UNIVERSITIES

In the first half of the nineteenth century, higher education in Europe underwent changes that resulted in the establishment of divergent institutional systems. Beginning in the 1870s, however, a new consensus began to emerge, based on an ideal that combined teaching and research that accelerated the exchange of knowledge, teachers, and students across the Continent.

changes in the map of european universities

In 1790 there were 143 active universities in Europe. As the century came to a close, and over the first half of the nineteenth century, major changes started to occur that, to begin with, affected Germany, France, and Russia.

Germany, France, and Russia: Revolution in the university

Of the thirty-five German universities existing in 1789, with a total of seventy-nine hundred students, eighteen disappeared during the Revolutionary period. On the other hand, three new institutions were founded, in Berlin (1810), Breslau (1811), and Bonn (1818). Prussia hoped that these would help buttress the control it recovered after 1815 over extremely heterogeneous lands now stretching from part of conquered Poland to the Catholic Rhineland.

The French university landscape was even more radically altered. A string of revolutionary laws and decrees issued between 22 December 1789, when universities were subordinated to the départements, and 7 Ventôse Year III (25 February 1795) quite simply swept away colleges and faculties of theology, medicine, the arts, or law founded in the Middle Ages. Under the Consulate (1799–1804) and Empire (1804–1814), French higher education was integrated into a highly restrictive central administrative framework from which all local institutional autonomy was completely absent. Professional faculties (three of medicine and three of law for the whole empire in 1804) and academic faculties (of arts and letters and of science) were all brought under the authority of a central administration known as the "Imperial University." Fortunately, the Napoleonic regime spared certain major institutions considered to be genuine seedbeds of scientific innovation. Some of these dated from the ancien régime, such as the Jardin du Roi, turned into a museum in 1793, and the Collège de France; some had been founded during the Revolutionary period, such as the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, the Institut de France, and the School of Oriental Languages; and others were long-established elite training establishments such as the École Polytechnique for civil and military engineers, the Saint-Cyr military academy, and the École Normale for the training of university teachers.

In Russia too the transformation of the university system was rapid and carried out from above. Moscow University itself was founded early on, in 1755. Between 1803 and 1819, however, as many as five Russian universities came into being: Kazan (1804); Kharkov (1805); Dorpat (Tartu), formerly a German institution, became Russian in 1802; Vilna (1803), transferred to Kiev in 1835; and St. Petersburg (1819). In the second half of the nineteenth century, universities in Odessa (1865), Tomsk (1888), and Saratov (1909) were established. To these institutions should be added very many higher technical schools, chiefly in Moscow.

Elsewhere in Europe, however, the growth of universities was far slower.

Slow progress in northwestern and southern Europe

The British Isles were especially conservative. In 1800 there was one university in Ireland, namely Trinity College in Dublin; four in Scotland; and two—the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge—in England. This deficit was gradually mitigated by local endeavors with no overarching plan: by 1901, Durham (1832), London (1828; reincorporated 1836), Manchester (1851), and twelve other "civic universities" had gradually been established in the larger English cities. And, thanks to reforms made in Scotland in 1858 and at Oxford and Cambridge in 1877, it is possible to say that a real university system, rather than the isolated colleges of an earlier time, had come into existence in Great Britain before 1914.

As for the Mediterranean region and northern and eastern Europe, it is hard to blame traditionalism for the delayed progress of higher education. Governments in these areas tended to create new, more functional institutions as a response to social and political pressures, the result being a highly unbalanced distribution of facilities. Before 1871, the Italian states as a whole possessed twenty-one establishments of higher learning, but these varied dramatically in size and were distributed in a way that failed to reflect real needs: northern and central areas were overserved, whereas from the academic standpoint the south was a near-desert utterly dominated by the giant University of Naples.

By contrast, a centralized country such as Spain was able to rationalize its university map gradually during the nineteenth century. A number of the institutions of the old regime were simply closed down between 1807 and 1845, with no attempt being made to revitalize them. Just ten universities remained, each covering a district conceived on the model of France's "circumscriptions." After the transfer of the main institution from Alcalá de Henares to Madrid in 1836, the nationwide network suffered, just like that of France, from the crushing weight and privileges of what in the official terminology was called the "Central University."

Smaller countries also, notably the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and to a lesser degree the countries of Scandinavia, met with much difficulty in their attempts to bring a measure of rationality to their university systems. As in the modern period, religious traditions and national, even regional, rivalries meant that these sparsely populated states had a disproportionate number of institutions relative to their actual needs. In the wake of Belgium's independence, two new universities were founded, a liberal and secular one in Brussels and a Catholic one in Malines (both in 1834). The reorganization of 1835, however, left the country with just four universities: two state institutions, in Ghent and Liège, an independent university in Brussels, and a Catholic one in Louvain.

