[HN Gopher] The Origin of the Research University
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The Origin of the Research University
Author : Petiver
Score : 137 points
Date : 2025-07-06 21:50 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (asteriskmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (asteriskmag.com)
| sebmellen wrote:
| Those Trailblazing Teutons...
| djoldman wrote:
| > The students were menaces, given to drunkenness, gambling,
| dueling, and chronically skipping class.
|
| I came across this awhile ago and thought it pretty incredible
| and interesting:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scholastica_Day_riot
| Exoristos wrote:
| They also harassed churches:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliards#Satirical_poets
| cernocky wrote:
| were the students really surprised about the quality of wine in
| a place called "Swindlestock Tavern" ? :)
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Great thought provoking article, a lot of starting points for
| wikipedia deep dives. It's really surprising to me that most of
| the big name intellectuals from before the 19th century were
| indeed not doing their work in the university system. I guess
| it's in nobody's interest to highlight this. Academia wants to
| present itself as the obvious deposit and trailblazer of
| knowledge and that it always has been. There is similarly little
| discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and
| journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis of
| good science.
|
| I find it curious and bad that people can go through the academic
| pipeline without ever being presented with any deep explanation
| of what this thing even is, where it came from, what else it
| could be, what historical opposition there was or what debate
| there was around what it should be, what it is in ideal theory
| and what it is in real practice and what cynics see it as. People
| just enroll because that's obviously the thing to do. Then they
| may stick around for grad school and get comfy in the system but
| reflection and meta is rare.
| biofox wrote:
| It's a somewhat selective history. Off the top of my head:
|
| Kepler developed his ideas while at the University of Graz.
| [16th century]
|
| Galileo built his first telescopes while a professor at the
| University of Padua. [16th - 17th century]
|
| Newton did all of his work while at Cambridge (although,
| admittedly, it took the plague and a lockdown for him to have
| his annus mirabilis). [17th century]
|
| William of Ockham (of Razor fame) did his work at Oxford. [14th
| century]
|
| Giordano Bruno did the work that got him burnt at the stake
| while at the University of Paris (and briefly Oxford). [16th
| century]
|
| Roger Bacon developed the scientific method while at Oxford.
| [13th century]
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Still, it may be surprising to learn that these weren't doing
| their famous work within the university system: Copernicus,
| Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, Euler,
| Lagrange, Laplace, Leeuwenhoek, Halley, Spinoza, Hobbes,
| Cavendish.
|
| Kepler didn't get a professorship and did his most famous
| work (elliptical orbits, Kepler's Laws) later in Prague as
| imperial mathematician.
|
| Newton is the main one who indeed was a prof in Cambridge
| during his main works.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| They were all educated at universities though.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Yes, but the point is that universities weren't places of
| _research_ , but learning/teaching.
| analog31 wrote:
| It could be that interest in research itself is a
| relatively recent development. A lot of scholarship
| amounted to study of past scholarship, until science came
| along. Empirical science as we know it was barely a
| century old when Newton came along.
| checker659 wrote:
| The article doesn't say much about the role of religion
| in this matter. Surely what one could study was limited
| by what was allowed by the church.
| oersted wrote:
| The article does state that professors did do research, but
| in their free time.
|
| For the examples you listed, were their famous research
| achievements really part of their university job description?
|
| Otherwise it's more like Nietzsche working as an undertaker
| or Einstein working in the patent office just to support
| themselves. Naturally many such people would opt to be
| teachers to get by, that doesn't necessarily mean that the
| university was a research institution.
|
| Earlier many philosophers and mathematicians were also
| priests or monks, that's also a lifestyle that allows for
| research without worrying about supporting yourself.
| Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly
| hobbyist aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means
| to support themselves while doing free research.
|
| It's the same story with most famous artists actually, even
| now. Most of open-source even operates that way, and it's an
| important foundation of our modern world.
|
| I don't really know what to do about that, it's not like
| giving everyone universal income would work either, most
| people do not have this impulse. And grant systems are pretty
| flawed too. But there is some important insight in the
| observation of how much has been achieved by people trying to
| do cool things as a hobby. It's just really hard to support
| that systematically, almost by definition.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly
| hobbyists aristocrats that drove it, those who had the
| means to support themselves while doing free research.
