University Reform

In 1840, Justus Liebig lamented that at the time of the liberation of the German states from French domination "there were no longer any scientists in Germany."^[1] A certain discount for hyperbole must be applied to this, as to many of Liebig's programmatic assertions. Among the active workers in German academic chemistry at the time of Napoleon's final defeat were Friedrich Stromeyer, Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner, Heinrich Klaproth, J. B. Trommsdorff, and Karl Kastner—all justly famous chemists in their day. Chemistry was being practiced by an identifiable professional community of capable scholars and researchers, which, although less prominent than the corresponding communities in France or England, was far from negligible in importance. Allied with the academic chemical community in various ways were the guild-based but state-licensed and increasingly university-educated apothecaries who compounded drugs for the medical profession. Finally, largely outside this professional community were the practical chemical entrepreneurs and workers who made the soda, potash, acids, gunpowder, soap, paints, and dyes needed in their society by largely empirical methods in small shops. Recognition of the practical utility of chemistry in medicine, pharmacy, technology, mining, metallurgy, agriculture, and most other arts of material civilization resulted in a certain minimum level of social support for chemists and their community, even in the agrarian German states of the early Vormärz period (1815-1848).^[2]

But despite the importance of pharmacists and technical chemists, the real institutional home for the chemical community in Germany (more so than in any other country) was the university.^[3] The universities had arisen in the middle ages essentially as guilds of teachers and students; indeed, the Latin word universitas from which the modern term derives was used by the medieval guilds to refer to the totality of workers in a given craft. The guild model survived into modern German history. After satisfying entrance requirements (after 1834 this meant only graduating from a Gymnasium—a neohumanist secondary school—with the leaving certificate called the Abitur ), the student (apprentice) worked with a professor (master) until he had satisfied the minimum demands of his intellectual craft. Students typically studied a fairly narrow curriculum—usually in one of the three professional faculties of law, medicine, or theology—having already spent nine years in Gymnasium learning the classical languages, religion, history, and German, as well as a modicum of modern foreign languages, mathematics, and natural science. But the matriculated student had full freedom to take whatever university courses he chose. The student could also travel from one university to another, and due to the fragmentation of the German states, there were many from which to choose. The baccalaureate and master's degrees having fallen into disuse, the doctorate was the degree that mattered, and it could be earned after two or three years of hard work. In addition to examinations, a dissertation was often (but not always) required; in the sciences during the nineteenth century, this was on the order of a substantial (and often published) article.

Most university graduates entered one of the traditional professions or became civil servants. If the student desired an academic career, it was customary to spend one or more years after the doctorate at other universities, sometimes foreign ones, as a kind of Wanderjahr , or journeyman period. One then normally needed to obtain a second degree, the venia legendi , or teaching certification. The Germans still refer to this process as Habilitation , or enablement. A second dissertation was required, analogous to the journeyman's certifying masterpiece; this was called the Habilitationsschrift . Some universities in the scholastic mode also required a public disputation on a theme chosen by the aspirant. The successful applicant now had the right to teach courses at the university that had certified him; but his income derived solely from fees collected directly from students electing his courses, nothing from the university itself. Those who had passed this certification were known as Privatdozenten , or private lecturers; uncommon in the eighteenth century, Privatdozenten proliferated in the nineteenth.

After a few years one could hope to be named an ausserordentlicher (extraordinary) professor, also called Extraordinarius . These were poorly paid positions, however. The ultimate goal was to receive a "call" to an ordentlicher (ordinary) professorship, which was a "chair" or Ordinarius position for which one was paid a real salary, as well as being entitled to student fees for all except the required weekly public lecture. As in the guild model, the universities were largely self-regulated by the "masters," that is, the ordentlicher professors. From their number they elected deans of constituent faculties, the rector (president) of the university, and a senate. They also had the power, at least in theory, to select new members of their body, i.e., to fill vacant chairs.

In eighteenth-century Germany, this corporative structure was particularly strong, and many small universities lived almost entirely from their own distressingly meager financial means. Even ordentlicher professors often earned ridiculously small salaries, and student fees usually could not make up the difference since enrollments declined throughout the century. As a consequence, an academic profession barely existed at all, and what did exist tended toward mediocrity. Much of the instruction in the fourth or "philosophical" faculty (designed to prepare students to enter one of the professional faculties) was painfully elementary and hidebound. Publishing novel research was not considered necessary or even desirable and hence was not normally done. The universities, having become essentially narrow professional schools, left scientific research largely to the academies of sciences and to wealthy or patronized amateurs.