The map of Scandinavian universities went through analogous revisions in response to political changes and the requirements of scientific innovation. The achievement of autonomy, and then independence, by such new states as Norway and Finland enabled them to develop systems of higher education clearly distinct from those of their former protectors, Denmark and Russia, respectively. The ancient universities in Scandinavia were Copenhagen, founded in 1479, and, in Sweden, Uppsala (1477) and Lund (1666). To these was added the University of Christiania (Oslo); founded in 1811, six years after Norway became independent of Denmark, it was to be the center of Norwegian nationalism. Similarly, the elevation of Finland to the status of a grand duchy dependent on the Russian Empire was followed by the transfer of the University of Turku to Helsinki (1828).

Change in the university and political change in central and eastern Europe

In the early modern period, central and eastern Europe was a region with little in the way of a university system. This traditional pattern, however, was gradually transformed by virtue of the expanding national and liberal movement, the training of local elites in western Europe, the birth of new states, religious and ethnic rivalries, and a growing desire to catch up with the more developed parts of Europe. A few signs of intellectual subordination or archaism nevertheless survived until after World War I, as witness the continuing flow of students sent to Germany and France from most of these new nations.

The western part of the Austrian Empire (Cisleithania) was undoubtedly the best served region, with six ancient universities at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to which almost as many advanced technical schools were added in the first half of that century. This picture underwent very few modifications thereafter, except for the division of the University of Prague into two autonomous institutions, one Czech and the other German, in 1882; the creation of the University of Agram (Zagreb) in Croatia in 1874, with philosophy, theology, and law faculties; and the founding of the University of Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) in 1875.

As for the eastern portion of the empire, Transleithania, its sole university was founded in Nagy-szombat (now Trnava, Slovakia) in 1635 then moved to Buda in 1775 and then to Pest in 1784. The university could award doctorates but offered only partial programs of technical instruction and specialized law and theology courses. New universities were eventually established around the turn of the nineteenth century, as was consistent with the country's development.

A very different path was taken by higher education in partitioned Poland, which would not regain its independence until 1918. Throughout the nineteenth century, Polish elites were educated for the most part in foreign universities. Students from the Prussian province of Posen (Poznán) attended the universities of Berlin and Breslau and, being barred from administrative posts, tended to take up Catholic theology. In Austrian Galicia, however, there were two predominantly Polish university towns, Kraków and Lemberg (now L'viv, Ukraine). The most repressive university system was in the Russian-dominated "Congress Kingdom of Poland." From 1831 to 1862, the University of Warsaw was in effect closed in reprisal for the 1830 uprising. During those years, Polish students were thus obliged to go to Russia—to Kiev or St. Petersburg. After 1864 the University of Warsaw was Russified, becoming in effect a sort of private free university. This institution had to struggle to survive, and indeed it lost all autonomy in 1869. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Polish elites preferred to educate their young people abroad, in clandestine establishments or, more and more, in the Polish-speaking and relatively independent Galician universities. The most oppressed group of all were Jews aspiring to higher education but confronted by both Russian and Polish anti-Semitism.

On the fringes of Europe, Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania provide examples of the simultaneous emergence of the modern university and the modern nation under strong foreign influence—Bavarian or German for the first two, French for the third. In such small rural countries the founding of a university in the capital was one of the chief symbols of an independence eventually won after long centuries of cultural oppression. From the outset, the new kingdom of Greece, with Otto, son of the king of Bavaria, at its head, sought to buttress its national identity by establishing a university in Athens. Inaugurated on 3 May 1837, it was to serve for the rest of the century as a rallying point for the Greek diaspora living under the Ottoman Empire (more than 40 percent of students at the University of Athens were born outside Greece's borders).

In Romania, the creation of the University of Ia?i (1860) through the expansion of an academy dating from 1835 was followed in 1864 by the founding of the University of Bucharest on the basis of three preexisting faculties (arts, sciences, and law); a medical school was added in 1869 and a department of theology in 1884. These two institutions reflected the desire of the Moldo-Wallachian elites to emancipate themselves from dependence on ancient centers of learning abroad that had trained the ruling class until that time. As a small country speaking a romance language, however, Romania maintained its links to France, and most of its future university teachers and a significant proportion of its students, especially in law and medicine, continued to complete their education in Paris.

european university systems

The first seventy-five years of the nineteenth century thus saw the rise of university systems in Europe that differed greatly according to their location. This may be explained in part by the upheavals and reorganizing already mentioned, and in part, too, by the survival of long-standing cultural traditions. The two most radically distinct approaches, which for the sake of convenience are referred to here as the "Napoleonic" and "Humboldtian" systems, were instituted almost simultaneously and represented opposing responses both to critical historical contingencies and to the intellectual and pedagogical debates of the Enlightenment.

