A History of The University in Europe Volume 4

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A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY IN EUROPE
general editor
W A L T E R R Ü E G G
This is the final volume in a four-part series covering the development

of the university in Europe (east and west) from its origins to the present
day, focusing on a number of major themes viewed from a European
perspective. The originality of the series lies in its comparative, inter-
disciplinary, collaborative and trans-national nature. It deals also with
the content of what was taught at the universities, but its main pur-
pose is an appreciation of the role and structures of the universities as
seen against a backdrop of changing conditions, ideas and values. This
volume deals with the reconstruction and epoch-making expansion of
higher education after 1945, which led to the triumph of modern sci-
ence. It traces the development of the relationship between universities
and national states, teachers and students, their ambitions and politi-
cal activities. Special attention is paid to fundamental changes in the
content of teaching at the universities.
A H ISTORY OF TH E UNIVERSITY IN EUROPE
General Editor and Chairman of the Editorial Board: Walter Rüegg (Switzerland)
Andris Barblan (Switzerland)

Asa Briggs (United Kingdom)
Alison Browning (United Kingdom)
Aleksander Gieysztor† (Poland)
Notker Hammerstein (Germany)
Olaf Pedersen† (Denmark)
Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (Belgium)
John Roberts† (United Kingdom)
Edward Shils† (United States of America)
Jacques Verger (France)
This four-volume series, prepared under the guidance of an editorial board,

has been directed by the Standing Conference of Rectors, Presidents and
Vice-Chancellors of the European Universities (CRE), now European Univer-
sity Association (EUA). The EUA, which is a non-governmental organization
based in Brussels and Geneva, has over 650 member universities in both
eastern and western Europe. Its Brussels and Geneva secretariat oversees the
administration of the project.
The university is the only European institution to have preserved its funda-
mental patterns and basic social role and function over the course of the last
millennium. This History shows how and why the university grew to encom-
pass the whole of knowledge and most of the world, how it developed an
intellectual tradition common to all Europeans, and how it trained academic
and professional elites whose ethos transcends national boundaries.
Volumes in the series

I Universities in the Middle Ages
Editor: Hilde de Ridder-Symoens
II Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800)
Editor: Hilde de Ridder-Symoens
III Universities in the Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries (1800–1945)
Editor: Walter Rüegg
IV Universities since 1945
Editor: Walter Rüegg
A HISTORY OF THE
UNIVERSITY IN EUROPE
general editor
w a l t e r r ü e g g
VOLUME IV
UNIVERSITIES SINCE 1945
EDITOR
cambridge university press
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c Cambridge University Press 2011
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2011
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

A history of the university in the Europe / editor, Walter Rüegg.
p. cm. – (A history of the university in Europe; 4)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-521-36108-8 (hardback)
1. Universities and colleges – Europe – History – 20th century. 2. Universities and
colleges – Europe – History – 21st century. 3. Education, Higher – Europe – History –
20th century. 4. Education, Higher – Europe – History – 21st century. I. Rüegg, Walter.
la627.h57 2010
378.409 – dc22 2010030058
isbn 978-0-521-36108-8 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
CONTENTS
Contributors and editors page xi

Reader’s guide xvi
Bibliographical abbreviations used in the notes xvii
Foreword xviii
w a l t e r r ü e g g ( g e n e r a l e d i t o r )
Acknowledgements xxiii
PART I: THEMES AND PATTERNS
CHAPTER 1: THEMES 3
Introduction 3
Reformatio in melius 4
Humanism and university reform through dialogue 8
The liberal reform of the universities by Schleiermacher and
Humboldt 11
Expansion and ‘democratic’ university reforms, 1956–1981 13
The introduction of entrepreneurial reforms and the
destruction of the ivory tower 15
The universities and globalization 22
The ‘Americanization’ of European universities 26
Postscript 29
CHAPTER 2: PATTERNS 31
guy neave
Introduction 31
Post-war reconstruction 32
v
Contents
The expansion of the Soviet university model 35
The drive to mass higher education 41
Foundation and creation 48
Regionalization 52
The place of the ‘non-state’ sector 54
The non-university sector 56
Caveats on the sources for the period 1990–2005 59
New perspectives 60
The astounding vitality of the non-university sector 61
The closing of the circle 63
The symmetry of patterns 64
Select bibliography for Part I 65
PART II: STRUCTURES
CHAPTER 3: RELATIONS WITH AUTHORITY 73

w a l t e r r ü e g g a n d j a n s a d l a k
Introduction 73
Recovery in a divided Europe, 1945–1955 74
Emerging national and international university policies,
1956–1967 95
Expansion, democratization, bureaucratization,
1968–1982 102
Towards a common European model, 1983–1995 113
Concluding remarks: the universities’ Europe 118
Select bibliography 122
CHAPTER 4: MANAGEMENT AND RESOURCES 124

geoffrey lockwood
Introduction 124
The university as an organization 125
Images of change 128
Academic structure 130
Forces of change 132
Effective autonomy 137
The management quadrilateral 140
Management and governance 144
Resources 150
Management techniques 155
The arrival of management 159
vi
Contents
CHAPTER 5: TEACHERS 162
thomas finkenstaedt
Introduction 162
New quantities – new qualities 163
Staff structure 170
The university teacher in the modern world 197
Conclusion 201
PART III: STUDENTS
CHAPTER 6: ADMISSION 207

a. h. halsey
Introduction 207
Persistent inequality 211
Models of higher education 213
Matriculation 217
Social selection before 1970 223
Social selection after 1970 226
Shifts in the social distribution of opportunity 232
CHAPTER 7: CURRICULUM, STUDENTS,

EDUCATION 238
sheldon rothblatt
The whirligig of change 238
Responsibility for curriculum and teaching 243
Diplomas and degrees 253
Undergraduates and postgraduates 256
Research and curricula 262
The student role in the curriculum 266
Student mobility 270
Conclusion 272
CHAPTER 8: STUDENT MOVEMENTS AND

POLITICAL ACTIVISM 276
louis vos
Introduction 276
International student organizations 278
Diverging missions (1945–1956) 283
vii
Contents
A ‘new student movement’ (1958–1969) 288
The Leninist turn and decline (1969–1974) 297
The nature of the ‘new student movement’ 299
Fighting for freedom (1956–1989) 303
Beyond the student movement (1974–2000) 312
CHAPTER 9: GRADUATION AND CAREERS 319

ulrich teichler
Introduction 319
Overall development of enrolment, graduation and
attainment 321
Variations in Europe 324
Distribution by field of study 325
Changing debates about the quantitative and structural
relationships between university education and
employment 327
Degrees and graduation 335
Graduate employment and work 341
Women’s employment and work 353
Expectations, recruitment and work 354
The responses of universities to changing graduate
employment and work 356
Four decades of trends and policies 362
Postscript: trends and policies since the 1990s 364
PART IV: LEARNING
CHAPTER 10: SOCIAL SCIENCES, HISTORY

AND LAW 371
notker hammerstein, with the collaboration of
dirk heirbaut
Introduction 371
Sociology 375
Political science 386
Economics 398
Anthropology/ethnology 405
Geography 408
History 409
Law 414
viii
Contents
CHAPTER 11: THE MATHEMATICAL, EXACT
SCIENCES 424
john ziman
A traditional scene in a larger frame 424
Policing the internal frontiers of knowledge 427
Trans-disciplinary disciplines 431
Collectivism 435
Internationalization 437
Linking the academy with industry 441
Teaching and/or research 444
Looking backward and forward 446
CHAPTER 12: THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES 451

herbert c. macgregor
From bones to biotechnology 451
Progress, development and discovery in biology 1945–2004 452
The unravelling of DNA 453
The rise of ecology 456
The role of the university 459
The biology undergraduate 464
The Internet 468
Universities, graduates and employment 469
CHAPTER 13: THE EARTH SCIENCES 473

gordon craig and stuart monro
Introduction 473
Planetary geology 474
Plate tectonics 476
Palaeoclimates and global warming 478
Impact on earth science education 480
Conclusions 483
CHAPTER 14: MEDICINE 485

john ellis
The changing context of university medicine 1945–1995 485
The adaptation of medical education to a changing context 491
The reform of medical education 495
The cost of medical education 507
The outcome of reform 511
Teachers and students 516
ix
Contents
Education and training 520
Research 523
CHAPTER 15: TECHNOLOGY 528

christopher watson
The post-war context 528
Technology-related developments in the universities 529
The marketplace for knowledge and research in technology 537
Sources of funding and competition 541
Successes and failures of the universities in meeting the
competition 544
EPILOGUE: FROM THE UNIVERSITY IN EUROPE

TO THE UNIVERSITIES OF EUROPE 550
andris barblan
The origins of the project 550
The lessons of history 552
European images of the university 553
The premises of Europeanization in higher education 555
Lowering the iron curtain: 1989 and beyond 557
The main issues of the 1990s: quality and mobility 561
The return of European integration policies 567
A European model of higher education 572
Appendix: Universities founded in Europe between 1945

and 1995 575
Name index 595
Subject index 603
x
CONTRIBUTORS AND EDITORS
a n d r i s b a r b l a n (Switzerland) was born in Orbe, Vaud, in 1943.

Denis de Rougemont’s assistant at the Centre européen de la culture
(Geneva) from 1973, in 1976 he became the secretary general of the CRE,
Standing Conference of Rectors and Vice-Chancellors of the European
Universities (Geneva), and in 2001 of its successor, EUA, the European
University Association. From 2002 to 2007 he was the secretary general
of the Magna Charta Observatory on University Fundamental Values and
Rights, Bologna, while also consulting for the Mario Boella Institute in
Turin on knowledge-development strategies in European cities.
a s a b r i g g s (United Kingdom), from 1976 Lord Briggs of Lewes, was
born in Yorkshire in 1921. He is a former provost of Worcester College
Oxford (1976–92), a former vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex
(1967–92), a former chancellor of the Open University (1978–94) and a
former chairman (1974–80) of the European Institute of Education and
Social Policy in Paris. He is president of the British Social History Society.
His writings span economic, social and cultural history and the history of
broadcasting. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
a l i s o n b r o w n i n g (United Kingdom/USA) was born in Bucking-
hamshire in 1951. In her role as deputy secretary general of the CRE,
the Association of European Universities (1986–94), she had responsibil-
ity for a number of the organization’s international and interdisciplinary
projects, including the preparation of this History of the University in
Europe. She now divides her time between the USA and Europe.
g o r d o n c r a i g (United Kingdom) was born in Milngavie (Scotland)
in 1925. He held the James Hutton Chair of Geology in the University of
xi
Contributors and editors
Edinburgh. His published work includes Scottish geology, palaeoecology
and history of geology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
h i l d e d e r i d d e r - s y m o e n s (Belgium), born in Sint-Jans-
Molenbeek (Brussels) in 1943, is professor of early modern history at
the University of Ghent (Belgium), former president of the International
Commission for the History of Universities and a member of the Royal
Flemish Academy of Belgium. She has published on European university
history and education in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.
j o h n e l l i s† (United Kingdom, 1916–98) was born in Birmingham to
a medical family. Educated at Cambridge and at the London Hospital,
where he qualified as a doctor in 1941, he became subdean of this insti-
tution in 1948, consultant physician in 1951, and dean in 1968. He is
famous as the founder of the Association for the Study of Medical Educa-
tion and as a pioneer in that field, acting as a consultant to many overseas
governments on setting up new medical schools and organizing gradu-
ate training; he was also the foundation editor of the British Journal of
Medical Education. He was knighted in 1980.
t h o m a s f i n k e n s t a e d t (Germany) was born in Planegg near
Munich in 1930. He was professor of English in Saarbrücken (1960–
72) and Augsburg (1972–92), president of the Association of University
Professors in Germany in 1970/71 and served on the foundation commit-
tees of several new universities. He was also the first head of the Bavarian
Institute for Research into Higher Education in Munich. He has pub-
lished books on the history of English vocabulary and has written a short
history of English studies in Germany. Since his retirement (1992) he has
published several volumes on the history of the pilgrimage to the ‘Church
in the Meadows’ (Wieskirche) in Upper Bavaria as well as several volumes
on local history.
a . h . h a l s e y (United Kingdom) is emeritus professor of sociology at
the University of Oxford and Fellow of Nuffield College. He was born
in London in 1923 and graduated after war service from the London
School of Economics in 1950. He then specialized in the sociology of
education, in the field of higher education. His most famous book is The
Decline of Donnish Dominion: The Academic Professions in Britain in
the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1996).
n o t k e r h a m m e r s t e i n (Germany) was born in Offenbach am Main
in 1930. Emeritus professor of early modern history at the University of
Frankfurt am Main, he has published several works on the history of
German universities and the history of learning. He is a member of the
editorial board of History of Universities.
xii
d i r k h e i r b a u t (Belgium), born in Hamme (Eastern Flanders) in 1966,
is professor of legal history and Roman law at the University of Ghent
(Belgium) and secretary of the Legal History Committee of the Royal
Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. He has published
on medieval customary law, the history of private law in nineteenth-
century Belgium and the methodology of legal history.
g e o f f l o c k w o o d (United Kingdom) was born in Yorkshire in 1936.
He graduated in economics at the London School of Economics. In 1959,
having previously served in the Royal Air Force in Germany, he joined
the staff at the University of Manchester and in 1961 was a founder
member of staff at the University of Sussex which he continued to serve
until 1996, including twenty-four years as its head of administration.
He earned his doctorate in strategic management in 1981. He was for
thirty years a consultant in university management with the Organiza-
tion for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), UNESCO-
International Institute of Educational Planning (UNESCO-IIEP) and the
European Commission, and a founder member of the European Centre for
Strategic Management in Universities. He has published widely, including
the standard British text on university planning and management.
h e r b e r t c . m a c g r e g o r (United Kingdom), born and educated in
Scotland, is professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Leicester
and a visiting professor at the School of Biosciences of the University of
Exeter. His research and publications centre on animal cytogenetics and
on the organization and expression of gene sequences in chromosomes,
with a special emphasis on the genomes of amphibians and birds. He is
editor of the journal Chromosome Research.
s t u a r t m o n r o (United Kingdom), born in Aberdeen (Scotland) in
1947, is scientific director of Our Dynamic Earth, a centre in Edinburgh
communicating Earth and environmental sciences to the public. He was
a principal geologist in the British Geological Survey from 1970 to 2005
and now also serves as a trustee of the National Museums of Scotland,
as a non-executive director of the Edinburgh International Science Fes-
tival, as a member of Edinburgh University Court and as independent
co-chair of the Scottish Science Advisory Committee. He was appointed
an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2007.
g u y n e a v e (United Kingdom) was born at Lyndhurst, Hampshire, in
1941. He is honorary professor at the Centre for Higher Education Policy
Studies, Twente University (Netherlands), and senior principal researcher
at the Centro de Investigação de Polı́ticas do Ensino Superior (CIPES)
at Matosinhos (Portugal). A historian by training, he has published
as author/editor some thirty books on comparative higher-education
xiii
policy, as co-editor the Encyclopedia of Higher Education and the Com-
plete Encyclopedia of Education. He was for eighteen years editor of the
journal Higher Education Policy, and served as president of the Euro-
pean Association for Institutional Research, He is a foreign associate of
the National Academy of Education of the United States of America.
Since 1990 he has lived mainly in Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris.
s h e l d o n r o t h b l a t t (USA) was born in Los Angeles, California, in
1934. He is professor of history emeritus at the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley, and sometime director of the Center for Studies in Higher
Education on that campus. He holds an honorary degree from Gothen-
burg University in Sweden. Besides American universities, he has taught
in Australia, Austria, Sweden and Norway. He is a Fellow of the Royal
Historical Society of Britain, a foreign member of the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Educa-
tion (USA). His academic publications are on the comparative history of
universities, with translations into Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Japanese.
He serves on the editorial board of a number of journals.
w a l t e r r ü e g g (Switzerland) was born in Zurich in 1918. He was
professor of sociology at the Universities of Berne (1973–86) and at
the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main (1961–
73), and served as rector of the latter (1965–70), as president of the
Westdeutschen Rektorenkonferenz (1967–8) and founder president of
the International Federation of Social Science Associations (1976–8). His
numerous publications focus on humanism, historical sociology and the
history of higher education.
j a n s a d l a k (Poland/Canada), born in 1945, is professor and vice-
rector at the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities/SWPS,
Poland. He is also a visiting professor of European studies at the Babes-
Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He is a former director of
UNESCO’s European Centre for Higher Education (UNESCO-CEPES).
His many publications cover such topics as the processes of reform and
transformation in higher education and science policy, the organization
of doctoral studies and academic qualifications, private higher education,
academic excellence and rankings, as well as the ethical dimension of
higher education and academic values. He has been awarded six honorary
doctorates from leading universities in Romania, the Russian Federation,
and Ukraine.
u l r i c h t e i c h l e r (Germany), born in 1942, is a professor and for-
mer director of the International Centre for Higher Education Research
(INCHER) at the University of Kassel. The major themes of his numerous
academic publications include higher education and the world of work,
xiv
systems of higher education, and the internationalization of higher edu-
cation. He is a member of the Academia Europaea and the International
Academy of Education, a past chairman of the Consortium of Higher
Education Researchers (CHER) and a former president of EAIR, an asso-
ciation of higher-education management professionals.
j a c q u e s v e r g e r (France) was born in Talence near Bordeaux in 1943.
He is professor of medieval history at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne
and Directeur d’études at the École pratique des hautes etudes, IVe section
(Paris). He is a leading medievalist whose publications on the intellectual
and cultural world, especially on the universities of the Middle Ages, have
been translated into several languages.
l o u i s v o s (Belgium), born in Mol in 1945, is professor of history
in the Faculty of Arts at the Catholic University of Leuven. A former
visiting professor at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Nijmegen, he
teaches on contemporary European history and the history of Poland.
He has published several books and articles on the history of student
movements, youth associations and nationalism in Belgium.
c h r i s t o p h e r w a t s o n (United Kingdom) was born in Edinburgh in
1937. He was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford from 1968 to 2002 and
has since been an emeritus fellow. In parallel with this appointment, he has
worked for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (subsequently
AEA Technology), initially engaged in research in plasma physics and
controlled fusion, and later in managing R&D on offshore technology and
nuclear robotics. He was a member of the international team which built
the Joint European Torus at Culham, and has more recently been involved
in UK-funded programmes to help Russian nuclear weapon scientists to
transfer to civilian work. His writings include publications on the history
of science.
j o h n z i m a n † (United Kingdom, 1925–2005) was born in Cambridge
but brought up in New Zealand. He studied at Oxford and lectured at
Cambridge, before becoming professor of theoretical physics at Bristol
in 1964. His researches on the theory of the electrical and magnetic
properties of solid and liquid metals earned his election to the Royal
Society in 1967. Voluntary early retirement from Bristol in 1982 was
followed by a period as visiting professor at Imperial College, London,
and from 1986 to 1991 as founding director of the Science Policy Support
Group. He was chairman of the Council for Science and Society from
1976 to 1990, and wrote extensively on various aspects of the social
relations of science and technology.
xv
READER’S GUIDE
This series, although compiled by specialists, is destined for the general

reader. The notes and bibliographies accompanying the different chapters
have therefore been kept to a minimum. The notes are either bibliograph-
ical references to specify sources, generally the most important or recent
works relating to the subject, or they have been introduced to justify quan-
titative data or explain any significant differences between two interpreta-
tions of a particular point. Select bibliographies at the end of the chapters
are designed to stimulate further reading and are not exhaustive. The
reader will find more complete bibliographical references in the works
indicated. As a number of well-known works for the period are quoted in
several chapters, abbreviations of the titles of these works have been used
in the notes. A list of bibliographical abbreviations is provided on the
next page. In addition, the reader will find a more general bibliography at
the end of chapter 2 (‘Patterns’), as this chapter locates the presence and
nature of universities during the period covered by this volume. In order
to avoid unnecessary overlaps between the various chapters, the editors
have made cross-references to other chapters in the text as well as in the
notes, thereby informing the reader that more ample information on the
subject can be found elsewhere in the volume (see also the subject index).
The standard English version of proper names has been used throughout;
when necessary, a form more commonly used in Continental Europe is
indicated by means of a cross-reference in the name index.
xvi
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
ABBREVIATIONS USED
IN THE NOTES
Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I

B. R. Clark and G. Neave (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Higher Education,
vol. I: National Systems of Higher Education (Oxford, 1992).
Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia II
vol. II: Analytical Perspectives (Oxford, 1992).
Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia III
vol. III: Analytical Perspectives (Oxford, 1992).
Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia IV
vol. IV: Academic Disciplines and Indexes (Oxford, 1992).
Jı́lek, Historical Compendium
L. Jı́lek (ed.), Historical Compendium of European Universities/Répertoire
historique des universités européennes (Geneva, 1984).
xvii
FOREWORD
With this fourth volume the History of the University in Europe reaches its
conclusion. It owes its origins to the Standing Conference of Rectors and
Vice-Chancellors of the European Universities (Conférence permanente
des Recteurs et Vice-chanceliers des Universités Européennes, CRE). In
the Epilogue the former general secretary, Andris Barblan, describes how
the project came about, and, from the position of someone who has been
continually involved with European university questions, adds conclu-
sions he has drawn from the completed History.
After thorough clarification of the aims in the autumn of 1983, the CRE
handed the concrete realization of the project to an international edito-
rial board. This body decided that a modern university history focusing
on Europe could not simply be organized according to countries, types
of university, leading universities, and intellectual movements. Instead
it should seek to summarize the social conditions and tasks, the struc-
tures and functions, the protagonists and activities of the university from
its origins to the period after the Second World War in a comparative
European context and according to the very latest research. There then
appeared between 1992 and 2004 three volumes with the same thematic
structure for the Middle Ages, the Early Modern era, and the period cov-
ering 1800 to 1945 – a fundamentally coherent time span in terms of
university history. The Epilogue in each volume sketched the transition
to the next and, in addition, in the second volume the chapter ‘Tradition
and Innovation’ showed the gradual transition from the Middle Ages to
the Early Modern period.
The comparative European approach of the individual chapters caused
the least difficulties in the first volume, not only because the university
landscape of the Middle Ages was largely restricted to those parts of
Europe Christianized by Rome, but especially because medievalists have
xviii
Foreword
always carried out their research within a European perspective. This
could only be sustained in the following volumes for Part IV, ‘Learning’,
in which topics were not bound by national frontiers. For those aspects
treated in the other chapters, historians in a variety of countries had
produced excellent work, but in terms of content they were for the most
part national, indeed local, in their focus.
Already in the preparatory stages of the project, the CRE had set up a
network of national correspondents, who were able to help improve the
European comparative element of the undertaking. The network passed
its first major test in collecting material, for a Historical Compendium of
European Universities was published by the CRE in 1984 and served as a
reference book for the whole project.1 Later on, the national correspon-
dents were at the disposal of the different authors for information on the
particularities of their respective university systems, and they helped to
furnish a more complete European perspective.
As a result, the editorial board tried to find authors for the various
chapters of each volume from a wide range of European cultural tra-
ditions willing to pursue their theme comparatively over the whole of
Europe. In order to introduce them to this comparative approach, they
were invited to take part in two or three workshops for each volume,
which were hosted by old and new universities famous for their European
importance – from Bologna and Oxford to Bochum, from Salamanca
and Coimbra to Ghent. At the first workshop the authors’ concepts of
the individual chapters, which they had prepared on the basis of guide-
lines proposed by the editorial board, were thoroughly discussed by both
authors and editors. At the second and third meetings a similar debate
occurred relating to the authors’ drafts. This led to a learning process
that increased not only the European perspective of the different chap-
ters, but was also introduced by our collaborators into conferences and
publications on modern European university history.2
The fifteen chapters and the Epilogue of volume IV have been produced
by an East European scholar, a French-speaking Swiss, two Flemish Bel-
gian, four German-speaking and ten Anglophone authors. That the last
group forms the majority is a reflection of the leading role assumed by
their universities since 1945. The American model of entrepreneurial
universities was introduced in Europe in 1985 by the British Vice-
Chancellors’ Committee. In chapter 4, ‘Management and Resources’,
1 Jı́lek, Historical Compendium.
2 A. Romano and J. Verger, I poteri politici e il mondo universitario (XIII–XX secolo), Atti
del Convegno Internazionale di Madrid 28–30 Agosto 1990 (Soveria Mannelli, 1994);
M. Peset (ed.), Aulas y Saberes, VI Congreso Internacional de Historia de las Uni-
versidades Hispánicas (Valencia, 1999); R. C. Schwinges (ed.), Veröffentlichungen der
Gesellschaft für Universitäts- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Basel, 1999ff.).
xix
Foreword
the example of the University of Sussex clearly shows this revolution-
ary change, which was later adopted by university bodies throughout
Europe. The reason why the universities were cast adrift into this state
of autonomy is explained in chapters 2 and 3. That they were forced to
learn in a few decades of autonomous deficit funding what the American
universities had practised for hundreds of years is discussed in the con-
clusion of the first chapter. This one example shows that the thematic
treatment can sometimes only be explored in its European perspective
over several chapters.3
Part IV, under the title ‘Learning’, was designed to show what was stud-
ied, discovered, and taught in the various subject areas, but it presented
a special problem. Such an excursion into the history of scholarship and
knowledge had proved relatively easy to carry out in the earlier volumes.
Yet this was not the case in the fourth volume. The subject matter of
modern science and its applications is too far ranging and technically
demanding, and the university’s part in the development of science too
extensive, for adequate review in a work of this kind. However, the fact
that the European countries hardest hit by the war faced similar prob-
lems of reconstruction after it, including adjustment to the new American
dominance in all the natural sciences and technologies, suggested a sim-
plification in our approach.
We thus emphasize science policy, as in John Ziman’s chapter on the
exact sciences, rather than substantive scientific contributions. Some-
times, because of the many successes of the policy, a congratulatory tone
creeps in, as in Herbert Macgregor’s piece on the biological sciences. But
we have let the chapters stand as the considered opinions of experienced
men who worked in science and advised about its future during much of
the time covered by this volume. Their contributions have value as both
primary and secondary accounts of their topics.
The six authors of the chapters on science, medicine and technology
are British. Although this was not a determined editorial policy, it has
advantages that compensate for the resultant emphasis on the experience
of the UK. Firstly, it has provided some unity in problems and their
solutions and allowed extensive treatment of teaching in the sciences,
technology and medicine. Secondly, because Britain occupied a position
between the post-war driver of world science, the United States, and
Continental Europe, it felt American pressures early and keenly; and
because its infrastructures had not been destroyed in the war, it faced
squarely and publicly the problem of renovating them to meet the new
circumstances. Thirdly, the programme for academic expansion in general
and for enlarging the relative representation of science and technology
3 That is the reason for the detailed subject index.
xx
Foreword
in particular gave exemplary results in Britain. Our authors have made
comparisons with the situation in other European countries as they have
seen fit.
On the occasion of the ‘Ninth Centenary Celebrations’ of the University
of Bologna in 1988,4 work started on volume IV with the establishment
of the plan and the guidelines. When the working groups and the authors
who had been engaged up to that point came together in 1991 and 1992
in Bologna and Ghent, the European university landscape was no longer
divided by the Iron Curtain. The comparison of the Soviet and western
university models in the third chapter, ‘Relations with Authority’, which
had been developed using the example of the occupying powers in Ger-
many, had to be augmented by an author who was particularly familiar
with the universities of Central and Eastern Europe. In other chapters
writers were asked to broaden the European perspective wherever possi-
ble and appropriate. It was also necessary to extend the finishing point of
the volume in stages, from 1990 to 1995.
Delays held back the appearance of the third volume until 2004, and
we had to ask the authors of volume IV to revise their drafts in light
of the current state of research. Some of them felt it necessary to sketch
in developments beyond 1995. Sir John Ellis, who wrote the chapter
‘Medicine’, died in 1998 and John Ziman passed away at the beginning
of 2005, before being able to complete the revision of his chapter ‘The
Mathematical, Exact Sciences’.
The editorial board reviewed the revised drafts at its nineteenth meeting
in June 2005 and delegated various editorial tasks for the English edition
to individual members. We owe a particular debt of gratitude to John
Heilbron, who agreed to help with the editing of the science chapters of
the ‘Learning’ part, paying special attention to those written by the now
deceased authors. Both he and the board decided to leave this section as
a testimony to the authors’ own experience.
The earlier volumes contained a chronological catalogue of the univer-
sities in existence during the period in question. In the third volume this
was augmented by a list of specialist colleges and applied science univer-
sities of equivalent standing. In the fourth volume the great number of
colleges and universities has made such a detailed catalogue impractical.
However, at its last meeting the editorial board thought it helpful to list
for every country those universities founded between 1945 and 1995 in
chronological order. The successor body to the CRE, the EUA, kindly
asked the national rectors’ conferences to supply the appropriate infor-
mation. Any missing data were added by the general editor, using the
World Higher Education DATABASE 2005/6. As in the earlier volumes
4 For further information on the ‘foundation’ date of 1088, see vol. I, pp. 24–6, 58–60.
xxi
Foreword
(and, indeed, as in most developed nations) the definition of a university
was taken to be an institution that had been accorded the right to award
doctorates by the state; this definition naturally presupposes teaching
supported by research.
Among the national correspondents, Walter Höflechner, Graz, and
I. V. Komarov, St Petersburg, have contributed most helpfully to individ-
ual chapters with their commentaries. We are also very grateful to our
authors for their patience and their willingness to revise their contribu-
tions. The two youngest members of the editorial board, Andris Barblan
and Alison Browning, have been especially active in the preparation of
the fourth volume. As secretary general and deputy secretary general of
the CRE during the gestation and implementation phase of this project,
they have played a crucial part in following it through to completion
with never-failing energy. They must derive great satisfaction from the
fact that not only the English and German editions initiated by the CRE
have been very well received, but Portuguese and Spanish versions of the
first volumes have already appeared, and translations into Russian and
Chinese are in progress.
In the early volumes it was repeatedly necessary to point to gaps in
the research base. The same is of course true for volume IV. As we have
done throughout this series, in the ‘Learning’ section we have emphasized
the subjects that gave the university its character during the several peri-
ods covered by the volumes. Thus theology and the arts received special
attention in the first three volumes, with particular emphasis on the rise of
humanism and the humanities. During the period covered by the present
volume, natural science set the tone and direction, and the social sci-
ences followed suit. Our coverage includes history as a social science and
omits religion and the humanities. The latter as academic disciplines have
undergone substantial changes since 1945 and their place in contempo-
rary universities driven by science, engineering and business is constantly
being redefined. Perhaps our successors will be inspired to examine recent
developments in both areas, and in the process persuade the publishers
to bring out a fifth volume.5
Yet despite its deficiencies, we hope that A History of the University in
Europe – by presenting and explaining the conditions and developments
that shaped this history – will not only stimulate further research but
also contribute to a better understanding of the purpose and task of the
university in a globalized world.
5 For the teaching of the humanities, see chapter 8, ‘Education’.
xxii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The preparatory work for A History of the University in Europe has

been generously supported by Dutch, German, Portuguese, Swedish,
Spanish and Swiss foundations and sponsors, the European Cultural
Foundation in Amsterdam, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung in Cologne, the
Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Sankt Augustin, the Robert Bosch Stiftung
in Stuttgart, the Stifterverband für die deutsche Wissenschaft in Essen,
the Stiftungsfonds Deutsche Bank in Essen, the VolkswagenStiftung in
Hanover, the Portuguese Secretary of State for Higher Education, the
National Institute for Scientific Research as well as the Calouste Gul-
benkian Foundation in Lisbon, the Fondación Ramón Areces in Madrid,
the Antonio de Almeida Foundation in Oporto, the Bank of Sweden Ter-
centenary Fund in Stockholm, the Crédit Suisse in Zurich, Hoffmann-
La Roche & Co. in Basel, the Jubiläumsstiftung der Versicherungs-
gesellschaften Zürich/Vita/Alpina in Zurich, the Max und Elsa Beer-
Brawand-Fonds of the University of Bern, the Nestlé Corporation in
Vevey, and the Schweizerische Nationalfonds zur Förderung der wis-
senschaftlichen Forschung in Bern.
Among the national correspondents listed in volume II, Walter
Höflechner, Graz, and Griigori A. Tishkin, St Petersburg, helped espe-
cially in giving volume IV a ‘European’ dimension. The assistance of
other colleagues is recognized in the chapters concerned.
Johan Hanselaer from Ghent (Belgium) has systematized the names,
footnotes and format of this volume, as he did for the earlier volumes
in our series. He also prepared the name indexes, and, with the help of
Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, the subject indexes for volumes I, II and IV.
We thank him for his meticulous and intelligent work over the course of
the whole project.
xxiii
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful for all the financial and scholarly support of the
project. We thank the universities at which our conferences and dis-
cussions have taken place, notably the Universities of Bern, Salamanca,
Coimbra, Eichstätt, Oxford, Bochum, Bologna and Ghent. Above all we
thank the CRE and its successor, the EUA, for their invaluable help. Last
but not least we wish to thank the authors, sponsors and publishers for
their patience and understanding during the long delay of this publication.
xxiv
PART I
THEMES AND PATTERNS

