*Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Historisches Seminar, Rempartstr. 15, D-79085 Freiburg im Breisgau. e-mail:
University history has a long-standing record. The early formation of university historiography materialized not only as a result of scientific self-reflection, but also as an occasion-driven practice tied to anniversaries. Therefore, it was linked to a concrete context of utilization and application. Thus, university history was often some sort of casual remittance work, carried out on the occasion of a jubilee by historians who were chosen rather for their local availability than for their special knowledge. This holds true even today, in spite of the fact that since the mid-1990s there has been an increased research interest in university history, both on the national and international level. Thus, it still seems productive to ask what anniversaries mean for the writing of university history. In what follows, I will address this question by a three-step approach. First, I am going to roughly sketch out the history of university jubilees to illuminate the historical background of this particular production context. In step two, I will turn to some basic and systematic reflections about how university history can and should be written. Finally, step three will provide a short screening of the (German) anniversary publications that came out in recent years.
University history has a long-standing record. Its beginnings date back to the early modern period. We find the first academic accounts of university history around the end of the eighteenth century, when historiography began to turn into a science.
This holds true even today. Though since the mid-1990s there has been an increased research interest in university history, both on the national and international level, the community of actual university historians with a decided research focus in this field is still rather small. This late research boom in university history is owed to a need for historical self-assurance in times of educational and scientific-political changes, but it also reflects ongoing discussions about the knowledge society and the new attention paid to cultural matters in history, following the influence of the various
When looking at recent works on German university history, it soon becomes evident that in spite of the above-mentioned tendencies towards professionalization, the major part of these publications exhibits the well-known pattern of originating in the context of a jubilee. Anniversaries still provide a great opportunity for university history as demonstrated recently on the occasion of the university jubilees in Jena, Leipzig and Berlin, but also, for instance, in Oslo.
At the origin of our anniversary culture, there were the church, Christianity and – perhaps surprising for many – the universities. As Winfried Müller has shown, the jubilee tradition goes back to the Old Testament, to the introduction of the Holy Year by Pope Boniface VIII in 1300 (in the beginning celebrated as a centennial) and to the first secular centenaries or bicentenaries which took place at protestant universities in the sixteenth century, for example at Tübingen (1578) or Heidelberg (1587).
In the modern era, anniversary celebrations increasingly gained importance with regard to the orientation and formation of identity. On the way to the modern culture of remembrance, universities played a key role in the spread of anniversaries. With the first university jubilees, we already find the development of components of a culture of remembrance, which has been passed on until this day. Thus, the early modern period already saw anniversary and historical retrospection as going hand in hand. The engagement with one’s own history was functional in terms of the present and future. Even then, as in our time, commemorative historical texts (
In the course of the nineteenth century, the anniversary celebrations of German universities became increasingly more elaborate and colourful. By then we find expanded press coverage even in the illustrated journals, and memorial publications were distributed for free around the world. There was severe competition among universities in terms of an exuberant staging of the jubilee since all of them sought to profit from this event in the competition for students, professors, financial resources and public attention. A preferably splendid and long historical tradition was a definite competitive advantage. In the nineteenth century, university anniversaries thus marketed events for the university itself as well as for the city, for the respective State (that is for Saxony, Baden, Bavaria or Prussia) as sustainer of the universities as well as for the nation as a whole.
With regard to its function of shaping unity and orientation, a jubilee needs a harmonious celebration and a university history, which is functional for the present time and consensually embedded into the dominant culture of remembrance. Anniversaries cover the past with an order-constructing time frame. And yet, in light of the non-linear and contingent course of history, they ultimately are coincidental dates. So what happens when anniversaries fall into times of crisis or political upheaval, as for example in the twentieth century? In this regard, we find a great range of variation on the part of the universities. Jubilees were celebrated either cautiously or not at all, if a historical tradition with the potential to ‘match’ the present was not yet available and thus still waiting to be constructed. But anniversaries could also be used to demonstrate the institution’s adaptation to the new political system or on the contrary could be transformed into events of protest.
To give a few examples: the transition from the German Empire’s constitutional monarchy to the post-1918 Republic also had its bearings on university anniversaries. The rejective attitude towards the young Republic exhibited by the majority of German professors can be traced in Munich University’s anniversary of 1922.