The Napoleonic system

Though constructed almost from scratch, the Napoleonic system of higher education extended certain eighteenth-century innovations (the vocational schools) while rejecting the universalizing ambitions and new departures of the radical phase of the French Revolution. The intent was to endow the state and postrevolutionary society with the framework needed to stabilize a country turned upside down, to exercise a tight control over education in accordance with the new social order, and to prevent the emergence of a sphere of intellectual freedom too large and dangerous for the state to handle. This enlightened despotism accounts for the predominance of the "school" model (even when the term faculty was used), the tyranny of state diplomas governing the right to exercise a specific function or profession, the importance placed on grading and competition even in courses of study that did not necessarily call for them, the regimentation of curricula, and the conferment of degrees by the state alone. The system implied a strict division of labor among faculties and a high measure of educational specialization. In consequence all essential research and innovation was confined to the large establishments—to a few departments of the Sorbonne or the Collège de France or to the academies and learned societies. This explains the chief shortcoming of French higher education, namely the overconcentration of resources and manpower in Paris.

This unegalitarian logic was also reflected in the hierarchical relations among teachers: because a portion of their remuneration was in the form of examination rights, teachers in the vocational schools with their large intake and those in Paris with its abundance of candidates had unfair advantages. This inequity was exacerbated by the ability of professionals, notably teachers of law and medicine, to supplement their incomes through extramural activity. Professors of arts and science subjects, meanwhile, often sought to increase their revenue by cumulating teaching or administrative functions, which had an exploitative effect on substitutes and adjuncts.

The Humboldtian system

The new university system promoted by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) was conceived in explicit opposition to the Napoleonic approach. Under its sway the philosophy faculty was assigned equal if not superior status to other departments. The philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) defined the university in this context as that place where masters and fellow students assemble between school (in the sense of secondary education, viewed as a coming together of masters and apprentices) and academy (meaning an assembly of masters among themselves).

This ambitious intellectual ideal explains the categorical rejection of French-style vocational and specialized schools, which turn their back on what the German model considered the true purpose of the university, namely to awaken the individual to knowledge, to adopt an encyclopedic approach, and to offer a free choice of studies (Lernfreiheit). Nevertheless, even though the organization of the University of Berlin was certainly influenced by these ideas, it would be an error to assume that its structure conformed strictly to the myth of the "Humboldtian system" as later constructed by German academia.

To begin with, research played a distinctly subordinate role in the new system, and the particular relationship between teaching and research that was subsequently deemed one of the chief distinguishing features of the Prussian approach came into being only slowly and in an uneven manner depending on place and discipline. As for another hallmark of the German system, much admired by foreign observers, namely the use of the privatdocent (an assistant professor who gives lectures to students without being tenured and is directly paid by them) in the training of future teachers, it should be pointed out that this arrangement was by no means as widespread as is often assumed. The real basis of the dynamism of the German system (or more accurately systems) was perhaps that, being less rigid than any other, it was able to benefit from nineteenth-century intellectual and social advances. Decentralization indeed allowed for local initiatives that might later, imitated or imported, spread to other universities. Student mobility obliged institutions to adapt according to demand, and this created a process of emulation that was by definition absent from unified and centralized states such as France. All these features are primarily the result not of any concerted approach but of a history based on the division of Germany into several different states.

Nor should one overlook the persistence of older traditions (differing religious practices according to region, the continuing subordination of philosophy departments in southern Catholic states such as Bavaria) or the enduring wish of the sovereign of the German states to retain political control over "their" universities. In 1819, for example, the conference of German states in Karlsbad decided that the universities should be subject to political surveillance in view of a growing liberal student movement, the Burschenschaft. The concern of the states was only increased by the degree of student participation in the 1848 movement for German unification. The supposed competitiveness of the academic market within a multipolar system unique in Europe was nonetheless vulnerable to corruption through persistent nepotism in recruitment, especially in the smaller universities. Inasmuch as the state, in order to meet the demand for teachers, resorted to the creation of extraordinary, low-paying and nontenured positions for teachers or privatdocenten, this arguably served as a spur to young researchers whose work had to be truly distinguished if they were to join the professoriate. On the other hand, the appointment process remained prone to biases of a social kind into the twentieth century; in the conservative Protestant states, for instance, Catholics, teachers considered too liberal, and—a fortiori—Jews were persistently discriminated against or even excluded from the academy.

The vocational crisis of the German system

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the German university system was being imitated across Europe and elsewhere in the world, the system itself was undergoing a crisis. This reflected several problems related to social and intellectual changes: the difficulty of incorporating the most modern scientific and technical culture, the aristocratic corporatism of the teachers, the lagging professionalization of certain career paths, and so on. This was a crisis of growth—and a crisis in the academy's sense of vocation.

After stagnating between 1830 and the mid-1860s, the German student population had multiplied by a factor of five (to sixty-one thousand) by 1914. In the main, this growth benefited the smaller universities and the philosophy faculties. For the first time the number of arts and science students surpassed that of law students, while the tally of theology students in 1914 was a full half lower than in 1830. Higher education was changing, shifting its emphasis from traditional avenues such as the clergy or the civil service to more modern careers such as college teaching, scientific research, engineering, and the technical professions. In parallel to the universities a network of Technische Hochschulen (polytechnics) was set up—ten in all by the beginning of the twentieth century. Their student population more than tripled from five thousand in 1871–1872 to seventeen thousand in 1903; university enrollment doubled during the same period. These technical colleges were disparaged by those in traditional universities, and it was only thanks to the intervention of Emperor William II in 1899 that they obtained the right to bestow doctorates.

