Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities

The collegiate structure continued for a long time at a number of universities. The most famous examples are the colleges still at the base of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but colleges figure in the life of other universities as well, notably Pavia. As late as the middle of the eighteenth century, Paris had ten residential colleges. The ambiguity attached to the word ‘college’ – certainly a learned connotation but otherwise unspecified with regard to level – persists up to our time. North-American colleges function variously as faculties or dormitories at universities, while in the Latin world a college is the usual designation for a secondary school. One of Montreal’s most distinguished private schools, Lower Canada College, now instructs a class of six-year-olds; Montreal’s most distinguished university, McGill, includes Victoria College, a women’s dormitory. In Paris and Mexico City there are national colleges with professors who devote most of their time to research. At Rome and Washington, special colleges convene from time to time to choose a new pope or president. In all these instances we find the notion of a common pursuit.

The waning of the Middle Ages led to vesting ultimate academic authority in the faculties on the one hand, and to a levelling of the student body on the other hand. The masters appropriated the collegiate model for their own ends. But the medieval legacy is not hard to spot today. In addition to faculty senates and directors of residential life, we have university fraternities and privately endowed student societies, residential colleges and dining clubs, concessions (bookstores, presses, tailors), and a bewildering hierarchy of professional bargaining units – trade unions of professors, teaching assistants, janitors, and cafeteria workers.

The greatest medieval legacy is that of academic freedom – and not merely for the masters. Medieval students enjoyed considerable privileges. These sometimes included the right to strike as well as protection against cruel and unusual treatment by civil authorities. The privileges were eroded when, over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the masters claimed control of corporative activity, but certain student rights have persisted into the modern world. At some universities today, students exercise a decisive role in the choice of new professors, in matters of professional promotion, and in curriculum reform. Universities continue to discipline members of their own corporation. Even institutions that bear little resemblance to medieval guilds – certain state or provincial universities in North America – tread carefully around the matter of allowing municipal police or soldiers on their campus.

Following the model of early thirteenth-century Paris, law, theology, and medicine were the recognized ‘higher faculties’; arts, the fourth faculty, was a grab-bag of skills deemed preparatory for professional careers. The object of university study was to acquire knowledge and be able to teach it, and the course of study was open to any qualified person – that is, any man of the right faith and class. Although the medieval university was a fast track to the three professional guilds, it did not directly prepare students for earning a living productively. There were, it is significant to note, no faculties of engineering, architecture, navigation, or commerce.

By the late medieval period, European Christian universities issued various certificates: the baccalaureate, for competence in teaching certain subjects under supervision; and a master’s or doctorate, awarded after a public examination, for admission to the corps of masters. These diplomas persist to our own time, albeit with modifications. German university faculties came to offer, by the eighteenth century, only a doctorate, by which time Oxford and Cambridge awarded, as earned degrees, little beyond a bachelor’s. (The nineteenth-century honours degree at Cambridge was held to be equivalent to a German DPhil, according to the polymath John Theodore Merz [1860–1922], who had intimate experience with both systems.2 ) In all cases the diploma signified that the holder came from a background of wealth and ease, and it augured (but did not promise) a career in law, medicine, one or another church, or government.

The universities functioned until the eighteenth century in the absence of a coherent system of secondary education, although something in this line came to be provided by Jesuit colleges and English public schools, among other institutions. For this reason the lower faculties – arts (frequently divided later into letters and sciences) or in Northern Europe, philosophy – continued to provide basic, or remedial, services. Professors of many sciences, then, were from the beginning under continual pressure to lecture far below the level of the research front. The pattern persists to the present day. Medical students learn about the latest diseases, drugs, and instruments; prospective lawyers study last year’s legal opinions; future theologians receive the party line from clerical conclaves. But a great many science students never get beyond rational mechanics of the Baroque and thermodynamics of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution.