Changes in the political system and in society were responded to through the construction of a new historical tradition that brought together the old and the new, if only with a certain temporal delay and after a period of insecure attempts. This can also be evidenced in post-1968 West Germany: university celebrations were interrupted and radically questioned in their traditional form by the students’ movement. Their ritualistic vocabulary of forms was attacked as the symbol of an undemocratic and outdated institution. Thus, between the late 1960s and the 1980s the West German universities were characterized by a rather low-key celebration culture. It was typical for the old Federal Republic of that time that next to the official
From the 1990s onwards, a new consensus with regard to anniversary culture seems to have emerged in West Germany. Jubilees were again celebrated on a large scale; they were – again and even more intensely – utilized as PR events and machines for the production of corporate identity
Thus, university jubilees not only highlight the history of the university, but also the respective overall political, societal and cultural conditions. University anniversaries never just exhibit a purely commemorative dimension. They simultaneously serve political and economic interests and bring the university and the public into closer contact. In terms of ritual, university anniversaries encourage reflection upon the prevailing self-identity of the institution. The context of a jubilee is janus-headed: it clearly holds affirmative and legitimizing traits, but it often also provides (material) resources for investigating university history and thus enables reflection on the tasks and functions of university and science through the engagement with history.
University history is about investigating the university’s historical change as a social institution in terms of its self-image and functions, its social and cultural practices as well as its modes of producing, mediating and storing knowledge. University history also poses questions about the interactions of the institution and its members with state, society, economy and culture, and looks at the various spatial dimensions and relationships of the institution.
The modern university’s core functions are defined by a triad: general education, professional academic qualification (
The institutional function of the professional academic qualification is also closely connected to the history of the respective professions and the demand for qualifications within the state and society. The qualification and training of future academics who then continue to work at universities or research institutes is a quantitatively small, yet from the standpoint of the academic community an extremely significant function of the university. The constantly changing demand for various experts – in Early Modern times this was mainly for theologists and lawyers – provides a picture of the development of society and has a strong impact on the production of knowledge at the university and the status of the respective disciplines. Thus, in the face of improving educational standards and changes in society since the second half of the nineteenth century, there was an ever-increasing demand for experts, for higher education instructors, for economists and legal practitioners in institutions of public administration, as well as for scientists – chemists, biologists, pharmacists and physicists – due to the increasing use of technologies in economics, the military and society. In contrast, the demand for theologists, the ‘experts’ of the pre-modern universities, began to drop. These developments within society were reflected in the numbers of students and were important yet often ignored factors in the process of expanding and differentiating academic disciplines, which proceeded rapidly during the second half of the nineteenth century.
A third function of the university is as producer and repository of knowledge. Generally one can say that the transition to the modern or so-called research university took place during the course of the nineteenth century. In that period the production of new knowledge gained decidedly more relevance while the universities of the medieval and early modern periods were predominantly characterized by the organizing, storing and passing on of knowledge. Nevertheless, the manner in which knowledge was ordered remains important for the study of academic development, for instance an analysis of which disciplines and professorships were institutionalised and how they were organised into faculties and other groupings. Although the retention of traditional designations such as the faculty of philosophy (
According to Rüdiger vom Bruch,
Because many university histories are written in the context of a jubilee, the history of the university and its knowledge production is often written by persons available on-site and not authored by a university historian or a skilled historian of science. Due to a lack of knowledge regarding new concepts in the history of science, and for reasons of labour economy, the everyday practice of dealing with the history of academic disciplines was long subjected to intellectual biographies and constructed in terms of a sequence of chair holders and their special fields of study. When the individual scholars are highlighted, this was frequently done by drawing on ex-post value judgements, previous constructions of tradition and teleological lines of development that characterize the respective discipline.
The three core functions of the university – providing general education, academically grounded professional qualification and knowledge production – establish a complex field of tension and must not be conceived in terms of an equilateral triangle. Moreover, it is important to note that they do not characterize the various national university systems in equal measure. In historical terms, they underwent changes in terms of emphasis and one or the other core area pointedly emerged to the foreground. To give just one example: in immediate post World War II Germany, the assignment of moral and general education as a remedy against the barbarianism of dictatorial and inhuman political systems such as National Socialism took centre stage in the public discussion about the tasks of German universities.
