4 ms·

The Origin of the Research University

144 points by Petiver 1y ago

sebmellen 1y ago
Those Trailblazing Teutons…
djoldman 1y ago
> The students were menaces, given to drunkenness, gambling, dueling, and chronically skipping class. I came across this awhile ago and thought it pretty incredible and interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scholastica_Day_riot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scholastica_Day_riot
- Exoristos 1y ago
  They also harassed churches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliards#Satirical_poets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliards#Satirical_poets
- cernocky 1y ago
  were the students really surprised about the quality of wine in a place called "Swindlestock Tavern" ? :)
bonoboTP 1y ago
Great thought provoking article, a lot of starting points for wikipedia deep dives. It's really surprising to me that most of the big name intellectuals from before the 19th century were indeed not doing their work in the university system. I guess it's in nobody's interest to highlight this. Academia wants to present itself as the obvious deposit and trailblazer of knowledge and that it always has been. There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis of good science. I find it curious and bad that people can go through the academic pipeline without ever being presented with any deep explanation of what this thing even is, where it came from, what else it could be, what historical opposition there was or what debate there was around what it should be, what it is in ideal theory and what it is in real practice and what cynics see it as. People just enroll because that's obviously the thing to do. Then they may stick around for grad school and get comfy in the system but reflection and meta is rare.
- biofox 1y ago
  It's a somewhat selective history. Off the top of my head: Kepler developed his ideas while at the University of Graz. [16th century] Galileo built his first telescopes while a professor at the University of Padua. [16th - 17th century] Newton did all of his work while at Cambridge (although, admittedly, it took the plague and a lockdown for him to have his annus mirabilis). [17th century] William of Ockham (of Razor fame) did his work at Oxford. [14th century] Giordano Bruno did the work that got him burnt at the stake while at the University of Paris (and briefly Oxford). [16th century] Roger Bacon developed the scientific method while at Oxford. [13th century]
  - bonoboTP 1y ago
    Still, it may be surprising to learn that these weren't doing their famous work within the university system: Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Leeuwenhoek, Halley, Spinoza, Hobbes, Cavendish. Kepler didn't get a professorship and did his most famous work (elliptical orbits, Kepler's Laws) later in Prague as imperial mathematician. Newton is the main one who indeed was a prof in Cambridge during his main works.
    - griffzhowl 1y ago
      They were all educated at universities though.
      - bonoboTP 1y ago
        Yes, but the point is that universities weren't places of research, but learning/teaching.
        analog31 1y ago
        It could be that interest in research itself is a relatively recent development. A lot of scholarship amounted to study of past scholarship, until science came along. Empirical science as we know it was barely a century old when Newton came along.
dr_dshiv 1y ago
The Mouseion of Alexandria (the larger institution around the more famous library) was arguably the origin of the research university. Scholars there published scholarship in the humanities and sciences — and it lasted hundreds of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouseion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouseion
- analog31 1y ago
  Indeed, and I suppose it's worth looking into the universities of the Muslim world. I read that at one point, there were more universities in the Spanish Caliphate than in the rest of Europe.
mistrial9 1y ago
> It had a modern academic research library, the largest in the world, which featured brand-new innovations like organizing books on shelves by subjects with reference to a catalogue the tone is light-hearted overall, but really think about how foolish this insufficiently rigorous statement is! > It hardly mattered if a professor of oriental languages could read Hebrew or Arabic, so long as he had adequate seniority, and a poetry professor who wanted a raise might well be handed an additional chair in mathematics. this is a glib treatment of seniority > As we’ll see, they mostly failed. The rights of traditional university faculties were protected by ancient laws (and ancient lawyers) but some genuinely funny lines too! > Promising young scholars had to burnish their resumes with useless publications long before anyone thought of asking them to do real research. insightful > before any kind of institutional academic specialization it feels a bit unsettling to read so many detailed and insightful bits of this story but then get these sort of bombastic over-summary lines that sink credibility IMHO
megaloblasto 1y ago
I am so unimpressed with research universities in the US. Most just accept and neglect undergrad students. They use them as a steady income and have very little intention of providing them with a quality education. I happen to be very close with the dean of arts and science of a major state university. He told me that all of his professional goals given to him by the president and provost had to do with research impact, while 100% of the money he was allocated came from student tuition. The incentives are completely out of line and the students are the ones who pay the price.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Weird, most of the money my professor had to spend on grad students came from grants, and the school takes a big chunk of the grants. I dunno where the undergrad money went. The student union was pretty, I guess.
  - megaloblasto 1y ago
    For grad students, yes, the money largely comes from grants (more than 50% of my funding in grad school was from grants from my advisor). The university doesn't actually take a chunk of the grant, they get an additional "overhead". This used to be 60%, now with the Trump administration its been cut to between 15% and 30% depending on the federal agency. For example, if the overhead was 30% and I get a $1000 grant from the NSF, the university will get an additional $300, but I still get the full $1000 (actually the university has full control of the $1000, but I can ask them nicely to use it). I am more concerned with the research institution's effect on undergrads rather then grad students. Grad students have their own unique ways of being exploited.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  There's an argument to be made that at least the bachelor's level should be taught by specialist lecturers who focus on improving didactics and teaching. On the other hand, interacting with someone who is working at the forefront of the field can be helpful when you have a question where a cookie-cutter answer doesn't suffice and expert thought is needed. But it's indeed peculiar that profs are mostly hired based on their research not on their teaching ability (though it is also considered). But either way, since you mention the US, it's a very common experience for American exchange students in European universities that in America they learned to expect much more handholding and pampering than it's provided in Europe. In the US, there is more individual attention from faculty to students, there are all kinds of counseling and guidance services that basically nudge them through the whole thing, reminding them of deadlines, explaining processes etc. In the US, college students ("college kids") are not seen as self-reliant adults. So depending on what kind of "support" you mean, it might be already too much for their own good instead of little.
ricksunny 1y ago
A former MIT Lincoln Lab researcher dedicated years of his life to demonstrating, (in purely technical terms) the contributions of mid-19th-c-to-prewar German technologists to science & history. Underpinned by archive citations & scans throughout, it makes for good reading (and requires no purchase to read). Being 4000+ pages, I’ve found it works well as a reference to sci-technical topics of interest to me rather than a front-to-back readthrough. https://riderinstitute.org/revolutionary-innovation/ https://riderinstitute.org/revolutionary-innovation/
dlcarrier 1y ago
It really is a strange system we have. I wish we could separate education from academia.

