Reviewed by: The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook ed. by Louis Menand, Paul Reitter, and Chad Wellmon Melody Herr, Ph.D. Louis Menand, Paul Reitter, and Chad Wellmon (Editors). The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 400 pp. Paperback: $32.50. ISBN 9780226414713 The concept of the research university originated in nineteenth-century Germany and, transplanted to the United States, achieved its modern form in the early twentieth century. This volume gathers key primary sources charting the parallel development of this institution in these two nations from the 1780s through the 1930s. By collecting these documents, many of which are difficult to find or otherwise available only in German, into a single reference book, providing an introduction describing the historical context for each, and placing them in dialogue with one another, the editors have done both scholars and critics of higher education a great service. The volume editors are intellectual historians with a long-standing interest in the university. Paul Reitter, Director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State University, who specializes in German-Jewish culture; and Chad Wellmon, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of German and History at the University of Virginia, who recently published a monograph on the invention of the research university (Wellmon, 2015), collaborate regularly. Their websites list several forthcoming co-edited and co-authored publications. Louis Menand, Pulitzer Prize winner, recipient of the National Humanities Medal, Professor of English at Harvard University, and staff writer for The New Yorker, is the best-known of the three editors. In The Marketplace of Ideas (2010), he argues that in order to understand the [End Page E-7] modern university and its problems, specifically its resistance to change, one must study its history. The same argument underlies the present volume. By documenting controversies of the past, Menand, Reitter, and Wellmon hope to provide a corrective, long-view perspective on current controversies over the university's purpose and alleged shortcomings. Consequently, they select sources with both historical significance and current relevance. The first half of the volume proceeds roughly in chronological order. Part 1, "German Research Universities," opens with a report on the state of universities in German lands presented to King Frederick Wilhelm II in 1789. Refusing to allow bureaucrats to determine the future of institutions dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schleiermacher, F.W.J. Schelling, and other intellectuals of the day proposed reforms. This section climaxes with Wilhelm von Humboldt's essay "On the Internal Structure of the University in Berlin and Its Relationship to Other Organizations" (circa 1809), which the volume editors refer to as the "ur-text of the modern research university" (p. 2). Humboldt's call for the establishment of the University of Berlin concludes Part 1. Part 2, "Americans Abroad and Returning," captures observations of those who studied at or visited German universities. The letters from Göttingen by George Ticknor and George Bancroft, along with reflections by Richard Ely and James M. Hart, give a sense of student life. Although Henry Tappan did not study abroad himself, he toured several European institutions. When he became the first president of the University of Michigan in 1852, he constructed it according to the German model that he so much admired. For Tappan, higher education was a matter of national pride, a demonstration of the practical merits of America's republican form of government. In the essay reproduced here, he declares the educational system created by the despotic Prussian monarchy a "glorious achievement" and challenges his compatriots to prove that "a republic, too, can create and foster the noblest institutions of learning, can patronize the arts and artists, and learning and learned men" (p. 149). Tappan's challenge serves as a segue to Part 3, "American Adaptations," which opens with the Morrill Act of 1862. As the editors rightly point out, the Act was one component of the U.S. Congress's nation-building efforts initiated during the Civil War. Under the Act, states received an allotment of federal land that they could lease or sell in order to generate revenue to establish a college. These land-grant...
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Mar 28, 2019
Artem Sokolov 
Open Access
