Universities in the United States grafted the doctorate onto an existing structure, the undergraduate college, whose standards approximated those of a French lycée or German Gymnasium. Seeking the grail of appropriating European wisdom, American professors (complemented by a large number of European imports) taught specialized courses to students registered for an advanced degree. This new structure – departing from the freedom to choose courses which was enjoyed by European students – slowly but inexorably increased the time required for obtaining a doctorate and inflated the length of doctoral dissertations. As higher learning experienced an uneven course in Europe under the excesses of fascism and Stalinism, the modified American model provided a new standard for research training.
From the end of the nineteenth century, foreigners were astounded by the material resources of American universities. The English mathematician James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897), Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), and German biologist Jacques Loeb (1859–1924) held significant university posts in America; by the end of the century, an American lecture tour was obligatory for leading scientific lights, like Englishman Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), German Felix Klein (1849–1925), and Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1904, who ironically referred to his tour as a voyage to El Dorado). Immigrant talent educated in the United States – physicists Albert Abraham Michelson (1852–1931) and Michael Idvorsky Pupin (1858–1935) – rose to the heights of their discipline. But all comers did not stay. Max Abraham (1875–1922) took the measure of a physics chair at Urbana in 1909 and then returned to Europe, where he had no comparable position. Einstein’s first scientific collaborator Jakob Laub (1882–1962) declined to fill Abraham’s Urbana chair, opting instead for one at La Plata in Argentina. Shortly after the turn of the century, Ernest Rutherford would not forsake McGill University in Montreal for Yale (although he did leave when Manchester beckoned). The United States of the 1890s held no permanent attraction for young Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), fresh out of Cambridge and married to an American Quaker. For scientists at the peak of their career in Europe, the preferred arrangement was a visiting lectureship, like those liberally endowed before the First World War. Under this arrangement, physicists Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853–1928) and Max Planck taught at Columbia University. After 1918, Einstein was lured to the California Institute of Technology for months at a time. As these examples suggest, by the first decade of the twentieth century, it was normal for German or French professors to take leave from their universities in order to occupy positions abroad, notably in the New World. There were even world-ranging, extramural professorships. In 1914, for example, geophysicist Gustav Angenheister (1878–1945) became a special professor who split his time between Göttingen and the capital of Western Samoa.
Technology has made commuting professors an established feature of academic life. In the 1920s, theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) commuted by train from Göttingen to his lectureship at Hamburg. The possibilities of commuting coincided with the end of the university science institute as a personal empire, presided over by the professor and his wife. The institute or laboratory became a university monument, rather than (as it was during a brief moment, between approximately 1870 and 1910) a living part of a professor’s aura. Only the president’s mansion, often conspicuously located on the campus of a new university, allowed state or private overseers to place an administrator on public display. But because the presidential office served as an obvious focus for student discontent, the mansion sometimes became a white elephant. Today, the president of the University of Southwestern Louisiana lives happily on campus, but the gothic presidential mansion of the University of Tokyo stands vacant – the victim of student protests a generation ago.
Along with the end of the university institute came the rise of the university department. By 1900 professors and lecturers sometimes organized sequences of courses, assigning responsiblity for all the parts of a domain, but the spectacular fragmentation of knowledge led to a hierarchical structure for managing it only in the United States. There, the arrangement extended to a military command structure, with a department chair, professors, associate professors, assistant professors, and a host of supporting staff. The departmental innovation coincided with the rise of the department store and the departmentally structured industrial firm. The inspiration is found in the administrative units of the federal government. With the model of academic departments in science, American universities distanced themselves from the European tradition where a professor taught what he liked. Science instruction became highly organized and goal-oriented. In the nineteenth century, European academics were traditionally able to take advantage of fast-breaking developments in neighbouring disciplines; in the twentieth century, innovative American academics spent much time and energy breaking out of disciplinary confinement.
Both geographical decentralization and interdisciplinary innovation have become watchwords in academic science. Electronic information-processing to some extent obviates the necessity for a scientist or scholar to reside at an ancient college of learning. Universities everywhere have adapted to new socioeconomic conditions by expanding curricula. They have always responded in this way, although never as quickly as their critics would like.
Measured and deliberate innovation is one of academia’s heavy burdens. It is also a great strength. Emerging fields of knowledge become new scientific disciplines only after they have found a secure place in universities. We look to universities for an authoritative word about the latest innovations. New scientific ideas emerge in a variety of settings, but they become the common heritage of humanity only when processed by an institution for advanced instruction like the modern university.
3 Sharing: Early Scientific Societies
Above the deafening cacophony of a dozen screaming four-year-olds, a daycare teacher admonishes, ‘Now share!’ The concept of sharing a toy – of sacrificing individual possession for a communal experience, of deferring pleasure until others have taken a turn at gratification – is altogether foreign to the toddler, whose universe heretofore has been entirely self-centred and unabashedly selfish. It is seen as an important measure of maturity when the child is able to transcend the universe of ‘me and mine’, and to begin to entertain the idea of a greater social imperative.
The development of science seems to recapitulate the odyssey of every individual as he matures from infantile egotism to participation in the universe of social give-and-take. In the ancient and medieval worlds, learning about the natural world proceeded by fits and starts. People recorded intriguing theories and thoughts, constructed ingenious mechanisms and monuments, and even established schools. There existed, however, no special notion of a common mission to uncover new truths about nature, no clear idea that a division of labour could prove especially conducive to the rapid accumulation of knowledge. Earlier thinkers tended to guard and keep secret what they knew, fearing that good ideas might be stolen by a rival.
With