CHAPTER 1
THEMES
introduction
The Second World War left behind a devastated university landscape in
many parts of Europe. The only areas to escape were Spain and Portugal
in the Iberian peninsula, Sweden in Scandinavia, and Switzerland in the
middle of Europe. The most severe damage was sustained by the uni-
versities of Eastern Europe, which were systematically destroyed by the
conquerors. In Central and Western Europe as well, the German occupa-
tion and liberation by the Allies left many universities in ruins. Fifty years
later, they had more than recovered. The 201 universities registered in
Europe in 1945 had grown by another 600. They enrolled five times as
many young men and women as had attended universities just after the
war. Among their subjects of study were many not taught at universities
in 1945. This success story is the general theme of this volume, which is
the last in our History of the University in Europe.
Three main themes contribute to its particular character. The first is
the idea of reform, an essential element in universities since their earliest
beginnings. The second theme, the destruction of the ivory tower, is
concerned mainly with the consequences of the reforms that began in the
1980s relating to the university and its interaction with the public domain.
The third major theme is the provincialization of European universities,
the loss of their world dominance in research and instruction. Both the
second and third volumes have a chapter devoted to the adoption of the
European university model in other continents. In the present volume
there can be no talk of this. Europe itself has become a province, though
an important one, in a global university landscape, whose contours are
drawn largely by the United States. There first British and then German
university models underwent an independent development, with the result
3
Walter Rüegg
that in the 1990s it was the American model that drove the fundamental
changes in the universities of a reunited Europe. In this final volume of
our history, it will be useful to put these changes into perspective.
reformatio in melius1
The oldest-surviving university statutes of 1215 state as their goal lasting
improvements in the circumstances of the Paris schools, ut statui Parisien-
sium scolarum in melius reformando impenderemus operam efficacem.
Reformatio described not only the restoration of a dissolved university,
but also the renewal of former statutes and the foundation or regulation
by statute of a university. The officials in the Italian city states responsible
for the universities were often referred to as reformatores studii. Since the
tenth century Reformatio had been applied to monasteries in its original
sense of the restoration of an original form, and when it came to be used
in connection with the universities, it meant that, from the very begin-
ning, they had as their task to realize their own particular form, their
underlying Platonic idea, their Aristotelian entelechy.
As far as the imagination of the new students and the public were
concerned, this form was symbolized by a figure of authority. The very
first universities, therefore, invented founders from the distant past. In
Paris it was Charlemagne, in Oxford, the English king Alfred the Great.
In Bologna they concocted a foundation document according to which
the emperor Theodosius II of the late classical period, who had played
an important role in establishing Roman law, gave Bologna the right to
teach jurisprudence.2
Later foundations authorized by popes, emperors or kings followed the
model of one of the two oldest universities founded around 1200, that is,
either Paris or Bologna. They only differed in the way they were admin-
istered through their scholars, or masters, and in the number of their
faculties. Gradually the state university emerged, with its four faculties:
the ‘arts’ or philosophical faculty, offering a general education in the artes
liberales and in philosophy, and the three higher faculties, which provided
the academic basis for a career as a theologian, lawyer or doctor. The
reformatio in melius explains the uniformity of the organization into fac-
ulties and the structure of study, with the grades of baccalaureus, magister
or licentiatus and doctor, together with prescribed teaching programmes
and methods.
1 Vol. I, 28–34 (Rüegg, ‘Themes’).

2 Around 1888 a foundation year of 1088 was invented in Bologna in order to be able to
celebrate the jubilee of the oldest university in Europe; cf. vol. I, 24f.
4
Themes
The reformatio was given concrete form in the university statutes.
Minute regulations and proscriptions ruled the behaviour of the uni-
versity members, with the aim of avoiding friction between them and
with the general public and of ensuring that the university fulfilled its
purpose as efficiently as possible. The norms laid down in the regulations
embodied the values then associated with the ideal of the scholar and
expressed both explicitly and implicitly in sermons and disputations. In
addition to amor sciendi, intellectual honesty, wide-ranging knowledge,
and clarity of thought, there were virtues such as humility, a paternal
interest in the well-being of the scholars, collegial solidarity and loyalty
to the university, and obedience to the officers of the university and its
ecclesiastical and secular supporters.3
The essential features of this newly emerging academic ethos rested on
seven values, which gave a religious legitimacy to amor sciendi and its
practice in the universities:4
1. Belief in a world order accessible to human reason underwrote the

concept of academic research as an attempt to discern the rational
order in God’s creation.
2. The ancient view of man as an imperfect being and the Judeo-
Christian vision of a creature who had lapsed into sin, together with
the associated idea of a limited human intellect, acted as a motor for
academic criticism and collegial cooperation, while forming the basis
for the conversion of general ethical values such as humility, modesty,
respect and self-criticism into the ideal of the academic scholar.
3. Respect for the individual as a reflection of the macrocosm or as
an image of God constituted the basis for the gradually emerging
freedom of academic research and teaching.
4. The establishment of absolute truth as the goal of the academic pur-
suit of knowledge required the introduction of basic norms, such
as sharing information, submitting statements to generally accepted
rules of critical examination, and, not least, subscribing to the public
nature of the procedures underlying academic research and its results.
5. A readiness to improve one’s own knowledge by accepting convinc-
ing results from any source, such as the rediscovered Roman law or
Arabic medicine and science. Thus from the very beginning there was
3 A. L. Gabriel, ‘The ldeal Master of the Medieval University’, The Catholic Historical
Review, 9 (1974), 1–40; G. Lebras, ‘Velut splendor firmamenti. Le docteur dans le droit
de l’église médiévale’, in Mélanges offerts à Etienne Gilson (Toronto and Paris, 1959),
373–88; J. Leclerq, ‘L’idéal du théologien au moyen-âge, textes inédits’, Revue des sciences
religieuses, 21 (1947), 121–48.
4 W. Rüegg, ‘The Academic Ethos’, Minerva, 24 (1986), 393–412; cf. A. B. Cobban, The
Medieval Universities: Their Development and Organisation (London, 1975), 13ff.
5
Walter Rüegg
a particular value unique to the universities, which in the course of
the centuries was to take on a socially revolutionary force: judging
knowledge on the basis of its merit, not its source, and accepting
the equality and solidarity of their members in carrying out this
task. However much modern social history emphasizes the social
inequalities in universities, they disappeared completely (at least in
principle) when it came to the pursuit and transmission of academic
knowledge.
6. Thanks to the appreciation of academic research as a public good,
in religious terms as a gift of God, the university – in contrast to
the guilds and the regional corporations – was an open institution.
Any freeborn Christian able to study was admitted, and the pecuniary
interest in exploiting knowledge was lower within the university than
outside.
7. The reformatio put enormous emphasis on prescribed authors and
systems of thought, but these were not accepted uncritically. They
were scrutinized logically before being admitted as the basis of edu-
cation. Academic research as the acquisition of knowledge in a cumu-
lative process was based, in the Middle Ages, on the reformatio ad
melius.
The fact that the world is illuminated by academic research, which at
the same time leads towards obedience to God and his servant the emperor
(scientia mundus illuminatur ad obediendum deo et nobis, eius ministris,
vita subiectorum informatur) was stressed by Frederick Barbarossa in
1155 in his ordinance protecting foreign masters and scholars.5
The student practised obedience when he matriculated at the minimum
age of thirteen and had to find a master who would supervise his studies
and his way of life. He practised academic obedience by listening to the
prescribed texts as they were dictated and explained by his teachers, and
by learning them by heart and repeating them in class. After three or four
years of basic study in grammar, logic and rhetoric, he could graduate
as a bachelor and either take up an academically non-specialized career
as a town scribe or notary, or, under the supervision of a master, learn
to become a teacher and educate himself further in the mathematical
artes liberales (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy) and the three
philosophies (physics, ethics and metaphysics). After a total of four years
he was allowed to present himself for the master’s examination, which
brought with it the licentia ubique docendi, the generally recognized
teaching qualification. Only a few students who had qualified as masters
in the arts faculty went on for a further four to eight years of study to
5 W. Stelzer, ‘Zum Scholarenprivileg Friedrich Barbarossas (Authentica ‘Habita’)’,
Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 34 (1978), 123–45.
6
Themes
gain the licentiate in one of the higher faculties of medicine, the two forms
of law or theology. Both masters and licentiates could obtain the title of
doctor without any extra examinations, simply on the payment of hefty
fees.
As early as the Middle Ages, therefore, university study already had
the levels of bachelor and master or licentiate. Both were retained in
the Anglo-Saxon higher-education system as well as in France, since the
Baccalauréat, which forms the school leaving examination, is considered
the lowest form of university examination. What today would be deplored
as high rates of non-completion was the norm in the medieval period.
Most of those entering the university left without taking an expensive
examination. In their self-determined period of study they gained the
intellectual skills that would allow them to prosper without an academic
qualification in areas increasingly dominated by the ability to deal with
the exchange of money and letters. An Italian city administration, for
example, accepted the possession of the Corpus iuris as a qualification
for the post of judge.
In the Middle Ages the social function of the university consisted in
the dissemination of academic knowledge and methods vitally necessary
to reduce rational uncertainty in the socially uncertain situation that
prevailed in the realms of politics, the church, the law, medicine and
education between 1200 and 1600. The university taught intellectual
certainty by subjecting the contradictions between doctrines themselves
and between these and the experiences of practical life to a dialectical
process, and by finally resolving it in a logical synthesis. The disputations
in which students practised this dialectic were an important part of the
curriculum in all faculties.
This scholastic method corresponded to the Aristotelian and monastic
ideal of the vita contemplativa. From the fourteenth century onwards the
universities had to contend with the criticism that, with their scholastic
method, they were not concerned with individual human beings and
their concrete problems, although their main task was the education of
medical doctors, lawyers and careerists in public service. As a result, other
institutions of higher education emerged. There were state schools for
navigation in Portugal and Spain. Learned private circles and academies
started up in Italy before spreading to Erfurt, Cracow and Buda.6 Printing
also contributed to breaking the medieval university’s monopoly in the
production and dissemination of academic knowledge.
6 T. Klaniczay, ‘Das Contubernium des Johannes Vitéz. Die erste ungarische “Akademie”’,
in K. Benda et al. (eds.), Forschungen über Siebenbürgen und seine Nachbarn, Festschrift
für Attila T. Szabó und Zsigmond Jakó (Munich, 1988), 227–43.
7
Walter Rüegg
humanism and university reform

through dialogue
Just a few decades ago scholars focused on the decline, indeed the
comatose state of universities in the Early Modern period. The second
volume of our series, which appeared in 1996, destroyed this diagnosis.7
On the contrary, the universities contributed to a very considerable degree
to the spread of the ‘scientific revolution’.8 But they no longer did this
within the framework of a unified Europe governed hierarchically by uni-
versal powers, but in the role of bridgeheads linking intellectual elites
across a confessionally and politically divided Europe.
The foundations for these bridgeheads were the studia humanitatis,
the humaniora, humanités, humanidades, umanità, that is, a humanist
education common to all European states with a shared cultural back-
ground. This was the second reform of the universities in Europe, the
reformatio of the thirteenth century being the first. Admittedly, in terms
of the list of subjects studied, it only differed in the addition of history
and Greek together with an emphasis on rhetoric and moral philosophy.
But much more important than the difference in the material studied was
the difference in the direction of study in all the faculties.
Similarly, just as the vertically oriented Gothic cathedrals were replaced
by renaissance and baroque churches with their emphasis on the horizon-
tal perspective, so the aim of university study became not so much that
of the scholar, who had scaled the tower of the sciences in order to view
the world beyond, but rather the gentleman, the honnête homme, the
enlightened servant and citizen of the state, who educated himself ‘in con-
versation with the most learned personalities of the past as they imparted
to him the best of their thoughts’. It was in these words9 that Descartes
committed himself to the principle of the structured dialogue, which the
Italian humanists had employed to open up a new access to the classi-
cal world.10 For the mathematician Descartes and other scientists, the
dialogical structure, which also manifested itself in the style of academic
publications, changed not only the educational basis of the European
elites, but also the concept of academic research itself. Whereas in the
vertical perspective of the Middle Ages the academics sat like dwarves on
the shoulders of giants and only in this way were able to see further,11
7 Vol. II, xxi (Rüegg, ‘Foreword’). 8 Vol. II, 531–62 (Porter, ‘Scientific Revolution’).
9 G. Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française, 12th edn (Paris 1912), viii.
10 For this and what follows: W. Rüegg, ‘Die Funktion des Humanismus für die Bildung
politischer Eliten’, in W. Ludwig and G. Huber-Rebenich (eds.), Humanismus in Erfurt
(Rudolstadt, 2002), 13–32.
11 John of Salisbury, Metalogicon III, 4, ed. C. C. I. Webb (Oxford, 1929), 136. Cf. R. K.
Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (New York, 1965).
8
Themes
the humanist dialogue with the authors of the past enabled scholars to
undertake voyages of discovery on the high seas, in order to discover new
worlds, for which the title page of Francis Bacon’s Instauratio magna of
1620 provides both an illustration and a commentary.12
In their study of the surviving written sources, the social elites, depend-
ing increasingly on written forms of commerce and communication,
maintained a dialogue with the authorities of traditional learning. In
the process they judged opinions not so much by rules or doctrines, but
by degree of persuasiveness. The exchange of letters as a dialogue with
personal addressees, often written with publication in mind, linked Euro-
pean scholars with one another and with the political elites in a way that
transcended confessional and political boundaries. It made possible the
rapid spread and discussion of new ideas throughout the whole of Europe.
In 1665 the Journal des sçavans, associated with the Académie Royale
des Sciences in Paris, and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London took on this function.
The key function of this humanist dialogue, in which the stranger is
recognized as a partner in conversation and then often as a friend, appears
most vividly in a letter that Guillaume Budé, the intellectual father of
what was to be the Collège de France, wrote to the Swiss humanist
Vadianus in October 1518: their friendship, which had just been forged
as a result of the dedication of a book, would not be jeopardized by a war
between France and the Swiss Confederation, for ‘what person imbued
with humanist values [humanitate literaria imbutus] who had once found
friends in foreign lands could renounce them, even if the governments
became tired of peace and developed a taste for warlike enterprises?’13
Such an attitude, for which Erasmus of Rotterdam is also a model, allows
us to understand why, after the collapse of church unity, the Europe of
the universities survived.
They did not survive, however, as the sole all-embracing institution of
higher education. General education was entirely or partly displaced from
the arts faculties into residential colleges within the university, which
in England continued to operate as an examining body for academic
degrees, or outside the university in schools, gymnasiums, lyceums, which
prepared students not only for university study, but also for the direct
assumption of social roles. Humanist education was so successful in its
socially integrating role that Rousseau declared in 1772 that ‘there were
12 Vol. II, 6; 16 (Rüegg, ‘Themes’).

13 Vadianische Briefsammlung, vol. VII: Ergänzungsband (St Gallen, 1913), 9. Text based
on the original corrected by W. Rüegg, ‘Humanistische Elitenbildung in der Eidgenossen-
schaft zur Zeit der Renaissance’, in G. Kauffmann (ed.), Die Renaissance im Blick der
Nationen Europas, Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung, 9 (Wies-
baden, 1991), 133.
9
Walter Rüegg
no longer Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, and indeed Englishmen, there
were only Europeans. They had all been formed in the same way.’14
Academic research also burst the bounds of the university. Either on
their own initiative or as a result of invitations on the part of princes,
scientific societies, often called academies, brought together university
scholars and scientists with members of the academic professions and
educated lay persons for the joint discussion and advancement of aca-
demic discoveries.
Apart from a few leading universities in Scotland, Italy, Germany and
the Netherlands, which ushered in the enlightenment by modernizing their
curricula, the humanist impulse towards a vita activa and a socially ori-
ented education degenerated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
into the sterile pedantry and pretence of learning that Molière and Mozart
caricatured so arrestingly. It is not surprising that the French Revolution
put an end to universities together with other medieval institutions and
carried out that most radical of reforms, the replacement of outmoded
forms by new ones.
In France the Revolution closed all twenty-two universities and
replaced them in the twelve largest cities by technical colleges, grandes
écoles and schools for medicine and law. Later the Facultés des lettres
and the Facultés des sciences were reintroduced, in order to administer
the baccalauréat examinations, to train secondary-school teachers, and
to provide lectures for an educated public. In other countries, too, univer-
sities disappeared; in the whole of Europe some sixty had gone by 1815
out of the 143 that had existed around 1789.15 This policy corresponded
to the mentality of the enlightenment and its desire to direct higher edu-
cation towards the transmission of practical knowledge, which served the
common good, and to establish professional schools. Thus the leaders of
large and small states from Spain to Russia created institutes of higher
education to provide an academic training for their military and civilian
officials. In 1801 the Prussian king expressly demanded that the Academy
of Architecture founded in Berlin two years previously ‘should train archi-
tects and not professors’.16 As in the Middle Ages, the production of their
own teachers was still considered to be the main task of the universities.
It is thus all the more remarkable that the Prussian universities not only
14 J.-J. Rousseau, Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation
projetée (ed. J. Fabre), Oeuvres complètes (ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond), vol. III
(Paris, 1964), 960. Originally the quotation was erroneously attributed to Voltaire (e.g.
in O. Dann and J. Dinwiddy (eds.), Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution
(London and Ronceverte 1988), 14); this was corrected by Charles Wirz, curator at the
Institut et Musée Voltaire in Geneva.
15 With regard to the following section, see vol. III, 7ff. (Rüegg, ‘Themes’).
16 Die Technische Hochschule zu Berlin 1799–1934. Festschrift (Berlin, 1935), 39.
10
Themes
survived, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries developed into
the world’s leading institutions in higher education. The reason is that a
‘General Educational Institute’ was not established in Berlin, as had been
planned, but instead a university was founded in 1810 on the basis of the
modern idea of university reform.
the liberal reform of the universities by

schleiermacher and humboldt
In the French model, given its final form by Napoleon, higher education
dedicated to the training of higher civil servants and officers, and the
academic professions under the control of the state, fell under a bureau-
cratically organized administration. The same bureaucracy regulated cur-
ricula and examinations in detail, supervised the political and religious
conformity of teaching, and subjected the behaviour of the staff to a quasi-
military discipline.17 This model was very successful in the meritocratic
selection and specialized training of highly qualified officials.
Today, however, the ‘unexpected rise of the universities’ in the nine-
teenth century is explained even among French historians of universities
‘by that policy of a modernizing revival of the university, which is sym-
bolized by the opening of the University of Berlin in 1810, and is now
associated with the name of Wilhelm von Humboldt’.18 In the course
of his fourteen months in charge of the Prussian education system, the
diplomat and scholar, Wilhelm von Humboldt convinced the king that he
should reject the French model and found a modern university in Berlin
based on the liberal proposals of the theologian and philosopher Friedrich
Schleiermacher and charged the latter with carrying them out.19
For Schleiermacher and Humboldt, schools were responsible for dis-
seminating generally accepted and directly applicable knowledge. The
task of universities was to show how to discover knowledge by ‘making
apparent the principles at the basis of all knowledge in such a way that the
ability to work one’s way into any sphere of knowledge would emerge’.
17 Vol. III, 33ff. (Charle, ‘Patterns’).

18 A. Renaux, ‘Le rôle des institutions universitaires dans le développement d’une culture
démocratique européenne’, in N. Sanz and S. Bergan (eds.), Le patrimoine des universités
européennes (Strasbourg, 2002), 123–31, quotation 126; cf. W. Rüegg, ‘L’Europe des
universités: tradition, fonction de pont européen, modernisation libérale’, ibid., 39–48.
19 W. Rüegg, ‘Der Mythos der Humboldtschen Universität’, in M. Krieg and M. Rose (eds.),
Universitas in theologia – theologia in universitate: Festschrift für Hans Heinrich Schmid
(Zurich, 1997), 155–74. Cf. R. C. Schwinges (ed.), Humboldt International: Der Export
des deutschen Universitätsmodells im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Veröffentlichungen der
Gesellschaft für Universitäts- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte (GUW), 4 (Basel, 2001).
11
Walter Rüegg
The subject of study was thus for Schleiermacher ‘learning how to learn’.
The university should teach so that ‘the idea of pursuing knowledge, the
highest consciousness of reason, is awakened as a guiding principle in the
human being’.20
For the founders of the University of Berlin the freedom that lay at the
heart of the academic pursuit of knowledge meant not only freedom to
study, to teach and to do research, but also freedom in the university’s
relationship with the state and the church. It was Humboldt’s belief that
the state had only two tasks with regard to the university: ‘to ensure
the richness (strength and variety) of intellectual resources through the
selection of the staff, and to guarantee their freedom to carry out their
work’.21
This liberal model was not as easy to realize as the dirigiste version
preferred by Napoleon. Academic freedom of speech and publication fell
victim in 1819 to the censorship and control measures agreed in Carlsbad
following student demonstrations, and it was only reinstated in 1848.
Nor did the introduction of students to academic research through their
participation in seminars and laboratories take place quickly.22
Nevertheless, the liberal reform of universities prevailed. Whereas at the
beginning of the nineteenth century Paris had been the Mecca of scholars
and scientists from around the world, from 1830 on French governments
regularly sent observers to Germany to obtain up-to-date information
about the advances in the universities there. Many French, British and,
later, American scholars were educated at German universities, and by
the end of the century they had institutionalized the ideal of the modern
research university throughout Europe, the USA and Japan.23 The number
of universities increased rapidly. In 1939 there were 201 in Europe, twice
as many as had existed one hundred years earlier.24 In addition there
were 300 specialized institutions of higher education preparing students
for careers in the military, medicine and veterinary medicine, agriculture,
education, music, engineering and commerce. These had not, however,
replaced the universities, for they were attended by a relatively small
20 F. Schleiermacher, Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten im deutschen Sinn: Nebst

einem Anhang über die neu zu errichtende (Berlin, 1808), 33f.
21 W. von Humboldt, ‘Über die innere und äußere Organisation der höheren wis-
senschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin’, in Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. IV: Schriften zur
Politik und zum Bildungswesen (ed. A. Flitner and K. Giel) (Darmstadt, 1964), 255–66,
quotation 259.
22 B. vom Brocke, ‘Die Entstehung der deutschen Forschungsuniversität, ihre Blüte und
Krise um 1900’, in Schwinges, Humboldt International (note 19), 367–401.
23 W. Rüegg, ‘Humboldt in Frankreich’, in Schwinges, Humboldt International (note 19),
248–61.
24 Cf. universities and similar institutions in existence between 1899 and 1945, in vol. III,
679–706.
12
Themes
number of students and aspired, sometimes with success, to acquiring the
status and freedoms of the universities.
expansion and ‘democratic’ university

reforms, 1956–1981
After the Second World War the universities in Germany, devastated both
from within and without during Hitler’s reign of terror, presented a tabula
rasa, which Plato considered to be necessary for a fundamental reform
of the state and its education system. In the zone of occupation under its
direct supervision, the Soviet Union embarked on a total reorganization of
the university system based on the Soviet model. In the liberated states of
Central and Eastern Europe, this reorganization took place indirectly with
the help of the local communist regime. Until the collapse of the Soviet
regime in 1989, there were few changes in the Soviet-style university and
academy model, but its application varied in the satellite states.
In the Western occupation zones of Germany plans for real university
reform were discussed intensively, but the occupying forces soon refrained
from imposing them and cultural and academic exchange programmes
began. These exchanges – in marked contrast to the boycott of German
academics after 1918 – helped to underpin the economic miracle of the
1950s with the politically more important democratic miracle, which in
1968 prevented the growth of extreme right- or left-wing parties.
In the liberated states of Western Europe, the governments restricted
themselves to rebuilding universities, sometimes adding new disciplines,
such as nuclear physics or political science, and in some cases founding
modern institutions, such as the École Nationale d’Administration in
Paris.
Real university reform began after 1955. In France Prime Minister
Mendès-France invited high-ranking figures from business, politics and
academia to a conference in Caen on concrete proposals for reform, the
immediate effect of which was the expansion of engineering schools, the
reform of medical studies, and the promotion of research, especially in
the natural and social sciences.
In 1957 the Federal Republic of Germany established a Science Coun-
cil (Wissenschaftsrat), composed of representatives of the federal govern-
ment, the federal states and the academic community. Its recommenda-
tions, beginning with the extension and reform of universities, allowed
until 1965 the systematic establishment and equipping of new chairs in
subjects already strongly represented at each university.
In the United Kingdom a royal commission set up in 1961 examined
academic research and teaching. Its results, published in 1963 in the so-
called Robbins Report, led to a country-wide network of universities and
13
Walter Rüegg
polytechnics. Similar measures were taken in other countries of Western
Europe.
The purpose of the reforms was to increase competitiveness vis-à-vis
the United States and the Soviet Union. They led to a massive increase
in the numbers of students, to a considerable increase in the number of
staff, though not in proportion to the increase in students, to an initially
modest number of new universities (except in the United Kingdom, where
they were widespread), and to increased resources for academic research.
From the outset, Marxist students in France and in the Federal Repub-
lic of Germany criticized this expansive reform as ‘capitalist’ or ‘tech-
nocratic’. The emergence of mass universities gave them the numbers
to produce political movements using the methods of the American stu-
dent revolts originated in Berkeley. The starting point was the summer
term of 1967 in Berlin when, during a demonstration against the Shah
of Iran, a police officer shot a student. This triggered solidarity move-
ments in other universities. During the winter term the Emergency Laws
(Notstandsgesetze) planned by the Federal Republic provoked sit-ins at
lectures, initially in Frankfurt.
At the same time, disputes with the administration in the over-crowded
social studies faculty in Paris-Nanterre led to disturbances that in May
1968 spread to the Sorbonne and other French universities. The unex-
pected political successes that followed, and which precipitated a national
political crisis, unleashed a hurricane of student protest actions, sweeping
the continent as far as the Iron Curtain. In Continental Western Europe,
they forced the governments to offer so-called democratic university
reforms.
In academic governance terms, the bodies consisting of all permanent
professors were replaced by committees made up of representatives of the
various categories of university members. At the same time administra-
tors ceased to justify university expansion on economic grounds alone,
and added the desirability of the democratization of education. In con-
sequence the 1970s saw the foundation of many new universities25 and
other higher-education institutions, thereby opening up tertiary education
to a growing percentage of the population.
The spread of the mass university and the power of committees
strengthened the bureaucratization of academic and state university
administrations. A striking example is the unprecedented number of suc-
cessive university laws. At the same time, the ongoing cost of the reforms
had such an impact on national budgets that in the 1980s it was no longer
possible to finance them fully.
25 Cf. the appendix in this volume with chronological lists of the new foundations in
different countries.
14
Themes
the introduction of entrepreneurial reforms and

the destruction of the ivory tower
The crisis first became evident in the United Kingdom, where the costs
of the individual universities were not a part of the governmental bud-
get. From 1919 onwards an autonomous university organ, the University
Grants Committee, distributed the state’s contribution to the universities
on the basis of submitted development plans and their implementation.
The British universities thus had to compete with one another to finance
their basic needs. In 1982 the government cut the new three-year con-
tribution by 12%. Many universities were forced to introduce drastic
economy measures, ranging from reductions in salaries and grants to the
enforced early retirement of professors and the closing of whole subject
areas.26
This dramatic situation induced the Committee of Vice-Chancellors
and Principals to investigate the consequences of the shortfall. The Jarratt
Report of 1985 recommended the introduction of business-like adminis-
trative control systems. As a result the British universities were paid like
firms for the various services that they provided. In 1988–9 they received
from the state, by way of the University Grants Committee’s successor,
the Universities Funding Council, an average of 53% of their budgets for
‘securing of high quality research and teaching’. Student fees brought in
another 15%, which local authorities provided for British citizens; 7%
came from research projects supported by the subject-specific national
research councils; and 25% came as external subsidies and reimburse-
ments for different services.27 The British universities still gained their
funding predominantly through competitive bids for public moneys, but
the business methods introduced into their administration brought about
greater transparency and planned fund-raising.
University reform based on differentiation and competition had also
stimulated public interest on the Continent through international com-
parative studies and conferences of experts.28 Their ideas on competi-
tion found concrete embodiment in the British model of university finan-
cing. Consequently, more universities on the Continent began to test their
26 R. Dahrendorf, ‘Die europäischen Universitäten in einem veränderten sozialökono-

mischen Klima’, in W. Kalischer (ed.), Die Internationalität der Universität: Jahresver-
sammlung 1982: Ansprachen und Referate, Zusammenfassung der Plenardiskussionen.
Konstanz, 3. und 4. Mai 1982, Dokumente zur Hochschulreform, 50 (Bonn and Bad
Godesberg, 1982), 12–139, quotation 136.
27 J. Brennan and T. Shah, ‘Higher Education Policy in Great Britain’, in L. Goedegebuure
et al., Higher Education Policy: An International Comparative Perspective (Oxford,
1993), 176–93.
28 W. Rüegg, ‘Diversification and Competition in Higher Education’, International Journal
of Institutional Management, Higher Education, 2/11 (1987), 221–32.
15
Walter Rüegg
autonomy through performance agreements over several years with their
governments. Autonomy in most universities meant nothing more than
the management of deficiency, but it induced universities to prepare them-
selves for a new role as entrepreneurial teaching and research bodies. This
forms the second main theme of this volume.
Since the late nineteenth century the universities have been compared to
‘ivory towers’ to symbolize their arrogant distancing from the world. This
charge can hardly be laid at the door of the entrepreneurial university.
Yet the ‘ivory tower’ did not originally symbolize arrogant withdrawal
from the world. In the twelfth century it stood for the casing in which the
salvation of the world was segregated for a while in order to grow for
its role in the world. The Virgin Mary was compared to an ivory tower
because she had carried the Saviour in her pure womb until He entered
the world.29 No doubt no one at that time would have linked the activities
of scholars and masters with the purity of the ivory tower. But as a space
protecting individual growth, the university was compared with a tower,
up which the student climbed from the basement of grammar up through
the floors of the artes liberales and philosophy. En route he looked down
on the general public through narrow windows before finally rising as a
theologian through the clouds to the attics of metaphysics.30
Scholars and masters, especially in universities based on the Paris
model, were clerics who lived in monasteries or monastic-like buildings,
and whose separation from the general citizenry can still be experienced
by the visitor to a college in Oxford or Cambridge.
This separation only increased the authority of the university over
important sectors of public life. The law schools provided an appro-
priate civil and criminal law for a growing international trade and, in
fulfilling their spiritual and intellectual tasks through the extension and
binding interpretation of the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church,
the development of the first modern administrative structure in Europe.
The theological faculties provided the church with arguments to preserve
and enforce orthodoxy, while the medical faculties developed rationally
based procedures and techniques to preserve and restore the health of
prominent persons in public life.
Translated into the horizontal dimension of the secularized world, the
symbol of the ivory tower corresponded to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s
idea of the university. His famous definition of the university of 1809
ends with a sentence that attracts too little attention:
29 R. Bergmann, ‘Der elfenbeinerne Turm in der deutschen Literatur’, Zeitschrift für

deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 92 (1963/64), 303–20.
30 G. Reisch, ‘Margarita philosophica, Freiburg 1503’, in G. Münzel, Der Kartäuserprior
Gregor Reisch und die Margarita philosophica (Freiburg/Breisgau, 1937), fig. 1: Der
Turm der Wissenschaften (The Tower of the Sciences).
16
Themes
Listening to lectures is only a minor matter, the essential thing is to live for
a number of years in close community with like-minded colleagues of the
same age in the consciousness that there is in the same place a number of
those whose education is complete and who dedicate themselves fully to
the enhancement and spread of scholarship and science.31
These peculiar conclusions, drawn from his famous principles of free-

dom and solitude (Freiheit und Einsamkeit) underlying university orga-
nization, are found in his report on the Lithuanian school plan, and were
thus derived directly from Humboldt’s official task, which was to reorga-
nize the Prussian school system within the framework of Stein’s admin-
istrative reforms. The sentence quoted makes it clear that, according to
Humboldt, the university best fulfils its social function when it offers
its students, the future senior civil servants and members of the pub-
licly regulated free professions, a protective space where they can educate
themselves for their professional roles. The professors, characterized by
Humboldt rather too flatteringly as ‘completely educated’, promote this
self-education of the students less as teachers who could intimidate the
students with their superior knowledge and ability than as examples of a
disciplined search for knowledge, which mould personalities able to solve
problems with rational methods.
This method of preparation for public service allowed the universities to
present themselves very rarely to the public. Certainly, university teachers
and students were present in the public sphere in many social and political
roles. Yet as an institution the university rarely emerged from its ivory-
tower isolation. The French facultés des lettres were an exception, since
their lectures were primarily addressed to the general public. In other
countries the public offerings of universities were limited to the annual
commemoration of its founders or foundation, to other manifestations of
remembrance, and to rare processions to celebrate a university jubilee.
Each year on 6 August the rector of the Königliche Friedrich-Wilhelms-
University in Berlin remembered its founder in a public oration that
usually combined historical references with the discussion of an actual
contemporary problem. Thus in 1893 the famous professor of medicine
Rudolf Virchow praised the advances in the natural sciences since the
foundation of the university and warned against pseudo-scientific move-
ments, especially the anti-Semitism that was rife even among academic
youth.32 Early in 1900, at the express wish of the king, the Prussian
universities celebrated the beginning of the twentieth century, one year
too early in fact, and praised their role in the rise of Germany as a
31 Humboldt, ‘Innere und äußere Organisation’ (note 21), 191.

