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 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