The Origin of the Research University | Hacker News Reader

The Origin of the Research University

asteriskmag.com

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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.

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]

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.

They were all educated at universities though.

Yes, but the point is that universities weren't places of research, but learning/teaching.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Thanks for elaborating on it, it’s good to learn. The trope though is more about the Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution and Royal Society era. But yeah they were never actual nobility, just upper-middle class. And indeed during the Renaissance and early modern period it was much more about patronage. A number of Greek philosophers were also wealthy, although others were simply frugal.

Nevertheless, my general point stands in that their research was almost never their job and they needed other means to support themselves, just like artists. And this was true throughout history until the paradigm shift described in OP’s article.

One example [1] of a group that was doing stuff outside universities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society_of_Birmingham

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.

> 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.

You are right, not sure where I misremembered that from.

That’s an impressive off-the-cuff cataloguing - few could do that.

> 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/...

> [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.

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.

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.

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.

On the contrary, academics love to navel gaze and complain about academia. What’s lacking is realistic alternatives.

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.

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.

> 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 "Göttingen 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.

> Instead it says that careers depended on publication counts before original research was even expected of university professors.

But these were not peer-reviewed publications.

True. But I'd also gladly report that in small pockets like AI, having highly cited and used arXiv preprints that never passed peer-review can also be impactful regarding careers and job offers. Industry and academics often are smarter than looking at raw numbers. And they are aware that some subfields can sometimes be overtaken by mafialike collusion rings that keep every outsider away from their turf (it's usually hyperspecific to some narrowly defined AI task or benchmark area). It also depends on whether the decision maker is some huge committee and multi-level bureaucracy with process and metrics and numbers in Excel sheets or just one professor who can make their overall assessment without being questioned on it. Of course, this relies on trust that can be abused for biased hiring. Falling back on raw metrics is often a CYA tactic in low-trust, litigious societies.

True, though it was only in some universities and there are boom / bust cycles.

Universities weren't picky in the 60s. Now they are cut-throat.

> 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

They also harassed churches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliards#Satirical_poets

were the students really surprised about the quality of wine in a place called "Swindlestock Tavern" ? :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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

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.

> 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

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/

It really is a strange system we have. I wish we could separate education from academia.

Those Trailblazing Teutons…

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