32 Cf. vol. III, 19 (Rüegg, ‘Themes’).
17
Walter Rüegg
world power. In Berlin, the speaker the classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-
Moellendorf put into perspective the internationally accepted superiority
of German scholarship and science: Germany was only giving back what
it had received from other nations; in the worldwide relay race of nations
towards the goal of a world society, it had taken over the baton in the
nineteenth century for transmission to the USA in the twentieth.33
The topical question which Wilamowitz-Moellendorf discussed in his
oration concerned the monopoly right of the humanist gymnasium to
award the Abitur qualification for admission to the universities. Already
in 1890 the king wanted to abolish this monopoly. The head of uni-
versity affairs in the Prussian Ministry of Education, Althoff, hoped to
overcome conservative resistance in parliament and in important pres-
sure groups with the help of this leading classicist, and thus encouraged
Wilamowitz-Moellendorf’s move from Göttingen to Berlin. Wilamowitz
obliged by launching a devastating critique of classical antiquity as a
model for modern education and contributing to the opening of the uni-
versities in 1900 to successful Abitur candidates from other types of
secondary school.34 Another reform in the same direction had occurred
the year before, when the technical universities gained the right to award
doctorates, thus obtaining a legal status equal to that of the universities.
In 1905 the University of Berlin went a step further with a programme
of professorial exchanges with the USA. In 1906 the speech at the uni-
versity’s commemoration of its founder took up the question of whether
visiting professors from abroad should use their mother tongue or that
of the audience – an issue still topical today but eased somewhat by the
prominence of English in the academic world.35
Not only in Germany was the university viewed as an exclusive, socially
prestigious institution, which, without having to take any special mea-
sures, enjoyed the esteem and support of the public. This status was
expressed in the monumental buildings erected by many European states,
not only for ministries and higher courts but also for their universities. A
Danish scholar wrote in 1889 that in the new buildings of the Swedish
university of Uppsala the finest rooms were used for concerts and balls
as well as for housing state and academic authorities. The real purpose
of the university, academic teaching, was restricted to the smaller rooms.
‘Everything signals to the students, “make a real effort, rise until you can
33 U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, ‘Neujahr 1900’, in U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff,
Reden und Vorträge, 4th edn (Berlin, 1926), vol. II, 35–55.
34 W. Rüegg, ‘Die Antike als Leitbild der deutschen Gesellschaft’, in W. Rüegg, Bedrohte
Lebensordnung: Studien zur humanistischen Soziologie (Zurich and Munich, 1978),
93–105.
35 U. H. Diels, Internationale Aufgaben der Universität: Rede zur Gedächtnisfeier des
Stifters der Berliner Universität König Friedrich Wilhelm III in der Aula am 3. August
1906 (Berlin 1906).
18
Themes
become professors, then you will get comfortable chairs and splendid por-
traits by great masters on the walls”.’36 In this caricature the ivory tower
appears to have been reduced to a fitness centre for future professors. But
the main point of the grand buildings was to indicate that cultural events
and social festivities gained lustre when held in university settings.
The two world wars, which revealed the murderous underside of sci-
entific discoveries, did not tarnish the prestigious image of the university.
Indeed, the unexpected shortage of university graduates after 1945 wor-
ried the governments of Western Europe, which embarked in the 1950s
on the expansionist reforms already discussed. At the same time, public
and private foundations generously supported academic research. There
followed an expansion of student grants based on social and in part
intellectual criteria, in order to make better use of the talent pool.
Not only was entrance to the ivory tower widened, the universities also
began to take a more active role in shaping their relationship with the
public.37 They ran courses for students resident outside the universities:
the radio college in Frankfurt38 was opened in 1966 followed in 1969
by the Open University in Milton Keynes39 and by similar developments
in other countries. In 1964 the West German conference of university
rectors recommended that universities set up their own press offices to
inform the public about their activities.40 The university administrations
began to implement this suggestion in 1966, at first with the help of
private foundations.41
The transition to entrepreneurial management in the 1980s caused
the universities to intensify their public relations work.42 They did not
recoil from using marketing methods. Lectures that had been open to the
public but without arousing much response were now offered as ‘The
University of the Third Age’, and they filled auditoriums with members
36 G. Brandes, ‘Tale i Upsala (1889)’, in G. Brandes, Samlede Skriften, vol. XV (Copen-

hagen, 1905).
37 W. Rüegg, Hochschule und Öffentlichkeit: Speech Held at the Installation of the Rector,
Frankfurter Universitätsreden, 40 (Frankfurt/Main, 1965).
38 J. Greven (ed.), Das Funkkolleg 1966–1998: Ein Modell wissenschaftlicher Weiter-
bildung im Medienverbund, Einführungen Auswertungen Dokumentation (Weinheim,
1998).
39 W. Perry, Open University: A Personal Account by the First Vice-Chancellor (Milton
Keynes, 1976).
40 Universität und Presse: Empfehlung der Westdeutschen Rektorenkonferenz, Berlin, 5.–
7. Februar 1964. Reprint in W. Becker (ed.), WRK, Stellungnahmen, Empfehlungen,
Beschlüsse, 1960–1989, vol. I (Bonn, 1989), 31f.; cf. Zur Öffentlichkeitsarbeit der
Hochschulen und zur Einrichtung von Presse- und Informationsstellen: Erklärung der
86. Westdeutschen Rektorenkonferenz. Bonn-Bad Godesberg, 26. Januar 1971. Reprint,
ibid, 279–85.
41 In 1966 that was the case at the University of Frankfurt.
42 Zur Öffentlichkeitsarbeit der Hochschulen: Empfehlung des 176. Plenums der Hoch-
schulrektorenkonferenz, Juli 1995, Dokumente zur Hochschulreform, 102 (Bonn, 1995).
19
Walter Rüegg
of the public that had taken the time to enrol in the new university
institution. The success of this programme led to the introduction of the
‘Children’s University’, in which motivated youngsters could share in the
adventure of academic research while their taxpaying parents convinced
themselves of the value of the university.
Today universities advertise themselves to the world through their web
pages. Many regularly present their academic achievements in multi-
coloured format and inform the reader about their distinguished fac-
ulties, activities and plans. The development of a new logo and so on for
a university is pursued with the energy and expense of a medium-sized
research project. In short, packaging and marketing have become, if not
more important than the fulfilling of their tasks of teaching and research,
at least an essential factor for the management of the entrepreneurial
universities. The demolition of the ivory tower by the market-oriented
opening up of the university was in full swing by 1995.
The market had always been important for universities. They came
into being round 1200, when the demand for the academic education of
clerical and secular elites brought so many students to Paris and Bologna
that corporate bodies were created to augment the individual scholar–
teacher relationship. The market also determined over the years the long-
and short-term waves of expansion and decline in the universities and
defeated every attempt to orient their capacity to absorb student num-
bers in the various subject areas according to guesses, usually erroneous,
about the future development of the market. Yet in those times the alter-
nation of supply and demand in academic education took place on such
a modest scale that most adaptations were caused by scientific progress
and restricted to new areas of study and to specialized universities.
The big changes came with the mass university after 1960. The huge
numbers of new universities founded from 1968 onwards only provided
a temporary respite for the older ones (in the larger towns of France,
the new derived from division of the old). Many of the new foundations
turned into mass universities. The governments hoped to take some of
the pressure off the universities by offering an academic preparation for
a practical career in the shortest possible time. The English polytechnics,
the French IUTs, the German Fachhochschulen and the corresponding
institutions in other countries performed this task splendidly.
Nonetheless, they did not improve the situation at the universities.
On the one hand, they could take only a relatively small number of
the new students, and those rejected turned to the universities. On the
other hand, many intermediary institutions applied for and received the
status of universities with the right to do fundamental research and grant
doctorates. Many of the more than 600 new universities founded between
20
Themes
1945 and 1995 developed out of such intermediary institutions. The
university status did not raise their capacity and was irrelevant for the
problem of the mass universities.
The multiplication of European universities from 200 to over 800 in
199543 reflected less an increase of their public influence than an inflation-
ary decline to provinciality. This is clearly shown in a comparison with
the United States, where, in 2005/6, there were 4,276 post-secondary
institutions offering a state-recognized final qualification. Some 1,694
provided only two years of study. Of the 2,582 four-year institutions,
1,049 limited themselves to the study of a single subject such as medicine,
business, theology, fine arts or engineering. In 637 colleges, study led
only to a bachelor’s degree, whereas in 638 of them it was possible to
continue to a master’s degree. In the fifty federal states and the District
of Columbia there were only 258 universities (165 state-supported and
93 private) that also regularly awarded doctorates (yearly at least twenty
doctorates in more than four disciplines). Together they made up hardly
more than 6 per cent of the degree-granting institutions of American
higher education and less than a quarter of the number of European
universities.44
The small number of universities in a broadly differentiated range of
tertiary education cannot be ascribed to market orientation. It is only pos-
sible in democracies, which recognize the academic degree or title as a sign
of academic education, and yet do not regard it as necessary to procure
general advantages in careers or social prestige. As long as the nature and
length of a successful period of university study provides access to privi-
leged career paths in the public service and in bureaucratically organized
firms, then the inflationary growth and consequent qualitative provincial-
ity of European universities will continue, even in those countries whose
politicians and businessmen do not bear the title of professor.
Provinciality in the literal sense of the word indicates that Europe has
lost its leadership in higher education. The Erasmian sancta quaedam
communitas eruditorum developed into a worldwide scientific commu-
nity. Europe has become just one of several provinces in a global edu-
cation sphere. The national authorities responsible for higher education
have been supplemented and are being increasingly replaced by suprana-
tional institutions. This forms the third main theme of this volume.
43 Numbers for 1939/49: vol. III, 3, IV, ch. 2, table 5. Numbers for 1995 according to the
appendix in this volume.
44 NCES National Center for Educational Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education
Data System (IPEDS) (Fall 2005), table 249. Degree-granting institutions and branches
by type and control of institution and state of jurisdiction.
21
Walter Rüegg
the universities and globalization

A new chapter entitled ‘Exporting models’ appeared in the second volume
of our History of the University in Europe. It dealt almost exclusively with
Latin America and the English colonies of North America between 1500
and 1800. The third volume, dealing with the period 1800–1945, had
to include the other parts of the globe as well. Quantitatively and quali-
tatively the chapter dealt mainly with those states in Latin America and
especially North America that had become constitutionally independent
or, in the case of Canada, were in practice independent. Japan founded
state and private universities on the German and the American model,
while China established some also on the English model. The universities
of other countries were offshoots of the colonial powers. Englishmen or
Indians trained in England taught in India; Gandhi was representative of
many other Indians in completing his studies in England. The University
of Algiers was the jumping off point for the careers of important French
academics, and at the Cité universitaire in Paris a student hostel built for
students from Indochina provided a place to prepare themselves for their
future as revolutionary leaders.
Today Indian professors, doctors and lawyers are found in universities
throughout the world. A few years ago the German government attempted
to ease the shortage of IT specialists by recruiting graduates from Indian
universities. Colleges and universities in former European colonies in
Africa and Asia no longer follow European models but American ones.
A ranking list of world universities, issued by a Chinese university, was
received very positively in Europe although only a few European univer-
sities figured among the first fifty. Despite the fact that Europe has not
become just one of the many university provinces of the world, as far as
the status of its universities is concerned, it has fallen a long way behind
North America.
The globalization of university relationships began after the end of the
Second World War with the exchange of professors and researchers. Since
1948 the Fulbright Program has enabled some 250,000 graduate students,
university teachers and administrators, 40% from the United States and
60% from 140 other states, to extend their education at foreign univer-
sities and, as ‘Fulbrighters’, to remain in touch through alumni associ-
ations. The American example was followed in Europe. The Alexander
von Humboldt Foundation, set up in Bonn in 1953, has supported 25,000
highly qualified scholars who have formed permanent associations in their
home countries.45 Governments have provided the considerable funding
45 http://exchanges.state.gov/education/fulbrigh44t/ (16 April 2005); C. Jansen and

C. Nensa, Exzellenz weltweit: Die Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung zwischen
22
Themes
required for such initiatives, and probably not just for the publicly pro-
claimed goal of international understanding. But the exchanges had an
impact far wider than was intended by those who financed them.
This wider effect in the university sphere may also be seen in some
supranational institutions established after 1945, again on the initiative
of the Americans. In 1948 the Organization for European Economic
Cooperation (OEEC) was founded to carry out the Marshall Plan for
the reconstruction of a devastated Europe. After reconstruction ended in
1960, the OEEC continued as the Organization for Economic Coopera-
tion and Development (OECD). Article 2 of its statutes gave the OECD
the task of ‘developing aid in the scientific and technical sphere and fur-
thering research and professional training’ in order to achieve its goals
(economic growth, full employment and a rising standard of living). There
followed not only a substantial research programme (between 1962 and
196846 ) but also a series of influential regular evaluations of the univer-
sity and research policies of its member states. More recently, the OECD
gained a broader pedagogical influence through PISA (Programme for
International Student Assessment), which is an internationally standard-
ized assessment that was jointly developed by participating countries and
administered to fifteen-year-olds in schools. Half a century ago the ques-
tion was raised whether actions of such political consequence should not
be controlled by politically legitimized bodies. A proposal to require polit-
ical legitimization failed, owing to what was described as the excessive
workload of parliamentarians who had to represent their various coun-
tries on many international bodies at the same time.47 Such an argument
would hardly stand up today, but still the question Quis custodiet ipsos
custodes? (who guards the guardians?) is rarely answered.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) initially concerned itself with the educational problems of
developing countries. Three initiatives in university policy had a lasting
effect. In 1963 UNESCO founded an Institute for Educational Planning
in Paris, in 1973, a European Centre for Higher Education (CEPES)
in Bucharest, and in 1950, an International Association of Universities
(IAU), which has grown into a world body of some 600 members.48 The
IAU publishes regularly a global directory of World Higher Education
Wissenschaftsförderung und auswärtiger Kulturpolitik (1953–2003) (Cologne, 2004),

8.
46 See chapter 3, p. 99 note 97.
47 K.-J. Maass, Europäische Hochschulpolitik: Die Arbeit des Europarats im Hochschul-
bereich 1949–1969, Schriftenreihe zur europäischen Integration, 7 (Hamburg, 1970),
77.
48 G. Daillant, Universality, Diversity, Interdependence: IAU 1950–1990, A Commemo-
rative Essay (Paris, 1990).
23
Walter Rüegg
containing not only universities entitled to award doctorates, but also
other state and privately funded tertiary-sector institutions.49
The cultural committee of the Brussels Pact of 1948 received the charge
of improving cooperation among West European universities. Its leaders
met in 1955 at a conference in Cambridge and decided to found a Stand-
ing Conference of European Rectors (CRE), which came into existence
in 1959 in Dijon.50 The organization was all the more important because
the Council of Europe, founded in 1949, had turned down the idea of a
European association of university heads. It made university matters the
responsibility of its Council for Cultural Cooperation (CCC), composed
of government representatives, and its Committee for Higher Education
and Research (CHER), consisting of two delegates from each member
state, one of which represented the government and the other the universi-
ties. After a number of interventions by the national conferences of univer-
sity rectors and vice-chancellors, the university member was nominated
by the universities and not by the government. The CHER submitted rec-
ommendations and reform projects to the CCC, but it could not influence
their later fate. Relatively few decisions of the Council of Europe in rela-
tion to the mutual recognition of university entrance requirements and
qualifications were ratified.51 Bilateral agreements between the national
rectors’ conferences on equivalences of diplomas therefore remained until
the 1990s the usual procedure for the mutual recognition of studies in
foreign countries.
The Rome treaties of 1957, directed to economic goals, contained only
two proposals relating to the university sphere. Initially, therefore, the
Council of Ministers had members responsible for agriculture and eco-
nomics, but not for education or research. Today the European Union
has a very considerable influence on European university policy and will
have an even bigger role in the future. How has this come about?
The foundation of the European University (in Florence), provided for
in the Euratom Treaty and pursued energetically by the Italian govern-
ment, met with enduring resistance from university bodies, as did other
similar ideas put forward beginning in 1947. Universities were not will-
ing to accord the status and name of a European University to a single
institution and thus indirectly to downgrade their own institutions to a
national level.
49 IAU World Higher Education DATABASE 2005/6.

50 H.-A. Steger (ed.), Das Europa der Universitäten/L’Europe des Universités/The Univer-
sities’ Europe: Entstehung der Ständigen Konferenz der Rektoren und Vize-Kanzler der
europäischen Universitäten 1948–1962, Dokumentation (Bad Godesberg, 1964); cf. 40
ans CRE, CRE-action, 115 (1999), Supplément.
51 Maass, Europäische Hochschulpolitik (note 47), 25–9, 127–34.
24
Themes
In 1970 an innovative compromise found favour: a proposal to estab-
lish not a European University but a European Graduate College. In 1976,
in the Badia Fiesolana of San Domenico above the city of Florence, the
European University Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Social Sciences
opened.
Cooperation between the rectors’ conferences of the six EEC states and
the European Commission played a major part in this outcome. Their
cooperation arose from an obstinate struggle around the EEC’s second
university-related task to establish guidelines for the mutual recognition
of the diplomas, examination certificates and other proofs of competence
that then restricted the free movement of people and services.52 The first
draft of these guidelines, put forward in 1969, made the free professional
practice of medicine dependent on completion of a certain number of
study hours in the medical subjects recognized at the time; if they had
been accepted, the guidelines would have paralysed curricular reform and
undermined the autonomy of universities in their most sacred areas. An
obstinate resistance movement took root within the rectors’ conferences
and the universities of the EEC member states organized in the European
Rectors’ Conference. Finally, the Commission withdrew the proposal and
invited a liaison committee in Brussels made up of representatives of the
rectors’ conferences of the EEC states to participate at the elaboration
of a more flexible series of guidelines based on qualitative rather than
quantitative criteria.53
The difficulties experienced in achieving this goal prompted the EEC
for the first time to call a conference of the education or research min-
isters of the six member countries (on 16 November 1971). It charged
a committee composed of academics of the old and would-be Member
States to enquire into the possibilities of widening the educational and
scientific policy within the framework of the Rome treaties.54 The report,
published in 1973, noted that ‘the application of the Rome treaties makes
it necessary to deal with the whole problem of the education of young
persons and adult education insofar as it is an inherent part of the obli-
gation to achieve the best possible economic development’. The report
offered general conclusions and concrete recommendations that made it
52 W. Rüegg, ‘La CRE, autonomie et cadre européen’, in 40 ans CRE (note 50), 31–3.
53 W. Rüegg, ‘La coopération entre les universités européennes. Kolloquium in Grenoble.
Tagungsbericht’, Integration. Vierteljahrshefte zur Europaforschung, 4 (1970), 323–
6. W. Rüegg, ‘Les relations entre les Communautés européennes et les établissements
d’enseignement supérieur en Europe. Le point de vue des universités’, in Semaine de
Bruges 1973: Université et société. Pour une politique européenne de l’enseignement
supérieur, Cahiers de Bruges, n.s. 32 (Bruges, 1974), 253–60.
54 The Commission of the European Communities, Für eine gemeinschaftliche Bil-
dungspolitik, Bulletin der Europäischen Gemeinschaften, Beilage, 10/73 (Luxemburg,
1973), 9f.
25
Walter Rüegg
possible for the European Community (EC) and the EU to extend their
activity to European cultural educational and research policy.55
The recommendations proposed at first the creation of a ‘common
research centre’ and a ‘European Scientific Foundation’,56 but the Euro-
pean Commission accepted the argument that a European Scientific Foun-
dation should at least include all the free countries of Europe. Thus, in
cooperation with the EC and yet independent of it, the European Science
Foundation (ESF) was founded in 1974, with its seat in Strasbourg.57
A decade later the EC started its own programmes to encourage stu-
dent mobility and inter-university cooperation with study and research
projects in areas known by imaginative acronyms such as ESPRIT (Euro-
pean Strategic Programme for Information Technology) 1984, EURECA
(European Research Common Action) 1985, Comett (Community Pro-
gramme for Education and Training for Technology) and Erasmus (Euro-
pean Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students) 1987. The
success of these projects prompted the European Free Trade Area (EFTA)
states to take part in them, so that the research and university policy of
the Union became the model for large parts of Europe.
The ‘Memorandum on University Education in the European Com-
munity’ of 1991 strengthened cooperation on university policy between
the European Commission and the European universities.58 The EU gave
the Confederation of European Union Rectors’ Conferences, which had
succeeded the Liaison Committee of the rectors’ conferences, in Brussels
more and more tasks to execute autonomously. In 2001 it merged with
the Conference of European Rectors (CRE) in Geneva to become the
European University Association (EUA), located in Brussels.
the ‘americanization’ of european universities

Part IV of this volume, ‘Learning’, testifies to the leading role of the Amer-
ican universities in the natural, life and social sciences, and increasingly
also in the humanities. The American hegemony derived from successful
adoption and further development of the ideas of the European univer-
sity, especially the combination of teaching and research that the German
universities developed in the nineteenth century. From 1825 onwards, the
adoption of the German professional faculties was discussed and rejected.
When the state of Michigan entered the Union in 1837, it founded a
university on the German model, with secondary schools based on the
55 Ibid., 11. 56 Ibid., 53.

