page_title: History of European universities
section_title: Modern universities
hierarchical_section_title: History of European universities / European university models in the 19th and 20th centuries / Modern universities
context_page_description: European universities date from the founding of the University of Bologna in 1088 or the University of Paris. In the 19th and 20th centuries, European universities concentrated upon science and research, their structures and philosophies having shaped the contemporary university. The original medieval universities arose from the Roman Catholic Church schools. Their purposes included training professionals, scientific investigation, improving society, and teaching critical thinking and research. External influences, such as Renaissance humanism, the discovery of the New World, the Protestant Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the recurrence of political revolution, enhanced the importance of human rights and international law in the university curricula.
  The French Ecole Polytechnique was established in 1794 by the mathematician Gaspard Monge during the Revolution, and it became a military academy under Napoleon I in 1804.
context_section_description: Moving into the 19th century, the objective of universities evolved from teaching the “regurgitation of knowledge” to “encourag[ing] productive thinking.”  Two new university models, the German and the post-Revolutionary French Grandes écoles, arose and made an impact on established models such as the Russian and British - especially the newer foundations of  University College London and King's College London. Both have been connected with the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, the rise of the bourgeoisie during industrialization and the decline of classical medieval Scholasticism but used rather different approaches. Such free thinking and experimentation had notably already begun in Britain's oldest universities beginning in the seventeenth century at Oxford with the fathers of British scientific methodology Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, and at Cambridge where Isaac Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics & Physics.
  The situation in Germany, or rather the various German states, was different. The specific German Bildungsbürgertum, which emerged in starting from the mid-18th century with an educational ideal based on idealistic values and classical antiquity had failed in gaining political power and in its aims for nationalist movement. The Bildungsbürger turned to education as means to construct a common national culture and strived for freedom against the nobility in power. Only when Prussia and its absolutist government had been utterly defeated by the Napoleonic armies in 1806, the weakness of the defeated government allowed for the Prussian reforms of the county's institutions. 
   Wilhelm von Humboldt was appointed Geheimer Staatsrat (not minister as intended) of education in 1809 and held office for just one year. He however succeeded in drafting a complete reform of the country's educational system, including the primary Prussian education system in the de:Königsberger Schulplan and establishing the new University of Berlin. Based on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s and his own liberal ideas, the goal was to demonstrate the process of the discovery of knowledge and to teach students to “take account of fundamental laws of science in all their thinking.” Thus, seminars and laboratories started to evolve. Humboldt envisioned the university education as a student-centered activity of research:
  Just as primary instruction makes the teacher possible, so he renders himself dispensable through schooling at the secondary level.  The university teacher is thus no longer a teacher and the student is no longer a pupil.  Instead the student conducts research on his own behalf and the professor supervises his research and supports him in it.
   Early 19th-century American educators were also fascinated by German educational trends. The Prussian approach was used for example in the Michigan Constitution of 1835, which fully embraced the overall Prussian system by introducing a range of primary schools, secondary schools, and the University of Michigan itself, all administered by the state and supported with tax-based funding. However, some of the concepts in the Prussian reforms of primordial education, Bildung and its close interaction of education, society and nation-building are in conflict with American state-sceptical libertarian thinking.
  Freedom was an important concept in the German university model, and the system of professors was based on competition and freedom: although professors served as state functionaries, they had the freedom to choose between several states, and their identity and prestige arose from the specialization of scientific disciplines.
  The French University model lacked the freedom of the German model, consisting of severe discipline and control over the curriculum, awarding of degrees, conformity of views, and personal habits (for example, there was a ban on beards in 1852). French university professors trained at the École Normale Supérieure, and much of their prestige depended on their schools’ reputations. By 1866, though, the German model had begun to influence the strict French model. The École
caption: The main Entrance to Old College at Aberystwyth University.
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