The Crisis of University Research
THE DEBATE OVER THE ROLE of research in the life of the university was settled a long time ago. In a classic 1852 book, The Idea of a University, the Catholic priest and future cardinal John Henry Newman made what in retrospect appears to have been a last stand against the proposition that research should be an intrinsic part of university life. The Newman argument went something like this: if university professors are properly doing their work—seriously keeping up with the reading in their fields, preparing and revising lectures, grading exams and papers, engaging broadly in the life of the university, and guiding students in the decisions they must make at such a crucial time in their lives—then they are not going to produce original scholarship on top of everything else. To Newman, teaching and research were fundamentally incompatible activities, requiring very different talents and skills. Because universities are teaching institutions, research can have no proper business in them. Research, he concluded, should take place in institutes created for that purpose.
Newman was on the losing side of the argument about university research. The great 19th-century historian Leopold von Ranke energetically countered the kind of arguments put forward by Newman, asserting that in his field the capacity to produce and publish original archival research was the real measure of a scholar. Primary sources found in archives were for Ranke the premier form of reputable historical evidence. Young historians in German universities would be trained in seminars to investigate archives. Ranke’s relentless emphasis on the primacy of such research produced a revolution in historiography, and the modern scholarly community of historians is to a large extent a reflection of his wishes for the profession. Scholarship in the university generally came to abide by the spirit of Ranke’s principle that the production of original research determined the professional worth and standing of an institution of higher learning.
For historians especially, the German research university served as the model for graduate programs in the United States, beginning in the 1880s at Johns Hopkins. Historians in America thereafter underwent a rigorous graduate school apprenticeship. An elaborate testing structure evolved, featuring oral and written examinations, foreign language qualifying examinations, and theses and dissertations—leading to the doctorate in philosophy, a German degree. By about 1900, the PhD had become the highest badge of professional competence in American universities. The academic world of conferences, papers, publications, scholarly periodicals, and book reviews took shape in this period. The university as we know it today is a direct consequence of the late-19th-century professionalization revolution associated with Ranke’s name.
Ranke’s model of historical scholarship, however, is not without difficulties. Some of Newman’s concerns about the burden of fully carrying out the responsibilities of teaching, service,
