pathology at the University of Utrecht with great distinction.

More significant exceptions to this situation are found beyond the western part of continental Europe. By the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, the Russian-speaking and the English-speaking worlds had created separate, university-grade colleges for women – complete with women professors. St Petersburg featured a women’s university, a women’s medical faculty, and a women’s normal school, all with women science professors. Barnard (at New York’s Columbia University) and Radcliffe (at Harvard University) followed the model of women’s colleges at Cambridge; colleges like Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, and Vassar, founded independently of male institutions and staffed largely by women, offered advanced degrees; and around 1900 coeducational sectarian colleges such as Oberlin, as well as a host of universities from Sydney to Manchester, signed on women as lecturers of various sorts.

Universities elsewhere

During the Third Republic, from 1871 to 1940, French administrators tried to borrow features of the German universities. Of all nations they were slowest to make the desired improvements, the research doctorate firmly establishing itself in France only in the late 1920s. But what of laissez-faire England?

For nearly two generations, the Scottish pressure valve accommodated the enormous demands for scientific education which had been generated by the First Industrial Revolution of steam, coal, iron, and textiles. The valve became insufficient by the 1820s, when Oxford and Cambridge still discouraged entry from religious nonconformists (the last of the religious ‘tests’, required for obtaining a diploma, were swept away only in 1871) and offered nothing approximating advanced scientific or even medical instruction. The reform of British education occurred over the middle quarters of the century. Generations after dissenters had established schools for languages and science outside the pale of the Church of England, English Public Schools were renovated with French, German, and mathematics under remarkable headmasters like Shrewsbury’s Benjamin Hall Kennedy (1804–1889), Charterhouse’s William Haig Brown (1823–1907), and Rugby’s Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), the father of poet Matthew Arnold.

Early in the nineteenth century London was a bit like Prussia’s Berlin had been: a seat of government without a university. Unlike Berlin, London generated scientific colleges piecemeal. The Benthamite-inspired University College founded in 1828 and the establishment King’s College in 1830 eventually became the larger installations of a huge organization, the University of London, which countersigned diplomas (by examination) at many domestic and colonial locations. London colleges offering scientific and technical instruction multiplied: the Royal College of Chemistry (founded in 1845 by students of Justus von Liebig), the Royal School of Mines (founded in 1851 along the model of the Ecole des Mines in Paris), and the City and Guilds of London Institute (founded in 1878 and located in the storied, sixteenth-century Gresham College).

The earliest of the so-called ‘red-brick’ universities in England’s industrial north also grew by collegial accretion. Durham revived its Cromwellian university in 1832, added a college for physical science at Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (of which John Theodore Merz was for many years the guiding spirit) and a medical school, and then picked up affiliated colleges in places such as Barbados (Codrington) and Sierra Leone (Fourah Bay). Manchester, growing from Owens College to a university in 1877, had within its orbit colleges at Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, and Sheffield, although these branches declared institutional independence within a generation. University affiliations were marks of prestige and avenues to power at a time when the old Scottish and English universities sent members to Parliament and enjoyed the privilege of conducting courts of common law with the prerogative of imprisoning women for morals offences.

The prosecution of research in English universities was something of an inconsistent accident: Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory rising to world prominence under its first four directors (James Clerk Maxwell [1831–1879], John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh [1842–1919], Sir Joseph John Thomson [1856–1940], Ernest, Lord Rutherford [1871–1937]) and Oxford’s magnificently appointed Clarendon Laboratory (founded with money originally willed for a hippodrome) sinking into desuetude under its fainéant directors Ralph Bellamy Clifton (1836–1921) and Frederick Alexander Lindemann (1886–1957). To a certain extent science in England lived vicariously from imperial recruits, Rutherford’s trajectory (from Christchurch, New Zealand, to Cambridge to Montreal to Manchester and back triumphantly to Cambridge) being a paradigmatic illustration. Before 1918 the preparation of scientists did not generally include a doctorate, the British having marked this diploma (as the Russians also reserved it) as a laudeo for illustrious professors. (Rutherford’s DSc came courtesy of McGill University after he had been appointed Second Macdonald Professor of Physics there.)

Unlike England and France, the United States responded with enthusiasm to notions Germanic. Early in the nineteenth century the new nation had religiously-affiliated colleges of the English kind, public universities financed by individual states, and a diverse collection of privately endowed institutions of higher learning – there being generally no governmental restrictions on recognizing institutions that variously styled themselves colleges, academies, and high schools. There was, indeed, no clear distinction between secondary education and higher learning, high-school and college diplomas being roughly equal in number across the nineteenth century. Americans adopted French engineering schools as soon as the Germans did, and with more felicitous results. Until 1850 science was best acquired at the West Point military academy and at nearby Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute, both modelled on the Ecole Polytechnique. Diverse polytechnics since then, such as the Massachusetts and California institutes of technology, Case, Carnegie, Armour, Rice, Stevens, and Drexel, established themselves as temples of science and technology, the Americans never having separated (as the Germans, the French, and the English separated them) the two distinct traditions.

