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The Origin of the Research University

asteriskmag.com

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Re: The Origin of the Research University

#11

Post by bonoboTP »

griffzhowl wrote: post #10
bonoboTP wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, it may be surprising to learn that these weren't doing their famous work within the university system: Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Leeuwenhoek, Halley, Spinoza, Hobbes, Cavendish. Kepler didn't get a professorship and did his most famous work (elliptical orbits, Kepler's Laws) later in Prague as imperial mathematician. Newton is the main one who indee…

They were all educated at universities though.

Yes, but the point is that universities weren't places of research, but learning/teaching.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#12

Post by bonoboTP »

oersted wrote: post #9
biofox wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a somewhat selective history. Off the top of my head: Kepler developed his ideas while at the University of Graz. [16th century] Galileo built his first telescopes while a professor at the University of Padua. [16th - 17th century] Newton did all of his work while at Cambridge (although, admittedly, it took the plague and a lockdown for him to have his annus mirabilis). [17th century] William of Ockham (of Razor…

The article does state that professors did do research, but in their free time. For the examples you listed, were their famous research achievements really part of their university job description? Otherwise it’s more like Nietzsche working as an undertaker or Einstein working in the patent office just to support themselves. Naturally many such people would opt to be teachers to get by, that doesn’t necessarily mean…

> Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyists aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research.

I think this is overexaggerated in the popular consciousness. Most of the famous intellectuals weren't really big aristocrats. Yes they mostly didn't come from dirt poor peasant or serf families. But they also weren't, with some exceptions, highest nobility. It was much more common that they secured funding through patronage from or got hired by the aristocrats. The aristocrats didn't really do the hard work themselves, again with some exceptions.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#13

Post by dr_dshiv »

The Mouseion of Alexandria (the larger institution around the more famous library) was arguably the origin of the research university. Scholars there published scholarship in the humanities and sciences — and it lasted hundreds of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouseion

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#14

Post by oersted »

bonoboTP wrote: post #12
oersted wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does state that professors did do research, but in their free time. For the examples you listed, were their famous research achievements really part of their university job description? Otherwise it’s more like Nietzsche working as an undertaker or Einstein working in the patent office just to support themselves. Naturally many such people would opt to be teachers to get by, that doesn’t necessarily mean…

> Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyists aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research. I think this is overexaggerated in the popular consciousness. Most of the famous intellectuals weren't really big aristocrats. Yes they mostly didn't come from dirt poor peasant or serf families. But they also weren't, with some exceptions, highest no…

Indeed, the way I expressed it was an oversimplification. I generally wanted to make the point that they were people that weren’t forced to have a tiring full-time job just to get by, and that research was not really their job, with patronage as middle ground.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#15

Post by mistrial9 »

> It had a modern academic research library, the largest in the world, which featured brand-new innovations like organizing books on shelves by subjects with reference to a catalogue

the tone is light-hearted overall, but really think about how foolish this insufficiently rigorous statement is!

> It hardly mattered if a professor of oriental languages could read Hebrew or Arabic, so long as he had adequate seniority, and a poetry professor who wanted a raise might well be handed an additional chair in mathematics.

this is a glib treatment of seniority

> As we’ll see, they mostly failed. The rights of traditional university faculties were protected by ancient laws (and ancient lawyers)

but some genuinely funny lines too!

> Promising young scholars had to burnish their resumes with useless publications long before anyone thought of asking them to do real research.

insightful

> before any kind of institutional academic specialization

it feels a bit unsettling to read so many detailed and insightful bits of this story but then get these sort of bombastic over-summary lines that sink credibility IMHO

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#16

Post by analog31 »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #13

The Mouseion of Alexandria (the larger institution around the more famous library) was arguably the origin of the research university. Scholars there published scholarship in the humanities and sciences — and it lasted hundreds of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouseion

Indeed, and I suppose it's worth looking into the universities of the Muslim world. I read that at one point, there were more universities in the Spanish Caliphate than in the rest of Europe.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#17

Post by rjsw »

bonoboTP wrote: post #12
oersted wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does state that professors did do research, but in their free time. For the examples you listed, were their famous research achievements really part of their university job description? Otherwise it’s more like Nietzsche working as an undertaker or Einstein working in the patent office just to support themselves. Naturally many such people would opt to be teachers to get by, that doesn’t necessarily mean…

> Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyists aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research. I think this is overexaggerated in the popular consciousness. Most of the famous intellectuals weren't really big aristocrats. Yes they mostly didn't come from dirt poor peasant or serf families. But they also weren't, with some exceptions, highest no…

One example [1] of a group that was doing stuff outside universities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society_of_Birmingham

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#18

Post by analog31 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #11
griffzhowl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were all educated at universities though.

Yes, but the point is that universities weren't places of research , but learning/teaching.

It could be that interest in research itself is a relatively recent development. A lot of scholarship amounted to study of past scholarship, until science came along. Empirical science as we know it was barely a century old when Newton came along.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#19

Post by megaloblasto »

I am so unimpressed with research universities in the US. Most just accept and neglect undergrad students. They use them as a steady income and have very little intention of providing them with a quality education.

I happen to be very close with the dean of arts and science of a major state university. He told me that all of his professional goals given to him by the president and provost had to do with research impact, while 100% of the money he was allocated came from student tuition. The incentives are completely out of line and the students are the ones who pay the price.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#20

Post by bee_rider »

megaloblasto wrote: post #19

I am so unimpressed with research universities in the US. Most just accept and neglect undergrad students. They use them as a steady income and have very little intention of providing them with a quality education. I happen to be very close with the dean of arts and science of a major state university. He told me that all of his professional goals given to him by the president and provost had to do with research impa…

Weird, most of the money my professor had to spend on grad students came from grants, and the school takes a big chunk of the grants. I dunno where the undergrad money went. The student union was pretty, I guess.
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