It is frequently overlooked that German universities, which have been classified as cutting edge in terms of research, have been addressed particularly in their function as institutions of higher general and professional education in public debates of the nineteenth and throughout major parts of the twentieth century. Thus, university history must not be conceived merely in terms of a history of scholars and of academic knowledge production. Rather, the history of the institution’s functions of providing general education and professional qualification in their diverse entanglements with politics and society at large as well as the thereby produced path dependencies for the production of scientific knowledge must form a central part of a university history. If university history is to be written as an institution’s
The university’s three core areas sketched out above are entangled across different levels – discursive, institutional, material, social, cultural and spatial. The level of discourse signifies the tasks and functions of universities as defined by politics and society. This means to investigate the circulating images of the university, the constructions of historical traditions, as well as the self-image held by the institution and its members. Writing university history merely as a history of discourse focusing on the ‘master texts’ of major university reformers and scholars and conflating this kind of intellectual history with the institution’s
The institutional and material structures are regulators of how the institution of the university, its members and the dissemination and production of knowledge are organized. In this respect, the university’s constitution, its academic (self-)government and its administration must be seen as major facets. The structural and material level also comprises the financing of the university, the structuring of existing jobs and positions with regard to scientific and non-scientific employment as well as its spatial and aesthetic design (as we see for example in the interior and exterior of university buildings).
The university’s social structure always was and still is subject to permanent change. Since the end of the nineteenth century universities have turned into mass institutions. Starting out with hundreds and advancing to thousands and tens of thousands of affiliates in the twentieth century, the social structure of the university members is determined by factors such as social, regional or ethnic background, gender, confession or age. In this respect, ‘classical’ social history and quantitative methods are still helpful. Quantitative surveys and analyses are important for an overview and first approach to the university as an institution. Not only students and scholars, but also the so-called non-academic staff, unfortunately left out of the picture by most accounts, were an integral part of a university’s social history and therefore must be investigated. As an aside, it should be noticed that this group’s enormous growth and feminisation are central traits of the modern university’s development in the twentieth century.
Talking about social and cultural practices at the university relates to its day-to-day work life. The habitus of differing status groups and individuals – that of faculty members and students of the various disciplines or of decision makers in the academic administration such as president, deans and (vice) chancellor – come into the picture. How do they negotiate hierarchy or ranking, how do they handle conflicts and exert power and how do they perform an academic habitus via rhetoric, gender roles, performance, the handling of space or artefacts? In recent work on university history even the
Universities not only have a social dimension, but also a spatial one. A university is always embedded in regional, national and transnational academic and educational landscapes. Important here is not only the respective university’s territorial affiliation to its town or city, but generally its geographic position with regard to traffic infrastructure, its urban catchment and its regional, national and transnational relationships. Of interest is also the coordinate system mounted by the connections to other universities, other types of academic institutions (such as universities of applied science for example) or extramural education and research facilities.
Like other research areas, the history of the university has formed narratives as interpretive patterns which produced consensus and facilitated syntheses, yet at the same time placed limitations with regard to perspectives. A typical case in point is the Humboldt myth that emerged in the twentieth century and remained unchallenged in the history of the university for a long time.
This narrative originated in the context of a jubilee and was (unconsciously) designed for the purpose of identity formation. It was repeatedly accessed in the (national and international) discussion about higher education and science policy throughout the twentieth century and remodelled according to contemporary legitimation requirements. This ‘Humboldt-narrative’ was built on an analysis of a few selective programmatic ‘master texts’ but not on empirical historical research on German universities. Accordingly, the success of German universities in the nineteenth century and the early rise of the research imperative were explained merely by the idea and the ideal of the freedom and unity of research and teaching. The Humboldt myth was intrinsically tied to the idea that science in itself fulfils an educational purpose and provides the best academic professional qualification possible since it mediates problem-solving skills and prepares one for future, still unforeseeable changes. In its simplicity and coherence, this was an impressive idea since it merged the university’s three major tasks under the roof of science through leadership by ‘great’ scholars into a seemingly clear-cut solution. Yet, a look into the depths of day-to-day university life shows that the multiversity of institutional tasks could hardly be resolved merely through this idea. The formation of the research imperative emerged from a complex mixture of factors owed to the history of ideas as well as to social, political and material dimensions.
Most older works on university history operate with the Humboldt myth and we still find newly published monographs which uncritically reiterate the Humboldt myth and present a teleological success story by drawing a long line from medieval times to the present.
Even today most university histories are written in the context of anniversaries. A university jubilee tends to lend itself to a monumental view of history rather than a critical one and to writing history in terms of a success story rather than one that (also) accounts for losses. Moreover, practicing university history means that the writer partly writes his or her ‘own’ history, i.e. that of his or her own institution, profession or discipline and thereby negotiates his or her current self-interpretations and identity formations in terms of his/her role as academic and teacher. Both are crucial reasons to critically reflect on the narratives underlying university history. Therefore, a critical university history must reflect upon the narrative and the historical images constructed by both academic and ‘popular’ publications. Recent works in university history take on this task
In recent years we have seen an almost insurmountable mass of publications on the history of German universities in the context of upcoming university anniversaries. By comparison, the output of topical monographs and anthologies which is not owed to the production context of an anniversary is clearly much more limited.