57 European Science Foundation, Report 1975 (Strasbourg, 1975).
58 F. van Vught and D. Westerheijden, ‘Institutional Management for Quality. The CRE
Programme: Background, Goals and Procedures’, CRE-Action, 107 (1996), 9–151.
26
Themes
German Gymnasium the task of which was to prepare students for
the university. This direct borrowing had few echoes.59 Lasting success
occurred by combining a college that offered bachelor’s and master’s
degrees with research-based graduate and professional schools at the
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, founded and endowed in 1876.
The graduate school prepared students for a PhD as the testimony of
a comprehensive academic education. The professional school, at first
intended for medicine only, had as its final qualification a specialized
qualification, the MD. Johns Hopkins had no difficulty in finding employ-
ers for its excellently educated academic products, and the combination
of the college with the attached schools not only formed the basis for
new foundations such as the University of Chicago, but also gradually
established itself in older universities such as Harvard and extended the
university concept to professional schools such as MIT.
In 1900 a group of nine private and three state universities founded the
Association of American Universities (AAU) in order to ‘strengthen and
unify doctoral studies in the USA’.60 Since then only institutions in the
USA that possess the officially acknowledged right to award doctorates
and do so on a regular basis can be considered universities. As mentioned
earlier, there are approximately 260 such institutions, of which only 60
American and 2 Canadian universities have been accepted as members of
the AAU. It is through these leading institutions that the university ideal of
an academic education through research has become a worldwide model,
with its attendant demanding bachelor’s and master’s courses.
The emergence of the American research university shows that the for-
eign model was applied successfully only when its basic idea was adapted
to the conditions of the new environment. It was adopted across the
United States not by governmental initiatives, but by successful competi-
tion with other institutional models; the universities themselves embraced
and developed it, and then the federal states accepted it as the standard
by which new universities are recognized. In the model process, certain
idiosyncrasies of the alien system were ignored, such as the autocratic
position of the individual professor, the unpaid teaching of the Privat-
dozenten, and curricula free from checks on performance right up to the
final examination.
From the bachelor to the doctorate the students’ freedom to edu-
cate themselves rather than the contents of the curriculum formed the
basis of teaching. The American universities introduced after 1900 the
59 J. Herbst, ‘The Yale Report of 1828’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition,
2/11 (2004), 213–31, especially 223f. Cf. H. Röhrs, The Classical German Concept of the
University and its Influence on Higher Education in the United States (Frankfurt/Main,
1995).
60 Quotation from AAU Internet Homepage 2006.
27
Walter Rüegg
pedagogical ‘democratization’ which had been put forward by John
Dewey, and which took seriously the position that students are respon-
sible for their own learning. To prepare themselves to be partners in
the teaching sessions and in their search for knowledge, the students are
expected to master a demanding reading list in their own free time and
usually on their own, in such a way that Humboldt saw ‘freedom and
isolation’ as the organizing principle of the modern university.
For the administration and management of the universities the Amer-
icans kept the model of the entrepreneurial organization developed in
the seventeenth century. When the American colonists began to found
colleges to educate and train their priests and other public officials, they
were happy to take over the humanist subjects of study from Oxford
and Cambridge, but not their system of corporate self-governance. In
order to provide a materially secure base for the liberal arts colleges in an
environment in which Plato, Cicero and Euclid had been strangers, they
appointed an entrepreneurial director responsible to a board of trustees
made up of people from their own ranks. The Puritans were familiar with
this form of leadership from the Nonconformist academies of England,
which had had to survive in a hostile religious environment.61
This entrepreneurial form of management proved effective. Through
private sponsorship it secured the autonomy of any college recognized by
a state so effectively that a court case, introduced by Dartmouth College
in 1816 against state interference, led to a wide-reaching judgment from
the Supreme Court, which secured the independence of the universities.62
The state universities founded in the nineteenth century took over the
entrepreneurial management and administrative structure of the college
and thus also learned to solve their financial problems. Today the private
universities cover almost half of their expenses through private means,
and the state universities have to add a considerable income from pri-
vate and public sources to their state funding. The entrepreneurial man-
agement style necessary to achieve this is in no way detrimental to an
academic education based on research.
All this agreed with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s view that the role of
the state was above all to guarantee the autonomy of the university
faculty.63 Consequently, he had proposed in his plan for the Univer-
sity of Berlin that the state should make over property to the university,
61 Vol. III, 166f. Cf. S. E. Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass.,
1935).
62 B. I. Wheeler [President, University of California], Unterricht und Demokratie in
Amerika: Die Quellen der öffentlichen Meinung, das College, Universitäten, Studen-
tenleben, Schule und Kirche in den Vereinigen Staaten. Vorlesungen, gehalten an der
Berliner Universität (Strasburg, 1910), 70–7. J. Herbst, From Crisis to Crisis: American
College Government (1636–1819) (Cambridge, Mass., and London 1982), 232–43.
63 See p. 12.
28
Themes
which the university could administer itself, so that the income from this
property, rather than direct contributions from the state budget, should
provide for its expenses.64 If the idea had not been rejected by his suc-
cessor, the modernized concept of the university in Berlin in 1810 could
also have embodied the modern self-governance of an entrepreneurial
university.65
The European Commission in its report of 1973, ‘For a Common
Education Policy’, raised a question still of direct relevance to universities:
Taking into account the growing size of companies, the increasing special-
ization and the degree of international cooperation with all the associated
scientific and technical developments, can one really contemplate European
economic integration without considering a simultaneous ‘Europeaniza-
tion’ of the ‘great’ universities∗ ? By ‘Europeanization’ we mean that these
universities will train their academic teachers, their researchers, and their
students and will obtain their resources in such a way that their politics and
their initiatives will so develop ‘as if’ the Europe of the Nine represented
their natural environment, as is the case for the American universities in
their vast state territories.66
postscript
Today (2007) the notion of the Europeanization of the universities based
on the model of American universities is not merely a futurist vision. The
European University Association brings together 760 universities from
forty countries throughout the whole of Europe and works through the
national rectors’ conferences for the realization of a common educational
area. Many European universities will be able to develop into top univer-
sities in the face of worldwide competition. What the American higher
education institutions from the seventeenth century onwards had to take
into account has also been brought home to European universities as a
fact of life by the rapid growth in university-level institutions after the
Second World War. The influence of university teaching and research
today now requires forms of organization that are not restricted to the
relationship between the university and its state funding body. Universi-
ties must now fulfil their manifold tasks in cooperation with a variety of
social partners from the local to the global level.
The current Europe of twenty-seven EU Member States cooperating
with the EFTA states on university policy has laboured in vain with the
Erasmus and Socrates programmes to increase mobility within Europe
64 W. von Humboldt, Antrag auf Errichtung der Universität Berlin, Schriften, vol. IV
(note 21), 33, 117f.
65 Kommission der Europäischen Gemeinschaften (note 54), 12.
66 These being by no means always the ones with the greatest number of students.
29
Walter Rüegg
to what was the norm until the eighteenth century, i.e., 10 per cent
of students. This is now to be achieved by a formal harmonization of
student degrees agreed at the conference of European education ministers
in Bologna in 1999 and due to come into effect in 2010. Even though this
goal cannot be attained, at least the Bologna process has brought about
a long-overdue curricular reform. This reform must not be perverted by
bureaucratic impositions that turn the majority of European universities
into provincial teaching bodies like the American version so horrifyingly
caricatured in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The university has undergone many reforms in its 800-year history.
That it has not only survived these but gone on to spread throughout the
world is owed mainly to its students. Because of their academic training
they were able to remove fossilized structures and mistaken initiatives
in the way the universities worked. Some of them, as employees of the
universities, developed new perspectives and methods, while still others
supported the universities as exponents of public debate both politically
and through their professional careers. These graduates harmonized the
basic idea and ethos of the university with its changing environment and,
in the process, modified the very process of change.
This is also true for more recent reforms; they will favour universities
that apply the Bologna process and other elements of Europeanization as
independently and thoughtfully to their own environment and the world
outside them as the predecessors of the top American universities did
when they adopted European models. Then, even after toppling the ivory
tower, European universities will be better able to fulfil the basic task they
have shouldered since the Middle Ages: that of creating an inspirational
space for the adventure of the academic search for knowledge and the
development of educated individuals.
30
CHAPTER 2
PATTERNS
GUY NEAVE
introduction
Few institutions escape entirely from the consequences of war, particu-
larly so when the conflict involves the ideological and physical mobiliza-
tion of whole populations, young and old, civilians, soldiers and non-
combatants alike.1 The influence of war upon the development of the
university in Europe has been an important, if not always closely studied,
phenomenon. The so-called Humboldtian model of university was forged
in the aftermath of the Battle of Jena;2 the shaping of the French edu-
cation system in the reforms associated with the Napoleonic university
took place against a similar martial background 3 and, somewhat farther
afield, the roots of modern American higher education were laid by the
Morrill Act passed in 1862 in the midst of civil war.4
There are, however, cogent reasons for considering the Second World
War as a marker point in the development of the university in Europe.
This war was less a matter of territorial conquest than a confrontation
between ideologies and values expressed in the political order that each
side enshrined. Since the education system is the prime instrument for the
diffusion and perpetuation of such values, schools and universities formed
a crucial and central part in that other parallel conflict which went on
behind the front, namely the battle for ‘hearts and minds’. Whether as the
repository of the nation’s historic memory, as quintessential of a country’s
1 The precise and long-term consequences of modern war upon educational change are
beginning to attract increasing attention amongst historians of education. See, for
instance, R. Lowe (ed.), Education and the Second World War: Studies in Schooling
and Social Change (London and Washington, 1992).
2 T. Nybom, ‘The Humboldtian Legacy: Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of the
European University’, Higher Education Policy, 16:2 (2003).
3 See vol. III, 34. 4 Ibid., 168.
31
Guy Neave
national values or, finally, as a concentration of the nation’s highest
qualified manpower and research capacity, the university in Europe stood
at the forefront of the battle. Academic work was as much a strategic
resource in its own right as the more visible forms of production that
sustained an industrial nation at war.
In the territories occupied by Nazi administration, sustained attempts
were made to bring schools and universities if not under direct control of
those sympathetic to the occupier, then at least to ensure that his ideas
had favourable reception.5 In Eastern Europe, and particularly in Poland,
attempts to eradicate both national identity and the institutions by which
this was perpetuated involved wholesale destruction of both schools and
universities.6 The obverse is equally true. Defence of national identity
and the first glimmerings of what were later to emerge as resistance
movements, whether organized or not, found their roots amongst students
and staff in the universities of Belgium,7 France8 and the Netherlands,9
and attained its most heroic expression in Poland.10
post-war reconstruction
Three strands of thinking may be identified within the university reform
that emerged at war’s end. The first of these was internal to the individual
nation. It was often the result of governments newly restored from exile
assessing the performance less of whole systems than of the part played
by individual institutions in sustaining wartime regimes. Not untypical
of this was the foundation of the École Nationale d’Administration as a
Republican counterweight to what was seen as the ambiguous role of the
Institut d’Études Politiques11 in the training of high civil servants who
had succoured Vichy.
The second and third strands which emerged in the course of the
wartime discussions between the Allied Powers and the exiled gov-
ernments of occupied countries derived from the need for a ‘moral
5 For a closer examination of this in Belgium, France and the Netherlands, see G. Neave,
‘War and Educational Reconstruction in Belgium, France and the Netherlands 1940–
1947’, in Lowe, Education (note 1), 84–127.
6 J. Szczepanski, Systems of Higher Education: Poland (New York, 1978).
7 G. K. Tanham, Contribution à l’histoire de la Résistance belge 1940–1944 (Brussels,
1971); J. Willems, Belgium under Occupation (New York, 1947), 135.
8 H. Granet and H. Michel, Combat: Histoire d’un mouvement de Résistance de juillet
1940 à juillet 1943 (Paris, 1957); A. Calmette, L’OCM – Organisation Civile et Militaire:
Histoire d’un mouvement de Résistance de 1940 à 1946 (Paris, 1961).
9 L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de tweede oorlog (The Hague, 1980);
also L. de Jong, Je maintiendrai: Een jaar Nazityrannie in Nederlanden (London, 1941).
10 See vol. III, 657–8, 676, 683, 689–90.
11 M. Blocq Mascart, Chroniques de la Résistance, suivies d’études pour une nouvelle
révolution française par les groupes de l’OCM (Paris, 1945).
32
Patterns
reconstruction’ to run in parallel with the physical rebuilding of Europe’s
universities. Within this approach, initiated largely under American
auspices,12 two perspectives coexisted. A minimalist approach was
backed mainly by the governments in exile. It turned around the restora-
tion of the status quo ante and involved the removal of those more igno-
minious academics who had made themselves the adepts of the occupier’s
cause. A maximalist programme, backed by American officials, was more
radical in its strategic purpose. It did not stop at the removal of collab-
orators. It also called for a goodly degree of curricular reform and the
remodelling of course content. The purpose of this latter element was to
give solid root to the theory and practice of a democratic society, to serve
as the foundations of a ‘new world order’ and to ensure that society’s
key value-allocating body – the university – would act as a sure bastion
against any possible return of totalitarianism in the future.
If the context in which these issues were raised was highly specific,
the principles and the long-term implications which arose from them
were to have major influence upon the patterns, practices and structures
within which the universities in Europe evolved over the ensuing fifty
years. And they raise issues, which, though placed in a different setting
and often conducted through a different vehicle of discourse, are relevant
today. The minimalist programme for the reconstruction of Europe’s
universities took the view that occupation and its accompanying ideolo-
gies had not significantly altered the basic commitment of the university
to seek after Truth and to exercise independence of judgment and rea-
son. Totalitarianism, to be sure, had imposed a superficial overlay upon
a community which had entered into a species of inner exile. Yet the
inner values of higher education’s private life had remained intact in the
form of ‘Underground Universities’ in Belgium,13 the Netherlands and
Poland,14 to cite but three examples. Restoration of what was basically an
institution in good health simply involved stripping away the ideological
excrescence. This could be done by the return of democratic governments
to power and/or by bringing academia back from its self-imposed inner
exile. In short, these were matters that could be settled by the individual
nation acting on its own accord.
12 See, e.g., the speech by then Congressman William J. Fulbright to the Liaison Committee
for International Education 5 May 1944 in Newsletter of International Education,
2 (12 July 1944). Also ‘Memorandum: Grayson Kefauver to Assistant Secretary of
State William Benton’, London, 6 October 1944, [Personal] in Kefauver Papers, Hanna
Collection (Hoover Archives, Stanford University, Cal.).
13 Personal communication from the late Mme Henriette Herlant-Meewis, Professor
Emerita, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 25 July 1992.
14 I owe this point to my colleague at London University Institute of Education, Mr Janusz
Tomiak, who was one of the many students enrolled in Poland’s clandestine universities
during the war.
33
Guy Neave
A similar approach could not, it was thought, apply to those coun-
tries where totalitarianism was a native product with which academia
had thrown in its lot.15 The restoration of the nation’s historic universi-
ties and values could always be interpreted as returning to a happier era
prior to the submission to the party and to its apparatus. But this could
not be achieved from within the nation. The programme of recovery had
to be set down from without and applied by the occupying forces, a
situation of no little paradox since it involved democracy in eradicating
totalitarian loyalties and practices in a top-down manner which many felt
was precisely the hallmark of that self-same political system democracy
was dedicated to replace. A further presumption also existed beneath
the maximalist programme. It did not hold that, once democracy was
restored, the academic community would revert to being part of an inter-
national community. On the contrary, strenuous efforts, both at the level
of courses and in the content of what students should study, were to be
made to stress the role of universities as part of an international commu-
nity of scholarship rather than exponents of an aberrant and nationalistic
ideology.
The post-war arrangement reached at Potsdam on 2 August 1945
between the USA, the USSR and the UK, which France also applied, com-
bined elements of territorial redistribution with the recognition of spheres
of influence. At the same time, it gave final expression to the fact that if
a new world order stood in the offing, it subscribed to two very different
interpretations of democracy, of the relationship between the individual
and the state and, by extension, the articulation between social and polit-
ical key institutions to the economy. Whatever label one cares to put on
the two blocs, liberal/social democratic for the West or Marxist-Leninist
for the Central and Eastern portions of Europe, the consequences for
the world of academe were fundamental. The most remarkable feature,
which formed an explicit part in the maximalist programme of educa-
tional reconstruction, involved at first the introduction of practices and
curricula as part of re-education for democracy.
Yet, in 1947, the Western Allies withdrew the forcible application of
the re-education programme. The universities asked for and obtained the
right to self-government, which they had lost during the Nazi regime.
Essentially, their former structures and practices were re-established. But
the various strands contained in policies of post-war reconstruction were
also to have a major effect in Western Europe upon the patterns and long-
term development of the universities. Prior to the drawing up of plans
15 For the situation of German academia, see F. Ringer, The Decline of the German Man-
darins: The German Academic Community 1890–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).
34
Patterns
for post-war reconstruction, a nation’s universities tended to be regarded
as individual establishments, each contributing in its specific manner to
the training of future political and administrative elites and as guardians
of the nation’s culture. Their mission, quite apart from their place in
society, had been interpreted largely within the canons of the humanistic
and largely historical tradition. The experience of war and recovery gave
particular legitimacy to the university system of what may pass for an
administrative if not a planner’s paradigm. The individual university was
seen as one element in an overall ‘university system’. Because today this
perspective is taken for granted as a basic category of analysis and com-
parison by policy-makers and students of higher education, we should
not be blind to the importance of this conceptual shift.
The notion of higher education as a system, the increasing degree of
operational complexity and detail, regulation and oversight in Western
Europe were not the only pattern-shaping influences at work from 1945
to 1995. This sheer operational complexity may be brought to mind by
referring to two areas: changes in ministerial remits and the drive towards
system-wide legislation. The first involved the setting up of specific min-
istries to deal with the affairs of higher education. Although not techni-
cally a ministry, but a board of permanent civil servants, the now defunct
Swedish National Board of Universities and Colleges created out of
the Office of the Chancellor of Swedish Universities in 1964 is perhaps the
first in a line of development that spread across Western Europe over the
ensuing quarter century. In 1970 the government of the Federal Republic
of Germany was granted the right of ‘framework legislation’ on higher
education and established a Federal Ministry of Education and Science.
In Austria higher education became the domain of a Federal Ministry of
Science and Research, created in 1973. The French Ministry of Universi-
ties, set up in 1976, is another, though it did not survive beyond 1981. In
Belgium, two Ministries of Higher Education, one for the Francophone,
the other for the Dutch-speaking parts of the country, were put in place in
1988. Italy followed suit in establishing the Ministry of Higher Education
and Research in 1990.
the expansion of the soviet university model

In countries under Soviet occupation collectivization of the means of
production, the setting up of a command economy, the establishment
of centralized state planning, the creation of single-party states and
the fusion of party and state brought with them radical consequences
for the university. And though the way each country responded and
35
Guy Neave
interpreted this programme was far from the same, the basic goals were
very similar.16 These goals were first the incorporation of universities
into the apparatus of state as part of the nation’s intellectual productive
process; second, subordination of the higher-education system in toto to
the imperative demands of the economy, both in quantitative and in qual-
itative terms, the close control exercised by central administration over
capacity planning and curricular content justified on grounds as much
ideological as technical. If higher education, under such a scheme, had
the basic ideological goal of creating socialist man whose individual and
personal fulfilment lay in the service he or she rendered the collectivity,
it also had the explicit purpose of ‘eliminating the essential differences
between physical and intellectual work and of ensuring the development
of the social homogeneity of society’.17
Clearly, the repercussions that followed from such a programme pen-
etrated all areas from admissions policy and access to the institutional
structure and stratification and to the content of studies. Just as Socialism
can be viewed as a way of adapting traditional society, its institutions
and its policies to the process of industrialization, so the reforms put
in place in Central and Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1951 can be
seen as a deliberate attempt to break away from that model of organic
accretion which had hitherto largely characterized the development of the
historical university. In short, if executed in the name of the collectivity
and Marxism-Leninism, it was a programme which, to use the inim-
itable parlance of contemporary Western technocracy, aimed not merely
to ‘systematize’ the university by ‘scientific planning’ and economic fore-
casting, it also sought to rationalize, though principally by administrative
and political centralization, management structures, goal setting, priority
formulation and academic authority – issues which were to assume par-
ticular importance in the Western democracies only after the upheaval of
1968.
The incorporation of the higher-education system as a subset of a com-
mand economy brought a number of consequences in its wake and more
particularly those related to the role and status of the university sensu
stricto. In the first place, the university, either in terms of student enrol-
ments or of numbers of establishments, constituted a minority form of
higher education. Thus, in the Soviet Union of 1960, of the 739 institu-
tions of higher education covering all sectors of the economy, 40 were
universities. Similarly, total student enrolments across all sectors of higher
education in that same year were 2,396,000 of which slightly over
16 L. Rybalko and E. Soloviev, Reflection on the Future: Educational Development and

Forecasting (Paris, 1980), 4–5.
17 V. Affanasiev, ‘The Soviet Union’, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 643–63.
36
Patterns
10 per cent – 249,000 – were university students.18 Clearly, as the ‘leading
sector’ within the Soviet model, the university discharged a very specific
mission alongside the other highly differentiated sectors of higher educa-
tion. This was to train researchers, to supply highly qualified academic
staff to the university world and to provide teachers for secondary edu-
cation. This model not only placed major emphasis on the significance of
the non-university sector as a means of meeting medium-term needs of
the economy – an issue that was to emerge in the course of the mid-sixties
and beyond in the West. But, because institutional tasks and functions
were formally assigned in keeping with the instrumentality of a planned
economy, it tended also to be a system far more differentiated than any
equivalent pattern of higher education in the West, with the possible
exception of Belgium.19
The incorporation of the university into the command economy not
only tended to strengthen the specialized nature of the non-university
sector(s), it also involved a policy of splitting off some of the more
‘practice-oriented’ disciplines from the university and the building up of
separate, highly specialized ‘universities’, virtually of a mono-disciplinary
nature. Not untypical of such a policy of diversification by fragmentation
was the case of Riga University at the war’s end. The faculty of agri-
culture was split off to form a Latvian Academy of Agriculture whilst
the technological faculties were transferred to the Riga Polytechnic Insti-
tute. A similar development was visible slightly later at the University
of Poznań. Between 1948 and 1951, as part of the general transition
towards a Soviet-based model, the faculties of medicine and pharmacy
were broken out of the university to form medical academies, whilst the
department of physical education was hived off to become a college of
the same activity.20 Agriculture and forestry migrated to become a higher
school of agriculture.21 In Hungary similar moves applied to the facul-
ties of theology and medicine, the latter receiving the name of a medical
university.22
The degree to which disciplinary fields held to be key to the com-
manding heights of the economy were broken into specific fields varied
from country to country. The disciplinary fields retained within the ‘his-
toric’ university – in contrast to the specialist universities or polytechnic
18 Affanassiev, ‘Soviet Union’ (note 17), table 14, 657.

19 Higher education in Belgium divided formally and legally into seven different sectors
including the university. The details of this are set out in the law of 7 July 1970, See,
e.g., Ministerie van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap, Department Onderwijs, Education in
Belgium: The Diverging Paths (Brussels, 1991), 67–78, 211.
20 Ministry of Higher Education, Institutions of Higher Education in Poland: Information
and Statistics Bulletin (Warsaw, 1963), 8.
21 Jı́lek, Historical Compendium, 267, 260.
22 Jı́lek, Historical Compendium, 115, 129, 255, 290.
37
Guy Neave
establishments – were also subject to considerable variation. The strip-
ping out of ‘university-based subject areas’ reached its apogee in Bulgaria
and Hungary, where universities were confined to teaching the humani-
ties, natural sciences and law – a development that closely mirrored the
re-establishment of universities in the Soviet Union.23 At the other end
of the spectrum stood Czechoslovakia where the subject range covered
by the ‘historic’ university remained largely untouched and included the
humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, law, medicine and physical
education.24 Thus, in the face of the growth of the parallel university
system, based on key specialist sectors of the economy, or the expansion
of a non-university sector during the early fifties by the application of the
Soviet policy of diversification founded upon dividing up the university,
the university continued to be identified as providing a species of general
education.25
Two other features underlined the functional stratification which devel-
oped as a result of introducing a command economy model of higher
education into Central and Eastern Europe. The first of these, which was
to have a galvanizing effect on higher education in Western Europe in
the sixties,26 was the particular emphasis placed upon the development
of technological and technical higher education. The drive towards the
establishment of technological universities in the period of reconstruction
up to the early fifties corresponded both to an ideological commitment
as well as to a pragmatic need. The ideological commitment derived
from one of the fundamental tenets of Marxism-Leninism, namely, the
removal of the intellectual distinction between theory and praxis, and
consequently of the social stratification between those who were ‘brain’
workers and those who worked with their hands. The second and more
pragmatic consideration emerged in the need not merely to reconstruct
the industrial base, but in so doing also to lay down the social order
which derived from a political system founded upon the primacy of the
industrial proletariat.
The role of the university as an instrument of industrial and economic
reconstruction on the one hand and its mission of social engineering on the
23 See vol. III, Annex.

24 UNESCO, ‘Case Studies on the Development of Higher Education in Some Eastern Euro-
pean Countries’, Document ED-74/WS/52, 26 October 1974 (Paris, 1974), 17 [roneo].
25 Szczepanski, Systems (note 6).
26 Symbolically, this took the form of the Sputnik scare which, if its most direct effect
was to be seen in the United States in the form of the National Defense (education)
Act of 1960, had secondary order consequences for Western Europe; see also G. Neave,
‘Higher Education Policy as Orthodoxy: Being One Tale of Doxological Drift, Political
Intention and Changing Circumstances’, in P. Teixeira, B. Jongbloed, D. Dill and A.
Amaral (eds.), Markets in Higher Education: Rhetoric or Reality? (Dordrecht, 2004),
132–4.
38
Patterns
other brought with it equally significant changes in the place of research.
In the area of research policy, though universities did not cease their basic
commitment to this essential undertaking, they were neither the centre
nor, in general, did they command the best conditions, either of work or
of equipment. These remained firmly in the various academies – of sci-
ence, engineering, medicine, agriculture, social sciences and pedagogy –
which not only moulded national guidelines for research in response to
the various sectional ministries to which both they and the corresponding
type of university were linked via the branch and ‘inter branch’ system
of control and planning, but also carried out fundamental research and
awarded higher doctorates.27 The academies stood within their disci-
plinary fields, at the apex not only of the research system, but also of
an extremely powerful series of centrally constituted coordinating lay-
ers. They conferred upon the Soviet model of higher education their
fundamental feature of being coordinated by the state, as opposed to
being coordinated either by academic oligarchy, which is sometimes held
to have been the historic Western European model of coordination, or
by ‘the marketplace’, which some writers have equated with the United
States’ systems of higher education.28
Just as the establishment of a command economy placed especial weight
on developing technical and technological institutes to reinforce knowl-
edge transfer between higher education and a renascent industry, and in
so doing sought to allocate social prestige away from the historic model
of university towards these domains, so the creation of a socialist society
was reflected in policies of access to higher education. If higher education
was open to all qualified, this general principle was attenuated in various
ways: by competitive entrance examinations, by rigorous capacity plan-
ning to ensure that qualified student output remained in keeping with
the manpower requirements of the economy usually set by the State Plan-
ning Commission or its equivalent.29 The Eastern bloc countries practised
what may be presented as a form of positive discrimination in favour of
young people from working-class and peasant backgrounds.30 In addi-
tion, special facilities for members of both the agricultural and industrial
27 Y. M. Rabkin, ‘Academies: Soviet Union’, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia II, 1049–
55.
28 B. R. Clark, The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross National
Perspective (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1983), 265.
29 For Bulgaria: B. Penkov in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 95–9; Afanassiev, ‘The
Soviet Union’, in Clark, Encyclopedia I, 643–63; H. Möhle, ‘German Democratic Repub-
lic’, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 231–40.
30 For Poland: Szczepanski, Systems (note 6). In Poland, this measure had mixed results.
By the mid to late seventies, the numbers of entrants with these backgrounds had begun
to fall substantially. See W. Adamski and I. Bialecki, ‘Selection at School and Access to
Higher Education in Poland’, European Journal of Education, 16:2 (1981), 209–33.
39
Guy Neave
working classes to pursue higher education were set up from the first,
in the form of evening classes and correspondence classes. In Eastern
Germany, the democratization of higher education was the object of par-
ticular attention. The University of Greifswald, reopened in 1946, made
provision for lectures for secondary-school students who had left school
without formal qualification. Three years later, this facility was formal-
ized as a Faculty of Workers and Peasants. It lasted throughout the tran-
sition period and was closed in 1962.31 This species of second route to
higher education for workers and professionals in employment, incorpo-
rated into the mainstream of higher education, remained a characteristic
feature of higher education in East and Central Europe. If founded upon
the need to bring forward to higher levels of knowledge social strata
other than the traditional upper middle classes which predominated in
non-Socialist regimes, access to higher education remained, for all that,
driven primarily by manpower considerations to which social demand
remained firmly subordinated.
However one interprets the Soviet model of higher education or the
variants upon it which were implanted into Eastern and Central Europe,
whether as an attempt to harness the university to the scientific principles
of socialism, or as an adaptation to the ‘progressive forces of dialec-
tical materialism’, it remained self-contained. Until the events of 1989
and 1990, academic mobility between the two ‘world order’ systems of
higher education remained highly restricted and under close official con-
trol. This is not to say that within the Eastern bloc academic exchange
at all levels – students, researchers and staff – was absent. On the con-
trary, academic traffic was heavy, above all between systems of higher
education in East and Central Europe and the Soviet Union.32 Yet, across
the decades, despite the fact that universities in Europe grew unprece-
dentedly in number, and their staff and students expanded their ranks,
academic interchange between the two blocs remained invisible to all but
the anxious eyes of governments and security services. Expressed as a
proportion of those involved in the respective systems of higher educa-
tion, whether as students, researchers or as staff, such interchange was in
fact minimal.33 There is no testimony more eloquent to the depth of the
ideological cul-de-sac into which Europe’s universities had been backed
than this.
31 Jı́lek, Historical Compendium, 162.

32 D. Kallen and G. Neave, The Open Door: Pan European Academic Cooperation
(Bucharest, 1991), 9–84.
33 Kallen’s enquiry, conducted by field visits during 1989 and 1990 to government agencies
in charge of academic mobility both in West and East, suggests that over the period from
1988 to 1989, some 11,164 individuals from the Eastern bloc countries visited Western
universities and approximately 3,080 were involved in moves in the opposite direction
(Kallen and Neave, Open Door (note 32), 48–9).
40
Patterns
the drive to mass higher education

The drive of the university in Europe towards mass higher education
stands as one of the watersheds in its history. From the 1950s through
to the 1990s, higher-education systems and within them the university
have been under the severe and continued pressure of spiralling student
numbers. By 1990, a higher proportion of the age group found places
in higher education than was often the case four decades previously in
the academic upper secondary school on its own. In 1990, Spain enrolled
fifteen times more students than in 1960; Finland and the Netherlands
more than ten times more university students than in 1950. In the Federal
Republic of Germany and the United Kingdom, student enrolments rose
by a factor of nine, in France eight, in Greece, Italy and Austria six, in
Belgium five, and in Yugoslavia four.
This was not the case for the universities in East and Central Europe.
Annual growth rates in most East European systems of higher education
were low if not negative.34 The reasons for this will be dealt with later, in
the context of the institutional development of the university in different
parts of Europe. The contrast between the two blocs is striking in the uni-
formity of trends within each, quite apart from the enormous differences
between them.
If this policy – extended over two decades from the early sixties
onwards – left few aspects unchanged, it remains no easy matter to
plot the course of even the crudest of these dimensions. The develop-
ment of mass higher education was not confined to the university alone,
although in certain countries, Italy and Spain being the most noteworthy,
the university sensu stricto was the main institutional vehicle through
which the transition was accomplished. In other countries, for exam-
ple France, the ex-Federal Republic of Germany, Britain and Norway,
expansion of student numbers went hand in hand with an expansion in
the types of institution brought into the ambit of the nation’s higher-
education provision. Expansion was then matched by institutional diver-
sification and by the development of a non-university sector, the principal
features of which tended to be its emphasis on the applied and social
sciences, a duration of studies shorter than the classical university first-
degree curriculum, a claim that imparted skills and knowledge held to be
directly applicable in the world of work,35 and finally a commitment to
34 Kallen and Neave, Open Door (note 32), esp. table 3, 19.
35 D. Furth, Short Cycle Higher Education: Crisis of Identity (Paris, 1974); for France: J.
Lamour, Les instituts universitaires de technologie (Paris, 1981); for the Federal Republic
of Germany: U. Teichler, ‘Das Hochschulwesen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland – ein
Überblick’, in U. Teichler (ed.), Das Hochschulwesen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
(Weinheim, 1990), 11–42; for Norway: S. Kyvik, The Norwegian Regional College: A
Study in the Establishment and Implementation of a Reform in Higher Education (Oslo,
1981); for Britain: J. Pratt and T. Burgess, The Polytechnics (London, 1974).
41
Guy Neave
Table 2.1 University enrolments in thousands from 1950
to 1990
Country 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990∗
Austria 24.6 27.2 43.1 100.1 213.4

Belgium 18.2 28.1 42.0 63.3 108.5
Bulgaria 85.3 127.0
Czechoslovakia 38.8 112.9∗∗
Denmark 7.3 113.8
Finland 10.4 23.0 58.8 83.0 120.5
France 129.0 240.7 694.8 883.6 1,251.4
Germany FRG 247.2 412.0 791.5 (1,504.1)
Germany GDR 30.1 44.0 32.0
Greece 72.3 85.7 117.3
Hungary 108.4
Iceland 0.9 2.0 3.6 5.2
Ireland 42.8
Italy 180.1 268.0 682.0 1048.0 1,324.9
The Netherlands 18.1 40.7 103.4 151.2 173.9
Norway 7.4 9.6 30.2 40.6 47.9
Poland 823.0∗∗
Portugal 11.5 19.5 43.6 65.0
Romania
Spain 76.4 232.1 629.6 1,158.8
Sweden 9.7 93.9
Switzerland 13.2 80.2
UK 81.0 129.0 258.0 340.0 799.4
USSR 248.9 503.5 609.4 593.7
Yugoslavia 60.6 106.3 172.6 302.8 267.1
Source: specified country entries in Clark, Encyclopedia I and UNESCO,

Organization and Statistics (Paris, 1951); OECD, Education in OECD
Countries: A Compendium of Statistical Information (Paris, 1993), 64ff.;
File and Goedegebuure, Real-Time Systems (note 39), table 5, 49.
practice-based teaching that was not matched by its institutional commit-

ment to research.
If such institutional markers in theory set the non-university sector
off from the university, in reality the boundary lines were less clear-cut.
British polytechnics, created between 1966 and 1972 as an alternative
to the university – though the origins of individual establishments can be
traced back to the end of the last century – provide an excellent example of
the blurring of institutional frontiers. Their duration of study was exactly
the same as the university first degree; their subject profile and patterns of
student subject choice imbued with remarkable similarity to universities.
Over the years, they accumulated a not inconsiderable research capacity
as well as scattered doctoral degree programmes. In France, the university
institutes of technology, also created in 1966, whilst differentiated by their
emphasis on subjects directly aligned with economic sectors, secondary
42
Patterns
and tertiary, awarded first degrees corresponding to the two-year first
cycle at university.
The promotion of establishments outside higher education to higher-
education status – a pattern found in the Federal Republic of Germany in
the case of the Fachhochschulen upgraded from secondary school status –
nevertheless poses severe methodological difficulties. What defines a uni-
versity? Is it, as an American student of higher education has proposed,
an establishment with the full range of faculties?36 Some of the more
prominent French universities would not qualify.37 Some of the more
specialized institutions in Eastern and Central Europe, such as economics
universities or veterinary universities, would suffer the same fate. Are
there operational criteria that permit us to draw a hard and fast line
between different institutional types in face of the evident blurring at
the edges which has been a feature in the higher-education systems of
Western Europe from the early seventies onward?
These discriminations became even more central from 1990 onwards
owing to major shifts in the definition of higher education itself. In addi-
tion to universities sensu stricto there emerged ‘university-type’ estab-
lishments, often identified by the presence of master’s – or equivalent –
degree programmes and, here and there, a smattering of research. Def-
inition became even more complex with the need to assert identity and
status and to generate revenue, all of which accompanied the injection of
a ‘market-driven ideology’ and the principle of competition. In the case
of the ex-Eastern bloc, definitional sleight of hand became commonplace,
as governments imploded and ‘private’ universities proliferated,38 largely
as an attempt by academia to ensure its daily bread, if not its survival.39
Faced with these pitfalls, to which can be added the sheer number of
universities created or founded, we have chosen the legalistic approach
which the CRE/EUA applies to member institutions and which has its
roots in the history of the European universities: universities are insti-
tutions of higher education founded or recognized as universities by the
public authorities of their territory and authorized by these authorities
36 C. Kerr, The Great Transformation of Higher Education 1960–1980 (Albany, 1991).

