Diplomacy and War at NATO: The Secretary General and Military Action after the Cold War

How nice for academics to think of ourselves as charismatic. That may be stretching William Clark’s title, but he is examining the academic mystique. And we are at least charismatic in our own minds, hearing approval for our lectures and recognition of our research. Clark has written, in his own words, an “odd book” that examines in minute detail and sweeping generalizations the emergence of the academic culture that most of us absorb in graduate school as our identity and value system. Clark begins by questioning our founding myth that the research university dates from the Humboldtian post-Napoleonic reforms. He carefully makes the case that the changes in the German-speaking world predate the resistance to the Napoleonic political and academic order. Clark depicts the German (Prussian-Hanoverian) university as a creation of market forces and of the bureaucracy operating in the intellectual world of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Central to his case is that the fundamental pieces of the “German” university were already in place by 1789, rather then 1815. By 1789 a “star” system had already developed in Prussia and Hanover in which academics’ scholarly fame had become a valuable commodity to universities and government ministries. Clark switches Humboldt’s role from that of initiator of a new type of university to the author of an intellectual rationale for what already existed. In place of the perception that succeeding bureaucrats perverted Humboldt’s bildung, Clark maintains that he expected the university to be intimately tied to the state. Clark begins by examining the triumph of the written over the oral academic culture. The previous dominance of those who excelled in the lecture and disputation, the heritage of the medieval university, was eclipsed in the Enlightenment. Although the lecture survived as a teaching technique, written work became the coin of the new academic realm. Written examinations, seminar papers, dissertations, the doctorate, and peer-reviewed scholarship became the road to academic success. Symbolically the library catalogue replaced the lecture catalogue as the most important academic record, the author’s charisma superceded the speakers’. Such written documentation fit the demands of rising bureaucrats in the Germanspeaking world who exerted a power over academics that was unimaginable in the Englishspeaking world, whose Oxbridge tradition placed tenured professors beyond discipline. This ambitious book connects material culture and minute investigations to the sweeping interpretations of Weber, Foucault, and others. The growing historiographic tendency to find greater continuity between ancien and new regime western Europe here finds its voice for higher education. And the conclusion hints at the literature showing how the international borrowing of ideas such as “the German university” was perverted by the perceptions of the borrowers. This impressive effort is densely (although playfully and sometimes humorously) written and long. Reflecting the modern academic culture whose origins it dissects, only a small number of specialists in intellectual history and history of higher education will fight their way through it. Those who do will be well rewarded.