This is not to say that research into natural phenomena and laws did not occur at universities. Medieval university philosophers at Paris, Oxford, Valladolid, Cracow, and elsewhere laboured to elaborate Aristotelian notions of motion, both terrestrial and celestial, as well as Galenic medicine – for these pagan texts had been translated from Arabic and Greek into Latin by the thirteenth century. Investigators committed to understanding the laws of the world including Nicole Oresme (ca.1320–1382), John Buridan (ca.1295– ca.1358), Albertus Magnus (ca.1200–1280), and Roger Bacon (ca.1219–ca.1292) all taught at universities for longer or shorter periods of time. Then as now, however, a professor’s freedom to navigate by his conscience depended on the secular and ecclesiastical winds, even after medieval universities acquired self-policing statutes.

A central paradox of institutions of higher learning has always been their vulnerability to ideological or political repression. The burning of academic libraries in classical antiquity and medieval Islam is exactly matched by conflagrations over the past five generations – at Strasbourg, Louvain, Madrid, Königsberg, Tokyo, Beirut, and Kuwait. The condemnation in 1927 of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti by officers of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a cause célèbre of the 1920s, echoes the condemnation of the subversive Joan of Arc by the University of Paris.

Universities do not make society. They teach what people want to learn, and they give voice to what people prefer to hear. But because they are keepers of tradition and accumulated wisdom, their response time is slow. This allows universities to become authorities for what we know. Relative isolation from prosaic concerns provides a unique environment for encouraging new knowledge about the world. The tension between tradition and innovation is a fundamental characteristic of the European university, and it is central to the enterprise of modern science.

2 Teaching: From the Time of the Scientific Revolution

Henry Adams, who as a Harvard University professor brought the history seminar to North America from Germany, pondered a thousand years of European culture and proposed, early in the twentieth century, laws for what he saw. In his view, the civilization of western Europe had reached a crisis, as the foundations of medieval faith sank into the shifting sands of technological change. Changes occurred at an ever increasing pace. Knowledge grew and events accelerated. Even with the finest tutors, a person could not keep up with all that was new. Cast adrift in the modern age, Adams dropped his anchor at the cathedral of Chartres, France. From this mooring, he reckoned the meaning of the world, and he calculated its demise in the year 1921. Adams (1838–1918) lived almost from the advent of electromagnetism through the observational verifications of general relativity; he himself measured his life by the technological inventions that he had experienced. He called himself a child of the eighteenth century who struggled to come to terms with the twentieth.

The literate speculations of Henry Adams – who contemplated regularities in the development of Western culture – spawned scientometrics, the science of measuring science. Derek de Solla Price, a firm advocate of the new science who found inspiration in Henry Adams, proposed that the rate of scientific change, however one measured the rate, obeyed a law first formulated by Alfred Lotka (1880–1949). The number of discoveries, periodicals, pages of print, individual researchers, and so on, all grow exponentially for a time until the growth levels off at a plateau. This S-shaped curve, in Price’s view, reflected a basic fact of civilization.

The take-off point for Price’s exponential curves occurred around 1650. At this time, the institutions of science – whether educational facilities, scientific societies, or scientific journals – blossomed. A host of new ideas, from the heliocentric universe to the circulation of the blood, shook the foundations of Western thinking about the natural world. This constellation of institutional and intellectual factors has been called the Scientific Revolution, a term that describes a period of rapid and radical change.

The Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries developed to a considerable extent outside the universities, which were bastions of scholasticism and Aristotelian thought. When the Catholic canon Nicholas Copernicus’s (1473–1543) book on the revolutions of the heavens appeared in 1543, universities could trace their traditions and prerogatives back more than three centuries. Yet a large percentage of contributors to the new natural philosophy (however it may be defined) were employed by universities, and by far the majority were university alumni. Over the latter half of the sixteenth century, university lecturers at Wittenberg (Georg Joachim Rheticus [1514–1574] and his colleagues Erasmus Reinhold [1511–1553] and Kaspar Peucer [1525–1602]), Tübingen (Michael Maestlin [1550–1631]), Oxford (Henry Savile [1546–1604]), and possibly Cambridge (Henry Briggs [1561–1630]) constructively criticized and otherwise promoted Copernicanism. Salamanca permitted, by statute, Copernicus’s thought to be taught. Although by 1600 only a dozen men had lined up solidly behind heliocentrism, the new doctrine was widely disseminated at various universities.

