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Berlin, the Mother of All Research Universities

1860–1918

Charles E. McClelland

This work is the first major reexamination in English of the rise of the world’s pioneer modern research university. It presents an authoritative history of science, scholarship, and education, offering readers a background platform from which to confront looming issues about the future of higher education systems everywhere, but especially in the United States. The innovations of the new-model University of Berlin reached their highest point of development and influence on foreign adopters of “technology transfer” under the new German Empire before World War I. These innovations were grafted onto and shaped American higher research, teaching, and professionalization like no other influence in the twentieth century. No previous book in English has described this impressive conscious creation of an institution promoting cutting-edge research—in fields from physics and medicine to law and theology—combined with the highest standards of active, self-involved student learning for the higher professions. Yet even at the moment its astonishing institutional achievements became the inspiration for the brilliant rise of the American research university over the last century, its own contradictions and limitations were already beginning to appear in the 1920s. Indeed, since the University of Berlin was originally little more than a new reformed German university before 1860 and subsequently faced the disadvantages of financial ruin of the 1920s and the imposed wreckage of the Nazi and East German Communist regimes from 1933 to 1990, the period 1860–1918 is the one of greatest interest for the development of what came to be a world-wide “model” for emulation. Today, when the entire concept of the elite “research university” is under attack, revisiting its origins in Germany should provide stimulus to the debates about the future of the university, not only in North America and Europe but in all countries with higher education systems modeled on or influences by the German or American ones (e.g., Australia, India). The question of whether future innovative science and scholarship should remain coupled with teaching institutions as in the “Berlin model” can best be explored against the background of the emergence of that model.

Lexington Books

Pages: 286 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-4020-9 • Hardback • October 2016 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

978-1-4985-4021-6 • eBook • October 2016 • $105.50 • (£82.00)

Subjects: History / Europe / Germany, Education / History, History / Europe / General, History / Modern / 19th Century, History / Modern / 20th Century, History / Study & Teaching

Berlin, the Mother of All Research Universities

1860–1918

Hardback

eBook

Summary

This work is the first major reexamination in English of the rise of the world’s pioneer modern research university. It presents an authoritative history of science, scholarship, and education, offering readers a background platform from which to confront looming issues about the future of higher education systems everywhere, but especially in the United States. The innovations of the new-model University of Berlin reached their highest point of development and influence on foreign adopters of “technology transfer” under the new German Empire before World War I. These innovations were grafted onto and shaped American higher research, teaching, and professionalization like no other influence in the twentieth century. No previous book in English has described this impressive conscious creation of an institution promoting cutting-edge research—in fields from physics and medicine to law and theology—combined with the highest standards of active, self-involved student learning for the higher professions. Yet even at the moment its astonishing institutional achievements became the inspiration for the brilliant rise of the American research university over the last century, its own contradictions and limitations were already beginning to appear in the 1920s. Indeed, since the University of Berlin was originally little more than a new reformed German university before 1860 and subsequently faced the disadvantages of financial ruin of the 1920s and the imposed wreckage of the Nazi and East German Communist regimes from 1933 to 1990, the period 1860–1918 is the one of greatest interest for the development of what came to be a world-wide “model” for emulation. Today, when the entire concept of the elite “research university” is under attack, revisiting its origins in Germany should provide stimulus to the debates about the future of the university, not only in North America and Europe but in all countries with higher education systems modeled on or influences by the German or American ones (e.g., Australia, India). The question of whether future innovative science and scholarship should remain coupled with teaching institutions as in the “Berlin model” can best be explored against the background of the emergence of that model.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 286 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-4020-9 • Hardback • October 2016 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

978-1-4985-4021-6 • eBook • October 2016 • $105.50 • (£82.00)

Subjects: History / Europe / Germany, Education / History, History / Europe / General, History / Modern / 19th Century, History / Modern / 20th Century, History / Study & Teaching

Author

Charles E. McClelland is professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: From the Ashes of Defeat to the Needs of a New Empire
Chapter 2: “The Intellectual Bodyguard”: The Professors of Friedrich Wilhelm University
Chapter 3: State and University: Finance, Control and Academic Freedom
Chapter 4: The Structural Model “Modern Research University” in National and International Comparison
Chapter 5: Students’ Relationships to Professors, Finances, and the Social Order
Chapter 6: Minorities, Women, Privilege, and Subculture
Chapter 7: The Public Sphere and Political Culture
Chapter 8: The University in Public Opinion, Issues and Movements of the Day
Chapter 9: The University and World War I: Preparing, Fighting, and Struggling to Recover
Chapter 10: A Tarnished Model among World Adaptors

Reviews

Berlin, the Mother of All Research Universities, 1860–1918, should be read or consulted by all historians of science and by historians of higher education, in Germany and beyond.
— Isis

Given the iconic significance of this university, referenced in the book’s title, the study recommends itself not only to the small community of university historians but also to scholars more broadly interested in the politics and social history of academic institutions and professions. . . . This book presents an informative. . . overview of the social and political history of Germany’s leading university at the height of its significance and fame.

— Journal of Modern History

These two recent university histories [Berlin and Nottingham: A History of Britain’s Global University by John Beckett] both offer a mine of useful information and key analyses of university development. . . . McClelland paints a detailed picture of the hierarchy of academic staff in the Berlin system. . . . These two books, both well written. . . merit deep attention by historians, especially those of higher education.

— History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society

Charles E. McClelland has, for the first time, exhaustively analyzed the heyday of Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University (1860 to 1914) and made the causes of its rise to world leadership both comprehensible to an English-speaking audience and relevant to its emulators abroad, especially in America. This book not only sheds new light on the history of science and social history, but embeds both in the political context in which professors and students acted.
— Elmar Tenorth, Humboldt University of Berlin

This is a careful and significant history written by a mature scholar that shows how the world’s first research university took shape and evolved over time. It is also, deliberately and appropriately, an effort to use history to improve contemporary debate, where the achievements of higher education are too often belittled. The book deserves wide attention in both of its domains.
— Peter N. Stearns

Berlin, the Mother of All Research Universities

1860–1918

Charles E. McClelland

Berlin, the Mother of All Research Universities

1860–1918

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