The Origin of the Research University • Hacker News Board

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#21

Post by bee_rider » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 2:30 PM UTC

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…

Isn’t the idea of an aristocratic scientists with a lower class sidekick (actual scientist) doing all the work part of the trope, though? Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure I can come up with any examples. But, I thought that was the whole thing.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#22

Post by lapcat » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

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…

> it’s more like Nietzsche working as an undertaker

Where is this coming from? Nietzsche was a university professor. He did however serve as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#23

Post by jltsiren » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 2:45 PM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #4

Great thought provoking article, a lot of starting points for wikipedia deep dives. It's really surprising to me that most of the big name intellectuals from before the 19th century were indeed not doing their work in the university system. I guess it's in nobody's interest to highlight this. Academia wants to present itself as the obvious deposit and trailblazer of knowledge and that it always has been. There is sim…

In some countries, kids learn some of that already in basic / secondary education. As a consequence of the same Humboldtian ideology that gave rise to the research university.

If schools help people become upstanding and well-informed citizens (which includes learning how the core institutions of the society came to be), they can supposedly pick vocational and other practical skills when needed. On the other hand, if schools focus on practical and directly useful skills, people's ability to see the big picture may be lacking.

In other words, you speak of symptoms of living in a society that has embraced the research university but not the ideology behind it.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#24

Post by bonoboTP » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

oersted wrote: post #14

bonoboTP wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think that's also not fully true. The trope is that the rich nobles were swimming in money and in their boredom they just tinkered and did hobby stuff and then this resulted in the discoveries.

But for example Galileo from Wikipedia:

> Three of Galileo's five siblings survived infancy. The youngest, Michelangelo (or Michelagnolo), also became a lutenist and composer who added to Galileo's financial burdens for the rest of his life.[22] Michelangelo was unable to contribute his fair share of their father's promised dowries to their brothers-in-law, who later attempted to seek legal remedies for payments due. Michelangelo also occasionally had to borrow funds from Galileo to support his musical endeavours and excursions. These financial burdens may have contributed to Galileo's early desire to develop inventions that would bring him additional income.[23]

Or Kepler:

> His grandfather, Sebald Kepler, had been Lord Mayor of the city. By the time Johannes was born, the Kepler family fortune was in decline. His father, Heinrich Kepler, earned a precarious living as a mercenary, and he left the family when Johannes was five years old. He was believed to have died in the Eighty Years' War in the Netherlands. His mother, Katharina Guldenmann, an innkeeper's daughter, was a healer and herbalist.

I think the pattern is less that they were so free from concern that they started to research, and more that they worked hard to get funded. And often incidental jobs, like calculating easter and astrology stuff (Kepler in Prague) and to the science as a bonus. Similar to how artists were mostly commissioned (like Leonardo) but also did their own "passion projects".

The typical intellectual was not some duke or baron or huge lord or the son of such. They had to be somewhat stable of course, but that's also true today. Today's professors also don't typically come from abject poverty.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#25

Post by canjobear » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #4

Great thought provoking article, a lot of starting points for wikipedia deep dives. It's really surprising to me that most of the big name intellectuals from before the 19th century were indeed not doing their work in the university system. I guess it's in nobody's interest to highlight this. Academia wants to present itself as the obvious deposit and trailblazer of knowledge and that it always has been. There is sim…

On the contrary, academics love to navel gaze and complain about academia. What’s lacking is realistic alternatives.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#26

Post by pphysch » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

biofox wrote: post #8

baby-yoda wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis of good science. Pioneered and exploited by Robert Maxwell (father of the infamous Ghislaine). Good summary below; was an all around eye-opening revelation for me. https://thetaper.library.virginia.edu/big%20deal/2019/04/26/...

> [Maxwell] entertained guests at parties with booze, cigars and sailboat trips. Scientists had never seen anything like him. > “We would get dinner and fine wine, and at the end he would present us a cheque – a few thousand pounds for the society. It was more money than us poor scientists had ever seen.” Similar to what Jeffrey Epstein did.

Jeffrey Epstein is speculated to be a Mossad agent, but Robert Maxwell was known to be one. Not exactly a innocent patron of the sciences, as GP sort of implies.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#27

Post by megaloblasto » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #20

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.

For grad students, yes, the money largely comes from grants (more than 50% of my funding in grad school was from grants from my advisor). The university doesn't actually take a chunk of the grant, they get an additional "overhead". This used to be 60%, now with the Trump administration its been cut to between 15% and 30% depending on the federal agency. For example, if the overhead was 30% and I get a $1000 grant from the NSF, the university will get an additional $300, but I still get the full $1000 (actually the university has full control of the $1000, but I can ask them nicely to use it).

