The University in Dissent by Rolfe Gary;

Author:Rolfe, Gary;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Humboldt and the research-teaching plexus

When Humboldt wrote his treatise on intellectual institutions (wissenschaftliche Anstalten) at the turn of the nineteenth century, teaching and research in Germany were two very separate activities conducted by two separate groups of people in separate institutions, universities and academies respectively. Humboldt recognized, however, that the distinction was neither natural nor even planned. Rather, he argued that the system had ‘developed in a haphazard way’, and that to continue to regard teaching and research as distinct, separate and exclusive activities was ‘partly wrongheaded and partly useless’.34 Humboldt’s call for the reform of what we would now call higher education was therefore an attempt to rethink the relationship between teaching and research, teachers and researchers, and universities and academies in the face of a very similar separation of roles and functions as we are now once again experiencing two centuries later. In a warning that is as relevant today as it was in Humboldt’s time, he cautioned that ‘the state must not deal with its universities as gymnasia [roughly translated as grammar schools] or as specialized technical schools; it must not use its academy as if it were a technical or scientific commission’.35 In other words, institutions of higher education should not be regarded merely as places where students come to be trained for work and where funded research is conducted for purely technical or instrumental ends.

Humboldt’s proposed solution was not, however, to bring universities and academies together, nor to build a bridge (nexus) between them, but rather to demonstrate that academies, those institutions concerned only with conducting research, could be dispensed with. Thus:

If one assigns to the university the tasks of teaching and dissemination of the results of science and scholarship and assigns to the academy the task of its extension and advancement, an injustice is obviously done to the university. Science and scholarship have been advanced as much-and in Germany, even more-by university teachers as by members of academies.36

Humboldt’s point was that teaching and scholarship, when conducted in the spirit of what Elton referred to as forschendes Lernen, is a superior form of research, and ‘it is inconceivable that discoveries should not be frequently made in such a situation’.37 Furthermore, whereas researchers in the academies had no access to students and therefore no opportunities to practise forschendes Lernen, university lecturers encountered no such barriers to conducting academic research. Thus, ‘University teaching is moreover not such a strenuous affair that it should be regarded as a distraction from the calm needed for research and study; it is, rather, a help to it.’38 Humboldt concluded: ‘It would be entirely safe to entrust the growth of scientific and scholarly knowledge to the universities as long as they are properly conducted; this is why the academies can be dispensed with.’39

Humboldt is making two observations here. First, he is claiming that teaching, if conducted in a scholarly and inquiring manner, not only transmits knowledge but also produces it, and is therefore a powerful form of research. This was, in essence, the point that Elton took from Humboldt’s work.

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