The new generation of students tended to be drawn from less middle-class, less cultivated backgrounds than its predecessors, and student attitudes were more pragmatic. Students were now less taken with the Humboldtian ideal, for they were seeking an education tailored to very precise career goals, and this often gave rise to misunderstandings with teaching staff who for their part were increasingly specialized, detached from the surrounding society, and prone to indulging nostalgia for a Germany that was no more.

The burgeoning student population alarmed conservatives fearful of the rise of what Otto von Bismarck called a "proletariat of bachelors." The absence of regulation with regard to enrollment probably did produce numbers of students in law, medicine, and arts and sciences that at some point became disproportionate to the society's needs.

As for the system's vocational crisis, it was an even more pointed threat to the German approach than uncontrolled expansion, because it precipitated an internal dislocation of the universities. The Humboldtian ideal was meant to help educate distinguished young men of the solid bourgeoisie or nobility. But once the universities were populated in the majority by young people (including, from the early nineteenth century on, young women and foreign students) whose concern was to maximize the future profitability of their university careers, the orientation of higher education was bound to veer toward utility and specialization. After 1871 the governments of German states gradually accepted this tendency, structuring their institutions and courses of study in accordance with the new needs of an industrial society. They also fostered ties between scientific research and the economy. These new priorities were bound to throw the earlier German ideal model of the university into question.

The crisis also affected those supposed to embody and uphold the Humboldtian ideal, the university professors themselves. The untenured were often in the majority, notably in the sciences and in medicine, but they did not always participate in collective faculty decisions. This imbalance made career advancement slower and more arduous and fed a discontent that erupted before World War I in the movement of the Nicht-Ordinarien. The proliferation of untenured teachers cannot be explained solely by the financial advantage governments stood to reap from the availability of lower-paid employees. It was related also to the increasing prestige of professorships, which were more and more eagerly sought after, and to the growing specialization of disciplines, whose new branches would typically be entrusted to young untenured teachers. These factors accelerated innovation, but they were also a source of intellectual frustration. They meant, for one thing, that new entrants to the system needed to dispose of private means while waiting for promotion or occupying lower-level positions.

Meanwhile, institutional autonomy was increasingly jeopardized by state intervention in appointments and even more by the growing financial dependence of the universities on public funding for the equipment needs of scientific and medical research and even for research grants and library resources in the humanities. The "freedom and solitude" of the ideal Humboldtian professor had scant prospect of survival in institutes where collective projects held sway or in universities collaborating closely with captains of industry.

Austro-Hungarian exceptionalism

Austro-Hungarian higher education presented a far more traditional aspect than the German universities. After the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1773, the central government administered the entire system, including the non-German-speaking parts, under the Ratio educationis law of 1777. Remnants of medieval tradition, such as "student nations" and the "assembly of the doctors," and the survival of absolutist tendencies into the 1850s, also impeded the introduction of German-style reforms. The university system thus had a strictly functional goal, namely the provision of the human cogs—priests, functionaries, or teachers—needed by a heterogeneous empire. Education was thus governed in every detail from above, in sharp contrast to the pedagogical freedom gradually spreading in Germany. With the exception of the Vienna Faculty of Medicine, Austrian universities were scientifically backward. The 1848 revolution, in which Viennese and Hungarian students were very active participants, obliged the authorities to experiment with the Prussian model (Count Leo Thun Von Hohenstien's reform), albeit in an authoritarian version that remained in place until around 1860. Under this arrangement higher education was extended by two years, while students in the preparatory years no longer entered institutions of higher education until they had passed a "maturity examination" (or baccalaureate). The philosophy faculty thus achieved parity with other departments, as in Germany. The government eliminated student nations and associated teachers' remuneration with the number of students enrolling in their courses. The opening up of the academic market through the hiring of more privatdocenten and the recruitment of teachers from Germany created a competitive situation that over time raised scientific teaching standards.

The chief peculiarity of the Austro-Hungarian system lay, however, in the obstinate survival up until World War I of professional (and especially law) faculties: 45.7 percent of Viennese students in 1860 and as many as 53.8 percent in 1909 were law students; in Hungary the proportion was close to 60 percent.

British systems

It makes little sense to speak of a single university "system" in the British Isles. The characteristics of English universities on the one hand and Scottish on the other were the product less of any state plan than of compromises between centuries-old traditions and long-postponed reforms. To this picture must be added new institutions, privately or locally conceived, that addressed shortcomings in the existing establishments and were thus governed by the logic of local conditions rather than by an overarching idea, as in France or Germany.