About 1870 a number of high-minded American educators introduced the German philosophy doctorate under its Latin cognomen (Philosophiae Doctor, or PhD), even though not one of them oversaw an institution with a philosophy faculty. The innovation spread through refurbished religious institutions, like Yale and Harvard, older private institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, state universities like the ones at Berkeley, Ann Arbor, and Madison, and newly endowed institutions of learning like Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, the University of Chicago, and Stanford. When universities like Princeton and Duke upgraded themselves, they expanded in the direction of ‘graduate’ studies. To distinguish the research function from the usual propaedeutic mandate, American universities invented the ‘Graduate School’ as one of their constituent divisions.

In Europe the university was a corporate entity with state prerogatives – a guild structure – rather than a self-contained and contiguous physical plant. Sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century transplants in places like Santo Domingo, Quito, Puebla, and Manila followed the European model, lodging professors and students wherever room could be found in the neighbourhood of ecclesiastical monuments. Although certain private corporations continued the European pattern (notably in dense, urban settings like Philadelphia and New York), by the eighteenth century, the colleges and universities erected beyond Europe had made use of their greatest asset – land – as a privileged domain. The university campus proliferated. The College of William and Mary is emblematic. It is situated at one point of an isosceles triangle, the other apexes being the colonial Virginia legislature (House of Burgesses) and the governor’s residence. The granting of land has subsequently figured in the foundation of new universities, and even the Europeans came to embrace the principle. The finest extended example of nineteenth-century German academic architecture, in fact, is the splendid campus of the Université Louis Pasteur, erected as an imperial German university at Strasbourg shortly after the Germans conquered Alsace in 1871.

The nineteenth-century campus was designed as a bucolic retreat, incorporating sylvan glens, conspicuously vacant fields, and arboreta, all of which might be seen as compensation for the lack of state privileges. As science helped to propel the Second Industrial Revolution, scientists were able to withdraw into specially constructed temples of limestone or marble in pristine settings.

Whether on or off a campus, specially designed research laboratories graced universities for the first time during the latter part of the nineteenth century. At the beginning, form was everything – allusions on the building’s portals reminding immature minds about the long tradition of science and the great power it represented. By the last quarter of the century, form was only skin deep. Science laboratories circled around large lecture halls for elementary courses (especially the ones frequented by medical students, who by 1880 were often required to go outside their faculty to learn about physics). Next to the lecture halls was an array of teaching laboratories, special halls for diverse kinds of professorial research (including massive stone plinths set independently of the building’s foundations to provide vibration-free working surfaces), rooms for housing steam and electrical generators, and seminar rooms and libraries. Larger physics institutes like the one at Berlin, inaugurated in 1877 on piers driven into a canal, had apartments for the director (Hermann von Helmholtz [1821–1894]) and his family, the assistants, and the maintenance staff of mechanics and maids. Like the one at Berlin, enormous structures arose at Leipzig and Zurich – veritable kingdoms under the command of a director. European institutes – massive, multistoried structures with several wings – dwarfed older academic buildings. The specialized laboratories eclipsed even the jewel of humanists, the library. Harvard’s Widener Library, the world’s largest university-owned book repository at its dedication in 1915 and an imposing memorial to a young man who went down with the Titanic, was not a great deal bigger than the Berlin physics institute.

By the end of the nineteenth century, nation states were bankrolling prestigious empires of science at independently administered universities (or, in France, at grandes écoles). Bureaucratic response followed swiftly: the state constructed its own scientific laboratories and funded them even more handsomely. Some scientists abandoned universities for the new settings (Helmholtz’s presidency of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt represented the leading edge of the new wave), but most sat on the fence between the traditional prestige (and independence) of a university position and the vast resources (with strings attached) of the new federal research centres. The usual arrangement was to divide time between (and accumulate emoluments from) university and state laboratory. A clever scientist could play off each patron against its competitor. This is what Albert Einstein did when he went to Berlin in 1914. Appointed to a salaried chair at the Academy of Sciences (positions in the same vein had been funded by the academy for many years), he received a courtesy appointment at the local university (allowing him to supervise doctoral students) and a titular directorship of an institute for theoretical physics in the federal laboratory structure known as the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft. Einstein used the academy position for publishing rapidly and circulating reprints free of charge; the university post for staying abreast of bright young talent and new scientific ideas; and the Kaiser-Wilhelm post for privileged access to its industrialist, financier, and politician patrons. Certification in research nevertheless remained a university prerogative. German universities continued to award doctorates throughout the twentieth century, and the doctorate became a sine qua non of scientific life elsewhere – even in England, where today a certain prestige still attaches to a scholar who, like Lawrence Stone (b. 1919), Quentin Skinner (b. 1940), or Simon Schama (b. 1945), may not sport an earned doctoral degree.