|
| I think this is overexaggerated in the popular
| consciousness. Most of the famous intellectuals weren't
| really big aristocrats. Yes they mostly didn't come from
| dirt poor peasant or serf families. But they also weren't,
| with some exceptions, highest nobility. It was much more
| common that they secured funding through patronage from or
| got hired by the aristocrats. The aristocrats didn't really
| do the hard work themselves, again with some exceptions.
| oersted wrote:
| Indeed, the way I expressed it was an oversimplification.
| I generally wanted to make the point that they were
| people that weren't forced to have a tiring full-time job
| just to get by, and that research was not really their
| job, with patronage as middle ground.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I think that's also not fully true. The trope is that the
| rich nobles were swimming in money and in their boredom
| they just tinkered and did hobby stuff and then this
| resulted in the discoveries.
|
| But for example Galileo from Wikipedia:
|
| > Three of Galileo's five siblings survived infancy. The
| youngest, Michelangelo (or Michelagnolo), also became a
| lutenist and composer who added to Galileo's financial
| burdens for the rest of his life.[22] Michelangelo was
| unable to contribute his fair share of their father's
| promised dowries to their brothers-in-law, who later
| attempted to seek legal remedies for payments due.
| Michelangelo also occasionally had to borrow funds from
| Galileo to support his musical endeavours and excursions.
| These financial burdens may have contributed to Galileo's
| early desire to develop inventions that would bring him
| additional income.[23]
|
| Or Kepler:
|
| > His grandfather, Sebald Kepler, had been Lord Mayor of
| the city. By the time Johannes was born, the Kepler
| family fortune was in decline. His father, Heinrich
| Kepler, earned a precarious living as a mercenary, and he
| left the family when Johannes was five years old. He was
| believed to have died in the Eighty Years' War in the
| Netherlands. His mother, Katharina Guldenmann, an
| innkeeper's daughter, was a healer and herbalist.
|
| I think the pattern is less that they were so free from
| concern that they started to research, and more that they
| worked hard to get funded. And often incidental jobs,
| like calculating easter and astrology stuff (Kepler in
| Prague) and to the science as a bonus. Similar to how
| artists were mostly commissioned (like Leonardo) but also
| did their own "passion projects".
|
| The typical intellectual was not some duke or baron or
| huge lord or the son of such. They had to be somewhat
| stable of course, but that's also true today. Today's
| professors also don't typically come from abject poverty.
| rjsw wrote:
| One example [1] of a group that was doing stuff outside
| universities.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society_of_Birmingham
| bee_rider wrote:
| Isn't the idea of an aristocratic scientists with a lower
| class sidekick (actual scientist) doing all the work part
| of the trope, though? Actually, come to think of it, I'm
| not sure I can come up with any examples. But, I thought
| that was the whole thing.
| lapcat wrote:
| > it's more like Nietzsche working as an undertaker
|
| Where is this coming from? Nietzsche was a university
| professor. He did however serve as a medical orderly in the
| Franco-Prussian War.
| baby-yoda wrote:
| > There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer
| review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the
| obvious hallmark and basis of good science.
|
| Pioneered and exploited by Robert Maxwell (father of the
| infamous Ghislaine). Good summary below; was an all around eye-
| opening revelation for me.
|
| https://thetaper.library.virginia.edu/big%20deal/2019/04/26/...
| biofox wrote:
| > [Maxwell] entertained guests at parties with booze, cigars
| and sailboat trips. Scientists had never seen anything like
| him.
|
| > "We would get dinner and fine wine, and at the end he would
| present us a cheque - a few thousand pounds for the society.
| It was more money than us poor scientists had ever seen."
|
| Similar to what Jeffrey Epstein did.
| pphysch wrote:
| Jeffrey Epstein is speculated to be a Mossad agent, but
| Robert Maxwell was known to be one. Not exactly a innocent
| patron of the sciences, as GP sort of implies.
| jltsiren wrote:
| In some countries, kids learn some of that already in basic /
| secondary education. As a consequence of the same Humboldtian
| ideology that gave rise to the research university.
|
| If schools help people become upstanding and well-informed
| citizens (which includes learning how the core institutions of
| the society came to be), they can supposedly pick vocational
| and other practical skills when needed. On the other hand, if
| schools focus on practical and directly useful skills, people's
| ability to see the big picture may be lacking.
|
| In other words, you speak of symptoms of living in a society
| that has embraced the research university but not the ideology
| behind it.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It's also simply hard to teach most of this beyond caricature
| level in secondary school. Ideally it wouldn't be a separate
| thing but integrated into how you learn the science itself.