For most of the nineteenth century, a clear distinction has to be drawn between the Scottish universities and the two ancient English universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The Scottish institutions were much more closely akin to universities on the Continent because they depended on the state for most of their financial support. Their doors were open to students from modest backgrounds, they imposed neither residence nor the tutorial system, and they were far more concerned with teacher training than the "colleges" of their English counterparts. Reformed before the English universities by virtue of two royal commissions (1826 and 1876) and two acts of Parliament (1858 and 1889), the Scottish universities took the lead in educating students in the new disciplines and preparing them for professions other than the clergy. As early as the 1820s, their total student population was large, totaling 4,250, whereas Oxford and Cambridge together had less than one thousand undergraduates. The reason was twofold: the simultaneous presence within the Scottish universities of adolescents of fourteen or fifteen, "lads o'parts" drawn directly from parochial schools, and young men of twenty or thirty years of age; and a generous scholarship system. The flexibility of curricula and attendance even made it possible to combine studies with work. While a humanist culture continued to dominate at Oxford and Cambridge and while vocational training in England, as a practical matter, was provided outside university walls, the Scottish universities, like those of most European countries, combined the two functions.

At the start of the nineteenth century, Oxford and Cambridge differed in every particular from the Scottish universities. They had barely emerged from a long period of stagnation stretching over the best part of the previous century. By about 1829, with 840 admissions annually, they had returned to their seventeenth-century level. The requirement that students reside in the colleges, the high cost of enrollment, the absence of vocational preparation other than clerical, and the refusal of admission to non-Anglicans placed further limits on expansion. The gradual introduction of formal examinations (the Tripos), especially at Cambridge, produced a corresponding improvement in the quality both of the teaching and of the students. The complete independence of these ancient universities vis-à-vis the state was founded on their vast landholdings and on their close relationship with the Church of England. Their ideal of an educated man was still that of a well-rounded honnête homme (honest man), and moral context continued to count as much as scholarly content. Thus the teacher–student ratio was kept much higher than in continental Europe. At Oxford, for example, there was a teacher for every nineteen students in 1814 and for every sixteen students in 1900. It is true that competition for "honors" introduced a kind of meritocracy and bestowed social markers, so to speak, of future success.

Even before religious restrictions were lifted, dissidents got around them in 1828 by instituting the first non-Anglican college in London, namely University College, destined to become one of the core components of the University of London. The

Anglicans of the capital responded in 1831 by founding King's College. The Whig government recognized both colleges in 1836 in setting up the University of London, licensed to deliver degrees on students in London institutions. As early as 1850, two hundred candidates took advantage of this method of circumventing the constraints of the traditional universities. The new university thus introduced another level of heterogeneity into British higher education, for London was not residential like Oxford and Cambridge ("Oxbridge"), nor was it unified like the Scottish establishments.

A third phase in the evolution of the British higher education system was constituted by the creation of the "civic universities" mentioned earlier, which had purely practical goals and philanthropical or local funding, and by the long-deferred reform of the ancient universities, where a few features of the German system were eventually introduced.

Russia between Humboldt and Napoleon

In Russia, the beginning of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of a system of secondary and higher education. The new universities were modeled on the German system. The first teachers were in fact Germans or Russians trained in Germany, notably at Göttingen. The most contradictory aspect of the new system, an aspect that would endure as long as the Russian Empire itself, was that these institutions, devoted in principle to science and theoretically rather autonomous, were nevertheless assigned the task, after the fashion of France's grandes écoles, of training civil servants. This ambiguity was reflected in an alternation between liberal periods facilitating Westernization and the politicizing of student youth and periods of repression and militarization precipitated whenever the authorities felt they had been too permissive.

The first such reactionary moment came in the 1830s in response to the European and Polish revolutionary events of 1830 to 1832. The statute of 1835 obliged students to wear uniforms and follow regimented curricula while teachers were forced to defend the Orthodox religion, autocracy, and nationalism. The tumult of 1848 in Europe sparked a new militarization of the Russian universities. Rectors were now to be appointed, the teaching staff was purged, the content of courses became liable to prior vetting, enrollment fees were increased so as to reduce the number of students, and students were subjected to military training and strict pedagogical control. Disciplines perceived as dangerous (such as constitutional law and philosophy) were eliminated. By the early 1860s, however, the return to a more liberal administration had begun.

Initially intended as they were to train a nobility integrated into the state, the Russian universities accepted but a small proportion of poorer students. In Moscow in 1862, 71 percent of students were children of the nobility or of eminent functionaries—actually up from the 65.9 percent estimated for 1831.

In theory at least, the teaching system was very rigorous, calling for twenty hours of obligatory course work per week, a pass-or-fail yearly examination, and a maximum of six years of study to finish the nominal four-year program. Selection was not very strict in practice, however: more than two-thirds of students were graduated and received the title of kandidat.

transformations and convergence of european university systems

Sociologists and historians of education have described the period from 1860 to 1914 as one of diversification, expansion, and professionalization of higher education. These three tendencies were accompanied by the growing influence of the German system as a model for reform in countries whose universities had remained traditional. Convergence was nevertheless only partly realized because of the persistence of national and regional particularities.

France: Incomplete reform (1868–1904)

In France during these years two main concerns, the need to develop the research function within the faculties, as in the German system, and the need to restore balance to a vastly overcentralized structure, joined forces with a mood of intense national self-examination prompted by the defeat of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) to spur on the movement for reform.

