International research orientation of Swiss universities: self-regulated or politically imposed?

Abstract

International openness is essential to science in small modern countries. The modernization of Swiss science and economy in the nineteenth century was promoted largely by foreigners: newly founded Swiss universities were staffed to a large extent by foreign professors, but students also came from abroad. Up to the middle of this century, the development of Swiss universities was marked by distinct successive phases of inviting in or shutting out international influence, depending mainly on changes in the political context. The international landscape of knowledge and science since the 1950s has undergone dynamic change. University structures were installed as a reaction to this dynamism. Patterns of international research orientation emerging in different universities and in the disciplinaryfields of business administration, chemistry and history are discussedin a comparative perspective.