| And this is somewhat attempted yes, there are often small-
| print framed stories in textbooks about how a discovery came
| about, but learning the actual science is hard enough and
| physics is better taught topicwise instead of chronologically
| with all the dead ends. The modern picture of the world is
| complicated enough without teaching how the process of it
| unfolded. Especially while the students haven't really
| learned the necessary context in history class to even have a
| "mental map" of the centuries, to place major temporal
| landmarks on it, to know who lived in parallel with whom.
|
| This is the biggest issue in general, that the material is
| fragmented and separated. You learn about romanticism and its
| poets in literature class but it doesn't get connected to how
| romanticism motivated changes in scientific attitudes and
| what discoveries are from that era etc. I needed at least 10
| years of curious self-directed reading after high school to
| appreciate such things. Just randomly arriving at the same
| topic from different angles and different disciplines. The
| same familiar characters and events start to pop up at new
| places in new light. Then suddenly even articles that would
| have seemed super boring started to become interesting
| because a story could be surprising and counterintuitive. If
| you have no background knowledge or expectation or intuition
| then any story is "meh" and not "who would have thought
| that!".
|
| Indeed if I sent high school myself the OP article, he
| wouldn't get much out of it, other than a flood of names,
| dates and boring facts. Once you are out of college, you have
| points of reference to be curious what all those years were
| actually based on.
|
| And my complaint was more that it also doesn't happen in
| university education.
| canjobear wrote:
| On the contrary, academics love to navel gaze and complain
| about academia. What's lacking is realistic alternatives.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Academics, yes. Like from the upper years of the PhD process
| onwards, to postdocs and professorship, yes. But during the
| bachelor's and master's, we had essentially zero idea what
| professors did outside lecturing. Didn't even realize a thing
| called "PhD student" exists. Just that TAs exist. Didn't know
| what a scientific publication or journal is. I did end up
| learning about it when I got a student assistant job at a
| chair, and interacted with the PhD students.
|
| Even then, I didn't quite understand what peer review was,
| other than a vague idea of being some kind of expert stamp of
| approval that it is real science and not woowoo. Didn't know
| what a citation was or why it mattered. The whole "knowledge
| production" system is fully opaque. And this was the view
| inside the university as a student. Now imagine people who
| don't attend university. To them science is not much more
| than some mad scientist Einstein trope and that's it. And
| that it has something to do with NASA and stuff.
| wisty wrote:
| Also, peer review started in the 1960s. Einstein published a
| single peer reviewed paper
|
| Also woth noting that Higgs claimed that the publish or perish
| climate of the 90s would have made his work in the early 60s
| impossible.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > Also woth noting that Higgs claimed that the publish or
| perish climate of the 90s would have made his work in the
| early 60s impossible.
|
| I found the posted article interesting in that it seemed to
| contradict this sentiment. See from the section titled
| "Gottingen and the birth of modern academia".
|
| Not the 60s vs now comparison, but the article contradicts
| the idea that "publish or perish" is new. Instead it says
| that careers depended on publication counts _before_ original
| research was even expected of university professors.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| The Mouseion of Alexandria (the larger institution around the
| more famous library) was arguably the origin of the research
| university. Scholars there published scholarship in the
| humanities and sciences -- and it lasted hundreds of years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouseion
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, and I suppose it's worth looking into the universities
| of the Muslim world. I read that at one point, there were more
| universities in the Spanish Caliphate than in the rest of
| Europe.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > It had a modern academic research library, the largest in the
| world, which featured brand-new innovations like organizing books
| on shelves by subjects with reference to a catalogue
|
| the tone is light-hearted overall, but really think about how
| foolish this insufficiently rigorous statement is!
|
| > It hardly mattered if a professor of oriental languages could
| read Hebrew or Arabic, so long as he had adequate seniority, and
| a poetry professor who wanted a raise might well be handed an
| additional chair in mathematics.
|
| this is a glib treatment of seniority
|
| > As we'll see, they mostly failed. The rights of traditional
| university faculties were protected by ancient laws (and ancient
| lawyers)
|
| but some genuinely funny lines too!
|
| > Promising young scholars had to burnish their resumes with
| useless publications long before anyone thought of asking them to
| do real research.