In 1868 the first concern was addressed when Victor Duruy (1811–1894) founded the four sections of the École pratique des hautes études, so creating teaching laboratories and a place where knowledge was transmitted by means of specialized seminars that broke from formal courses intended for a wide audience (the main form of teaching in the faculties). The second concern, the need for decentralization, took longer to address. A solution required local support from the provincial cities, a new inflow of teachers (teaching positions nearly tripled between 1865 and 1919), and much increased financial resources (faculty budgets more than tripled between 1875 and 1913). Most universities were reorganized or expanded during this time. An improved balance was achieved, too, between vocational and academic faculties, bringing things closer to the German model in this regard. The greatest challenge was the administrative reform embodied in the law of 1896 that grouped faculties together as universities. As was consonant with their status as civil institutions, these new entities had elected governing councils, controlled a portion of their budgets, and were empowered to create and eliminate professorial posts and to receive endowments. In a word, they could innovate.

Convergence with the German system was nevertheless incomplete. The decentralization failed to impinge seriously on the dominance of Paris: 43 percent of all French faculty students were still to be found in Paris in 1914, as compared with 55 percent in 1876. Paradoxically, the decision finally taken to transform all groups of faculties into universities, even in small towns, prevented the emergence of major regional centers capable of competing with Paris.

All the same, the reform must be credited with the diversification of the subjects on offer and a reduction in the average age of teachers, who now fell into several different categories.

The university reform was less successful in the vocational faculties, and it failed to challenge the enduring hold of an elite system of higher education over recruitment to top technical and administrative positions. So far from losing their importance, the schools of this system multiplied, keeping most of their privileges. After 1870 they were reinforced by commercial schools, as well as new engineering schools and schools of administration. Catholic faculties created after 1875 also developed vocational training opportunities.

The development of the British universities

This period was also decisive for British universities, which experienced their most radical reforms since the Middle Ages. England's two ancient universities were obliged by parliamentary action to adapt to the modern world: non-Anglican, female, and foreign students were at last admitted in the 1870s, when they were permitted to enroll outside the college system. Meanwhile college fellows were gradually given permission to marry. From this point on, therefore, a genuine academic career became a possibility, because university teaching was no longer merely a stepping-stone to the clergy or to the liberal professions. In consequence the population of Oxford and Cambridge grew considerably. The range of subjects taught, still confined at midcentury to the classics and to mathematics, opened up now to the sciences, history, law, and foreign languages. Research too now had a place, especially at Cambridge, after a gift from the Duke of Devonshire made it possible in 1871 to create the Cavendish Laboratory, where part of the future British scientific elite would be trained.

The most significant changes in the British academic landscape nevertheless occurred outside Oxbridge, as the new civic universities grew in number in the provincial cities, their purpose being to train the new managers needed by an industrial and urban society. Until these universities were granted full independence by royal charter, their students received their degrees through the University of London, an establishment that itself expanded very greatly as more and more specialized institutions were federated under its aegis in a somewhat abstract manner. The resulting "exploded" university obtained its real charter only in 1898.

The other change that underlined the break with the Middle Ages was the state's ever-increasing financial stake in institutions that had hitherto subsisted either on their inherited wealth (Oxbridge) or on the support of private or municipal benefactors (the provincial universities). This departure was initiated in 1889, and by 1906 state aid had already reached £100,000, a by no means negligible sum, albeit much inferior to university apportionments on the Continent (from the 1890s on, for example, France disbursed four times as much to its fifteen groups of faculties).

The Scottish universities depended even more on the state. They were granted £72,000 yearly from 1892, to which were added funds for building, endowments from local businesspeople to create chairs of practical interest, and, beginning in 1901, a gift worth £100,000 per annum from the Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.

The social background of university entrants continued to reflect great elitism at Oxbridge, but for the new universities and above all for the Scottish institutions the picture was considerably more egalitarian, and thus closer to the continental pattern. In 1910, for instance, 24 percent of university entrants at the University of Glasgow were children of manual workers, and 20 percent those of small shopkeepers, artisans, and office workers; at Oxford these two categories together accounted for a mere 10 percent of student intake, although they constituted 90 percent of the active population in Britain. This discrepancy in the level of social discrimination between the two kinds of universities had a financial underpinning: in Scotland, fees were low, scholarships plentiful, and the primary and secondary education network well developed; in England, by contrast, Oxbridge students continued to be drawn mostly from the high-fee public (i.e., private) schools, while some two hundred pounds per annum, roughly equivalent to the entire income of a middle-class family, was needed to fund an Oxbridge student. And in 1910 no more than 7 percent of English students received scholarships (predominantly young people supported by local municipalities interested in their pursuing technical careers).

