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Places of Inquiry: Research and Advanced Education in Modern Universities

University of California Press

It all began in early nineteenth-century Germany, for it was there that ideology and interest first came together powerfully and in a sustainable fashion to turn research into a university phenomenon. It was there that the principle of a unity of research and teaching (Einheit von Forschung und Lehre ) was first established. In its pure Humboldtian form, the Germanic conception insisted that university teachers become investigators who use the findings of recent research in their teaching. Their students, whether future doctors, teachers, civil servants, or academicians, should also engage in research activity. Together, teacher and student would pursue the truth. Humboldt offered an original and striking formulation.

One unique feature of higher intellectual institutions is that they conceive of science and scholarship as dealing with ultimately inexhaustible tasks: this means that they are engaged in an unceasing process of inquiry. The lower levels of education present closed and settled bodies of knowledge. The relation between teacher and pupil at the higher level is a different one from what it was at the lower levels. At the higher level, the teacher does not exist for the sake of the student; both teacher and student have their justification in the common pursuit of knowledge.1

Here was the formulation for all time that put the creation of new knowledge as well as the revision of old ideas first among the tasks of higher education. "An unceasing process of inquiry" was placed in the driver's seat. Seekers one and all, teachers and students were simply co-researchers.

Like much German idealism, this early nineteenth-century formulation was quite fanciful. The general attitude and larger plan of which it was a part, suffused with high-blown rhetoric, offered comforting but confusing ambiguity. Contradictory actions could claim its parentage, and within a few decades actual practices would stray far afield from what such ideological founding fathers as Johann Fichte, Friedrich von Schelling, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, as well as Humboldt, had in mind. But the broad principle that stressed the primacy of inquiry provided an ideological umbrella under which German universities increasingly became premier educational centers. From the second decade of the nineteenth century onward, a new breed of academic effectively learned in these universities how to put research foundations under the house of teaching and learning. And for over fifty years the secrets of this new framework were virtually a German monopoly. "Until about the 1870s, the German universities were virtually the only institutions in the world in which a student could obtain training in how to do scientific or scholarly research."2 Up to the turn of the present century and beyond, some alert English scholars crossed the channel, a much larger number of Americans made the long and difficult transatlantic voyage, and a goodly number of Japanese would-be academic researchers came all the way from Tokyo and Kyoto to pursue the means of working at the frontiers of knowledge and, on returning home, to attempt to graft research components onto their own system of higher education. Mighty were the German chair-holding professors in the last half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. They stood at the pinnacle of German culture and were recognized internationally as the leaders in a new world of research-based higher education. Their universities in Berlin, Heidelberg, Tbingen, Munich, and other German cities were the first true "research universities," a designation that would dominate internationally in the second half of the present century. Here the academic commitment to research was not only born but developed into a major institutional form. A different dynamic had been turned loose.

Thus what the German academic system became in the nineteenth century is doubly important for understanding connections among research, teaching, and study. A genetic imprint was established for the system itself, one that would strongly persist in the twentieth century; and the German system became a long-sustained exemplar internationally of how to turn research into a foundation for advanced teaching and study. Certain operational tools were fashioned which have had

lasting import in Germany and elsewhere, organizational devices that served well under certain conditions. In the twentieth century, however, radically altered settings have put enormous pressure on a deeply entrenched framework to adapt and change. The old ways have not only been increasingly challenged at home, particularly in the post-1960 decades, but they have been outdistanced by the new tools and procedures of another nation, the United States, which, although initiated in the late nineteenth century, blossomed after World War II. Nevertheless, nineteenth-century Germany is where historical and structural explanation begins.

Institutional Definition of the Humboldtian Attitude

A principle is one thing and practice quite another. Multisided from the outset and hardly a clear set of directives, Humboldtian doctrine contained ideas that lent themselves to various interpretations and pursuits. Going off in one direction were sentiments that helped to turn loose the research imperative in whatever form it might evolve. Inquiry for its own sake was foremost. Related to it was the strong assertion of Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit , concepts of freedom of teaching and freedom of learning that have persisted in Germany to the present day. For a fruitful common engagement in the pursuit of truth, professors and students needed to be free not only from state supervision but also from the constraint of mundane requirements that then as now would normally dot the curriculum and narrow the pathways of academic life. The "curriculum" would be whatever professors chose to do in their own inquiries and whatever research topics the students pursued. Directly based on current research, the teaching "program" would be the opposite of the fixed classical curriculum. Students were similarly liberated, free to choose universities and subjects to the point of wandering among them, even free not to study for long periods of time. As Lehrfreiheit and Lehnfreiheit became Holy Writ, professorial options and student choices were widened even further than what took place in American higher education in the last decades of the nineteenth century under the sway of the elective principle. Decades earlier in Germany, extreme freedom was seen to go hand-in-hand with the unceasing process of inquiry. The first would maximize the second; both would serve the production of knowledge.

At the same time, the original doctrine of Humboldtianism located

this new emphasis on unlimited and unfettered inquiry within a broad humanistic concern: the research commitment should enlighten and help create a rationally organized society. Education through inquiry would lead to informed, rounded personalities who would lift German culture to new heights. Wissenschaft ,...