The University of Göttingen was a notable exception to this pattern. Founded on a consciously "modernist" and liberal model, well funded and endowed with what soon became the best library in the German states, it attracted an international and often wealthy student body and served as an intellectual pipeline between the kingdoms of Hanover and Great Britain (whose sovereign was the same throughout most of the eighteenth century). In the second half of the century, it became the "first university" of Germany and the central locus of the movement to recast the universities from their stodgy medieval outlook toward the model of progressive teaching institutions, incorporating a strong research mandate. A. G. Kästner wrote toward the end of the century that those professors who failed this mandate were as "mouse turds among peppercorns."^[4] But most of the Göttingen professoriate were of the best odor. During its first century, the university was graced by Albrecht von Haller and J. F. Blumenbach in medicine and natural history; Kästner, Tobias Meyer, Wilhelm Weber, G. C. Lich-

tenberg, and Carl Friedrich Gauss in mathematics and physics; and Stromeyer and Friedrich Gmelin in chemistry. The humanities were equally well represented.

The other German universities changed dramatically after the turn of the century, when their sad state reached a point of crisis and the chaos and humiliation of the French wars provided an effective excuse for a new beginning. The German reforms were influenced to a degree by Napoleon's own progressive ideas about education, but even more by a neohumanist revival that was more typical of German Romanticism and constituted a reaction against Napoleon. Using the University of Göttingen as a model, such Prussian reformers as Wilhelm von Humboldt, J. G. Fichte, and Friedrich Schleiermacher worked to recast the universities of their state in a more "modern" mold. One side of the eighteenth-century resistance to the research ethic had been the Enlightenment ideals of utility, universalism, gradual progress, and encyclopedic breadth. It turned out that the new Wissenschaftsideologie was consistent with more particularist and individualist instincts, as well as with a certain iconoclastic dynamism and a strong disavowal of crass materialist utilitarianism—in other words, an ideology consonant with Romantic notions in general. Moreover, placing a neohumanist rhetorical overlay on university reform had the salutary consequence of rescuing the universities from their predominant eighteenth-century role of narrow professional and civil service training and providing the basis for their new mission of broadly based education of the mind and spirit. Finally, Göttingen's practice of hiring scholarly "stars" active in research and publication had been very successful in attracting relatively large numbers of wealthy, noble, and foreign students. Hanover reaped the benefits of the resulting prestige and indirect income, and envious university administrators in other German states wanted a piece of that action. In this way, the research mandate became associated with neohumanist reforms.

Taking stronger control over the corporative universities and hiring a larger and more eminent faculty meant both larger financial investments and higher expectations on the part of the state ministries of culture. The faculties were still expected to prepare a prioritized list of (usually three) candidates to fill any vacant chair, but the state could, and sometimes did, overrule the faculty to follow a program of its own. Once the research mandate became an expected standard, the German states often competed with one another in attempting to land the biggest academic stars for their universities and attract the highest number of wealthy and foreign students. Salaries rose, at least for the Ordinarien, and the professoriate became a real career option. The leading role was taken after 1817 by Prussian Kultusminister Karl Freiherr

vom Stein zum Altenstein, who put the reforms into effect, especially at the newly founded universities of Berlin and Bonn, and in the process revived the moribund philosophical faculties.

In the meantime, the Ordinarien were competing for student fees with the other faculty ranks, the Extraordinarien and especially the increasingly numerous Privatdozenten. One consequence of this phenomenon was the gradual raising of the standards for admission to the teaching staff, that is, for the venia legendi . Thus, vigorous competition among states, among academic ranks, and among the members of each rank for preferment, as well as the exercise of greater control by the states for their own reasons, resulted in a general strengthening of the research mandate, ever higher standards for research excellence, and increasing professionalization of academic careers. Institutionalized first in the German states during the Vormärz , the dualist professorial standard of teaching and research was widely copied by countries around the world during the second half of the nineteenth century.