The university is an invention of European origin.2 It was a guild-like arrangement of masters and scholars with two traditions emerging. One had the students hiring the masters and running the university. The more widespread organization was a faculty of masters who ran the university and charged the students fees for entry. Both were affiliated with the Catholic Church. The Medieval Universities differed from the Madrasas that followed the expansion of Islam from the Middle East to Spain. The Madrasas were focused on the Koran and its commentaries. They were not separate entities established by scholars or students. They were affiliated with a mosque and did not initially have formal academic degrees as did the Medieval Christian Universities. Most Islamic scientists were supported by patrons or their rulers. The University of Bologna in Italy, in 1088, was the first university established in Europe (and the students ran it). The University of Paris was established in 1150 (and the faculty ran it). The first public supported university was the University of Naples in 1224. By 1413 there were 21 universities in Europe. The first university in North America was Harvard University (1636).
In the 19th century both the MD and the PhD required a dissertation of book length. The research and dissertation aspects were dropped from the MD in the 20th century. The PhD was not part of the English academic degree. Until the twentieth century the British MA was the terminal degree of higher education. It was the flow of American students to German Universities that motivated Great Britain in 1917 to introduce the PhD so that American loyalties would be for Britain rather than Germany if another war broke out between Germany and Great Britain. The modern university PhD was established by the von Humboldt brothers, Alexander (1769–1859) and Wilhelm (1767–1835).3 There was (and still is) a degree called the DSc (Doctor of Science) used in Britain. It was awarded by a faculty committee to a scholar with a proven record of recognized research. It was rare and like election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt believed scientists should contribute to new knowledge by their experiments and discoveries and the research dissertation was the vehicle for launching new scientists and new knowledge. Another feature of higher education before the 19th century was the religious nature of most universities. They were highly motivated to produce ministers or priests. There were no secular universities in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Many scientists of those more distant centuries saw their careers as priests interpreting the works of God. Women were effectively absent from higher education until the late 19th century. The first female professor was Laura Bassi (1711–1778) who was born in Bologna and got her degree at the University of Bologna in 1732. She was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy (Physics) and helped spread the work of Newton to her students. She did research in chemistry, physics, mathematics, hydraulics, and mechanics.
In the United States, after the Revolutionary War, most colleges and universities were undergraduate institutions primarily training males for the ministry or, as phrased in their mission statements “creating Christian gentlemen.” American scientists took their BA degree and then went to Germany for a PhD. The first American PhD was awarded by Yale in 1861. In the 1870s the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Princeton, Clark, and Johns Hopkins established PhD programs based on the German model of research. Daniel Coit Gilman at Johns Hopkins University played a major role in promoting the German PhD model in American Universities.4 The two major suppliers of PhDs in the life sciences were Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University. Harvard University did so by recruiting Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz from Paris to its faculty. Johns Hopkins University staffed its faculty with H. Newell Martin (a student of Thomas Henry Huxley) and William Keith Brooks, a student of Agassiz.
Recommended Reading
1.Plato (375 B.C.) The Republic. The Jowett translation is available free on Project Gutenberg.
2.Rashdall, Hastings (1858–1920) The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (1895) Cambridge University Press) covers the history of the major European universities. It is a large work (1500 pages) and now available as an eBook.
3.For an account of the history of the university after the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, see Anderson, Robert D. European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914. It includes a lengthy discussion (Chapter 4) of the Humboldt brothers and their establishment of the University of Berlin in 1810. The idea of a university as a place for academic freedom to pursue scholarship and original research was shaped by the Humboldt brothers.
4.For a biographical account of the contributions of Gilman, see Franklin, Fabian The Life of Daniel Coit Gilman (1910 NY Dodd, Mead and Company).
2 The Origin of Academic Pedigrees
People have used pedigrees for many endeavors. The idea goes back to Biblical times and the Old Testament has numerous lists of family members across dozens of generations. They were first used in a more structured way to identify family histories or genealogy. This included royal families. Present monarchs in countries with a royal lineage can trace these pedigrees back to the Middle Ages or earlier. In the mid-Nineteenth Century Francis Galton used pedigrees to study talents and other traits running in families (Figure 1). His own family of Galtons, Darwins, and Wedgwoods is an example [1]. Galton’s pedigree analysis of intellectual and sports ability were forerunners of the pedigrees used in the eugenics movement especially by Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin at the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, NY [2]. Many geneticists recognized that these were highly influenced by bias when they included traits like becoming bankers, carpenters, physicians, or sea captains, among the talented and becoming criminals, paupers, or mentally deficient (in those days the terms “feebleminded” and “unfit person” were used) [3]. After WWII and the abuses of Nazi racial ideology that expanded the approach started by the Eugenics Record Office, such pedigrees for social traits were avoided. Instead they were used for taking family histories by physicians and studied in detail for medically significant traits for a field that became known as genetic counselling pioneered by Sheldon Reed (1910–2003) [4]. An additional use of family pedigrees was introduced by Murray Bowen (1913–1990) to work out family dynamics among relatives across three generations. A religious use of pedigrees is widely used by the Latter Day Saints (LDS or Mormons) who require members to prepare extensive pedigrees of their ancestral families so that they can be assimilated into the Mormon family [5].
Figure 1: The Galton-Darwin-Wedgwood pedigree used by the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor to illustrate inheritance of talent and high intelligence.
Galton used dictionaries of biography and scores obtained from competitive examination among top students in mathematics, classics, and other fields of knowledge. These pedigrees were also used in the eugenics movement that Galton founded, especially by Charles Davenport and his staff at the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor during the first third of the twentieth century. Earlier pedigrees were largely used for the nobility