37 For this point, see G. Neave, ‘France’, in B. R. Clark (ed.), The Research Foundations
of Graduate Education: Germany, Britain, France, United States, Japan (Berkeley, Los
Angeles and London, 1993), 159–220.
38 For the situation in Romania in the 1990s, see A.-M. Dima, ‘Quality Assurance Mech-
anisms and Accreditation Processes in Private Higher Education in Roumania’, in
UNESCO, Globalisation and the Market in Higher Education: Quality, Accreditation
and Qualifications (Paris, 2002), 145–58.
39 G. Neave, ‘On the Return from Babylon: A Long Voyage around History, Ideology and
Systems Change’, in J. File and L. Goedegebuure (eds.), Real-Time Systems: Reflections
on Higher Education in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia (Brno,
2003), 15–37; Teixeira et al., Markets (note 26).
43
Guy Neave
to confer the academic degrees of master and doctor.40 The data used to
compare universities so defined have been compiled by the CRE, now the
European University Association (EUA).41 A selection of establishments
that were already universities by 1950 or that subsequently achieved this
status by 1985 was made. It yielded 524 establishments across twenty-
five countries, eight in the ex-Eastern bloc and the remainder in West-
ern Europe.42 The thickening of what has been termed the ‘institutional
fabric’43 of the university sector is evident. The 200-odd universities in
1950 had more than doubled thirty-five years later and numbered around
500. There were more students in each institution. In the Federal Repub-
lic of Germany, Spain and Italy, certain establishments reached towering
proportions – Munich and the Freie Universität Berlin with more than
60,000 students each, the University of Madrid Complutense with a sim-
ilar number,44 and the University of Rome La Sapienza carrying the quite
extraordinary load of 120,000 students on its books. Few firms indeed
can claim to concentrate so many workers in one city!
Expansion was not a slow accretion over time. As figure 2.1 shows,
there was a very clear concentration on the five years between 1970 and
1975.
Against the long-term history of the university in Europe, this expan-
sion is a remarkable feat. From the perspective of creating universities,
it was an almost purely Western European phenomenon. There are a
number of explanations that might account for this fact and that also
explain the stagnation in the growth of student enrolments in the East-
ern bloc at the same time. The infrastructure of higher education has
always developed less intensely in Eastern and Central than in Western
Europe. Second, the ravages of war were immeasurably less in the West
and in the universities located there. The efforts needed in Eastern and
40 The same criterion is also applied by most governments for recognizing the status of a
university, because the award of these degrees asks for fundamental research facilities
and regular research activities.
41 Jı́lek, Historical Compendium, published by the CRE as the first result of and as a work-
ing instrument for the History of the University in Europe project, dates from 1984 and
therefore omits any establishment attaining university status after 1983. Nevertheless, it
has two immense advantages: it is about the only document that contains the succinct
institutional history of individual establishments; it also obviates, but not entirely, what
would otherwise be the work for a team of research assistants. All institutions in this
work were scrutinized for their date of foundation as a university, for their institutional
origins if they came from a non-university establishment.
42 Luxembourg was not included. Since Soviet universities are very much under-represented
in Jı́lek’s Compendium (some 22), the total of 65 was taken from Afanassiev, ‘The Soviet
Union’ (note 29).
43 For the treatment of this concept as a major analytical category in the study of higher
education systems, see Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia II.
44 For the administrative and managerial consequences of this, see ICED, La Reforma
Universitaria española: evaluación e informe (Madrid, 1987).
44
Patterns
Universites founded by half-decade
190
171
152
133
Absolute numbers
114
95
76
57
38
19
0
Prior to 1950 1956-60 1966-70 1976-80

Half-decades
Overall West East
Figure 2.1 New universities in Eastern and Western Europe

1950–1990
Central Europe to recover from such destruction are evident in figure 2.1,
particularly during the period from 1950 to 1955.
Also the university constitutes only one segment within a highly seg-
mented system. By plotting the institutional development of the univer-
sity we have left aside what may well be more substantial growth in the
non-university sector. Given the importance of technological and tech-
nical institutions, formally of non-university status, the poor showing of
Eastern and Central Europe in creating universities may be partially a
definitional artefact. The expansion of higher education in the West was
largely the product of individual demand, amplified in many countries by
the constitutional right of duly qualified individuals to a place in higher
education.45 There existed few ways that were politically acceptable of
channelling such demand, other than by the progressive establishment of
a restricted entry policy to specific disciplines – the numerus clausus –
or by selection during the first year of study, either in the form of a
propaedeutic year46 or by immense failure rates.
45 Such a right is attached to the French baccalauréat, the Austrian, Belgian, Italian, Swiss
Maturität, Maturité, Maturità and the German Abitur. It does not follow from this that
individuals are guaranteed a place in the faculty or department of their first choice.
Indeed, one of the major trends over the past thirty years in Western Europe has been
the introduction of a numerus clausus for certain over-subscribed faculties or disciplines.
Prime amongst these are engineering and medicine.
46 This has been tried at various times both in France and in the Netherlands and has its
functional equivalent in the Spanish Curso de Orientación Universitaria. In Spain, few
of those sitting this examination fail, however.
45
Guy Neave
By contrast, the essential feature of a command economy lay precisely
in matching student numbers to institutional capacity and from there to
aligning it on formal manpower requirements. Individual demand existed
insofar as it accorded with the individual’s attainment and his assignment
to a particular segment of the higher-education system. Demand could
be and was channelled between segments in accordance with manpower
planning projections.47 Command economy systems had then the ability
and, moreover, the legitimacy, to divert demand away from the university
sector if required. And though such considerations were not absent in the
West, the diversion could only be a matter of voluntary, individual choice.
This in itself is a significant difference.
National university stock accumulation

Table 2.2 sets out the total number of establishments identified as being
of university status between 1981 and 1984, the proportion of those
establishments in existence prior to 1950, and the number of universi-
ties created per half-decade expressed as a proportion of the ‘national
stock’.48
One of the more interesting aspects of this table is the fact that some
university systems were virtually in their present form by 1950. Switzer-
land, Ireland and Austria were then largely settled systems. Growth and
expansion in student numbers were accommodated within the existing
institutional framework. At the other end of the spectrum are countries
whose university system, though often resting on a solid core of more
than centennial foundations, is, in its present form, the creation of the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century. Into this group fall Bulgaria, Finland,
France, the ex-German Federal Republic, Greece, Portugal, Romania,
Spain and Yugoslavia. These countries undertook massive programmes
of institution creation, which raised their institutional stock to four times
the level of 1950.
Table 2.2 reveals with particular clarity the national dimension to the
overall trend noted in figure 2.1 – namely, that for many Eastern bloc
countries the period of post-war reconstruction was also the period which
saw the completion of the nation’s present-day university network. In
the case of Czechoslovakia, this process was to all intents and purposes
complete by 1955. Poland and Hungary present a similar picture. The
German Democratic Republic extended the policy of institution develop-
ment up to the period 1961–5, by which time Bulgaria had also put its
47 K. Hüfner, ‘Economics’, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia III, 1797–1809.
48 Table 2.2 locates the datum point at the end of the period under enquiry, i.e. 1984, in
order to show when the provision of the national university stock was completed and
over which length of time policies of institutional expansion and renewal were pursued.
46
Patterns
Table 2.2 The development of the university infrastructure 1949–1984.
Universities present or created per quinquennium as a percentage of all
universities existing in 1984 by country
1949 1954 1959 1964 1969 1974 1979 1984 Total

% % % % % % % % in 1984
Austria 58 8 8 8 17 12
Belgium 25 6 31 38 16
Bulgaria 17 17 17 50 6
Czechoslovakia 58 17 8 8 8 12
Denmark 67 17 17 6
France 20 3 67 11 81
Finland 8 8 23 38 8 16 13
Germany FRG 26 9 2 7 16 33 2 5 57
GDR 50 20 10 20 10
Greece 31 8 23 23 8 8 13
Hungary 56 44 9
Iceland 100 1
Italy 51 2 8 16 8 14 49
Ireland 100 2
Netherlands 50 7 14 14 14 14
Norway 50 50 4
Portugal 31 8 16 31 15 13
Poland 38 46 8 8 13
Romania 25 25 12 13 25 8
Spain 27 9 12 30 21 34
Sweden 46 9 18 9 18 11
Switzerland 100 10
UK 56 2 2 6 25 6 2 48
USSR 49 6 11 3 14 14 5 65
Yugoslavia 22 11 6 22 39 18
Unknown 4
Total created in 201 32 18 32 56 127 39 19 524
quinquennium
Per cent existing 38 44 47 53 64 88 95 99 100
in quinquennium
Source: Jı́lek, Historical Compendium
university system in place. Two exceptions are Romania and Yugoslavia.

The former divided its reforming energies across two periods, the first
coinciding with the pattern of post-war reconstruction common to other
socialist regimes, the second taking place at the same time as the institu-
tional boom in the West. Yugoslavia, by contrast, developed like Western
Mediterranean countries.
In the West, the large increase in universities occurred in the sixties and
seventies, though there was a ‘lagged response’ in Greece, Portugal and
Spain, countries where the bulk of the effort was concentrated across the
years 1971 to 1980. The interesting feature that emerges from the process
47
Guy Neave
of ‘stock accumulation’ in Western Europe is not so much its location in
time as its duration and intensity. Analysed along these two dimensions,
countries can be grouped into one of two categories: those where stock
accumulation was relatively protracted and those where the major effort
was concentrated and contained within a relatively short period. The
outstanding example of efforts which, for their very concentration, can
be classified as nothing less than Herculean – at least on paper, if not in
brick, concrete and glass – is France. Between 1970 and 1974 two-thirds
of France’s present-day universities saw the light of day, largely thanks
to institutional fission which split existing universities into two or three
separate entities, usually based around cognate disciplinary fields.49 Ex
uno plures rather than e pluribus unum.
Few other countries imitated the French, though Norway, in doubling
its stock between 1966 and 1970, might be seen as a possible contender.
The scale of the operation, however, was very different. Turning to the
first criterion, that of protracted development, four systems are notewor-
thy. In the Federal Republic of Germany and the United Kingdom the
accumulation of university stock began after 1950 and continued for two
decades, culminating in the United Kingdom between 1960 and 1969,
in the Federal Republic between 1965 and 1974. In Finland and Italy
expansion began slowly after 1950, but it increased from 1965 on and
continued until the eighties.
foundation and creation

It is one thing to observe the timing and intensity of the general process
of adding to the nation’s stock of universities.50 But the way in which
the process itself evolved demands the distinction between creation and
foundation. A university may be created out of the structure of an estab-
lishment of a very different type. The process has been in existence for
almost as long as the university itself, and it began, very often, by confer-
ring the rights of a studium generale with its structural implications upon
an already existing establishment. This has not changed today, and the
variety of prior institutional bases from which a university may spring
fully-fledged, recognized and accredited with all the remaining privileges
by authority, has in no way diminished. The process of assimilation is
49 L. Lévy-Garboua, ‘Différentiation des enseignements supérieurs notamment en premier

cycle’, in Documents annexes à demain l’université: Rapport au ministre délégué de la
recherche et de l’enseignement supérieur (Paris, 1987) [mimeo]; A. Bienaymé, ‘Deux
millions d’étudiants en l’an 2000: Que demande la France de l’enseignement supérieur?’,
Cahiers de l’Université Paris IX Dauphine (1987), 152.
50 For the policy of national governments promoting this spawning process, see chapter 3.
48
Patterns
Table 2.3 Foundation and creation of new universities in
Europe 1950–1984
Overall East West

% N= % N= % N=
Universities existing in 1949 37 204 50 71 33 133

Foundations 31 96 29 20 31 76
Establishments created:
(1) from university status 43 139 44 31 44 108
(2) from non-university status 26 83 27 19 25 63
Total of universities founded and 100 318 100 70 100 245
established 1950–1984
Unknown 2 5
Universities existing in 1984 N = 524 141 383
New universities as % of all 60 50 64
existing in 1984
not always easy, as many students of implementation theory in higher

education have found.51
Creation may involve several steps before reaching the Promised Land
of full university rank. Many of the establishments designated universities
in the UK in the inter-war and immediate post-war period possessed a pre-
vious institutional form as university colleges, affiliated to an established
university – in many cases, to the University of London. Between their
foundation as an establishment of higher education and their creation
as fully recognized universities, they went through the step of university
college. Variation on this process involved a two-step process. Many of
the so-called ‘technological’ universities established in the course of the
sixties had been regional colleges of technology in the early fifties. Certain
of them were promoted to colleges of advanced technology later in that
same decade.52 The British polytechnics established from 1966 onwards,
however, formed the basis of a reinforced ‘non-university’ sector and as
such are taken into account here only when they became fully-fledged
universities in 1992.53
Table 2.3 distinguishes between universities under a command econ-
omy and those in the Western countries. In the West almost two-thirds of
51 L. Cerych and P. Sabatier, Great Expectations and Mixed Performance: The Imple-
mentation of Higher Education Reforms in Europe (Stoke-on-Trent, 1986); J.-E. Lane,
Creating the University of Norrland: Goals, Structures and Outcomes (Umeå, 1983).
52 T. Burgess and J. Pratt, Policy and Practice: The Colleges of Advanced Technology
(London, 1970); P. Venables, Higher Education Developments: The Technological Uni-
versities 1956–1976 (London, 1978).
53 See below, 63.
49
Guy Neave
the universities existing in 1984 were created during the previous thirty-
five years. The command economies never surpassed the effort of their
Western rivals. True, the number of additional universities doubled the
regional stock from 71 to 141. Over the same period, Western Europe
added 255 establishments. Yet, when we turn our attention to the particu-
lar way in which universities were created – by building new foundations,
by upgrading those already endowed with a certain university status, or
by promoting others to this condition – there is a considerable similarity.
Upgrading establishments already endowed with a form of university
status was with 44% in the Eastern bloc and in the West the most used
of the three strategies. The proportion of new constructions was only
slightly higher in Western than in Eastern systems – 31% against 29%.
Direct institutional elevation from non-university to university status was
slightly higher in the Eastern bloc (27%) than in the West (25%).
The method employed to meet growth in demand and how it was
reflected in the university stock of individual countries is set out in
table 2.4.
In Western Europe, Belgium, Finland, France and the then Federal
Republic of Germany show particularly strong growth; in the Eastern
bloc, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia. Amongst the systems where
the policy of institutional promotion from a previous existence in the
non-university sector appeared to be the main instrument are Belgium,
Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, the Netherlands and Roma-
nia. By contrast, upgrading – that is, conferring full university status on
institutions which already enjoyed a partial condition – was especially
evident in Portugal, Poland, France and Spain. Creating new universities
by splitting old ones apart can be seen as a variation on institutional
upgrading – a pattern much employed for instance in France after 1968.
At the time of their creation, new universities naturally attracted con-
siderable attention, particularly when they sought to develop alterna-
tive ways of organizing disciplines, introducing new curricular patterns,
redrawing the map of knowledge and, in the case of the German com-
prehensive universities set up experimentally in the mid-1970s, of reunit-
ing ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ in the undergraduate curriculum in response
to changing skills requirements from the labour market.54 Not all new
foundations were dedicated to innovation. Yet a considerable number
assumed this additional catalysing role. It is no less evident that only in
a minority of countries did the founding of new universities constitute
the main and undisputed basis for the expansion of the nation’s univer-
sity network. Amongst the notable exceptions to this general rule were
Denmark, Finland and Portugal.
54 For example, H. J. Perkin, New Universities in the United Kingdom (Paris, 1969).
50
Patterns
Table 2.4 Foundation and creation of new universities 1950–1984
Created from
institutions with
Universities Non-
existing in New University university Total
foundations status status created
1949 1984
N= N= N= % N= % N= % N= %
Austria 7 12 1 8 3 25 1 8 5 42
Belgium 4 16 2 12 8 50 2 13 12 75
Bulgaria 1 6 1 16 3 50 2 33 5 83
Czechoslovakia 7 12 3 25 2 17 5 42
Denmark 4 6 2 33 2 33
Finland 1 13 5 39 3 23 4 31 12 92
France 16 81 7 9 34 42 24 30 65 80
Germany DDR 5 10 1 10 4 40 5 50
Germany BRD 15 57 10 18 18 32 14 25 42 74
Greece 4 13 7 54 1 8 1 8 9 69
Hungary 5 9 3 33 1 11 4 44
Iceland 1 1 100
Ireland 2 2
Italy 24 49 9 18 13 27 2 4 24 49
Netherlands 7 14 2 14 2 14 3 21 7 50
Norway 2 4 1 25 1 25 2 50
Poland 5 13 4 31 4 31 1 8 9 69
Portugal 4 13 4 31 4 31 1 8 9 69
Romania 2 8 1 12 2 25 3 38 6 75
Soviet Union 32 65 15 23 10 15 5 8 33 46
Spain 9 33 8 24 10 30 6 18 24 72
Sweden 5 11 2 18 2 18 2 18 6 55
Switzerland 10 10
United Kingdom 27 48 9 19 10 21 2 4 21 44
Yugoslavia 5 18 6 33 5 28 2 11 13 72
Unknown 10
Europe 204 524 96 139 83 320
Table 2.5 distinguishes the new universities from those that were
upgraded or promoted from a non-university institution.
Of the 224 establishments created by upgrading, more than half derived
from another institution of university status. Very few of these under-
went two changes prior to attaining university rank, though this mode
of development occurred more often in Eastern Europe. The question
remains whether, in expanding their provision of universities, the same
channels of institutional promotion were used by East and West.
In the West, more than 60 per cent of all universities extant in 1984
were new establishments as compared to 53 per cent in the Eastern bloc,
and a significantly higher proportion of established universities in the
East were the result of upgrading – one-third as against one fifth. The
51
Guy Neave
Table 2.5 Patterns of institutional development (new universities
created between 1950 and 1984)
Overall West East Unknown

N= % N= % N= % N=
Total universities 1984 524 383 141

New universities total 319 61 241 62 78 55
Universities established by:
– upgrading 129 58 107 63 22 42 10
– promotion 83 37 62 36 19 37
– 2-step promotion 12 5 1 <1 11 21
Total established universities 224 100 170 99 52 100
latter pattern largely reflects the process of splitting off faculties to form
specialized universities during the 1950s.
regionalization
The rising number of Europe’s universities was not simply a response to
student demand. It was also a response to the demand for accessibility.55
The creation of a university, as Max Weber long ago noted, is not just a
cause for rejoicing for students or their parents. It is also the source of no
less satisfaction amongst shopkeepers, landladies and local politicians,56
for if students are the wealth of tomorrow’s nation, they are very much
today’s consumers of goods and services. Equalization of geographical
access to university was a powerful argument, especially when allied
to the notion that the university itself could serve not merely to raise
the educational level of regions often distant from the capital or on the
periphery of a nation’s university infrastructure, but could also act as a
catalyst in a region’s flagging industrial infrastructure.
The physical location of universities, the upgrading of non-university
establishments and the strengthening of others became in the course of the
sixties and the following decade an aspect of considerable importance in
the planning of higher education. The foundations in the Federal Republic
of Germany of the Universities of Trier and Kaiserslautern,57 of the
University of Umeå in Sweden58 and of the University of Cosenza in
Southern Italy are examples, though the last responded more to the urgent
demands of party than to the theories of human capital applied to the
55 See chapter 3.
56 M. Weber, ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’, in C. Wright Mills and H. Gerth (eds.), From Max
Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford 1964) [translation].
57 G. Kueppers et al., ‘Die Universität Trier’, Paedagogica Europaea, 12:2 (1976), 86–112.
58 Lane, Creating (note 51).
52
Patterns
region.59 The clearest example of the marriage between the university and
regional development policies was Finland where, from the early sixties
onwards, university location was determined in the light of the need to
build up the regional economy.60
Equity in the distribution of universities across regions rarely, if ever,
brought about immediate change in governance, control or accountabil-
ity. Three factors have subsequently altered this situation. The first one
was administrative, exemplified by the Swedish reforms of 1977 that
brought all higher-education establishments under one administrative
umbrella within each of seven regions, and made provision both for
regional representatives on university boards and for regional higher-
education boards to have financial control over an element of non-degree
courses.61 The second factor that enhanced regional control over higher
education was cultural. It was a reflection inside the university of demands
made externally for a region’s claims to a specific cultural and his-
toric identity.62 The creation of the autonomous regions in Spain and
the establishment of social councils representing regional interests inside
the university,63 and the administrative division of Belgium into Dutch-
and French-speaking parts, each exercising control over the financing
of higher education, are cases in point. The third factor, while no less
political, has financial considerations as its prime motive and has to do
with hiving off certain functions of central administration down to the
regional level and increasing the direct contributions of regional authori-
ties to financing higher education. France since 198964 and Norway since
199065 are perhaps the best examples of this process.
The regional dimension as a force currently shaping the development
of universities is important, though still a minor trend. It implies strength-
ening what has often been seen as a ‘weak middle layer’ in higher-
education administration, one sandwiched between a powerful central
59 For a perceptive and hilarious account, see D. Ryan, ‘The University of Calabria in its
Regional Context’, Paedagogica Europaea, 13:1 (1977), 63–92.
60 J. Vakkuri, ‘Institutional Change of Universities as a Problem of Evolving Boundaries’,
Higher Education Policy, 17:3 (2004), 287–310.
61 R. T. Premfors, ‘The Regionalization of Swedish Higher Education’, Comparative Edu-
cation Review, 28:1 (1984), 85–104.
62 R. Diez-Hochleitner, ‘La educación postsecundaria ante la sociedad del conocimento y
de la comunicaciones – documento del trabajo basico’, in La educación postsecondaria
ante la sociedad del conocimiento y de las comunicaciones: documentos de un debate
(Madrid, 1989), 9–17.
63 ICED, Reforma universitaria (note 44).
64 J. Guin, ‘The Re-awakening of French Higher Education’, European Journal of Educa-
tion, 25:2 (1990), 123–46.
65 P. O. Aamodt, ‘A New Deal for Norwegian Higher Education?’, European Journal of
Education, 25:2 (1990), 171–85.
53
Guy Neave
administration and equally powerful institutions.66 It implies also that
university priorities will be influenced increasingly by the budgetary
clout of regional authorities. From there it follows that, since regional
economies and the labour market will develop in very different ways, the
university system, though held in many countries to be homogeneous in
task and disciplinary coverage, may well see new forms of institutional
diversification and specialization required by the regional economy. Since
the history of the university has long involved a swing between periods of
institutional convergence and divergence,67 the increasing weight of the
regional in the life of the university may well be a counterweight to the
convergence explicit in the creation of a European higher-education area.
It is certainly one of the many influences driving the ‘de-nationalization’
of higher education.68
the place of the ‘non-state’ sector

The conversion of the universities in Europe towards mass higher edu-
cation, by contrast with the United States and Latin America,69 was
almost exclusively a public undertaking. That it was planned, financed
and implemented by the government, and in Western Europe involved a
massive numerical reinforcement of state-sector higher education, should
not cause us to lose sight of the non-state sector. Recent developments
and the ideological shift towards ‘privatization’ in Western Europe and
its astonishingly rapid – if not incautious – assimilation as the guiding
principle for higher-education development in both Central and East-
ern Europe after 198970 give an additional retrospective importance to
this dimension. The importance of the ‘non-state sector’ is symbolic of a
66 T. Becher and M. Kogan, Structure and Process in Higher Education, 2nd edn (London,
1990).
67 U. Teichler, Convergence or Growing Variety: The Changing Organization of Studies
(Strasbourg, 1988).
68 For an exploration of some of the implications of this, see G. Neave, ‘La dimensió
educacional en la integració Europea: Una ulluda més enllà dels programes’, Bulletı́ dels
Mestres [Departament d’Ensaynament, Generalitat de Catalunya], 228 (June 1991),
5–11.
69 V. Stadtman, ‘The United States’, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 777–88; L. A.
Cuñha, ‘Public Policies for Higher Education in Brasil’, Higher Education Policy, 3:2
(1990), 21–5; D. C. Levy, University and Government in Mexico: Autonomy in an
Authoritarian System (New York, 1980); see also D. C. Levy, Higher Education and
the State in Latin America: Private Challenges to Public Dominance (Chicago, 1986); S.
Slancheva and D. Levy (eds.), Private Higher Education in Post-Communist Europe: In
Search of Legitimacy (New York, 2007).
70 See below, 60 and also the OECD Review of Higher Education in the Czech and
Slovak Federal Republic: Examiners’ Report and Questions (Paris, 1992); for the degree
of commitment to ‘market forces’ and some of their likely consequences, see Higher
Education in Europe, 16:3 (Autumn 1991).
54
Patterns
change in views as to the legitimate role of central administration in the
affairs of academe.71 It also had a real and structural significance as a
new species of ‘private higher education’ began to grow up on the margins
of the public sector, either as affiliates to established universities in the
form of schools of business administration (the Universities of London,
Manchester and Warwick in the UK) or, as one sees in France, Spain,
Belgium and the Netherlands, in the shape of schools of commerce, some
superior, others of a creatively ambiguous status and condition.
This ‘new’ non-state sector is characterized by its highly specialized and
restricted range of disciplines, which are focused almost exclusively on
economics, management and business studies, by its often considerable
fees even in countries where enrolment charges are minimal, and by its
proprietorial nature; that is, it is owned and legally incorporated as a
business. It also tends to have much smaller student intakes and to award
its own diplomas. Precisely how many establishments of this sort exist is
one of the grey areas of higher-education enquiry. The expansion of this
new institutional layer within the vaster universe of ‘non-state’ higher
education may well constitute one of the more significant amongst the
emerging patterns in the structure of higher education. Paradoxically,
since it has grown up as a structural response to ‘market forces’, it may be
seen as paralleling the segmentation between specialized establishments
which forty years ago were created to feed the different sectors of a
command economy in the Eastern bloc.
Be that as it may, the earlier forms of ‘non-state’ higher education, usu-
ally defined by their particular religious or ethical identity, were important
instruments in the drive to mass higher education. In some instances, and
notably in Belgium, the main change involved a ‘nationalization’ of their
financing.72 Another variant in the process of institutional development
of the ‘non-state’ sector may be seen in the Free University of Brussels
and the Catholic University of Leuven, though the decision owed more
to linguistic dissent than simply the demands for student places on their
own. Both universities were split along linguistic lines, with a Dutch-
speaking Vrije Universiteit te Brussel emerging from the former and the
French-speaking Université Catholique de Louvain from the latter.
In 1984, forty-four universities distributed across fourteen countries
were in the ‘non-state’ sector. Of these, only three were located in Eastern
and Central Europe, all of them religious foundations, two in Czechoslo-
vakia and one in Poland. Six non-state universities out of ten were con-
centrated in Italy, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands. Around one in
71 G. Neave and F. A. van Vught (eds.), Prometheus Bound: The Changing Relationship
between Government and Higher Education in Western Europe (Oxford, 1991).
72 R. L. Geiger, Private Sectors in Higher Education: Structure, Function, and Change in
Eight Countries (Ann Arbor, 1986).
55
Guy Neave
Table 2.6 Universities in the non-state sector
Overall Non-state sector

N= % N= %
Established universities 242 50 12 27

– upgraded 129 27 6 14
– promoted 89 18 21 48
– by 2-step mobility 13 3 3 7
Unknown 8 2 2 4
Total 481 100 44 100
Source: Jı́lek, Historical Compendium
four had been established before 1950. As the individual cases mentioned
above indicate, expansion was largely a matter of recognizing establish-
ments already in place but not officially designated as full universities
by the State. This process of accreditation was determined by the overall
rhythm and periodicity of reform in individual countries. It tended to be
earlier in Northern Europe, beginning in Belgium in the early sixties and
taking place somewhat later in Italy and Spain. As a result, around one-
third of the forty-four non-state establishments gained university status
between 1970 and 1983. This was not the only difference.
Table 2.6 shows the patterns of institutional advancement for the non-
state sector compared to all universities in the survey. Though perhaps
an obvious point, creating universities in the non-state sector was based
to a far higher degree on promotion from a non-university status than on
the institutional upgrading that had propelled their state counterparts.73
the non-university sector

There is another pattern-moulding development, which has already had
great effect. This is the rise of the ‘non-university sector’ and, more espe-
cially, short-cycle higher education.74 Enrolments in short-cycle higher
73 The point could be made that the rise of national university systems often took over
establishments which, like all universities, had at one time been religious in origin.
The growth in mass demand for higher education thus continued a practice steeped
in time. Yet it would appear that pressure for growth was more powerful in raising
establishments which were in the non-university sector to full university status than it
was in moving those already on the periphery of the university system to fully accredited
status.
74 We have already had cause to remark on the operational difficulties of identifying these
two categories. The non-university sector in Belgium and Britain, for example, may
contain degree courses the duration of which is as long as university programmes. If
all short-cycle higher education is located in non-university establishments, not all non-
university establishments are exclusively given over to short-cycle higher education. At
56
Patterns
education are far from uniform in Western Europe.75 As a proportion of
all students in higher education, these ranged from 2% in Italy to 58%
in the Netherlands. Countries where short-cycle programmes enrolled
a substantial minority of all student enrolments were Belgium (48%)
the United Kingdom (41%) Norway (36%) Ireland (30%) Switzerland
(29%) and Sweden (25%).76 In the Soviet model of higher education,
by contrast, the non-university sector, with certain exceptions such as
Czechoslovakia, catered for the overwhelming majority of students in
higher education.
The growth of short-cycle higher education as the non-university sector
of national provision passed through two interpretative phases. During
the first phase, the sixties and early seventies, it was seen as complemen-
tary and, to some extent, as an alternative to the university, as institutions
were concerned with the development of skills immediately applicable on
the market, often at the middle management and technician level.77 To
this extent, the non-university sector dealt with relatively short-term shifts
in the labour market. The task of meeting long-term change remained with
the university. Many short-cycle institutions – whether university insti-
tutes of technology in France, Fachhochschulen in the Federal Republic
of Germany, hoger beroepsonderwijs in the Netherlands or the polytech-
nics in Portugal – awarded what in the magnificently sinister terminology
of international agencies were deemed ‘terminal degrees’. They did not
open the path to research or to postgraduate training. Exceptions to this
‘binary’ model occurred in the Norwegian regional colleges, which pre-
pared the first part of a normal university degree programme. Possibilities
for transfer to university were also open to graduates of the Yugoslavian
visa skola.78 Short-cycle establishments during this phase of their evolu-
tion reinforced within their respective systems the dual phenomenon of
institutional segmentation and sectoral differentiation.
In the second phase, which emerged in the mid-1970s, short-cycle
higher education was reassessed as a prime vehicle for meeting labour
market requirements. It became a sector in competition with the univer-
sity, not merely for students, but also for the favourable eye of govern-
ments and employers. This they obtained, partly on grounds of cost –
short-cycle students were held to cost less, since a higher proportion of
students graduated within the time officially set for completion – and
the risk of confusion, we will, however, assume that short-cycle higher education and
the non-university sector are the same thing.
75 D. Furth, ‘Short Cycle Higher Education: Europe’, in Clark, Encyclopedia I, 1219.
76 OECD, Education in OECD countries (Paris, 1990), cited by Furth, ‘Short Cycle’ (note
74), 1219.
77 M. Y. Bernard, Les instituts universitaires de technologie (Paris, 1970).
78 G. Neave, Patterns of Equality: The Influence of New Structures in Higher Education
upon Equality of Opportunity (Windsor, 1976).
57
Guy Neave
partly because they were held to be more ‘market responsive’ and less
‘discipline driven’ than long-established institutes of academe.79
Whether their manifest success or their mediocre performance in meet-
ing public expectations about the ‘relevance’ of their training or the
employability of their graduates accounts for the undoubted influence
short-cycle higher education had upon the university is by no means clear.
There are examples of both. In France, to take one instance, the failure of
the two-year university institutes of technology to attract students in the
numbers for which planners had hoped was certainly one of the reasons
for extending the two-year first-cycle pattern to the university sector in
1972. In Britain, the reinforcement of vocationalism in universities was
the product of the relative success polytechnics had in developing new
cross-disciplinary combinations for degree programmes. Their initiatives
were rapidly emulated by the ‘noble’ sector.
Whether history repeats itself or, for that matter, whether higher edu-
cation has its counterpart of the long-term Kondratieff cycle in economics
is a matter that historians and their brethren, whose concern focuses more
exclusively on higher education, may well debate. Yet evidence for a sec-
ond cycle of reform, of radical shifts in both pattern and structure that
began to gather momentum from the mid-1980s, is undeniable. Indeed,
there is every indication, in terms of student enrolments, institutional cre-
ation and upgrading, to suggest that the second wave of reform was, if
anything, more far reaching than its predecessor. I shall not repeat the
analysis for the period post-1984 I gave for the years from 1950 onwards.
Rather, we will confine ourselves to what is seen increasingly by special-
ists as higher education’s driving onward and beyond the mass stage in
its development, and in some instances reaching what the American pol-
icy analyst Martin Trow termed the ‘universal stage’,80 when more than
40 per cent of the appropriate age group enters higher learning. Already
more than half the age range moves on to post-school learning in France.
In Britain, the attainment of a similar rate of attendance has been fixed
as a national goal for 2007,81 whilst the same ambition is being floated
for higher education in the Netherlands by the year 2010.82
79 Wissenschaftsrat, Fachstudiendauer an Fachhochschulen im Prüfungsjahr 1986 9/7

