By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Axtell, James. Wisdom’s Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016. xx +415 pp.
The book opens with the acknowledgment that “universities, like cathedrals and parliaments, were unique creations of Western Europe and the Middle Ages.” It was in the 12th century that it became clear that the monastic and cathedral schools could not provide the advanced training needed by the Church’s growing ranks of priests, missionaries, and administrators.
With the arrival of the newly translated Aristotelian texts in the 11th century and the influx of Greco-Roman and Arabic learning in philosophy, mathematics, and medicine, the seven liberal arts of antiquity were not enough to deal with the new learning.
These conditions stimulated the advent of the university, “one of the very few European institutions to have preserved their fundamental patterns and basic social values and functions over the course of history.” Cambridge University dates to 1209, Bologna’s founding sometime at the end of 12th century. Paris, Oxford, and Montpellier soon followed, having achieved their corporate existence at the beginning of the 13th century.
Axtell counts 18 existing universities that had their beginning in the 12th century. His is more than a simple narrative; the book is virtually an encyclopedia.
The narrative soon moves from Europe to North America where the first schools, following the English model, served the same purpose as the cathedral schools, namely, the education of clergy and others for administrative duties. Descriptions of the early institutions follow. Yale, Harvard, Brown, and the University of North Carolina receive their due. Then Chicago, Pittsburgh, Michigan, and the University of California, and others are subsequently examined in some detail. Axtell’s interests are primarily in the structure of the institution, its admission standards, its curriculum, and financial status.
In 1887, Yale declared itself a university. With faculties of theology, law, medicine, and philosophy and the arts, it fulfilled the four departments of which a university is commonly thought to consist. Yale’s graduate department, established in 1843, awarded the first three American Ph.Ds.
In the first half of the 19th century, America became a land of colleges. Before 1860, 241 are thought to have existed, at least by charter. American colleges were graduating large numbers of students who chose to complete their education abroad. By the First World War, 9,000 American college students were to make their pilgrimage to Germany. Wundt’s psychological laboratory in Leipzig, because of its novelty, attracted some and created a new discipline in the American academic sector.
Many students returned from Europe steeped in the methods and principle researches of the well-equipped laboratories and seminars in which they worked, and tried to duplicate them in their native country. The 54 pages of Axtell’s chapter 5, “The German Impress,” is worth the price of the book.
Axtell’s interest leads him to examine such things as the effect of the G.I. Bill on the expansion of higher education, and the influence of the Russian launch of Sputnik on the federal sponsorship of university research.
In 1982, we are told in an interesting aside, Clark Kerr, former chancellor of the University of California, made the statement, “Among the eighty-five institutions in the Western world established by 1520 that still exist in recognizable form are the Catholic Church, the British Parliament, and seventy universities. The seventy universities were still in the same location, pursuing their eternal themes of teaching, scholarship, and service.”
By the 21st century, “the university” had become “the multiversity,” with no guarantee that even a Ph.D. had ever encountered a course in philosophy or theology or even history, usually regarded as the source of wisdom.
Another datum: A recent study of higher education in the United States identifies 50 or so elite universities, and 200 “high” or “very high” research centers, whose numbers constitute 4.4 percent of America’s research centers. Axtell never passes a moral judgment, but leaves the reader with plenty of data to make his own.
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