Without labouring the point, it is well to mention some among the architects of the Scientific Revolution with significant university connections. Copernicus attended universities at Crakow, Bologna, Padua, and Ferrara; in Italy he studied medicine and canon law. Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) learned medicine at Louvain and Paris and then taught surgery and anatomy at Padua. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) went to Pisa for medicine and then at the end of the sixteenth century taught mathematics at Pisa and Padua. William Harvey (1578–1657) studied medicine at Cambridge and Padua. René Descartes (1596–1650) received instruction in (among other things) Galileo’s telescopic discoveries from the Jesuits at La Flèche and read law at Poitiers. Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) attended the University of Leiden. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) went to Leipzig, Jena, and Altdorf (where he took a doctorate). Isaac Newton (1642–1727) took a BA at Cambridge and then became Lucasian professor there. Their innate conservatism notwithstanding, universities have indeed served as crucibles for new ideas in natural knowledge.

As the example of Newton indicates, the universities did respond to the ‘new science’. Experimental and mathematical natural philosophy at once transcended and underlay the professional interests of the three traditional, higher faculties. The faculties of arts and sciences (or as they were known in northern Europe, faculties of philosophy) were the natural home for this learning, for they had long harboured professors of astronomy, mechanics, and mathematics. Furthermore, by the sixteenth century, schools to prepare students for the university assumed increasing importance, building on a tradition found in several of the medieval English Public Schools (Winchester and Eton) and the Dutch teaching order known as the Brothers of the Common Life. In St Paul’s, Shrewsbury, Westminster, the Merchant Taylors’, Rugby, and Harrow (all sixteenth-century English creations), and in the profusion of Jesuit colleges in Western Europe generally, adolescents could acquire the basic skills – languages and mathematics – that had previously been retained by university professors of the liberal arts. This preparation freed at least some arts-and-sciences professors from elementary instruction and allowed them to spend more time on the latest word. Clever professors in Italy, the Netherlands, and Germanic Europe were increasingly able to transmit the news and add to their income by attracting interested students. Since the seventeenth century, the prestige of a university has related to the situation of its professors on the research front.

The liberation of natural philosophers in the universities is not unrelated to a general climate of tolerance for diverse religions and credos. This openness governed the golden age of the Dutch Republic (1581–1795), offering a haven to giants like René Descartes and Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677). Dutch universities were much frequented by foreigners, notably the British, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the eighteenth century, Leiden featured an unusually strong corps of science professors, including Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande (1688–1742), and Petrus van Musschenbroek (1692–1761, originator in 1746 of the electrical capacitor known as the Leiden jar). The brilliant Dutch expositors of experimental science had at their command the unparalleled Dutch instrument trade. They were stimulated by the daily arrival of colonial exotica on the one hand and the deadly struggle against the North Sea on the other hand. In their hands, the dissertation for the doctorate became what it is today – a passport in the world of science. Indeed, from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, the Dutch doctoral dissertation – much longer than its German or French counterparts – has set the standard for the unwieldy tomes that now issue from the hands of aspiring scholars around the world.

