The absurdity of preventing future organic chemists from learning modern languages and advanced mathematics before the age of nineteen continued to the very beginning of the twentieth century, when the privileges of the Abitur (including university entry and preferential treatment generally by the state bureaucracies, including the army) extended to graduates of all three kinds of secondary school. But the prestige and unifying force of Gymnasium education – experienced by everyone from Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche to Otto von Bismarck and Max Planck (1858–1947) – has continued to the present day.
The reputation of the Gymnasium, the great scientific engine of the doctorate of philosophy, the vaunted emphasis upon professorial research, the fabled encouragement of independent thought – all these things produced imitators and adaptations around the world. Not everyone, however, accepted the German model uncritically. Boston’s Henry Adams graduated from Harvard University in 1858 and headed for Berlin. He found the university law lectures there depressing and useless. To work up facility in German, he then spent a number of months as a special student with thirteen-year-olds at a Berlin Gymnasium. Of this experience he recalled half a century later:
The arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strain that the memory endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the boys performed without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government did not encourage reasoning.
All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. The German machine was terribly efficient.2
That inhuman efficiency, flying the colours of neohumanism, found many theatres of operation over the next century.
The Gymnasium also had unabashed admirers. One of the most illuminating accounts of science at nineteenth-century German universities comes from John Theodore Merz, the British-born and German-educated entrepreneurial and intellectual wonder. He recalls of his Gymnasium days in Darmstadt during the 1850s:
All my teachers, with perhaps one exception, were, in my opinion, very superior and earnest-minded men, who performed their duties very conscientiously and certainly did not shirk work. They expected the same from the boys, and I believe succeeded largely in securing this. I remember only few instances of serious punishments either for laziness, insubordination, or untruthfulness. Only twice during the six years of my attendance was a boy caned before the class for telling an untruth.
Merz, a polymath in an age of specialization, flourished in Darmstadt’s neohumanism. Latin and Greek poetry,
which we were expected to commit to memory, made the greatest impression on me, and I learnt many passages and whole poems without any special effort simply by hearing them read and repeating them to myself. Many of them I have carried with me through my whole life, and they have been sources of great enjoyment to me in lonely hours.3
The nineteenth-century German university is known for its principles of Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit – the freedom of staff to teach whatever they liked and the freedom of students to attend any course they desired. Tenured instructors called Privatdozenten (because their income derived only from student fees, not state salaries) did indeed lecture on subjects of arcane interest (Merz attracted an audience of three when he was a Privatdozent at Bonn). Though salaried professors could do the same, they generally gave large introductory lectures to supplement their income. Students moved freely from one university to another and attended lectures ranging from philosophy to physics. A doctor of philosophy could apply to become a Privatdozent. This process of Habilitation meant submitting a dissertation for the right to teach, the venia legendi of medieval origin that allowed a professor to teach at any institution of higher learning. University faculties, controlled by tenured professors, were naturally extremely careful not to dilute their ranks (and their earning power) with a large number of Privatdozenten.
Rules were meant to be broken. The venia legendi could be revoked by the corporation (the university faculty) that issued it. From time to time professors and Privatdozenten were unceremoniously dumped as political or social liabilities. The most famous of these were the Göttingen Seven, removed from their posts in 1837 for associating themselves with political reform, although other causes célèbres included the exclusion of physics Privatdozent Leo Arons (b. 1860) from Berlin in 1898 for his membership in the Social-Democratic Party and the firing of Berlin physiology professor Georg Friedrich Nicolai (1874–1964) for his pacifist activity during the First World War.
Despite the refrain of academic freedom that resounded everywhere in Germany before 1933, university lecturers, much less professors, had to be the right sort of people. Jews, as Max Weber (1864–1920) noted, might take their cue from the motto written over the gates to Dante’s hell (‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’), but they became part of academia anyway. Women, although by the twentieth century not formally excluded, were almost completely absent as German university professors. This situation was not unusual in western, continental Europe, where women professors were phenomena. Physicist Marie CurieSklodowska (1867–1934), one of only two women professors at the Sorbonne before 1940 (the other was the organic chemist Pauline Ramart-Lucas [1880–1953]), obtained an appointment as a foreign-born, Nobel laureate, professor’s widow; Emmy Noether (1882–1935, daughter of a university mathematics professor) taught mathematics at Göttingen during the First World War only because most young men were serving as soldiers. Discrimination extended to neighbouring lands. In the Netherlands, where women had been earning medical diplomas since the middle of the nineteenth century, the first woman university professor did not begin lecturing until 1917. She was Johanna Westerdijk (1883–1961), who occupied the chair of plant pathology at the University of Utrecht with great distinction.
More significant exceptions to this situation are found beyond the western part of continental Europe. By the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, the Russian-speaking and the English-speaking worlds had created separate, university-grade colleges for women – complete with women professors. St Petersburg featured a women’s university, a women’s medical faculty, and a women’s normal school, all with women science professors. Barnard (at New York’s Columbia University) and Radcliffe (at Harvard University) followed the model of women’s colleges at Cambridge; colleges like Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, and Vassar, founded independently of male institutions and staffed largely by women, offered advanced degrees; and around 1900 coeducational sectarian colleges such as Oberlin, as well as a host of universities from Sydney to Manchester, signed on women as lecturers of various sorts.
During the Third Republic, from 1871 to 1940, French administrators tried to borrow features of the German universities. Of all nations they were slowest to make the desired improvements, the research doctorate firmly establishing itself in France only in the late 1920s. But what of laissez-faire England?
For nearly two generations, the Scottish pressure valve accommodated the enormous demands for scientific education which had been generated by the First Industrial Revolution of steam, coal, iron, and textiles. The valve became insufficient by the 1820s, when Oxford and Cambridge still discouraged entry from religious nonconformists (the last of the religious ‘tests’, required for obtaining a diploma, were swept away only in 1871) and offered nothing approximating advanced scientific