Among the jubilee publications, the project undertaken in Jena clearly has set a new benchmark, not the least due to remarkable resources provided there. While impressive publications have also been presented elsewhere, the Jena work group intensively studied both the new approaches in university history and the university anniversary as production context.
In conceptual terms, there was a twofold starting point on which the Jena project was based: firstly, there was the argument in favour of investigating a given university’s
While the Jena project has undergone an intense examination of systematic issues, a synopsis with other anniversary-based publications reveals commonalities. The commemorative paradigm, i.e. the reflection of universities’ memory culture, is also taken up by other publications, as the
Likewise, the thus-far published volumes of the Berlin
The works on university history published in recent years on the occasion of German university jubilees provide numerous new results and impulses for a re-conceptualization of the university, particularly for the twentieth century. What is still missing are modern syntheses based on the recent state of the art. What remains to be seen is what kind of sustainability will emanate from the recent research boom in the field of university history triggered by the anniversaries. What is indispensable is critical reflection on previous master narratives. Such reflections are necessary in both scientific and political terms, since the myths of university history still play a significant role in the universities’ current assessments and future scenarios. However, a structural history of the university, inspired by cultural and social history, which no longer interprets institutional development primarily in terms of the history of ideas, i.e. via reform texts, commemorative speeches, or the impact of ‘great personalities’ but seeks to capture the university through a variety of sources and access paths, also has to face the problem of having to organize this mass of information.
C. Meiners,
N. Hammerstein, ‘Jubiläumsschrift und Alltagsarbeit. Tendenzen bildungsgeschichtlicher Literatur’,
On an international level, the International Commission for the History of Universities (ICHU) as an international forum for university history has existed since 1960. For announcements of conferences etc. see its homepage
W. Rüegg (ed.),
On the occasion of the university’s 2011 anniversary, the
W. Müller, ‘Erinnern an die Gründung. Universitätsjubiläen, Universitätsgeschichte und die Entstehung der Jubiläumskultur in der Frühen Neuzeit’,
See for example W. Tischner, ‘Das Universitätsjubiläum 1909 zwischen universitärer Selbstvergewisserung und monarchischer Legitimitätsstiftung’, in: U. von Hehl (ed.),
M. Schreiber, ‘Die Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität und ihre Jubiläumsfeiern in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts’, in: E. Kraus (ed.),
E.g. K. Buselmeier, D. Harth and C. Jansen (eds.),
On the following considerations regarding writing university history see the more detailed S. Paletschek, ‘Stand und Perspektiven der neueren Universitätsgeschichte’,
Vom Bruch, ‘Methoden’ (n. 1) 10.
B. Wolbring, ‘“Ein wirklich neuer Anfang”. Öffentliche Kritik an den Universitäten und Reformforderungen in der Besatzungszeit (1945–1949)’, in: A. Franzmann and B. Wolbring (eds.),
M. Ash,
See S. Paletschek, ‘Die Erfindung der Humboldtschen Universität. Die Konstruktion der deutschen Universitätsidee in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts’,
E.g. T. Ellwein,
E.g. J. John and J.H. Ulbricht (eds.),
In a German context, e.g. T. Maurer (ed.),
D. Alvermann e.a. (ed.),
On the occasion of the forthcoming anniversary numerous volumes were published in the series
S. Gerber e.a., ‘Einleitung’, in: S. Gerber e.a. (eds.),
Gerber,
S. Paletschek,
M. Ash, ‘Wissenschaft und Politik als Ressourcen für einander’, in: R. vom Bruch (ed.),
S. Gerber, ‘Universität zwischen 1850 und 1914: Grundfragen’, in:
M. Grüttner e.a., ‘Wissenschaftskulturen zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie. Vorüberlegungen zu einer kritischen Universitätsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts’, in: M. Grüttner e.a. (eds.),
S. Gerber e.a. (eds.), ‘Einleitung’, in:
H. Carl and F. Lenger (eds.),
H.-E. Tenorth, ‘Genese der Disziplinen – Die Konstitution der Universität. Zur Einleitung’, in: H.-E. Tenorth and R. vom Bruch (eds.),
For example, the concluding synthesis on Jena University’s history from the second part of the nineteenth century until today has about 1000 pages.
Historic procession at the Leipziger university jubilee of 1909.
Friedrich Wilhelm University around 1880. Photo by F. Albert Schwartz.
Two jubilee publications celebrating the anniversary of Jena University