(Cologne, 1986); E. Frackmann, ‘Resistance to Change or no Need to Change? The
Survival of German Higher Education in the 1990s’, European Journal of Education,
25:2 (1990), 187–202; M. Doumenc and J. C. Gilly, Les IUTs: Ouverture et idéologie
(Paris, 1977).
80 M. Trow, ‘Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher Education: Policies
for Higher Education’, General Report to the Conference on the Future Structure of
Post-secondary Education (Paris, 1974).
81 White Paper, Education and Skills: The Future of Higher Education (London, 2003).
82 Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap and HBO-Raad, Prestatieagenda
2005 (The Hague, 2005), esp. ch. 4 ‘Participatie’.
58
Patterns
caveats on the sources for the period 1990–2005

The CRE/EUA compilation stopped at 1984. We have therefore to draw
on other sources for the later period, which are not always based on
the same definitions of institutional type and status, and are not always
directly comparable. The data bank of the International Association of
Universities, though worldwide, relies on official ministerial definitions
as to what constitutes a ‘university-type’ establishment. Furthermore, the
very events that mark the late eighties as a watershed in the history of
the universities of Europe – the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse
of those systems of higher education that drew upon the Soviet Union as
referential model – also saw the re-emergence of independent nations and
with them their higher education systems from behind the former Iron
Curtain. The world we have lost is very different from the world that we
have gained.
The main difference between the two datasets is that the first relied on
a historical definition of the university, whereas the second is grounded
in what is best described as a nominal or administrative definition. If
an establishment is defined by its authorities as a university and carries
the title university, it is accepted as such. This rule of thumb meets with
considerable difficulty in the case of France, where alongside the univer-
sity run two other sectors, the elite grandes écoles, engineering schools,
écoles d’application and higher commercial schools (écoles supérieures
de commerce) on the one hand and, on the other, the ‘short-cycle sector’.
Whilst identifying universities de nomine is not arduous, classifying the
remainder, which constitute by far the greater part of the institutional
fabric of French higher education, is a redoubtable task.
One of the salient features of the decade and a half since restoration
of the universities of Central and Eastern Europe as full members to
the Republic of Learning has been the drive towards marketization on
the one hand and privatization on the other.83 What is understood by
these terms is very different in Western Europe from the overtones it
carries in Central and Eastern Europe.84 They are matters of major con-
sequence in shaping the profile of particular systems of higher education
and especially so when it comes to the sources of support. Here again,
the definition of whether a particular establishment relies for the major
part of its financing on the public purse or the private pocket corresponds
to information given by official sources, which obviously follow their
own particular criteria. Nor is information always forthcoming. Indeed,
83 Slancheva and Levy, Private Higher Education (note 69), Appendix, 14–18.
84 J. de Groof, G. Neave and J. Svec, Governance and Democracy in Higher Education
(Dordrecht, 1998), esp. ch. 1.
59
Guy Neave
Table 2.7 Institutional growth rates 1990–2005 in the European
Union, Western Europe and East and Central Europe (universities only)
Public institutions Private institutions

East and East and
Overall West Central Unknown Overall West Central Unknown
N= N= N= N= N= N= N= N=
1990 614 508 104 2 100 89 8 3

2005 817 635 144 38 201 125 63 13
% growth 33.06 25.00 38.46 101.00 40.45 687.50
Source: Derived from IAU data archives of universities existing in 1990 and 2005
in certain states – Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands, for instance –

the question of financing combined with ‘ownership’ (pouvoirs organ-
isateurs in Belgian legal terminology) is a matter of such delicacy that
often no information was provided. Discretion is then the better part of
inaccuracy! Be that as it may, our concern here lies less with exactitude
down to the last establishment than with the gross patterns and gen-
eral tendencies that have emerged from the university world in Europe
since 1984.
new perspectives
The systems of higher education that today are part of the Member
States of the European Union have experienced an immense further
development in their institutional fabric. Leaving aside Russia, Albania,
Bulgaria, Romania, Belarus and the Ukraine, the number of universities
rose by more than a third between 1984 and 1990. By 2005, their number
had almost doubled, from 524 in 1984 to 1,018 two decades later. Once
we control for differences in ownership and funding patterns and break
out universities that governments see as publicly funded, it is clear that
the most rapid growth has occurred in the private sector.
The most intense activity occurred in the Western economies, where
some 200 establishments obtained university status over the decade and a
half that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. In terms of percentage rates,
growth is most marked in East and Central Europe, where the number
of universities created doubled. In both East and West, what one scholar
has termed ‘the rise and rise of the private sector’85 outstrips by far the
growth of its public counterpart, increasing by almost 40 per cent over the
85 V. Tomusk, ‘The War of Institutions, Episode 1 the Rise and Rise of Higher Education
in Eastern Europe’, Higher Education Policy, 16:2 (2003), 3–14.
60
Patterns
1990 base line by 2005 in Western systems and rising almost sevenfold
over the same period in Central and Eastern Europe.
The preponderance does not hold for student numbers. Most private
universities are relatively small and tend not to have the full range of
faculties, choosing rather to specialize where equipment costs are low and
private sector interest high – banking, business, management, languages
and so on.86 On the other hand, the private sector in Eastern Europe is
not as separate from the public sector universities as many analysts think.
Much of it draws on public sector university staff to provide teaching and
other services.87
In which of the EU Member States has institutional growth been the
most outstanding? In the public sector, the United Kingdom stands out –
more than doubling the number of universities from 53 in 1990 to 118 in
2005,88 followed by Poland (22 additions), Italy (17), Spain (11), France
(9), Slovakia (7), the Czech Republic (6), Estonia and Austria (4 each).
The league table in respect of private sector universities shows a different
profile: Poland is the most prolific (37 additions), followed by Portugal
(16),89 Spain (14), Italy and Austria (6 each) and Estonia (4).
the astounding vitality of the

non-university sector
In today’s system of higher education, the university sensu stricto
is increasingly looked upon by both governments and citizens as
‘primus inter pares’. It is first amongst perhaps not equals but certainly
amongst other forms of institution, whether these are called ‘short-cycle’,
‘higher vocational training’, ‘higher education outside the university’ and
so on.
If account is taken of the non-university sector, which was not possible
for the period 1949–84, a tipping point appears to have been reached in
the course of the last fifteen years. In terms of numbers, Europe’s univer-
sities despite their tremendous expansion now appear to form a minority
within the higher-education systems of the EU. In some systems, the sheer
86 V. Tomusk, ‘Higher Education Reform in Estonia: A Legal Perspective’, Higher Educa-

tion Policy, 14:2 (2001), 201–12.
87 For this in the Romania context, see Dima, ‘Quality’ (note 38), and also Tomusk, ‘War’
(note 84), 3–14.
88 For details, see British Council, Recognized UK Degrees (London, 2007). www.dfes.gov.
uk/recognisedukdegrees/index.cfm?fuseaction=institutes.list&InstituteCategoryID=1&
OrderBy=Category.
89 A. Amaral and P. Teixeira, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Private Sector in Portuguese Higher
Education’, Higher Education Policy, 13:3 (2000), 245–66.
61
Guy Neave
Table 2.8 The changing place of the university
in the institutional profile of higher education in
the EU 1990–2005
University as
Universities Non-university percentage of total
total sector total higher education
N= N= %
1990 714 656 52

2005 1,018 1,375 44
Source: IAU data bank
quantitative rise can only be the result of changes in legislation, nomencla-

ture and definition rather than physical construction. That appears to be
the case of the public non-university sector in Denmark, where the num-
ber of establishments associated with the non-university sector rose from
10 to 115 between 1990 and 2005. And a similar explanation holds for
Finland, where national policy laid particular weight on developing the
non-university public sector in the early nineties.90 Similar considerations
operated in Austria, where institutional diversification in the shape of set-
ting up a Fachhochschule sector took place at the same time,91 though
official sources classify these establishments, financially at least, as being
in the private sector. In Germany, where the non-university sector showed
similar buoyancy – adding some 68 establishments to the 159 that fell into
this category in 1990 – the assimilation of the higher-education establish-
ments of the ex-Democratic Republic largely accounts for the increase.
In Poland, however, institutional growth in all sectors – university and
non-university, public and private – showed a general mobilization which
far surpassed other systems of higher education, whether East or West,
especially in the non-university sector. This fact may be explained not
simply by entrepreneurial energy in meeting a social demand for higher
education that a command economy had long held in abeyance, but also
by the return of the Catholic Church as an ‘organizing power’ in a sys-
tem of higher education set free from the shackles of state and party. In
short, whilst the multiplication of institutions of higher education stands
as a phenomenon that transcends the frontiers of individual lands, the
circumstances that surround and accompany it are more often than not
90 OECD, L’enseignement polytechnique en Finlande (Paris, 2003).

91 E. Leitner, ‘Academic Oligarchy and Higher Education Research: Implications for the
Reform of Institutions of Higher Education in Austria’, Higher Education Policy, 12:2
(1999), 27–40.
62
Patterns
specific to the particular society. Similar outcomes do not always denote
similar causes.
Though there are certainly exceptions (the British reform of 1992 that
incorporated the polytechnics into an expanded university sector is one),
the expansion of the non-university sector, whether it is designated as
public or private in its ownership and financing, is a clear pointer to the
continuation of institutional diversification and institutional segmenta-
tion. Since 1990, this pattern has marked such diverse higher-education
systems as Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany,
Poland and Portugal. When set against the sheer numbers of establish-
ments that came into being after 1990 and especially those in the non-
university sector, the pattern is further evidence of a subtle and long-
drawn-out process that accelerated over the past decade. This process
does not point to a decline of the university from the place it occupied
over the past two centuries on the normative heights of post-school edu-
cation. That the university became a minority in terms of all institutions in
the higher-education systems of the European Union does not strengthen
it as a species, though triage through conditional financing, repeated qual-
ity assessment and performance evaluation may serve to boost the lot of
a fortunate few amongst them.
As the university and non-university sectors unfold, the exact rela-
tionship between them becomes crucial. Is cross-sectoral coordination
between them to be based on the extension of the university ethos to
the non-university sector? Or is it to be based on the swallowing up of
the university by the non-university sector? That such questions can be
posed is a sure pointer to the pattern-moulding power, irrespective of the
reasons or motives behind it, that the non-university sector now exercises
upon the university, though often indirectly through the declarations of
central policy-makers.
the closing of the circle

In examining the institutional dynamic that lay beneath the drive of
the university towards mass status, as well as exploring what we have
termed the pattern-moulding forces which bore down upon the univer-
sity once it had become a mass institution, we have concentrated per-
haps overmuch on Western Europe. There is one excellent reason for
this. The basic issues that the university in East, Central and Western
Europe faced were by no means dissimilar over the past forty years –
reconstruction, the ways of linking with the economy, the offsetting of
social inequality, to mention but three. The differences lay rather in the
institutional structures and their accompanying systems of control. They
reflected the model of human progress that each ideological bloc upheld
63
Guy Neave
and thus the priorities and goals that shaped the university systems within
them. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Soviet model of
higher education ceased to be the reference point for the countries that
assimilated it at the beginning of the period with which this volume is
concerned. Today’s reference point, regardless of the reasons and irre-
spective of whether it is fully apprehended,92 is now the patterns, prac-
tices and profiles contained in the higher-education systems of Western
Europe.93
the symmetry of patterns

A certain symmetry between East and West may be perceived across the
sixty years that have elapsed since the end of the Second World War.
This symmetry is present in two outstanding manifestations: first, recon-
struction of higher-education systems; second, and as a consequence of
the first, the quest for an optimal model on which to ground reconstruc-
tion. These were the predominant themes at the opening of this period.
They are at the head of the agenda as it draws to a close. It would
not be correct to believe that reconstruction is a priority confined to
East and Central Europe alone. There, the problems are certainly more
visible, more massive and often involve basic issues such as the balance
between university and non-university higher education,94 admission and
selection. They also embrace such fundamental matters as student parti-
cipation in governance, the internal distribution of power and authority
as much at institutional level as at the level of central administration.95
Many of these items on the agenda for reform were raised, and in some
cases dealt with, in Western university systems over the course of the past
half-century. The universities of Central and Eastern Europe, by con-
trast, have been faced with such matters simultaneously and under strong
pressure of time.96
Western universities are engaged in a species of reconstruction as well.
It is presented in terms of the creation of a ‘European Higher Education
Area’, of integrating national labour markets, of recognizing each other’s
92 J. Rupnik, ‘Higher Education and the Reform Process in Central and Eastern Europe’,
European Journal of Education, 27:1–2 (1992), 145–51.
93 V. Tomusk, The Open World and Closed Societies: Essays on Higher Education Policies
in Transition (New York, 2005).
94 The interest of the Czech authorities in the West German Fachhochschulen as an alter-
native sector and developed in much the same way, that is, out of upper secondary
vocational schools elevated to higher education status, is a case in point.
95 G. Neave, ‘A Changing Europe: Challenges for Higher Education Research’, Higher
Education in Europe, 16:3 (1991), 3–27. See also chapters 3 (‘Relations with Authority’),
4 (‘Management and Resources’) and 6 (‘Admission’) in this volume.
96 Neave, ‘Return’ (note 39).
64
Patterns
diplomas, of internationalizing student flows and opportunities to study.
This reconstruction drives towards the international at the very time when
what was formally also a species of international higher-education space,
grouped within Comecon, has gone the way of Nineveh and Tyre. Just
when Europe’s universities of the Centre and East are reasserting their
cultural and historic independence and identity, the question is being
raised in certain quarters in the West as to whether the nation state is
any longer an adequate framework for the university – and a fortiori,
university research – to develop further.97
select bibliography for part i

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1990, 2nd edn.
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Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, New York, 1971.
Cerych, L. and Sabatier, P. Great Expectations and Mixed Performance: The
Implementation of Higher Education Reforms in Europe, Stoke-on-Trent,
1986.
Clark, B. R. The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross
National Perspective, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1983.
Clark, B. R. and Neave, G. (eds.) Encyclopedia of Higher Education, Oxford,
New York, Seoul and Tokyo, 1992, 4 vols.
Furth, D. Short Cycle Higher Education: Crisis of Identity, Paris, 1974.
Daalder, H. and Shils, E. (eds.) Universities, Politicians and Bureaucrats: Europe
and the United States, Cambridge, 1982.
Geiger, R. L. Private Sectors in Higher Education: Structure, Function, and
Change in Eight Countries, Ann Arbor, 1986.
Hopkins, M. ‘Manpower Planning Revisited’, PhD thesis, Geneva, 2000.
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mission of the European Communities), Skills Shortages in Europe: Industrial
Research and Development Advisory Committee Opinion, Brussels, 1990.
Jı́lek, L. (ed.) Historical Compendium of European Universities/Répertoire his-
torique des universités européennes, Geneva, 1984.
Kallen, D. and Neave, G. The Open Door: Pan European Academic Cooperation,
Bucharest, 1991.
Kerr, C. The Great Transformation in Higher Education, 1960–1980, Albany,
N.Y., 1991.
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Nation State (Oxford, 2001), 107–20.
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Kogan, M. and Tuijnman, A. Educational Research and Development Trends:
Issues and Challenges, Paris, 1995.
Kwiek, M. ‘Social and Cultural Dimensions of the Transformation of Higher
Education in Central and Eastern Europe’, Higher Education in Europe, 26
(2001), 399–410.
Laderrière, P. ‘Les examens de politiques nationales d’éducation à l’OCDE’, in
Education comparée – Les sciences de l’éducation pour l’ère nouvelle –
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Lester, R. A. Manpower Policy in a Free Society, Princeton, 1966.
Levy, Daniel C. Higher Education and the State in Latin America: Private Chal-
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Lowe, R. (ed.) Education and the Second World War: Studies in Schooling and
Social Change, London and Washington, 1992.
Neave, G. ‘A Changing Europe: Challenges for Higher Education Research’,
Higher Education in Europe, 16:3 (1991), 3–27.
Neave, G. ‘La dimensió educacional en la Integració Europea: Una ulluda més
enllà dels programes’, Bulletı́ dels Mestres (Departament d’Ensaynament,
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1600: Historical and Sociological Essays, Cambridge, 1993.
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Europe’, European Journal of Education, 27:1/2 (1992), 145–51.
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and Forecasting, Paris, 1980.
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1975.
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Individual countries
Belgium
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Czechoslovakia
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Finland
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Education, 35:4 (December 2000), 465–74.
France
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69
PART II
STRUCTURES
CHAPTER 3
RELATIONS WITH AUTHORITY
W A L T E R R Ü E G G A N D J A N S A D L A K
introduction
Never before in history had the expectations placed on the universities
been greater than in the fifty years following the Second World War.
Never had Europe seen so many universities and other institutions of
higher learning being founded in such a short time. Never before had they
hosted such crowds of teachers, students and administrative personnel.
Never, to such an extent, had they been at the centre of public discussion,
expectation and criticism. Never had governments had such an influence
on the universities’ development; at the same time universities were co-
operating on an unprecedented scale at the national and international
levels.
Hardly anyone could have predicted this development in 1945 – quite
the opposite: there were fears that structural unemployment in the aca-
demic professions would continue as before the war,1 and that the state
would have to take measures accordingly.2 Thus, in 1942, the government
of neutral Switzerland created the office of a ‘Delegate for Job Creation’,
assisted from 1944 on by a ‘Commission for the Promotion of Scientific
Research’.3
In those countries that had been stricken by the war, government inter-
ventions in university education were even more drastic. Comprehensive
publications on the situation of universities in belligerent and occupied
1 See, e.g., W. Kotschnig, Unemployment in the Learned Professions (Oxford, 1937);

K. Dubois, Que deviendront les étudiants (Paris, 1937).
2 H. Erb, ‘Die Überfüllung in den akademischen Berufen und Vorschläge für Gegenmass-
nahmen’, Schweizerische Hochschulzeitung, 17 (1943), 61–128.
3 W. Rüegg, ‘Switzerland: The Re-affirmation of Autonomy’, in H. Daalder and E. Shils
(eds.), Universities, Politicians and Bureaucrats: Europe and the United States
(Cambridge, 1982), 398.
73
Walter Rüegg and Jan Sadlak
countries are still lacking. In Poland, following the Aktion gegen Uni-
versitätsprofessoren – Sonderaktion Krakau of 6 November 1939, most
universities were left bereft of their professors and closed down; they were
replaced by a clandestine network of college-level classes.4 In 1941, in
Posen (Poznań), a Reichsuniversität open only to Germans was founded.
Hitler considered France to be an archenemy and destined it to become an
agrarian state with low living standards. Therefore, until the end of 1941,
the occupied part of the country was treated as a reservoir for systematic
pillage. Then, with the transition from ‘blitzkrieg’ to ‘total war’, the doc-
trine of Albert Speer prevailed: French production facilities were not to
be destroyed but rather put to good use for the German war economy. As
a result, the practice of deporting students to German labour camps was
abandoned.5 With the exception of the institutions in the Alsace-Lorraine
region, the universities remained under French control. In Lille, entering
the buildings both of the state and of the free (Catholic) university was
forbidden to members of the German armed forces.6 In the Netherlands,
after 1942, the universities practically stopped their teaching activities,
since only a few of the students agreed to sign the declaration of loyalty
that the occupying power requested of them.7 Here, too, underground
university classes operated.
The war brought to light the economic and social importance of the
universities and, correspondingly, the state’s interest in the increasing role
of higher education in the interplay of social forces. Over the ensuing fifty
years, this process gained further impetus. In this context, four phases can
be distinguished:
1. Recovery in a divided Europe, 1945–1955
2. Emerging national and international university policies, 1956–1967
3. Expansion, democratization, bureaucratization, 1968–1982
4. Towards a harmonised European model, 1983–1995
recovery in a divided europe, 1945–1955

The war had left the universities heavily damaged, both materially and at
the very core of their intellectual foundations, because of Nazi occupation
4 Some 10,000 students, mostly in Warsaw and Cracow, participated in underground
higher education based on pre-war institutions. Jerzy Slaski, Polska Walczaca (1939–
1945) – Noc, Solidarni (Warsaw, 1986), 56. M. Zareba and A. Zareba (eds.), Ne Cedat
Academia: Kartki w tajnego mauczania w universytecie Jagelliońskim 1939–1945
(Cracow, 1975), 142–9.
5 J.-B. Duroselle, ‘Réflexions sur la France face à la “guerre totale” d’Adolf Hitler (1972)’,
in B. Duroselle, Itinéraire (Paris, 1991), 327.
6 C. Schmid, Erinnerungen (Bern, Munich and Vienna, 1980), 194.
7 W. Krönig and K.-D. Müller, Nachkriegssemester: Studium in Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit
(Stuttgart, 1990), 79.
74
Relations with authority
and collaboration. The speed of their reconstruction is one of the most
astonishing post-war achievements of both governments and universities.
Yet this phenomenon has only been partially studied to date. In 1949,
across many countries of Western Europe, about twice as many women
and men were studying as in 1938; in other regions, it was 25 to 30 per
cent more.8 This growth cannot be simply explained by the fact that, in
1945, the surviving members of several age cohorts returned from the
war – or from war-camps – to continue or begin their studies. The fact
that they were able to do so, in such numbers and to such an extent,
shows that the authorities viewed the reconstruction of Europe not only
as an economic and technical problem, but also as an educational and
intellectual challenge.
However, nowhere did they address this challenge by way of any spe-
cial university policy. In the UNITED KINGDOM, the Education Act
of 1944, officially called ‘An Act to reform, i.e. to reshape, the law relat-
ing to education in England and Wales’, left the universities untouched.
The University Grants Committee, founded in 1919 and composed of
university representatives, continued to distribute state subsidies without
any direct prescriptions; nevertheless, in 1946, the universities agreed to
follow the recommendations of the Barlow Committee and to double
the ratio of students they trained, in order to provide the professionals
required by society. The state subsidized research in the fields of Slavic
and oriental languages, economics and the social sciences.9
In the other Western European countries, too, the authorities confined
themselves to placing the universities in a position whereby they could
once again engage in their traditional tasks.
In FRANCE, de Gaulle’s government in exile had plans to reform the
higher-education system, particularly the grandes écoles. However, after
victory, ‘the need to reform higher education was neither felt nor given a
high place on the political agenda until after 1956’.10
In ITALY, the universities resorted to the traditions of autonomy and
freedom to teach they had enjoyed before Fascism.11 The same is true for
the countries that had suffered under German occupation. Countries that
had been spared by the war, such as SWEDEN and SWITZERLAND,
continued with their liberal university policy, whereas the governments
8 Wissenschaftsrat, Empfehlungen zum Ausbau der wissenschaftlichen Einrichtungen,

vol. I: Wissenschaftliche Universitäten (Tübingen, 1960), 510.
9 E. Shils, ‘Great Britain and the United States: Legislators, Bureaucrats and the Universi-
ties’, in Daalder and Shils, Universities (note 3), 440f.
10 F. Bourricaud, ‘France: The Prelude to the loi d’orientation of 1968’, in Daalder and
Shils, Universities (note 3), 36f.
11 A. Malintoppi, ‘Italy: Universities Adrift’, in Daalder and Shils, Universities (note 3),
109.
75
in SPAIN and PORTUGAL upheld their authoritarian hold on the uni-
versities.
The university policy of the allied military forces in Germany

The great difficulties of formulating a university policy that went beyond
mere material reconstruction were particularly evident in the case of Ger-
many. After its unconditional surrender, Hitler’s Reich was, in its mate-
rial, political, economic and cultural fabric, a tabula rasa of the sort Plato
had pictured as a starting point for the construction of an ideal state and
its educational institutions.
The university policy of the four occupying forces in Germany presents
a fascinating case study of promising and failed initiatives, and deserves
special consideration in the post-war history of the university in Europe.
As an interesting showcase, it confirms Popper’s warning, dating from
1945, about the dangers intrinsic to the Platonic idea of erecting an ideal
state and its universities on the basis of a tabula rasa.12 But it also shows
that the university policies of the Western occupation powers, whose
goal was to establish democratic and European political convictions in
Germany, had only indirect and long-term effects.
The Allied Powers had agreed on a common aim: to prevent Germany
from ever gaining the wherewithal to start another world war. Opinions
as to how this was to be achieved, however, were widely divergent. In the
United Kingdom, the prevailing wish was to avoid the harshness of the
Treaty of Versailles. Thus, starting in 1940 and culminating in 1944,13
the British propagated re-education as a ‘permanent change of heart and
conversion to tolerable European behaviour’.14 The Soviets, by contrast,
held that the winners of the First World War had not gone far enough
in Versailles. Stalin demanded a complete destruction of the industrial
potential for war and a democratic reconstruction of German society. In
the United States, initially, the tendency was to follow the British. Starting
in 1942, both the State Department and the War Department had experts
working on proposals for long-term policy and for the war occupation
of Germany. In 1943, social psychologists propagated re-education to
democratic values and behaviour for the mentally sick German people
12 K. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols. (London, 1945).
13 D. Phillips, ‘War-Time Planning for the “Re-education” of Germany: Professor E. R.
Dodds and the German Universities’, Oxford Review of Education, 12:2 (1986), 195–
208, esp. 196.
14 K. Jürgensen, ‘Was there a British Policy towards Higher Education? Some Retrospec-
tive Thoughts on the Oxford Symposium’, in M. Heinemann and D. Phillips (eds.),
Hochschuloffiziere und Wiederaufbau des Hochschulwesens in Westdeutschland 1945–
1952, vol. I: Die britische Zone (Hildesheim, 1990), 79.
76
by means of a group-dynamic process of self-healing. A handbook was
prepared, giving the universities a modest role in the reconstruction pro-
gramme for cultural and educational policy.15 In 1944, indignation about
the holocaust led to the Morgenthau Plan. Churchill adopted it at the
American–British summit in Quebec: on 15 September 1944, he dictated
a memorandum entailing a ‘programme for eliminating the war-making
industries in the Ruhr and the Saar and for converting Germany into
a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character’.16 However,
both in the UK and in the USA, public opinion reacted with such an
uproar of criticism that Roosevelt and Churchill backed off and failed to
endorse any definite occupation policy. Roosevelt banned any further use
of the handbook. American troops marched into Germany without hav-
ing any clear concept for the occupation of the country. Since 1942, the
University of Virginia in Charlottesville had trained experts for adminis-
trative tasks in the occupied regions, including 200 education specialists.
In spite of these efforts, in May 1945, the American military govern-
ment had only ten education officers to hand in Germany to monitor the
denazification and re-education of almost 20 million people.17
In January 1945, when Allied troops had already reached the Rhine,
Churchill was still not inclined to concern himself with post-war
politics.18 But since the very beginning of the hostilities he had emphasized
that their scope was not destruction and revenge, but rather peace and
security for the future community of nations, in which Germany would
also take its place again. In the summer of 1944, in Kensington, two
dozen education officers were trained in one of the various pedagogical
sections of the British Control Commission in Germany.19
The Potsdam Agreement, signed by Attlee, Truman and Stalin on 2
August 1945, combined Stalin’s call for de-industrialization – endorsed
by Churchill and Roosevelt in Quebec – with the concept of re-education.
For the universities, the first step toward de-industrialization resulted in
taking away scientists and facilities, and in research bans on the strategic
fields of war economy, such as nuclear physics, chemistry, aviation and
shipbuilding. The formulation of the education programme stipulated
that, out of the four D’s of denazification, demilitarization, democratiza-
tion and decartelization, the first three were to be assigned as education
goals for the Germans themselves. The victorious powers were to ‘allow’
15 J. F. Tent, Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American Occupied

Germany (Chicago, 1982), 22.
16 Henry Morgenthau, III, Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History (New York, 1991), 386.
17 Tent, Mission (note 15), 29.
18 G. Murray, ‘The British Contribution’, in A. Hearnden (ed.), The British in Germany:
Educational Reconstruction after 1945 (London, 1978), 68.
19 Ibid., 77.
77
and ‘control’ a successful transition from Nazi and militaristic doctrines
to the development of democratic ideas, but they were not to bring it
about themselves.
At the same time, the Potsdam Agreement was couched in such general
terms that it was compatible with the different university policies of the
four occupying powers. In 1947 the Allied military government issued
Directive No. 54, entitled ‘Basic principles for the democratization of
Education in Germany’, which was theoretically binding for all occupying
powers. But, against all expectations, the reopening of the universities had
already been permitted in the late summer and autumn of the year 1945 –
partly to improve medical care for an underfed population with the help
of the medical faculties,20 partly to keep potentially trouble-making youth
off the streets.21 According to the Potsdam Agreement, university officers
were to supervise, and, if need be, to enforce the denazification of both
the faculty and the students, as well as the demilitarization that was to
be carried out by German commissions. Additionally, they were to sup-
port education in democratic values. For these tasks they were unevenly
prepared and equipped.
Americans suffered both from the lack of a clear-cut concept for their
university policy and from a lack of qualified controlling officers for
their large occupation zone, with its fourteen institutions of university
rank; furthermore, these officers had to endure the strong, sometimes
contradictory, interference of the military command and its bureaucratic
ordinances.22
The British were better prepared for the academic challenges of the
occupation. For example, they had prepared lists of German professors
to be fired, checked upon, or restored to office immediately and given a
leadership role, depending on their activities under Nazi rule.23 They had
sufficient control officers for the eight universities and similar institutions
in their zone, although the officers were hardly prepared for their specific
tasks.24 They proceeded pragmatically; from the very beginning, they
adopted both informal and institutional ways of cooperating with the
heads of the universities.
France was granted its own occupation zone as late as October 1944. It
was not present at the Potsdam Conference, but it had adopted the guide-
lines of its Anglo-Saxon allies. Although most of the French university
20 Tent, Mission (note 15), 59.