Austria-Hungary: The attraction of Germany

It was during the second half of the nineteenth century, too, that the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the newly developing Balkan nations began in their turn to feel the gravitational pull of the German model. Their universities belonged in a sense to two worlds: they were modern, and close to the German academy, inasmuch as German-speaking teachers and students were continually circulating through the western part of the empire and even reaching Budapest; but at the same time they were still archaic in many ways, still characterized by the backwardness of largely rural countries where careers for professionals lay in the civil-service, judicial, ecclesiastical, or medical spheres far more often than in the scientific or literary ones. The eighteenth century's enlightened despotism had left a concrete legacy in the shape of many well-established advanced technical schools. But the whole system was subject to unusual stress on account of the national and religious origins of its students, drawn as they were from populations of great diversity. Another difficulty arose from the pressure, strongest in the east, for students to migrate westward to Vienna, to the German or Swiss universities, or even, in the latter part of the period, to Paris, a trend that deprived many new institutions of the most highly motivated individuals.

The universities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire gradually won the right to teach in national languages. They thus became seedbeds of national freedom movements, which naturally tended to block convergence with the German system and with international intellectual life.

The Hungarian universities had a number of special traits, notably the predominance of law studies, a privileged avenue so favored by the ruling class that Hungary was dubbed "a nation of lawyers." The explanation for this lies in the development of a Magyar bureaucracy after the Compromise of 1867 and by the new prominence of the legal profession in a liberal economy. The petty and middle-level Hungarian nobility, with its land rents in decline, used law training as a way of monopolizing positions in the state apparatus. By the end of the century this monopoly was being challenged by commoners, especially by Jews who were able to take advantage of bloated university law schools where rather easy requirements made it possible to combine legal studies with other activities. By the same token, such easy access to law courses facilitated the assimilation of Germans and Slavs into the dominant ethnic group.

Switzerland: Gradual expansion

During this period Switzerland slowly developed an approach to higher education that was unique in three respects. In the first place, there was no nationwide university system, because each establishment depended on a particular canton that had a free hand with respect to education. Second, because the canton authorities were directly involved in the governance of the university, institutions were immediately affected by political developments. Third, the independence of cantons notwithstanding, the nearness of Swiss university towns to one another meant that competition always had to be reckoned with when striving to attract students from a single linguistic catchment area; rather as in the German system, this was a powerful spur to productive rivalries. An original—albeit almost unavoidable—way to fund the conversion of the old Swiss academies created by the Reformation into true universities (including research facilities), was the opening of the door to foreign students and (unusually early) to young women. Even before 1914, female students constituted a fifth of the total Swiss student population, more than twice their proportion in France at that time. As for foreign students, their percentage in Geneva was very high: 44 percent in 1880 and 80 percent in 1910; for all Swiss universities their numbers were not much lower: 47 percent in 1900 and 53 percent in 1910. All these rather unusual characteristics made Switzerland's small universities into innovators when compared with peer institutions in neighboring countries.

Italy and Spain: The difficulty of reform

Reform in the Italian university system proceeded alongside the construction of the national state. It was particularly elusive inasmuch as modern and medieval traditions weighed heavily on the system, while the unique role played by the Catholic Church in Italian society meant that any attempt at modernization meant contesting clerical privileges. The Casati Law of 1859 sought to centralize higher education after the fashion of the French system. It excluded the church from higher education but failed to eliminate small local universities inherited from medieval times.

With its seventeen complete or incomplete groups of faculties, post-unification Italy at the end of the nineteenth century seemed overendowed by comparison with France (fifteen groups) or Germany (twenty universities), especially since Italy's population was smaller and its territory only half as large. In addition, the Italian network was very unevenly organized: in the 1890s, for instance, eight universities had fewer than five hundred students among them, while in the following decade the student body at Naples alone numbered more than four thousand. The only notable reform, motivated by anticlericalism, was the abolition of theology faculties in 1873.

At the turn of the century, despite German influence, the system's long-standing defects remained, among them the predominance of law studies, the lack of independence for the smaller university centers, and hidebound teaching methods. The archaic character of the degree courses was at the root of significant unemployment among brainworkers and a predilection for civil-service posts that worked to the detriment of the sort of advanced technical training needed by a modern economy.

In the early 1900s, however, this last tendency was significantly reversed, thanks largely to private-sector initiatives. In response to the new industrial Italy's need for managers, business leaders, and technicians, public business schools sprang up, the private Bocconi University was founded in Milan (1902), and engineering schools were established in Milan (1863), Naples (1868), and Turin (1859). But teachers were still badly paid, precipitating a continual search for other sources of income—especially in law departments, often a springboard to politics.

Spain, like other Mediterranean countries, saw its higher education system fall dramatically behind that of the more advanced northern European nations in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Until 1900 the Spanish universities were plagued by some of the same problems as the French but in an even more chronic way. Those problems included overcentralization, skeletal staffing, bureaucratic administration, and lifeless teachers given to rote methods. The law faculties monopolized the majority of students. The central university of Madrid dominated the whole system because it alone could confer doctorates and because its teachers were better paid. Advanced technical schools supplemented the very traditional degree courses offered in the faculties.

Though overshadowed by the technical schools, the Spanish universities were very slow to welcome academic and modern disciplines. Two-thirds of teachers were underpaid and to ensure their futures were obliged to seek additional work or hope for transfer to Madrid.

