Since at least the nineteenth century, research universities from Berlin to Baltimore have been indispensable institutions. They have conserved, created, and circulated knowledge not just for the specialized scholars within their ivied and bricked walls but also for the communities outside them. Research universities authorized and legitimated knowledge. They helped separate fact from fallacy. The research university, as Daniel Coit Gilman, the founding president of Johns Hopkins, put it in 1885, was a civilizing force. Alongside the family, commerce, and religion, it moved civilization forward. It was the motor of modernity.
But all that, as the sages of Silicon Valley tell us, is being disrupted. The research university, they say, has ossified into a bureaucratic behemoth that no longer creates knowledge—or innovates as the disrupters would put it—so much as inefficiently processes and distributes it. For the prophets of entrepreneurship, innovation, and start-up-ism, the research university is a vestige of a predigital age. Like journalism, manufacturing, and music before it, the research university too will soon be destroyed and reinvented in the digital revolution.
The research university emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Germany, when Prussian intellectuals and government leaders worried that the very idea of a university, whose origins stretched back at least six centuries to Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, was on the verge of collapse. In 1795, the Wednesday Society, a secret salon of Prussian civil ministers and intellectuals, entertained a provocative proposition from one of its members, a Reformed pastor named J.G. Gebhard. Universities, he asserted, should be abolished. “In our age,” he wrote in an essay circulated among the group before one of their Wednesdayevening meetings, had become “dispensable.” Their “purpose” could be achieved by other means, by which he meant other media, namely, print. As printed encyclopedias, lexica, periodicals, and monographs became more affordable and readily available, the university was losing what many saw as its monopoly on knowledge.
Gebhard’s frank proposal prompted a lively debate among his Wednesday Society colleagues about the purpose of the university in an age of print. They quickly moved beyond his vague imperative—abolish universities— to a more nuanced discussion of the ends of universities. What was the purpose of a university? And, perhaps more importantly, what kind of technologies and institutions were needed around 1800 in order to create and share knowledge that people could trust? Could the medieval model of the university survive the political, technological, religious, and economic revolutions of modernity? Gebhard and his colleagues’ concerns about the future of the university, however, revealed deeper anxieties about the fate of knowledge in an age of the proliferation of print. What counted as real, authoritative knowledge?