An atmosphere of tolerance also characterized late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Scotland. There, as in the Netherlands (and unlike in England, France, or Spain), a student’s religious views were his own business; and like the Netherlands, Scotland enjoyed close contacts with both Lutheran Germany and Catholic France. Aberdeen, Glasgow, and especially Edinburgh cultivated mighty traditions in medicine and natural philosophy. James Gregory (1638–1675) and Colin Maclaurin (1698–1746), prominent Newtonians, taught at Edinburgh, as did the three anatomists called Alexander Monro (father, son, and grandson). Monro primus’s physician father had studied at Leiden where he formed a friendship with fellow student Boerhaave. Monro primus (1697–1767) cultivated the friendship and brought Edinburgh to rival Boerhaave’s Leiden as a medical school. Chemists William Cullen (1710–1790) and Joseph Black (1728–1799) both taught at Glasgow and ended up at Edinburgh. By the middle of the eighteenth century Edinburgh and Glasgow variously featured David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790). The glow of a Scottish scientific education lasted through the nineteenth century – the tenures at Glasgow and Edinburgh of physicist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907) and physician Joseph, Lord Lister (1827–1912) reflect the brilliance of eighteenth-century predecessors. English speakers from the time of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) have gone down to Oxbridge to make social connections and up to Scotland to learn the sciences that were ancillary to medicine.

Autocratic theocracies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France and Spain, did not encourage freedom of thought in independent academic institutions that might ultimately threaten their own stability. The seventy-odd educational institutions of higher learning in French and Spanish lands (adding in engineering and mining schools as well as large colleges to the list of ‘universities’, properly speaking) did not blaze with scientific learning. In France, the universities receded before large establishments for scientific research created by royal patronage: the Paris Academy of Sciences and the Paris Observatory in the seventeenth century and their eighteenth-century offspring, the Paris botanical gardens and the natural history museum. Spain did not see comparable royal research institutions until the mid eighteenth century, and by then there were not many of them (notably the Madrid and Cadiz observatories and the Barcelona Academy of Sciences), but it maintained a string of institutions of higher learning in its colonial possessions.

The rise of the German university

Scottish universities possessed drawing power and brilliant professors; Dutch universities had these attributes as well as a tradition of publishing science doctorates. German universities were something of a question mark. ‘The total annual matriculations in the German universities averaged 4200 from 1700 to 1750,’ writes historian of science John Heilbron, ‘and then declined almost linearly to about 2900 in 1800.’1 Why, then, do we associate the modern research university with Germany?

Part of the answer relates to a medieval and Renaissance heritage that left Germany with a large number of institutions of higher learning. In the eighteenth century there were four times as many German-language universities as Dutch (five) and Scottish (four) together. The smallest of the German universities, Herborn and Duisburg, shrank to virtual extinction (sixty and eighty students respectively), but nearly all of them awarded a philosophical doctorate. German professors had their hand in scientific research from the very advent of printing, around 1450, and in old-style Jesuit universities and colleges (where philosophy still preceded professional studies), there was adequate employment for science researchers.

Part of the answer relates to historical accident. Only three Dutch universities (plus Louvain and Ghent, which the Netherlands lost to Belgium in 1832) survived the Napoleonic interregnum; it was not until after the middle of the nineteenth century that Leiden and Utrecht began to benefit again from Dutch colonial prosperity. Then, too, the Scottish medical faculties overwhelmed arts and sciences, which never succeeded in organizing a doctoral programme. Some of these conditions also applied to Germany, of course, which lost a good number of universities to Napoleonic reorganization. But eighteenth-century Germany nevertheless pioneered a new kind of university, where priority went to the philosophy faculty, and this is the image we see everywhere today, when we are accustomed to ‘doctor of philosophy’ degrees in such unphilosophical subjects as nursing, engineering, and agriculture.