21 M. Heinemann and J. Fischer (eds.), Hochschuloffiziere und Wiederaufbau des Hoch-
schulwesens in Westdeutschland 1945–1952, vol. III: Die französische Zone
(Hildesheim, 1991), 66f.; cf. Tent, Mission (note 15), 28.
22 Tent, Mission (note 15), 316ff.
23 Phillips, ‘War-Time Planning’ (note 13), 201–3.
24 Heinemann, Hochschuloffiziere, I (note 14), 166ff.
78
officers had studied German language and literature, they were equally
unprepared for their task.25
In the fields of culture and higher education, the French occupation
forces pursued a more active policy than their Western Allies. In addition
to the two ancient, barely damaged universities in their zone, Tübingen
and Freiburg, they founded four new institutions of higher education on
the western bank of the Rhine. These were the Universities of Mainz
(1946) and Saarbrücken (1948), the Academy for Administrative Sci-
ences in Speyer (1947) modelled on the grandes écoles, and the Higher
School for Translators in Germersheim (1947), which was affiliated to
the University of Mainz in 1949. The latter had been founded in 1476 as
a studium generale and closed down by the French revolutionary troops
in 1798. The significance of its being reopened by the French occupa-
tion force of 1946 was underlined by the foundation of an Academy of
Sciences and Literature at Mainz and an Institute for European History
at the university. By adopting this broad-scale mission civilisatrice, the
French were pursuing the goal of establishing ‘intellectual bridgeheads in
the former enemy’s country by cultural means’ in order to improve their
security.26
In their control tasks, the university officers were generally supported
by the rectors and the admissions committees of the various universi-
ties. When, beginning in 1947, the responsibility for university admin-
istration was increasingly handed over to the German States or Länder,
re-education was supplanted by re-orientation.
The university officers contributed to the successful development of
democratic ideas to a far greater extent by taking care of the well-being of
their universities and their members than by means of their official duties.
They supported the repair of buildings, defended students and teachers
when pestered by the military, and helped them to survive during the
Hunger Years and the exceptionally cold winter of 1946/47. Their pro-
motion of international contacts and exchange programmes was of partic-
ular importance. From 1946 to 1948, several hundred foreign scientists,
scholars, writers and artists presented the state of international science,
scholarship and culture to German students and professors. Unlike in the
years following the First World War, when even world-famous German
professors were excluded from international conferences, from 1947 on
professors and students alike were invited to the home countries of the
Western occupying powers and to international meetings. The success of
25 Heinemann, Hochschuloffiziere, III (note 21), 12ff.

26 M. Heinemann, ‘Bildung und Wissenschaft im Rahmen der Kultur- und Sicherheitspoli-
tik der Westalliierten. Erfahrungen der Nachkriegszeit’, in F. Knipping and J. Le Ridder
(eds.), Frankreichs Kulturpolitik in Deutschland, 1945–1950: Ein Tübinger Symposium,
19. u. 20. September 1985 1950 (Tübingen, 1987), 38.
79
this informal and indirect introduction to the values and customs of the
Western democracies is evidenced by the records of women and men who
studied in the early post-war years and who, later on, would belong to
the elite of the Federal Republic.27
An undisputed major value of the Western democracies was the auton-
omy of the universities in organizing their curricula, conferring academic
degrees and making a qualitative choice of the teaching staff. The occupy-
ing powers, together with the newly formed governments of the Länder,
acknowledged and supported the universities’ efforts to re-establish the
autonomy they had lost under Nazi rule.
This renewed, fledgling autonomy had to stand the test as the various
tasks of reconstruction and recruitment were solved by commissions for
planning and admission, by faculty committees, and through discussions
with the mostly inexperienced Allied and German university adminis-
trations. How sensibly the universities reacted to any infringement of
their newly acquired autonomy can be illustrated by a particular inci-
dent: when, in 1948, the government of Hesse appointed Secretary of
State Hermann Brill to an honorary professorship against the will of
the Frankfurt law faculty, the university, under the leadership of its rec-
tor Walther Hallstein, protested with such vehemence that this case of
relatively minor importance was widely discussed.28 In these years of
reconstruction, the universities were even temporarily granted the fourth
pillar of their autonomy that had been lost in the nineteenth century to
the secondary schools (Gymnasia): the right to choose their own students.
In 1948, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, founded in 1911, began operating
again under the name of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of
Science.29 In 1949, it was followed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemein-
schaft that succeeded the Notgemeinschaft für die Deutsche Forschung,30
founded in 1920 to promote university-based research. The year 1949
also saw the ratification of the State Treaty of the German Länder in the
27 Krönig and Müller, Nachkriegssemester (note 7), with detailed bibliography; J. von
Stackelberg, Die Überwindung der Fremdheit: Memoiren eines engagierten Romanisten
(Bonn, 2005), 33–53; M. Becke-Goehring and D. Mussgnug, Erinnerungen: Fast vom
Wind verweht (Bochum, 1950), 79–115; cf. Heinemann and Phillips, Hochschuloffiziere
(notes 14, 21) and M. Heinemann and U. Schneider (eds.), Hochschuloffiziere und
Wiederaufbau des Hochschulwesens in Westdeutschland 1945–1952, vol. II: Die US-
Zone (Hildesheim, 1990).
28 N. Hammerstein, Die Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, vol. I:
1914 bis 1950 (Frankfurt/Main, 1989), 249–60.
29 R. Vierhaus and B. vom Brocke (eds.), Forschung im Spannungsfeld von Politik
und Gesellschaft: Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Stuttgart,
1990).
30 T. Nipperdey and L. Schmugge, 50 Jahre Forschungsförderung in Deutschland: Ein
Abriss der Geschichte der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft 1920–1970 (Berlin,
1970).
80
German Federal Republic Concerning the Funding of Scientific Research
Facilities, contracted at Königstein im Taunus. The ‘Königstein Agree-
ment’ promoted university research that went beyond the scope and
financial power of a single Land. The costs were shared according to
the relative population numbers and tax revenues of the Länder.31
Efforts to bring about a fundamental reform of the university system
were less successful. From 1946 to 1952, the occupying powers initi-
ated or promoted numerous reform conferences.32 Only the proposal
to introduce general education programmes according to the American
model, with the goal of improving political education, was adopted in
the universities. It was called studium generale – without reference to
the historical meaning of the term – and remained a foreign body in the
German university system, not only semantically.33
For decades, post-war historiography focusing on university devel-
opments in Eastern Germany has encountered charges of partisan dis-
tortion. As they understood their role, historians in the DDR had to
‘face the task of explaining and proving, in a far-reaching and thorough-
going analysis, that Socialism’s victory over Imperialism was a historical
necessity’.34 Studies by Western scholars were considered to be cold-war
monstrosities – but not only in the DDR. In 1992, a scientific colloquium
on policies relating to universities and science was organized with the sup-
port of the Volkswagen Foundation at Gosen, near Berlin, with former
Soviet university officers, thus continuing the tradition of the colloquia
with university officers from the Western occupying powers.35 The con-
tributions of the former Russian university officers revealed that Western
studies on the Sovietization of East German higher education had been
largely accurate.
31 E. Freund, Forschung – der dritte Faktor: Eine Analyse mit Zahlen und Vergleichen
(Stuttgart, 1966) (with international summaries).
32 R. Neuhaus (ed.), Dokumente zur Hochschulreform 1945–1959, Veröffentlichungen der
Westdeutschen Rektorenkonferenz (Wiesbaden, 1961), 260–433; W. Rüegg, ‘Epilogue:
Higher Education at its Greatest Challenge. The Developments since 1960’, in M. Heine-
mann and U. Schneider (eds.), Hochschuloffiziere und Wiederaufbau des Hochschulwe-
sens in Westdeutschland 1945–1952, vol. II: Die US-Zone (Hildesheim, 1990), 228f.;
D. Phillipps, Pragmatismus und Idealismus: Das ‘Blaue Gutachten’ und die britische
Hochschulpolitik in Deutschland 1948, Studien und Dokumentationen zur deutschen
Bildungsgeschichte, 58 (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 1995).
33 F. F. Tenbruck and W. Treue (eds.), Studium generale: Bericht über zwei Weilburger
Arbeitstagungen 30. August bis 1. September und 3. bis 15. September 1951 (with
select bibliography); W. Rüegg, ‘Humanism, and Studium Generale in German Higher
Education’, The Journal of General Education, 8:3 (1955), 137–65.
34 W. Flaschendräger and M. Straube, Die Entwicklung der Universitäten und Akademien
im Spiegel der hochschulgeschichtlichen Forschungen (1960–1969): Literaturübersicht,
Informationen und Studien zur Universitätsentwicklung, 12 (Berlin (Ost), 1970), 7.
35 M. Heinemann (ed.), Hochschuloffiziere und Wiederaufbau des Hochschulwesen 1945–
1949: Die sowjetische Besatzungszone (Berlin, 2000).
81
We are facing a fortress. Its name is Science, Science with its innumerable
branches of knowledge. We must take this fortress at any cost. If it wishes
to be the builder of a new life, if it really wishes to supplant the old guard,
Youth must take this fortress.
This quote from Stalin introduced the Western standard reference work
on university policy promoted by the Soviet occupying power and the
DDR administration, published in 1953.36 In 1992, one of the Russian
participants at the Gosen conference used a quote by Lenin, which is very
similar in its meaning, to describe the core of Soviet education policy:
It is only by deeply transforming the training, organization and education of

Youth that we will be able to reach our goal: that Youth, by its efforts, may
realize a society unlike the old one – the communist society. [For university
policy] this means that the focus must be shifted towards political education
and the utilitarian and practical function of university education at the cost
of its role in promoting humanistic and general education.
Concretely, the Soviet Military Government in Germany (SMGG),

according to the Soviet experience, applied the following blueprint for
restructuring all institutions of higher education: the introduction of stan-
dardized institutions of higher education approved by the Ministry of
Higher Education, standardized teaching schedules for each department,
and standardized curricula for each discipline. This meant centralizing the
universities, giving them only limited independence; the compulsory study
of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and political economy in all faculties; the
total ideological and political orientation of higher education; securing
the leadership role of Communist Party structures at the universities;
creating strong ties between the needs of the socialist planned economy
and the training of experts in different disciplines; and the single-minded
transformation of the social origin of students, that is, the proletarization
of the universities.37
In the Soviet zone as well, the universities were reopened in the winter
of 1945/46. The fact that it took roughly six years to adapt them to the
Soviet university system can be attributed to the maxims of Lenin and
Stalin quoted above, according to which the taking of the ‘Fortress of
Science’ was the task of youth that had to be re-educated to the rev-
olutionary ideology. To achieve this, the occupying power needed the
support of German teachers, institutions and parties, especially that of
36 M. Müller and E. E. Müller, ‘ . . . stürmt die Festung Wissenschaft.’ Die Sowjetisierung

der mitteldeutschen Universitäten seit 1945 (Berlin, 1953), 1.
37 A. P. Nikitin, ‘Die sowjetische Militäradministration und die Sowjetisierung des
Volksbildungssystems in Ostdeutschland 1945–1949’, in Heinemann, Sowjetische
Besatzungszone (note 35), 1–10, quotation p. 2.
82
the Communist Party. There were very few communist university teach-
ers, and they certainly did not belong to the influential circle of Moscow
exiles surrounding Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck. University policy
in East Germany between 1945 and 1955 was mostly influenced by Paul
Wandel and Fred Oelssner, who, at best, were autodidacts.38
Owing to emigration from the areas that had previously been occupied
by the Americans, and because of denazification, the universities in the
Soviet zone had lost up to 90 per cent of their teachers. Contrary to belief
on the Western side, the officers of the SMGG in charge of universities
were as badly prepared as their Western colleagues in carrying out their
tasks.39 But they had retained a deep-rooted respect for the German uni-
versity tradition and defended it – often successfully – against hasty adap-
tations to the Soviet system. They defended the election, rather than the
appointment, of rectors, and keeping the law faculties within the universi-
ties, rather than farming them out.40 Of course, since the very beginning,
the SMGG had introduced an ideological cleansing of the universities,
removing not only Nazis and ‘militarists’, but also individuals with ‘reac-
tionary political opinions’ and upholders of ‘false knowledge’. In 1945,
the SMGG forced Professors Eduard Spranger and Bernhard Schweitzer,
the first rectors of the Universities of Berlin and Leipzig, to resign.41 Both
men emigrated to Tübingen. When, in the winter semester of 1946/47, the
teaching of philosophy was permitted again, the professors had to submit
the programme of every lecture and seminar for scrutiny, explaining how
they intended to use them for political re-education. In 1948 they were
asked to prove their allegiance to dialectical materialism by filling out a
questionnaire issued by the Soviet philosophy officer. As a result, lead-
ing philosophers such as Walter Bröcker, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans
Leisegang and Theodor Litt emigrated to the West.42
The general political context was another reason for the self-restraint
that the SMGG initially adopted in its dealings with universities. This
restraint, however, did not apply to disciplines like philosophy and his-
tory, nor did it prevent the party from exerting pressure on the elections
of rectors and deans. The inaugural manifesto of the German Communist
38 E. Richert, ‘Sozialistische Universität’: Die Hochschulpolitik der SED (Berlin, 1967),

13–17.
39 R. F. Lawson, ‘Die Politik der Umstände: Eine Kritik der Analysen des Bildungswandels
im Nachkriegsdeutschland’, in M. Heinemann (ed.), Umerziehung und Wiederaufbau:
Die Bildungspolitik der Besatzungsmächte in Deutschland und Österreich (Stuttgart,
1981), 29; Nikitin, ‘Sowjetische Militäradministration’ (note 37), 1; I. Bejdin, ‘Die
Russen in Deutschland, Auszüge aus meinen Erinnerungen’, in Heinemann, Sowjetis-
che Besatzungszone (note 35), 11.
40 Nikitin, ‘Sowjetische Militäradministration’ (note 37), 5.
41 Nikitin, ‘Sowjetische Militäradministration’ (note 37), 6.
42 Müller and Müller, Festung Wissenschaft (note 36), 67–72.
83
Party, issued on 11 June 1945, declared it would be wrong ‘to impose
the Soviet system upon Germany: for this would not correspond to the
present conditions for development in Germany’. Rather, these condi-
tions called for another procedure: ‘to establish the antifascist democratic
regime of a parliamentary democratic republic with all democratic rights
and freedoms for the people’.43
Just how far these ‘democratic rights and freedoms’ went was experi-
enced, among others, by three students from Berlin, relegated in 1948 for
having written articles critical of university policy; they subsequently took
the initiative to found the Free University of Berlin.44 By 1953, more than
500 students and professors had been arrested and mostly condemned to
prison, forced labour or penal camps.45 Apparently, they did not belong
to ‘the people’.
From 1948 to 1953, the Volksbildungsministerium (Ministry of the
People’s Education) and, in particular, its Secretary of State for Higher
Education (founded in 1951) began implementing the Soviet model
described by a former high-ranking official of the SMGG.46
The Sovietization of Central and Eastern Europe

The aftermath of the Second World War brought about profound changes
in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe which, for many years,
were depicted by their geopolitical status: ‘socialist’, ‘Soviet bloc’, etc.47
The totality of such changes – political, economic and social – together
with significant modifications of the state borders and ethnic composi-
tions had an impact on higher education and its relations with the new
dominant authority: the Communist Party and its representatives within
the higher-education establishment.
The consequences of the war on Polish higher education were partic-
ularly disastrous. One third of the Polish intelligentsia perished.48 Mat-
erial losses were equally substantial. Two important pre-war academic
centres – Lwów and Wilno – were outside the country’s new boundaries.
The human losses were only slightly compensated for by those who bene-
fited from the secret underground teaching and studying in Nazi-occupied
territory provided by the so-called ‘flying university’. The extent to which
43 Müller and Müller, Festung Wissenschaft (note 36), 11.
44 Heinemann and Schneider, Hochschuloffiziere (note 32), 143–72.
45 Müller and Müller, Festung Wissenschaft (note 36), 363–71.
46 Cf. Richert, ‘Sozialistische Universität’ (note 38), 42–96.
47 Yugoslavia, which was established as a federal state in 1943, should be considered as
part of this bloc despite its specific brand of one-party rule and independent international
policy.
48 It has been estimated that only about 600 university professors, approximately 40 per
cent of the total number, survived.
84
independent Polish education was able to function in Nazi-occupied ter-
ritory as well as in Western Europe, notably in the United Kingdom
and Switzerland, together with the role played by the non-communist
government-in-exile, were the reasons behind the eagerness of the Soviet-
backed Polish administration to support the launching and reopening of
higher-education establishments and to promote the idea of tuition-free
higher education. The potential political gain from this action was not
obvious, but became evident when the first new post-war Polish univer-
sity – Maria Curie-Skłodowska University – was established in Lublin in
October 1944 as the symbol of the rebirth and democratization of Polish
higher education. At the same time, but only after a hard struggle with
the new regime, another university in this same town – the Catholic Uni-
versity of Lublin – was assured of its continuing existence in its pre-war
form as autonomous from the state, but as a state-accredited academic
institution.
ROMANIAN higher education was also badly affected by the war, but
not to the same degree of physical annihilation and material destruction
as Poland.49 Both students and academics had to cope with the conse-
quences of the war in which Romania had been implicated, namely the
territorial transformation of its national boundaries, particularly those in
Transylvania.50
From the point of view of challenges, the situation was also not very
different in the three YUGOSLAV universities when this country started
its existence as a federal, multi-ethnic state.51 In HUNGARY higher edu-
cation had to cope with the consequences of war damage, particularly in
Budapest, as well as with the consequences for both students and aca-
demic staff of the loss of Transylvania, which was briefly under its control
from 1940 to 1944.52
But even if the new post-war regimes of Central and Eastern Europe
assumed an active role in higher education after the war, in many aspects
universities were allowed to adhere to their traditional internal struc-
ture, organization of admissions and studies, academic and student rep-
resentation, and so on. This situation, which lasted only until the end
of 1947, was dictated primarily by the needs of reconstruction and
49 J. Sadlak, Higher Education in Romania 1860–1990: Between Academic Mission, Eco-

nomic Demands and Political Control (Buffalo, 1990).
50 In 1940, the Romanian ‘King Ferdinand I’ University of Cluj had to be evacuated to
Sibiu, and in its place functioned, until mid-1944, the Hungarian Royal Ferenc József
Scientific University. V. Puscas (ed.), A History of Cluj Higher Education in the 20th
Century (Cluj, 1999), 285–302.
51 N. N. Soljan, ‘Yugoslavia’, in P. G. Altbach (ed.), International Higher Education – An
Encyclopedia (New York and London, 1991), 837–50.
52 J. Kardos, E. Kelemen and L. Szogi, Centuries of Hungarian Higher Education (Budapest,
2001), 132–6.
85
concealed the political pragmatism of the new – but not yet fully empow-
ered – ‘people’s’ national regimes. The situation altered drastically around
1948, when the communist-controlled countries of Central and Eastern
Europe radically altered the design and purpose of the university and
other higher-education institutions and academic organizations. Their
mission and operations were subjected to the imperatives of a single ideo-
logical doctrine – Marxism-Leninism. The universities were transformed
into vast bureaucratic structures of the communist/people’s socialist state
irrespective of their traditions and history.53 Like all the graduates of all
other institutions of higher education, the graduates of the universities
were destined to form a ‘people’s’ intelligentsia.
Higher-education institutions gradually lost most of their institutional
autonomy, even if basic internal structures and bodies such as faculties,
chairs and the senate were preserved. This was done by changes in the
composition and prerogatives of the governing bodies, and by the creation
of new ‘executive organs’. The veneer of democratic governance was kept
by various forms of ‘collective representation’, including periodic ‘con-
gresses of science’ or meetings organized within a particular academic
discipline. In reality, direct political and administrative intrusion into
the functioning of universities covered practically all essential matters
of governance, from the appointment of the rector, deans and academic
personnel, to the composition of the student body, the organization of
curricula, and the content of teaching – particularly in ideologically rele-
vant subjects such as philosophy, history, law, economics and other social
sciences.54
The other common characteristic of these reforms was the imposition
of a variety of features borrowed from the Soviet academic system and
its organization of science. The institutional framework of the ‘histor-
ical’ university, labelled ‘liberal-bourgeois’ and thus synonymous with
the obsolete, was radically altered. The ‘new university’ was to concen-
trate on ‘pure’ theoretical research and the teaching of the so-called basic
disciplines, including philosophy, social studies, mathematics and all the
natural sciences. Separated from the universities were disciplines such as
medicine and pharmacy, agriculture and physical education. As a result
of these changes, the importance of the specialized institutions grew,
while the role of the ‘traditional’ universities, particularly in relation to
53 The Humboldtian model of free access to ‘knowledge’ at the centre of the university’s
mission was prevalent in the region. However, some countries, such as Romania, also
developed institutions that derived from Napoleonic influences, such as the grandes
écoles.
54 Ideological ‘standard-setting’ in the teaching of such subjects was carried out by the
so-called ‘party schools’, which were quickly turned into fully-fledged higher education
institutions that enjoyed privileged conditions for study, teaching and ideologically ne-
cessary ‘research’.
86
technological establishments – usually called the polytechnics – began to
diminish. In a number of academic centres an unhealthy rivalry devel-
oped, particularly between the universities and the polytechnics, as the
sectors competed for political and social standing rather than scientific
prestige and excellence.
In line with the ideologically motivated and non-denominational char-
acter of the educational system, the theological faculties were moved out
of the universities. In many cases they were closed, marginalized or turned
into separate academic schools, institutes or academies.55 The essential
rights and functions of universities had to face additional competition
from the academies of sciences, which were reorganized or set up accord-
ing to the Soviet organizational model. The so-called ‘working academies’
had three functions: to act as a body of eminent scholars, as research cen-
tres, and as the state agency to supervise and coordinate the research
conducted at higher-education institutions. Historically, academies had
confined themselves almost exclusively to the first function. The new
academies were super-coordinators of all civil scientific activities in the
country as well as bodies of international scientific cooperation.
One particularly disturbing feature of the Sovietization of academic
life was the introduction of a new system of graduation procedures and
academic titles. A lasting legacy of these new measures was the poli-
cing and screening bodies modelled on the Soviet prototype – the Higher
Attestation Commission (VAK). The award of scientific titles and the con-
firmation of academic appointments required their approval; they took
into account not only academic merit, but also political soundness.56
These ‘quality’ commissions were either attached to the Council of Min-
isters, as in Poland and Czechoslovakia, or to the ministry responsible for
higher education, as in the other countries. They were usually fairly large
bodies, some consisting of more than 200 members and various discipline-
related sub-commissions. The government and the party exercised con-
trol, more de facto than de jure, over the nominations to these bodies. In
a majority of Central and Eastern European countries, these bodies han-
dled appointments to professorial ranks. In Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and
Romania, they also had power over the final certification of a number of
advanced scientific degrees, including the doctorate granted by the univer-
sities, other higher-educational institutions and the academies of sciences.
The advocates of this system argued, not without reason, that in light of
the unequal quality of higher-educational institutions there was need for
55 In Poland, two small theological academies were created. Together with the Catholic
University of Lublin, they were viewed as an integral part of the higher education system.
The faculty of Protestant theology remained part of the Humboldt University in Berlin.
56 A. G. Korol, Soviet Education for Science and Technology (New York and London,
1957), 164.
87
some kind of external academic review. However, the main consequence
of the process of centralized screening of academic nominations was not
only its politicization, but its unusually lengthy bureaucratic procedures.
This too had a justification. An extended review was appropriate and
desirable for the lifetime appointment of a professor.
Most positions in the governing bodies of academic institutions were
part of the nomenklatura system, in which any appointment required
the prior acceptance of the appropriate party organization or the special
regional department dealing with education and science. The degree of
political control over the institutions was enhanced by reminding those
academics and students who were members of the Communist Party
of their obligation to observe party discipline based on the concept of
‘democratic centralism’; this was supposedly a balanced combination of
democracy and central leadership, but in practice it meant an obligation
of lower bodies to observe the decisions of higher ones. Based on such
a paradigm, the reforms replaced institutional autonomy with central
political and administrative control.
In most Central and Eastern European countries, as a result of this
imposed model of governance, relations between academia and authority
became tense; they further deteriorated in the early 1950s, when commu-
nist regimes gained total control over the higher-education system and
started to implement the vision of the ‘socialist’ university with draco-
nian zeal and discipline. In Poland in the early 1950s, students had to
attend all lectures, laboratory exercises and seminars, and to pass regular
compulsory examinations. In addition, male students were conscripted
and their military training became part of their study programme. Stop-
ping or extending one’s studies could be treated as an irresponsible social
or unpatriotic act, or even as sabotage; the result might be not only
expulsion from the university, but also imprisonment. Similar control
was exercised over the academic staff with regard to their teaching and
research.57
In the centrally planned economic system, every institution was
financed as a government unit. The capital investments were part of a
central plan that usually covered a five-year period. The level of funding
and staffing of higher education was driven by manpower considera-
tions determined by branches of the economy and state bureaucracy. In
order to attain better coordination between higher education and the dif-
ferent sectors of the national economy, administrative responsibility for
57 Curricula became overloaded. In Polish universities, they increased to 36–38 hours per
week in the academic year 1948/49. In some cases, after the introduction of compulsory
military training for male students, they reached 45–50 hours per week. T. Suleja,
Uniwersytet Wrocławski w okresie centralizmu stalinowskiego 1950–1955 (Wroclaw,
1995), 139.
88
academic institutions was dispersed among ministries. This produced a
maze of administrative procedures governing higher education. The rigid
line-item budgeting left little room for the development of managerial
self-reliance in institutional governance or research funding.58 Relations
with authority were less contentious in the area of basic funding. Yet
taking into consideration the general ineffectiveness of the bureaucratic
procedures and the economic shortages, seeking ‘political support’ for a
particular project or capital investment constituted the norm in relations
between higher-education institutions and the state.
Emerging university cooperation

The material and spiritual reconstruction of the destroyed universities
arose through the cooperation between governments, rectors, deans, and
the teachers and students, who did much to overcome the initial difficul-
ties, often enthusiastically lending a hand in clearing rubble and restoring
classrooms.
Western Europe
A lasting effect on international cooperation between the members of the
university stemmed from the initiatives taken initially by American foun-
dations to grant scholarships that allowed European students to spend
time at American universities. In 1946, upon the request of Senator J.
William Fulbright (1905–1995), the Congress of the United States decided
to promote academic exchange with other countries. ‘The Fulbright Pro-
gram provides grants for Graduate Students, Scholars and Professionals
and Teachers and Administrators from the US and other countries’; it
was designed to ‘increase mutual understanding between the people of
the United States and the people of other countries.’59
When the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949 it
eagerly promoted the exchange of students and professors that the West-
ern Allied Powers had initially offered to the Germans, and the Ful-
bright Program was extended to the whole world. Thanks to subsidies
from the Federal Government, two academic foundations, founded in
58 J. Sadlak, ‘In Search of the “Post-communist” University – The Background and Sce-
nario of the Transformation of Higher Education in Central and Eastern Europe’, in
K. Hüfner (ed.), Higher Education Reform Processes in Central and Eastern Europe
(Frankfurt/Main, 1995), 43–62.
59 Funded at first by war reparations and foreign loan repayments, later by Congressional
contributions and additional contributions from foreign governments, the Fulbright
Program sponsored from 1948 to 2006 105,400 grantees from the United States and
174,100 from other countries. The Fulbright Program awards approximately 6,000 new
grants annually. (http://exchanges.state.gov/education/fulbright/ (12 February 2008)).
89
1925, reopened: in 1950 the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst,
DAAD, began exchanging student trainees; later it primarily granted
scholarships for the exchange of German and foreign students, uni-
versity interns, young scholars and university teachers, funded interna-
tional cooperation projects of German universities and promoted German
studies in foreign universities.60 In 1953, the Alexander von Humboldt-
Foundation reopened. It provided scholarships and research prizes for
highly qualified foreign postdoctoral students, and research scholarships
for German postdoctoral students. The three institutions kept in touch
with their fellows, and created ever-growing international networks of
academics.61
A lasting side effect of the reconstruction activities in Western Germany
was cooperation among universities, represented by their rectors, in pur-
suing, defending and promoting their genuine interests and tasks. Before
the Second World War there existed a number of such institutions: the
College of Dutch University Rectors, constituted in 1898;62 the German
Rectors Conference, founded in 1903, followed in 1904 by its Prussian
section;63 the Conférence des recteurs des universités suisses, founded in
1904;64 and the Austrian Rectors’ Conference, founded in 1911, but inac-
tive from 1935 to 1944.65 In the United Kingdom, the vice-chancellors
of the universities had met regularly since 1921, and in the early 1930s
60 P. Alter (ed.), Jubiläumsschrift ‘Spuren in die Zukunft’ – Der DAAD 1925–2000, vol. I:
Der DAAD in der Zeit. Geschichte, Gegenwart, zukünftige Aufgaben (Bonn, 2000). The
DAAD sponsored from 1950 to 1999 450,000 German and 550,000 foreign grantees:
M. Heinemann (ed.), Jubiläumsschrift ‘Spuren in die Zukunft’ – Der DAAD 1925–2000,
vol. II: Fakten und Zahlen zum DAAD (Bonn, 2000), 106f. In 2006 the annual number
of grants was 55,000, and the worldwide network of DAAD alumni included 120 foreign
alumni clubs and more than 250,000 academics: C. Bode and D. Jecht (eds.), 20 Jahre
‘Wandel durch Austausch’: Festschrift für Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Theodor Berchem.
DAAD-Präsident 1988–2007 (Bonn, 2007), 30.
61 Between 1953 and 2003 the Foundation promoted more than 25,000 scientists and
scholars from 132 countries: C. Hansen and C. Nensa, Exzellenz weltweit: Die Alexander
von Humboldt-Stiftung zwischen Wissenschaftsförderung und auswärtiger Kulturpolitik
(1953–2003) (Cologne, 2004), 8.
62 The College of Rectors was an informal organization whose authority had a broad
impact on higher education policy in the Netherlands. It resumed work in 1947 and still
exists besides the Vereniging van samenwerkende Nederlandse universiteiten (VSNU),
the official association of the Dutch universities which in 1985 replaced the Academische
raad (‘Academic Council’) established in 1956 as both a platform for the boards of
the universities and an advisory body for the Dutch government (information kindly
furnished by Dr Frans A. J. van Steijn, VSNU).
63 Information from Bernhard vom Brocke, Marburg (Germany).
64 F. Rintelen, ‘Die Anfänge der schweizerischen Hochschulrektorenkonferenz’, in A. E.
von Overbeck (ed.), Das 75-jährige Jubiläum der schweizerichen Hochschulrektorenkon-
ferenz (Basel, 1979).
65 W. Höflechner, Die österreichische Rektorenkonferenz 1911–1938, 1945–1969 (Vienna,
1993).
90
founded the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, a body that
was reorganized in 1950.66
The revival and expansion of university cooperation began in occu-
pied Germany. On 15 September 1945 the British Control Commis-
sion sponsored the first meeting, in Göttingen, of the main personalities
involved in the university policy of the British zone – German university
rectors, British university advisers, civil servants of the Länder govern-
ments in charge of higher education – to discuss problems of common
concern.67 At their third meeting, on 25–27 February 1946, they consti-
tuted the Nordwestdeutsche Hochschulkonferenz (North-West German
University Conference). The purpose of the designation ‘Hochschulkon-
ferenz’ instead of ‘Rektorenkonferenz’ was to stress cooperation between
the rectors, the representatives of the civil and military university admin-
istrations, and the political parties.68
The conference consisted of a ‘British’ section, whose agenda and chair
were chosen by the military control commission, and a ‘German’ section,
proposed and chaired by the rector of the university hosting the meeting.
Until its integration into the West German Rectors’ Conference, founded
in April 1949, it held eighteen sessions.
In the American zone, on 9 September 1945, the rector and senate of the
University of Heidelberg asked the military government for permission
to organize a conference bringing together the rectors of all the univer-
sities in their zone. The decision was postponed on the grounds that
‘the highest control authority must deal with it’.69 While they waited,
Hesse’s university officer, Edward Y. Hartshorne, and the philosopher
Julius Ebbinghaus, rector of the Philipps-University Marburg, organized
the first ‘Marburger Hochschulgespräche’ (Marburg University Discus-
sions) over Whitsun 1946 instead. These were attended by rectors und
professors from the Western zones as well as from other countries, and,
in 1947, by control officers and professors from the Soviet zone as well.70
In November 1946, the rectors of the American zone were able to
organize the South German Rectors’ Conference, which the universities
of the French zone joined. In 1949, its fusion with the Northwest German
66 H.-A. Steger (ed.), Das Europa der Universitäten/L’Europe des universités/The Univer-
sities’ Europe: Entstehung der ständigen Konferenz der Rektoren und Vize-Kanzler der
europäischen Universitäten 1948–1962, Dokumentation (Bad Godesberg, 1964), 68.
67 M. Heinemann and S. Müller (eds.), Nordwestdeutsche Hochschulkonferenzen 1945–
1948 (Hildesheim, 1990), 1. In the Introduction to the volume (pp. 1–30) Müller gives
a comprehensive survey on the conference’s work.
68 Heinemann and Müller, Hochschulkonferenzen (note 67), 136f.
69 Heinemann and Müller, Hochschulkonferenzen (note 67), 1 (n. 2).
70 Marburger Hochschulgespräche 12. bis 15.Juni 1946: Referate und Diskussionen
(Frankfurt/Main, 1947); W. Rüegg, Marburger Hochschulgespräche 1946–1947
(Frankfurt/Main, 1966), 25.
91
University Conference led to the foundation of the West German Rectors’
Conference, a body composed exclusively of rectors.71
The autonomous interaction between universities promoted by the
Western occupying powers opened the difficult path towards the
European cooperation of universities. Neither the Americans nor the Rus-
sians were particularly keen on promoting the idea of Europe. The goals
of their education policy consisted of ‘Democracy’ and ‘Humanism’.72
A worldwide association of universities was more consonant with the
framework of the United Nations. Thus, in 1950, with the strong sup-
port of UNESCO, the International Association of Universities saw the
light of day.73
The British occupation policy was designed to help the Germans edu-
cate themselves in ‘tolerable European behaviour’. Thus it came as no
surprise that on 24 September 1946, five days after Churchill’s famous
speech on Europe at the University of Zurich, the British agenda of the
Northwest German University Conference included the item ‘Develop-
ment of Methods to Emphasize European Unity in Philosophy, Science
and Art’. The chief of the university section, Pender, mentioned the view,
supported by newspaper reports, that the German universities were co-
responsible for the nationalist roots of the war. But he also acknowledged
the present efforts that the universities and their heads were making to
fashion their students into good Europeans. For Pender, the collapse of
German nationalism represented a particularly auspicious circumstance
for this type of European orientation. He thus proposed to give greater
space to the European dimension in lectures at the universities. In the
discussions, the idea of Europe was only explicitly embraced by the
representatives of the Communist Party – with reference to the East-
ern European dimension – and by the trade unions. The rectors accepted
the proposal as a way of opening the isolated German universities to the
rest of the world and unanimously welcomed the idea of ‘emphasizing
the relationship with other countries in the curricula’. The rector of the
University of Münster, Prelate Schreiber, mentioned that the concept of
the ‘good European’ had also been emphasized at the Marburg Univer-
sity Discussions.74 There, the Swiss professor Olof Gigon had deemed the
international opening of the German universities absolutely necessary for
71 Heinemann and Müller, Hochschulkonferenzen (note 67), note 2.