I am more concerned with the research institution's effect on undergrads rather then grad students. Grad students have their own unique ways of being exploited.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#28

Post by bonoboTP » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 3:08 PM UTC

jltsiren wrote: post #23

bonoboTP wrote: post #4

Great thought provoking article, a lot of starting points for wikipedia deep dives. It's really surprising to me that most of the big name intellectuals from before the 19th century were indeed not doing their work in the university system. I guess it's in nobody's interest to highlight this. Academia wants to present itself as the obvious deposit and trailblazer of knowledge and that it always has been. There is sim…

In some countries, kids learn some of that already in basic / secondary education. As a consequence of the same Humboldtian ideology that gave rise to the research university. If schools help people become upstanding and well-informed citizens (which includes learning how the core institutions of the society came to be), they can supposedly pick vocational and other practical skills when needed. On the other hand, if…

It's also simply hard to teach most of this beyond caricature level in secondary school. Ideally it wouldn't be a separate thing but integrated into how you learn the science itself. And this is somewhat attempted yes, there are often small-print framed stories in textbooks about how a discovery came about, but learning the actual science is hard enough and physics is better taught topicwise instead of chronologically with all the dead ends. The modern picture of the world is complicated enough without teaching how the process of it unfolded. Especially while the students haven't really learned the necessary context in history class to even have a "mental map" of the centuries, to place major temporal landmarks on it, to know who lived in parallel with whom.

This is the biggest issue in general, that the material is fragmented and separated. You learn about romanticism and its poets in literature class but it doesn't get connected to how romanticism motivated changes in scientific attitudes and what discoveries are from that era etc. I needed at least 10 years of curious self-directed reading after high school to appreciate such things. Just randomly arriving at the same topic from different angles and different disciplines. The same familiar characters and events start to pop up at new places in new light. Then suddenly even articles that would have seemed super boring started to become interesting because a story could be surprising and counterintuitive. If you have no background knowledge or expectation or intuition then any story is "meh" and not "who would have thought that!".

Indeed if I sent high school myself the OP article, he wouldn't get much out of it, other than a flood of names, dates and boring facts. Once you are out of college, you have points of reference to be curious what all those years were actually based on.

And my complaint was more that it also doesn't happen in university education.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#29

Post by bonoboTP » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

canjobear wrote: post #25

bonoboTP wrote: post #4

Great thought provoking article, a lot of starting points for wikipedia deep dives. It's really surprising to me that most of the big name intellectuals from before the 19th century were indeed not doing their work in the university system. I guess it's in nobody's interest to highlight this. Academia wants to present itself as the obvious deposit and trailblazer of knowledge and that it always has been. There is sim…

On the contrary, academics love to navel gaze and complain about academia. What’s lacking is realistic alternatives.

Academics, yes. Like from the upper years of the PhD process onwards, to postdocs and professorship, yes. But during the bachelor's and master's, we had essentially zero idea what professors did outside lecturing. Didn't even realize a thing called "PhD student" exists. Just that TAs exist. Didn't know what a scientific publication or journal is. I did end up learning about it when I got a student assistant job at a chair, and interacted with the PhD students.

Even then, I didn't quite understand what peer review was, other than a vague idea of being some kind of expert stamp of approval that it is real science and not woowoo. Didn't know what a citation was or why it mattered. The whole "knowledge production" system is fully opaque. And this was the view inside the university as a student. Now imagine people who don't attend university. To them science is not much more than some mad scientist Einstein trope and that's it. And that it has something to do with NASA and stuff.

Re: The Origin of the Research University

#30

Post by bonoboTP » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

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…

There's an argument to be made that at least the bachelor's level should be taught by specialist lecturers who focus on improving didactics and teaching. On the other hand, interacting with someone who is working at the forefront of the field can be helpful when you have a question where a cookie-cutter answer doesn't suffice and expert thought is needed. But it's indeed peculiar that profs are mostly hired based on their research not on their teaching ability (though it is also considered).

But either way, since you mention the US, it's a very common experience for American exchange students in European universities that in America they learned to expect much more handholding and pampering than it's provided in Europe. In the US, there is more individual attention from faculty to students, there are all kinds of counseling and guidance services that basically nudge them through the whole thing, reminding them of deadlines, explaining processes etc. In the US, college students ("college kids") are not seen as self-reliant adults. So depending on what kind of "support" you mean, it might be already too much for their own good instead of little.