144 points by Petiver 1y ago

Those Trailblazing Teutons…

> The students were menaces, given to drunkenness, gambling, dueling, and chronically skipping class. I came across this awhile ago and thought it pretty incredible and interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scholastica_Day_riot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scholastica_Day_riot

Exoristos 1y ago
They also harassed churches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliards#Satirical_poets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliards#Satirical_poets
cernocky 1y ago
were the students really surprised about the quality of wine in a place called "Swindlestock Tavern" ? :)

bonoboTP 1y ago

Great thought provoking article, a lot of starting points for wikipedia deep dives. It's really surprising to me that most of the big name intellectuals from before the 19th century were indeed not doing their work in the university system. I guess it's in nobody's interest to highlight this. Academia wants to present itself as the obvious deposit and trailblazer of knowledge and that it always has been. There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis of good science. I find it curious and bad that people can go through the academic pipeline without ever being presented with any deep explanation of what this thing even is, where it came from, what else it could be, what historical opposition there was or what debate there was around what it should be, what it is in ideal theory and what it is in real practice and what cynics see it as. People just enroll because that's obviously the thing to do. Then they may stick around for grad school and get comfy in the system but reflection and meta is rare.

biofox 1y ago
It's a somewhat selective history. Off the top of my head: Kepler developed his ideas while at the University of Graz. [16th century] Galileo built his first telescopes while a professor at the University of Padua. [16th - 17th century] Newton did all of his work while at Cambridge (although, admittedly, it took the plague and a lockdown for him to have his annus mirabilis). [17th century] William of Ockham (of Razor fame) did his work at Oxford. [14th century] Giordano Bruno did the work that got him burnt at the stake while at the University of Paris (and briefly Oxford). [16th century] Roger Bacon developed the scientific method while at Oxford. [13th century]
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  Still, it may be surprising to learn that these weren't doing their famous work within the university system: Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Leeuwenhoek, Halley, Spinoza, Hobbes, Cavendish. Kepler didn't get a professorship and did his most famous work (elliptical orbits, Kepler's Laws) later in Prague as imperial mathematician. Newton is the main one who indeed was a prof in Cambridge during his main works.
  - griffzhowl 1y ago
    They were all educated at universities though.
    - bonoboTP 1y ago
      Yes, but the point is that universities weren't places of research, but learning/teaching.
      - analog31 1y ago
        It could be that interest in research itself is a relatively recent development. A lot of scholarship amounted to study of past scholarship, until science came along. Empirical science as we know it was barely a century old when Newton came along.