|
| insightful
|
| > before any kind of institutional academic specialization
|
| it feels a bit unsettling to read so many detailed and insightful
| bits of this story but then get these sort of bombastic over-
| summary lines that sink credibility IMHO
| megaloblasto wrote:
| I am so unimpressed with research universities in the US. Most
| just accept and neglect undergrad students. They use them as a
| steady income and have very little intention of providing them
| with a quality education.
|
| I happen to be very close with the dean of arts and science of a
| major state university. He told me that all of his professional
| goals given to him by the president and provost had to do with
| research impact, while 100% of the money he was allocated came
| from student tuition. The incentives are completely out of line
| and the students are the ones who pay the price.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Weird, most of the money my professor had to spend on grad
| students came from grants, and the school takes a big chunk of
| the grants. I dunno where the undergrad money went. The student
| union was pretty, I guess.
| megaloblasto wrote:
| For grad students, yes, the money largely comes from grants
| (more than 50% of my funding in grad school was from grants
| from my advisor). The university doesn't actually take a
| chunk of the grant, they get an additional "overhead". This
| used to be 60%, now with the Trump administration its been
| cut to between 15% and 30% depending on the federal agency.
| For example, if the overhead was 30% and I get a $1000 grant
| from the NSF, the university will get an additional $300, but
| I still get the full $1000 (actually the university has full
| control of the $1000, but I can ask them nicely to use it).
|
| I am more concerned with the research institution's effect on
| undergrads rather then grad students. Grad students have
| their own unique ways of being exploited.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| There's an argument to be made that at least the bachelor's
| level should be taught by specialist lecturers who focus on
| improving didactics and teaching. On the other hand,
| interacting with someone who is working at the forefront of the
| field can be helpful when you have a question where a cookie-
| cutter answer doesn't suffice and expert thought is needed. But
| it's indeed peculiar that profs are mostly hired based on their
| research not on their teaching ability (though it is also
| considered).
|
| But either way, since you mention the US, it's a very common
| experience for American exchange students in European
| universities that in America they learned to expect much more
| handholding and pampering than it's provided in Europe. In the
| US, there is more individual attention from faculty to
| students, there are all kinds of counseling and guidance
| services that basically nudge them through the whole thing,
| reminding them of deadlines, explaining processes etc. In the
| US, college students ("college _kids_ ") are not seen as self-
| reliant adults. So depending on what kind of "support" you
| mean, it might be already too much for their own good instead
| of little.
| megaloblasto wrote:
| My ideal system involves teaching professors who work at a
| university, and state run research labs ran by PhDs that
| collaborate closely with universities, but remain distinct.
| Argentina has a similar system with CONICET and their public
| university system.
|
| The support you are talking about with American students I
| think is a symptom of the cost of higher education in the US.
| If you are paying $50,000 a year, you're going to expect that
| the university will do most of the work for you, and
| honestly, I think that's fair.
|
| Many American students have the attitude of "I paid for the
| degree, so give it to me", which I cannot fault them for, due
| to the ridiculous price tag and societal demand to get a
| bachelors.
|
| In Argentina, on the other hand, where education is free, the
| attitude among the professors is "if you don't learn this
| material, you won't pass". I find that very refreshing and
| more of how an institution of education should actually
| operate.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Indeed, and that can be tied back to the original article.
| Even if the American system was originally modeled after
| the German one back then, the two have significantly
| diverged due to the high tuition fees and downstream
| "consumer" or "customer" mentality both in students and in
| administration. It's interesting that outside the Anglo
| countries, education is mostly free for students, so yeah
| the attitude is more that the tax payer is giving money for
| your education, now it's your duty to either take it
| seriously or go somewhere else. It doesn't mean that
| everyone is so self-motivated, but a student can't say "I'm
| paying you, professor, so now dance to my tune".
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| In the US the students (or their parents or grants) are
| usually paying several orders of magnitude more money to
| attend University than in Europe, so it makes sense that the
| expect more support and services.
| ricksunny wrote:
| A former MIT Lincoln Lab researcher dedicated years of his life
| to demonstrating, (in purely technical terms) the contributions
| of mid-19th-c-to-prewar German technologists to science &
| history. Underpinned by archive citations & scans throughout, it
| makes for good reading (and requires no purchase to read). Being
| 4000+ pages, I've found it works well as a reference to sci-
| technical topics of interest to me rather than a front-to-back
| readthrough.
|
| https://riderinstitute.org/revolutionary-innovation/
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