| Popis: |
Professor Liebig of Giessen University is looking back with pride on his career in organic chemistry and his keen young team of researchers in their lab ‘almost exclusively devoted to the improvement of organic analysis . . . The only complaints were those of the attendant who in the evenings, when he had to clean, could not get the workers to leave the laboratory.’ All quite typical—except that he is describing a laboratory he created in 1826. It was the first research laboratory based in a university. There were a few other laboratories but they were usually sponsored by learned societies (you can still see Michael Faraday’s laboratory at the Royal Institution) and were nothing to do with universities. Professor Liebig knew the significance of what he was doing: ‘there began at the small university an activity such as the world had not yet seen’. It was the birth of one of the most important institutions of the modern world—the research-based university systematically creating new knowledge—and it was conceived in Germany, as we saw in Chapter One. Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote a short policy paper which proved to be one of the seminal documents in the emergence of the modern university, proposing that the university should become a centre of research. Underneath the idealist Hegelian prose he wrestles with issues which are still live today. He argues that research based in the university is enhanced by teaching, compared with the alternative model of research in a separate academy: . . . If one declares the university as destined only for the teaching and dissemination of science, but the academy to its expansion, one clearly does the former an injustice. Surely, the sciences have been just as much—and in Germany more so—expanded by university professors as by the academy members, and these men have arrived at their advances in their field precisely through their teaching. For the free oral lecture before listeners, among whom there is always a significant number of minds that think along for themselves, surely spurs on the person who has become used to this kind of study as much as the solitary leisure of the writer’s life or the loose association of an academic fellowship. . . . |