The German universities benefited from competition among the various German states in attracting students and generally building up academic prestige. The dominant late seventeenth-century universities were at Leipzig (belonging to Saxony) and Jena (belonging to Weimar). Prussia then founded Halle in 1694 to siphon off talent from nearby institutions. Hannover founded Göttingen in 1737 to remove the shine from Halle. Maria Theresa revived the moribund universities under Austrian care beginning in the 1750s, banishing Aristotelian scholasticism in favour of experimental physics; her reorganization affected Freiburg im Breisgau, Graz, Innsbruck, Prague, and Vienna, and it had a notable impact on collegiate-structured Pavia, in Austrian Italy. To make their mark, these new universities were charged by their state to teach and inspire by propagating and contributing to the stock of knowledge. This notion appeared early in the eighteenth century under the Leibnizian natural philosopher Christian Freiherr von Wolff (1697–1754), who lectured and wrote from Halle and Marburg, consulted widely across Europe, and turned down a dozen or so university calls.

Emphasizing research in a teaching climate followed the rationalist precepts that had taken Europe by storm in the seventeenth century – notably those of Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz. Uniting research with teaching fitted well with the emphasis on facts and experience that radiated from the writings of the foremost proponent of the new science, Francis Bacon. For the most part the innovation occurred earliest in universities without a medieval pedigree. The receptivity of institutions to change is related inversely to their entrenched traditions.

The professorial research function was opposed by privileged members of scientific societies, who received state emoluments for innovating without having to lecture. But the new style universities were adamant about encouraging research, and they made producing new knowledge a condition of professorial appointment, as, for example, with Johann Tobias Mayer’s (1723–1762) chair of physics at Göttingen in 1750. The condition extended to all fields of learning, and universities that ignored it – for example Basle, which at the time chose professors by lot from a slate of three men who usually belonged to the local patriciate – did so at their peril. It gave rise especially to the earliest institutional union of research and teaching known as the philological seminar.

The eighteenth-century university seminar was a key development, and it emerged from the discipline of comparative philology. Two hundred years of European expansion had stockpiled an astonishing variety of tongues. The literature in some of these was sophisticated and not completely foreign to European minds. Sanskrit – the Latin of India – found great appeal among scholars at the new universities, who set out to relate it to everything else they knew, dead or alive. The puzzle had endless parts, each one of which was ideally suited for a doctoral dissertation. The programme demanded specialized libraries, which would be increased from one generation to the next; it required a home and a budget, which university authorities then (no different from now) grudgingly provided. The doctoral seminar was thus born in a room surrounded by dictionaries and reference works. It has remained there ever since.

The doctoral seminar did not extend easily to France.

Napoleonic Europe, focusing on grand state institutions, was no friend of independent corporations with a royalist heritage. In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon created a score of pyramidal educational authorities, each one consisting of faculties, lycées, and elementary schools, all ultimately responsible to functionaries in Paris. This University of France continued through the nineteenth century, recruiting teenagers to become schoolteachers and, later in the century, becoming a motor of regional economic growth. Higher scientific learning was transmitted in special grandes écoles outside the university. The most important of these early in the century was the Ecole Polytechnique, governed then (as now) by the Ministry of War and designed to produce military engineers. There was also the Ecole Normal Supérieure, the national school that set norms for schoolteachers, which at mid century, under the inspired direction of Louis Pasteur, became a privileged conduit to a scientific career. By the twentieth century there were a score of these grandes écoles, which recruited by competition and which promised graduates a civil-service posting in diverse technical fields. The French universities have never received their place in science, but a comeback of sorts was made at the end of the nineteenth century in direct response to developments outre-Rhin.

Beyond the borders of France, Napoleon engineered the end of a number of universities in the Netherlands and German-speaking Europe. German rulers used the occasion of their new independence to open new universities in propitious administrative seats like Berlin, Breslau, Bonn, and eventually Munich. The notion of pure learning, or Wissenschaft (a neologism from the German Enlightenment intended to denote scholarship and science), lay at the centre of the reorganized and the new universities, especially in Prussia. The research spirit permeated the University of Berlin, created in 1810 with the guidance of historian Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), brother of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Over the next generation research became a way of life for German university professors, as councillors of the various kings, princes, dukes, following a long tradition, competed for prominent men of science.