dr_dshiv 1y ago

The Mouseion of Alexandria (the larger institution around the more famous library) was arguably the origin of the research university. Scholars there published scholarship in the humanities and sciences — and it lasted hundreds of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouseion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouseion

analog31 1y ago
Indeed, and I suppose it's worth looking into the universities of the Muslim world. I read that at one point, there were more universities in the Spanish Caliphate than in the rest of Europe.

mistrial9 1y ago

> It had a modern academic research library, the largest in the world, which featured brand-new innovations like organizing books on shelves by subjects with reference to a catalogue the tone is light-hearted overall, but really think about how foolish this insufficiently rigorous statement is! > It hardly mattered if a professor of oriental languages could read Hebrew or Arabic, so long as he had adequate seniority, and a poetry professor who wanted a raise might well be handed an additional chair in mathematics. this is a glib treatment of seniority > As we’ll see, they mostly failed. The rights of traditional university faculties were protected by ancient laws (and ancient lawyers) but some genuinely funny lines too! > Promising young scholars had to burnish their resumes with useless publications long before anyone thought of asking them to do real research. insightful > before any kind of institutional academic specialization it feels a bit unsettling to read so many detailed and insightful bits of this story but then get these sort of bombastic over-summary lines that sink credibility IMHO

megaloblasto 1y ago

I am so unimpressed with research universities in the US. Most just accept and neglect undergrad students. They use them as a steady income and have very little intention of providing them with a quality education. I happen to be very close with the dean of arts and science of a major state university. He told me that all of his professional goals given to him by the president and provost had to do with research impact, while 100% of the money he was allocated came from student tuition. The incentives are completely out of line and the students are the ones who pay the price.

bee_rider 1y ago
Weird, most of the money my professor had to spend on grad students came from grants, and the school takes a big chunk of the grants. I dunno where the undergrad money went. The student union was pretty, I guess.
- megaloblasto 1y ago
  For grad students, yes, the money largely comes from grants (more than 50% of my funding in grad school was from grants from my advisor). The university doesn't actually take a chunk of the grant, they get an additional "overhead". This used to be 60%, now with the Trump administration its been cut to between 15% and 30% depending on the federal agency. For example, if the overhead was 30% and I get a $1000 grant from the NSF, the university will get an additional $300, but I still get the full $1000 (actually the university has full control of the $1000, but I can ask them nicely to use it). I am more concerned with the research institution's effect on undergrads rather then grad students. Grad students have their own unique ways of being exploited.
bonoboTP 1y ago
There's an argument to be made that at least the bachelor's level should be taught by specialist lecturers who focus on improving didactics and teaching. On the other hand, interacting with someone who is working at the forefront of the field can be helpful when you have a question where a cookie-cutter answer doesn't suffice and expert thought is needed. But it's indeed peculiar that profs are mostly hired based on their research not on their teaching ability (though it is also considered). But either way, since you mention the US, it's a very common experience for American exchange students in European universities that in America they learned to expect much more handholding and pampering than it's provided in Europe. In the US, there is more individual attention from faculty to students, there are all kinds of counseling and guidance services that basically nudge them through the whole thing, reminding them of deadlines, explaining processes etc. In the US, college students ("college kids") are not seen as self-reliant adults. So depending on what kind of "support" you mean, it might be already too much for their own good instead of little.

ricksunny 1y ago

A former MIT Lincoln Lab researcher dedicated years of his life to demonstrating, (in purely technical terms) the contributions of mid-19th-c-to-prewar German technologists to science & history. Underpinned by archive citations & scans throughout, it makes for good reading (and requires no purchase to read). Being 4000+ pages, I’ve found it works well as a reference to sci-technical topics of interest to me rather than a front-to-back readthrough. https://riderinstitute.org/revolutionary-innovation/ https://riderinstitute.org/revolutionary-innovation/

dlcarrier 1y ago

It really is a strange system we have. I wish we could separate education from academia.