The movement for reform was started by a modest group of teachers at Oviedo, the smallest university in Spain. They were inspired by measures taken from 1900 on by a new minister of public education, among them the opening up of faculties of arts and sciences to new disciplines, the introduction of the social sciences into law departments, and the establishment of scholarships. Chronic shortages of funds, however, limited such advances. The necessity of modernizing course content and attracting students from new sectors was addressed by adopting the English system of university extensions; this solution was initiated in the shape of public courses at the University of Saragossa in 1893, and later spread to other Spanish universities.

Russia: The impossibility of liberalization

Russian higher education during this period was inhabited by contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, in accordance with the Russian tradition of benevolent despotism, the state was striving to make the system into an integral part of the modernization and Westernization of the country. On the other hand, the reactionary tendencies of the autocracy reemerged from time to time in response to endemic revolutionary agitation, enforcing authoritarian measures designed to reassert control over universities viewed as hotbeds of subversive ideas and a threat to the social order.

The expansion in the student population during the period is even more striking in view of the very low initial tally: a total of five thousand students in nine universities in 1860 swelled to thirty-seven thousand students fifty years later. That this trend was unstoppable, despite restrictive measures (including quotas for Jews and those of modest means) passed in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, is accounted for by the appeal of higher education in a society in which bureaucratic positions were the most prestigious of all. Aside from the study of law, which led to such positions, medicine also exerted a growing attraction in view of the country's immense health care needs and the perception that science was the prime weapon in the fight against poverty and ignorance. As a result of the rise of social aspirations in the middle and lower socioeconomic strata, the proportion of students of noble background dropped between 1865 and 1914 from 67 percent to 35 percent in the technical schools and from 55 percent to 25 percent in the universities. Meanwhile, aspirants from petty bourgeois, middle-class, or Jewish families who failed to enter higher education because of obstacles placed in their way by official policies were quick to go abroad, and indeed in great numbers, to obtain degrees. Thus Paris, Berlin, and the Swiss universities acquired large communities of Russian students whose number should really be added to the empire's official figures.

It was during this period too that women entered the Russian student population in force: in 1914–1915, women constituted 30 percent of all students in Russian higher education as compared with an almost negligible proportion in 1900.

Political agitation among students did not end with the century; rather, it continued to reflect the failure of the Russian system to adapt to the emerging modern society. The growth of student militancy was a response to the refusal of the authorities to recognize student associations and their recurrent reassertion of the most authoritarian regulations. The high point of student agitation was reached with the Revolution of 1905, when the universities served as centers of the mobilization that led to the general strike of October.

The growing inadequacy of the Russian university system was reflected in the fact that teachers in higher education, though drawn in the majority from privileged backgrounds (39 percent of them were nobles as late as 1904), inclined overall toward liberalism and reform. Their ideals were Humboldtian, even as tsarism continued to bar the way to the scientific freedom indispensable to progress. But both the statute of 1884, which sought to bring the universities back under control following the assassination of Alexander II, and an orientation toward vocational rather than scholarly and scientific goals were gradually brought into question in actual practice. The institution of privatdocenten in the German mold failed to produce the desired effect absent an adequate pool of teachers. Mediocre remuneration and the difficulty of obtaining a post made an academic career unappealing. Between 1900 and 1914, the situation in the Russian universities deteriorated sharply for lack of revenues (the state met only 60 percent of the budget, the remainder coming from fees) and because the creation of teaching positions failed to keep pace with student enrollment. Ever-growing internal and external tensions (between tenured and untenured teachers, between teachers, students, and the authorities, and so forth) further contributed to the disorganization of a system that, despite a government commission set up in 1902, shrank in fear from any idea of reform.

conclusion: a european system?

Despite the multiplicity of university systems and the persistence of national and cultural differences, the last years of the nineteenth century saw the birth of a truly "European" university, albeit a university that was invisible and without institutional boundaries. Its basis was the incessant and ever-increasing movement not just of students but also of teachers between different cultural environments. For students such migrations represented ways of escape from the political and institutional obstacles that faced them in "backward" or oppressive countries, mostly in eastern and southern Europe. Teachers for their part traveled a good deal between the main centers, attending congresses, joining scientific associations, and setting up exchange programs. This invisible academy realized the Humboldtian ideal inasmuch as it was based on a true desire for knowledge, despite geographical or institutional obstacles, and on the freedom to teach and learn outside official curricula. The fact that students could choose between competing university centers was one index among others of the intellectual reach of those institutions, and hence of their capacity for innovation and excellence in particular disciplines. As for teacher exchanges, they attested to the intensity of intellectual relations between different linguistic and cultural regions, and to the strong influence of this country or that in a particular branch of learning. Even though it issued into the most murderous explosion of nationalism in European history, this period nevertheless suggested the possible shape of a reconstructed academic Europe firmly linked to the most ancient medieval traditions.

See alsoEducation; Humboldt, Alexander and Wilhelm von; Intellectuals; Intelligentsia; Professions; Schleiermacher, Friedrich.

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Christophe Charle