72 Rüegg, ‘Humanism’ (note 33); W. Rüegg, ‘Humanismus. II. Die Umdeutung des
Begriffs’, in Staatslexikon: Recht, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, vol. III: Erbschaftssteuer
bis Harzburger Front (Freiburg/Breisgau, 1959), 171–4.
73 G. Daillant, Universality, Diversity, Interdependence: IAU 1950–1990, A Commemo-
rative Essay (Paris, 1990).
74 Heinemann and Müller, Hochschulkonferenzen (note 67), 224f.
92
the future of a Europe not confined to the role of a museum celebrating the
past of the West and sandwiched between the two future-oriented world
powers.75
Some German professors did indeed hold out for European Union,76
and the students’ enthusiasm for the political European movements
was even stronger. However, the universities looked on themselves as
European institutions, with their teaching and research deeply embed-
ded in European thought and tradition. Therefore they saw no need to
strengthen the ‘European orientation’ of their curricula.
Institutional cooperation between universities from different European
countries began on a bilateral basis, thanks to the initiative of the secretary
general of the West German Rectors’ Conference, Dr Jürgen Fischer. From
1952 until 1957, yearly conferences of British and German universities
were held in Königswinter near Bonn; the seventh of the series took place
in Bonn, in 1958, and the eighth in 1960, in Birmingham. The year 1958
saw the first French–German Rectors’ Conference in Berlin, a meeting
that continued on a yearly basis, alternating its location between the two
countries. The first Scandinavian–German Rectors’ Conference followed
in 1960 in Frankfurt.77
The initiative for multilateral cooperation between the Western Euro-
pean universities came from outside. Since Churchill’s speech, the idea of
Europe had found an institutional basis, especially thanks to the Euro-
pean Congress, held in 1948 at The Hague, and the Council of Europe,
founded in 1949. A resolution passed at The Hague had already called
for a European cultural centre to be set up in Geneva; it was also to
promote cooperation between the European universities. However, in
1950, this plan, together with the proposal for the foundation of a Euro-
pean Rectors’ Conference and a European University were all rejected by
the Ministers’ Committee of the Council of Europe which, until 1960,
had hardly dealt with university policy.78 Similarly, the universities were
not included in the political and economic unification process of other
international organizations. This was the case, for example, of the Orga-
nization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), founded in 1948
75 Marburger Hochschulgespräche (note 70), 111f., 134ff.

76 Heinemann and Phillips, Hochschuloffiziere 1 (note 14), 70. In April 1946, before
Churchill’s Zurich speech, the Professor of Education at the University of Hamburg,
Wilhelm Flitner, spoke about ‘The United States of Europe’ as a realistic political goal.
See W. Flitner, Die abendländischen Vorbilder und das Ziel der Erziehung (Bonn, 1947),
10.
77 Steger, Europa der Universitäten (note 66), 114–27.
78 K.-J. Maass, Europäische Hochschulpolitik: Die Arbeit des Europarats im Hochschul-
bereich 1949–1969, Schriftenreihe zur europäischen Integration, 7 (Hamburg, 1970),
2–12.
93
for the implementation of the Marshall Plan, as well as that of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), founded in 1949.79
But this did not apply to the Brussels Pact, ratified in 1948 by Belgium,
France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, with
the goal of promoting ‘economic, social and cultural cooperation and
common defence’. In 1952 and 1953, thanks to the initiative of the
secretary general of the Netherlands’ Ministry for Education, Arts and
Sciences, Dr H. J. Reinink, professors and administrators from the five
member states met in The Hague to discuss the common concerns of
the universities. This led to a plan for organizing a conference of uni-
versity heads of all the member states of the Council of Europe. On
20–25 July 1955, this conference was held in Cambridge, at the invi-
tation of the Brussels Pact’s successor, the Western European Union.
As a result of the Cambridge meeting, in 1959 the Standing Confer-
ence of Rectors and Vice-Chancellors of the European Universities was
founded in Dijon.80 At its third plenary meeting, in 1964, in Göttingen,
it promulgated its statutes. In 2009, its successor organization, the Euro-
pean University Association (EUA), comprises more than 800 universi-
ties and over 30 national rectors’ conferences from Eastern and Western
Europe.
Central and Eastern Europe

Over the years 1948–55, the natural inclination of academia to seek
international contacts and collaboration was subjected in the countries
of Central and Eastern Europe to ideological and political restrictions,
in which the glorification of Soviet higher education and science was de
rigueur. There were severe constraints on travel within national bound-
aries and even more stringent controls on travelling abroad. References
to the ‘achievements of Soviet theory’ in any given academic discipline
were encouraged.81 Some academies, especially those which enjoyed
respectability among their peers, ridiculed this forced ‘academic’ pro-
paganda, at some personal risk. But most people complied, not only
for safety, but also because of the genuine academic value of contacts
with the scientists and academic organizations of the Soviet Union and
other ‘socialist’ countries. These contacts and collaborations, run cen-
trally by the national academies of sciences, were particularly productive
in basic research and the exact sciences. In later years, these relations
expanded to include the exchange of young researchers and curricula.
79 Ibid.
80 Steger, Europa der Universitäten (note 66), 7–84. The acronym ‘CRE’ refers to the French
title, Conférence permanente des recteurs et vice-chanceliers des universités européennes.
81 Suleja, Uniwersytet Wrocławski (note 57), 168–9.
94
Graduates who had studied in the Soviet Union had a certain ‘competi-
tive advantage’ with regard to academic appointments and employment
opportunities.
A principal mechanism for mutual assistance in the areas relevant for
economic development among the communist countries of Central and
Eastern Europe was the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Come-
con), created in 1949. Until late 1960, ‘cooperation’ was the official
strategy, followed by the more ambitious goal of ‘integration’.82 Come-
con indirectly facilitated academic cooperation as it required a degree
of logistic support. But much more important were the bilateral agree-
ments forged under the auspices of ‘cultural and scientific’ collaboration,
which specified the number of visits, projects and so on. These ‘barter
arrangements’ were appropriate owing to the non-convertibility of local
currencies, but were not the most effective mechanism for promoting
academic cooperation.
emerging national and international university

policies, 1956–1967
Western Europe
From the mid-1950s, public opinion in Western Europe expected state
intervention to train a pool of scientists that would enable European
nations to withstand competition from the USA and the USSR.
In FRANCE, in 1956, the prime minister, Mendès-France, invited high-
ranking representatives of science, politics, administration and industry
to a conference at Caen to debate concrete plans for university reform.
Topics included the recruitment of students; the organizing, funding and
training of engineers, technicians and researchers; the status of teach-
ers as a profession; and the institutional framework of research centres.
The resulting recommendations led to a thorough reform of the study
of medicine, to the foundation of the Instituts universitaires de tech-
nologie (IUT) and new grandes écoles, as well as to the establishment
of research centres in the social sciences. The latter included the École
des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and the Maison des sci-
ences de l’homme (MSH) in Paris. They were founded between 1957
82 The organization forged linkages between the USSR and the other members such as
Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, East Germany (1950–1990),
Mongolia (from 1962), Cuba (from 1972) and Vietnam (from 1978), with Yugoslavia
as an associate member. Albania also belonged between 1949 and 1961. Its estab-
lishment was prompted by the Marshall Plan. Comecon was formally disbanded in
June 1991.
95
and 1963 thanks to the initiative of Fernand Braudel.83 In due course,
the MSH became one of the most important meeting places for Euro-
pean humanists and social scientists. Yet the modernization promoted by
these reforms met with the resistance of conservative professors, while
student activists increasingly denounced them as ‘capitalist’, ‘fascist’ and
‘imperialist’.84
In the FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY the seventy-year-
old lawyer Reinhold Schairer (1893–1971) who, before Hitler came to
power, had been chief manager of the Deutsche Studentenwerk (Student
Relief Organization) and one of the founders of the Studienstiftung des
deutschen Volkes (a foundation for promoting outstanding students),
took the lead. After an exile of more than twenty years in the United
States, he founded in 1956 in Cologne the Deutsches Institut für Tal-
entstudien (German Institute for Talent Research). This brought together
representatives of the federal government, the Länder, industry and sci-
ence to discuss ways of meeting the lack of researchers and techni-
cians. In 1957, it proposed the establishment of a national Volkswagen-
Foundation for the promotion of scientific research and training.85 The
year 1961 saw its realization,86 while at the same time, though quite
independently, the Fritz Thyssen-Foundation started. Both foundations
promoted research, regardless of national setting.
Another initiative with far-reaching consequences for university policy-
making was the revival of the university reforms of 1946–53, which
had been unsuccessful because the Länder administration had not been
involved. That changed in 1955. A joint conference of delegates from
the federal government, the Länder and the universities, in Bad Honnef,
developed a programme of state subsidies for students (Honnefer Modell);
its success prompted university rectors and parliamentarians to set up a
Wissenschaftsrat (Science Council) composed of representatives from the
federal government, the Länder, the universities, science and industry to
plan reforms in higher education and research. This body was founded
in 1957.87
83 J. Revel and N. Wachtel (eds.), Une école pour les sciences sociales: De la VIe section à
l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris, 1996); B. Mazon, Aux origines de
l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales: Le rôle du mécénat américain (1920–1960)
(Paris, 1988); G. Gemelli, Fernand Braudel (Paris, 1995) (information kindly given by
Elisabeth Dutartre (EHESS) and Maurice Aymard (MSH).
84 Bourricaud, ‘France’ (note 10), 37–51.
85 R. Nicolaysen, Der lange Weg zur Volkswagenstiftung: Eine Gründungsgeschichte im
Spannungsfeld von Politik, Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft (Göttingen, 2002), 166–73,
195.
86 Rüegg, ‘Epilogue’ (note 32), 228.
87 B. B. Burn, P. G. Altbach, C. Kerr and J. Perkins, Higher Education in Nine Countries:
A Comparative Study of Colleges and Universities Abroad (New York, 1971), 165–95.
96
In 1960, the Science Council published recommendations for the devel-
opment of universities and disciplines and for the creation of new chairs,
specified by university and faculty.88 Since the ministers of education and
finance of the different Länder had endorsed these recommendations, they
dutifully created the chairs over the following years. However, in the same
period, student numbers increased twice as fast as had been expected in
the prognosis of 1960, which had served as the basis for calculating the
required number of chairs and assistants. The administration did not react
to this unexpected increase. Beginning in 1961, student groups from the
radical left rejected the Science Council’s university reform as a ‘tech-
nocratic’ attempt to bend the productive sector of the university to the
dictates of capitalist economy.89
The government of the UNITED KINGDOM appointed a royal com-
mission in 1961 to examine all aspects of the higher-education system,
much as the Caen Conference and the German Science Council had done.
The resulting guidelines, published in 1963 and widely known as the Rob-
bins Report from the name of the committee’s chairman, differed radi-
cally from the reforms initiated in France and in the Federal Republic. The
Report respected the autonomy of the universities in fixing the number of
students admitted and the curricula on offer. But it also encouraged the
universities to present their individual development plans regularly to the
University Grants Committee, a body set up to receive public subsidies.
Since the committee’s members were university professors, the Report
in effect proposed that the universities plan their own development, set
their student numbers according to their capacity, and achieve their tar-
gets through entry exams. But the Robbins Report also sharply increased
the number of universities, from seventeen to forty-four. Consequently,
with the exception of the University of London – a loose federation of
more than thirty colleges and schools – only four universities had more
than 10,000 students, while the national average was below 6,000.90
Therefore British universities could handle the fourfold increase in their
total student numbers – from 103,011 in 1958 to 476,121 in 1966/67 –
without encountering structural problems.91
In the other Western European countries as well, circumstances forced
the authorities to take more active steps in their higher-education policy.
Switzerland, where the universities – apart from the two Federal Institutes
of Technology – are cantonal institutions, adopted the cooperative model
88 Wissenschaftsrat, Empfehlungen (note 8). 89 Rüegg, ‘Epilogue’ (note 32), 234.

90 Burn et al., Higher Education (note 87), 45–90.
91 Wissenschaftsrat, Empfehlungen (note 8), 510; Wissenschaftsrat, Empfehlungen zur
Struktur und zum Ausbau des Bildungswesens im Hochschulbereich nach 1970, vol. II:
Anlagen (Bonn, 1970), 383.
97
of the German Federal Republic, with all the delays intrinsic to the func-
tioning of a largely direct democracy.92 In the other countries, the central
governments began to expand higher education by increasing subsidies
for students, by widening the range of university studies and the number
of the corresponding chairs, and by carefully founding new universities,
especially on the periphery, often by promoting professional schools to
the rank of universities. Through such measures broader segments of the
population gained access to university.93 In 1967, three or four times the
number of young people were benefiting from academic training than in
1956.
In most countries, governments systematically promoted the univer-
sities’ scientific research by creating science research councils financed
by – and sometimes subject to – governmental oversight, but always
autonomous in their decisions.94 Through these measures national gov-
ernments aimed to overcome their deficit in research and in training
scientific experts to meet the competitive challenges their economies
faced. At first international cooperation was limited to research fields
in which the costs would have exceeded the capacity of single nations. In
1953, fourteen Western European states founded the Conseil Européen
pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), followed, in 1962, by the Euro-
pean Space Research Organization (ESRO). These initiatives allowed
Europe to attain worldwide leadership in high-energy physics and space
exploration.95 But although such cooperation had an effect on both indi-
viduals and groups of researchers, it did not affect the universities as
institutions.
This was also the case with the scientific programme of NATO,
initiated in 1959. It represented the first attempt of a supranational
institution to promote exchanges and cooperation between researchers.
From 1959 to 1967 NATO awarded scholarships for advanced study
at foreign universities to 800 graduate scientists and engineers: 21%
92 Rüegg, ‘Switzerland’ (note 3), 393–407.
93 On the university policies of several states of Western Europe: Daalder and Shils, Univer-
sities (note 3); Burn et al., Higher Education (note 87); P. Seabury (ed.), Universities in
the Western World (New York and London, 1975); L. Goedegebuure et al., Higher Edu-
cation Policy: An International Comparative Perspective (Oxford, 1993). As it appears
from the list of new universities in the Appendix to this volume, between 1956 and 1967
no country in Western Europe founded more than five universities.
94 Research councils founded before the war were reorganized: in the Federal Republic
of Germany (1921/1949), Italy (1923/1945/1963), Belgium (1928/1968) and France
(1936/1959). New ones were founded in Norway and the Netherlands in 1950, Switzer-
land in 1952, Sweden in 1959, Finland in 1981, the United Kingdom and Iceland in
1965, Ireland and Austria in 1967, and Denmark in 1968 (see G. Friborg (ed.), Sci-
ence Research Councils in Europe: Report of the Conference of West European Science
Research Councils Held on 9–11 February 1972 at Scanticon Conference Center, Aarhus,
Denmark (Stockholm, 1972), 171–282).
95 See chapter 15 (‘Technology’), notes 43, 44.
98
in physics and chemistry, 14% in engineering, 12% in biology, 8%
in medicine, 7% in earth sciences, 6% in mathematics and 10% in
miscellaneous fields, including agronomy, operations research and soci-
ology. International teams cooperated on some 281 research projects
in fields ranging from space science to medicine. In the mid-1960s,
every year about 3,500 scientists attended NATO’s summer schools for
advanced studies, whose topics ranged over mathematics, astronomy,
biology and medicine, psychological measurement theories and computer
languages.96
In 1960, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develop-
ment (OECD) succeeded the OEEC. According to article 2 of its statutes,
its task was to ‘promote the development of the necessary scientific
and technological instruments’ for the attainment of its goals (economic
growth, full employment and an increase in living standards) and ‘to pro-
mote research and vocational training’. This led to a series of comparative
studies (still ongoing) of national education policy, especially concerning
university-level studies, and also to promotion of international cooper-
ation in the development of research facilities and the initial funding of
supranational research projects. From 1962 to 1968, more than 300 insti-
tutes with 1,500 researchers participated in the research programmes of
the OECD.97
In 1953, the Council of Europe passed a ‘European Convention on the
Equivalence of Certificates of Secondary Education’. This was followed
in 1956 by a convention ‘on the Equivalence of the Time of Study at
University’ in the field of modern languages, and in 1959 by another ‘on
the Recognition of Academic Degrees and Diplomas’. While the first two
conventions were signed and ratified by almost all member states, the
third met with opposition and had no practical consequences.98
In 1957 the Treaty of Rome on the foundation of the European Eco-
nomic Community (EEC) stipulated in article 57 a free exchange of per-
sons and services and called for guidelines on the mutual recognition of
diplomas, examination certificates and other proofs of qualification. The
first draft presented in 1969 had to be withdrawn.
The Euratom Treaty, signed together with the EEC Treaty, called in
articles 9 and 216 for the foundation of a European University in Italy
in 1960. Although the Italian government supported this proposal, it
encountered numerous obstacles. Some were due to the resistance of the
universities themselves, which were unwilling to grant the name and status
96 NATO und Wissenschaft: Die Arbeit des Wissenschaftsausschusses der Nordatlantik-

paktorganisation 1959–1967 (Brussels, n.d.), 9–16.
97 Maass, Europäische Hochschulpolitik (note 78), 73f.
98 Maass, Europäische Hochschulpolitik (note 78), 127–34.
99
of a European University to any particular institution, thereby indirectly
downgrading themselves to merely national institutions.99
National rectors conferences

As a reaction to the expanding university policies of national govern-
ments, many European universities became members of the International
Association of Universities or the CRE, while also institutionalizing their
national cooperation by means of regular meetings of their heads.100
Before the Second World War, only five such bodies had existed.101
After 1957, national university or rectors’ conferences were set up in
most European countries. By 1995 such institutions had been founded in
Yugoslavia102 and Italy103 (1957), France104 (1958), Belgium105 (1962,
split into two in 1976),106 Denmark107 (1967), Finland108 (1969),
Lithuania109 (1970), Ireland110 (late 1970s), Norway111 (1977), Turkey
(1981), the Netherlands (1985),112 Iceland (1987), Hungary (1988),
Romania and Greece (1990), Latvia (1991), Bulgaria (1992), Croatia
and the Czech Republic (1993), and Sweden (1995).113
In 1959, the universities institutionalized their European cooperation
through the CRE, but they met in plenary session only every five years.
Such gatherings had to be carefully prepared and evaluated, and between
the meetings the universities’ common interests were defended by a per-
manent committee. From 1960, the latter consisted mainly of the dele-
gates from the national rectors’ conferences to the Council of Europe’s
99 European Parliament, Die Europäische Universität: Documentary Material of a Politi-

cal Committee (December 1967).
100 If not otherwise stated, the foundation dates and titles of the national rectors confer-
ences or councils were taken from A. Henzl, G. Priessnitz, K. Riegler and H. Wulz
(eds.), European Rectors’ Conferences: Status, Composition, Role and Function of the
Rectors’ Conferences of the European University Association, Österreichische Rek-
torenkonferenz/Austrian Rectors’ Conference (Vienna, 2003), or graciously acquired
from the national rectors’ conferences by Christel Vacelet, EUA Information and Com-
munications Director. Titles differing from the usual wording ‘(University) Rectors’
Conference’ are listed in the notes.
101 See notes 62–66.
102 Association of Yugoslav Universities, Steger, Europa der Universitäten (note 66), 117.
103 Conferenza permanente dei rettori degli atenei italiani. Steger, Europa der Universitäten
(note 66), 118.
104 Comité des recteurs français. Steger, Europa der Universitäten (note 66), 120.
105 Steger, Europa der Universitäten (note 66), 132.
106 Vlaamse interuniversitaire raad (1976), Conseil interuniversitaire de la communauté
française (1980).
107 Seabury, Universities (note 93), 184. 108 Finnish Council of University Rectors.
109 Officially registered in 1995. 110 Conference of Heads of Irish Universities.
111 Council of Norwegian Universities. 112 But see note 62.
113 They were followed by Poland and Slovakia (1997), Estonia (2000), Cyprus and Lux-
embourg (2004).
100
Committee for Higher Education and Research (CHER), consisting of
two representatives from each member state, one from the universities
and one from government. The group met every six months in connec-
tion with the sessions of the CHER as the Permanent Committee of the
CRE. This helped to ensure multilateral communication between the dif-
ferent national rectors’ conferences and between these collective bodies
and the CRE.114 The CHER was poorly treated by the Council of Europe,
however, probably because of the unofficial status of the university repre-
sentatives, who were not appointed by the governments.115 Its influence
upon the rare initiatives of the Council of Europe in the field of university
policy was less effective than that of the Cultural Committee, which con-
sisted solely of governmental delegates and communicated directly with
the Conference of the European Education Ministers, which met every
two years.116

The departure from the repressive and tyrannical communist regime was
only possible after Stalin’s death, followed also by the deaths or dismissal
of his cronies in a number of countries of the region. This brought about
important changes in the organization of social relations, including the
abandonment of a strict observance of the Soviet model of higher educa-
tion and its way of organizing internal relations. Estrangement from the
Soviet model took place within the national context of ‘building social-
ism’. Clear signs of the existence of a much larger ‘breathing space’ in
education, science and culture were felt around 1955, and still more so in
1956. Even if the fundamental precepts of the organization of the com-
munist system had not yet been modified, the policy of the party and
state had become less dogmatic, particularly in those countries where de-
Stalinization was a powerful force, such as Hungary and Poland, and later
on Czechoslovakia. Repressive policy, if applied, tended to be directed
towards politically outspoken individuals within the academic commu-
nity or certain disciplines such as the social sciences and the humanities,
rather than towards academia as a whole.
From 1956 to 1990, in most of the countries of Central and Eastern
Europe, the relationship between the universities and the authorities was
relatively stable, although disrupted by periodic returns to hard-nosed
restrictions on academic freedom (such as in Poland in March 1968 and
114 Steger, Europa der Universitäten (note 66), 78–84.
115 Maass, Europäische Hochschulpolitik (note 78), 33f.
116 Maass, Europäische Hochschulpolitik (note 78), 51–6; Steger, Europa der Universitäten
(note 66), 123. Europäische Erziehungsministerkonferenzen: Resolutionen (Bonn,
1973).
101
after the imposition of martial law in 1981, or in Czechoslovakia after
the spring of 1968). The strategy that dominated in Hungary should be
viewed as a native development within its national context rather than the
norm for ‘socialist’ higher education; following the Hungarian revolution
of 1956, higher-education policy was based on mutual concessions that
produced a specific model of relations between the state and the academy
described as l’université du compromis.117
Policy-makers improved their understanding by digesting the lessons
of politically motivated research fabrications, symbolized by Lysenkoism;
but this did not lead to substantial changes in the governance and man-
agement of higher education at the institutional and system level. There
had been periodic calls for, and discussions pointing to, the required
modifications. The most frequent argument stressed the importance of a
university’s basic activities: cultivating knowledge and training the intel-
ligentsia to a high theoretical level adapted to professional and civic
functions. During a debate on these issues in Poland in the mid-1960s,
it was felt that a ‘modern socialist university’ should be a hub radiating
its influence over the whole educational system, a centre for scientific
discussion, and the untiring organizer of ever more specialized scientific
disciplines. The prevailing view was that ‘the university’s old universality
must be replaced with multiplicity and diversity, its organizational unity
transformed into contacts and cooperation with other schools, and its
one-sidedness changed into a balanced co-existence of the natural sciences
and humanities; theory must be blended with practice’.118 These or sim-
ilar calls, even if only partially implemented, gradually led to increased
attention to meritocratic criteria in admissions and academic nomina-
tions. They also gradually brought about some substantive variations in
the degree of conformity or interpretation of the original socialist model.
But despite all these changes, the university system under communist rule
with which the countries of Central and Eastern Europe entered the 1980s
did not demonstrate any systemic departure from the orthodox model.
expansion, democratization, bureaucratization,

1968–1982
The need to establish more effective mechanisms for international aca-
demic cooperation gradually came to the attention of the policy-makers in
117 E. Auvillain, ‘Hongrie: L’université du compromis’, Le Monde de l’Education, 4 (1982),
25f.
118 E. Kujawski, ‘In Search of a New University’, Polish Perspectives, 8:12 (1965), 31–
41. J. Sadlak, ‘The Use and Abuse of the University: Higher Education in Romania,
1860–1990’, Minerva, 292 (1991), 186–225.
102
Central and Eastern Europe. This led to the so-called Prague Convention
covering the recognition of educational credentials between the commu-
nist countries, which was signed in Prague on 7 June 1972. The parties to
the convention were Bulgaria, Hungary, the German Democratic Repub-
lic, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, as well as
the ‘people’s democracies’ of Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam,
North Korea and Mongolia. The signatories agreed mutually to recog-
nize documents pertaining to general secondary education, vocational
secondary education, higher-education, academic degrees and titles.119
Any academically justified need for international collaboration was often
supplemented by ideological and international considerations. Therefore
all the countries of the region, though to a lesser degree than the Soviet
Union, had developed a study programme for students from developing
or non-European socialist countries, many of whom also benefited from
financial support that was superior to the support available for local
students.
A little-known body that supposedly coordinated collaboration
between the communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe was
the Conference of Ministers of Higher Education of Socialist Countries,
whose first session took place in 1966 in Moscow. The final session, the
sixteenth, took place in Bucharest in October 1989. In the last years of its
existence it tried to coordinate ‘educational research plans, communist
training for students, the modernization of didactic processes, and the
development of postgraduate studies, computerization, and student self-
government’. However, in view of the unforeseen pace and direction of
the democratic reforms in Eastern Europe, this conference lost all political
and practical meaning for its continuing existence.120
Participation in joint initiatives and projects implemented by UNESCO
was particularly valued, as the organization provided an opportunity
for contacts with the European academic community that had been
divided along ideological and military lines. In this regard, UNESCO’s
European Centre for Higher Education, CEPES (Centre européen pour
l’enseignement supérieur), founded in 1972 and located in Bucharest,
played a positive role.121
119 Around the year 2000, the convention ceased to function. On 11 April 1997 most of
the European countries had signed and later ratified the Council of Europe/UNESCO
Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning Higher Education in the
European Region, which is often referred to as the Lisbon Recognition Convention.
120 F. Januszkiewicz, ‘Eastern European Socialist Countries: Regional Analysis’, in A. S.
Knowles (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Higher Education (San Francisco, 1977),
1329–35; F. Januszkiewicz, ‘The XVIth Conference of Ministers of Higher Education
of Socialist Countries: Some Decisions and Recommendations’, Contemporary Higher
Education, 2 (1989), 251–5.
121 M. Malitza, ‘Reflections on the Creation and Functioning of UNESCO-CEPES: Personal
View of One of its Founders’, Higher Education in Europe, 27:1/2 (2002), 11–29.
103
Western Europe
The strengthened cooperation between the state and university admin-
istrations might have had a positive impact on university reforms; yet
its effect was nullified by the expansion of higher education that com-
pletely overwhelmed the university structures. In 1967, two to four times
more young people than in 1958 were enjoying an academic educa-
tion. Thanks to their autonomy, the relief provided by a 150 per cent
increase in the number of universities, and the strongly expanded poly-
technics sector, the British universities could deal with the education
explosion without serious structural difficulties. Things were very differ-
ent in Continental Europe, however. This is particularly well illustrated
by the case of the two countries that were first drawn into the students’
revolt.
In the FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY, in 1960, the Science
Council issued guidelines specifying the chairs and staff needed by each
university to fulfil its task of education and basic research. According
to the Council, no university should have more than 13,000 students.
It also recommended that larger universities – Cologne or Munich, for
example – reduce their numbers and that new universities take up the
surplus.122 This would have been possible if, as in Great Britain, the
student numbers established as guidelines for the increase in chairs and
staff had set a limit to the number of students admitted. However, for
political reasons the government representatives in the Science Council
refused to introduce this rule. As a result, the sparse new foundations of
the 1960s fell far short of relieving the existing universities.123
The embodiment of Humboldt’s ideal of a university that allowed as far
as possible free and easy cooperation between teachers and students in the
pursuit of science124 was attempted in Frankfurt, which numbered more
than 13,000 students, by splitting the university into three autonomous
but cooperating units. The government considered this plan in February
1969.125 Its implementation was prevented by the students’ revolution.
Subsequently, most of the old and, later, many new universities in the
Federal Republic had to accept far more students than the 13,000 that
had been advised as a limit in 1960.
122 Wissenschaftsrat, Empfehlungen (note 8).

123 In 1962 the Länder concerned decided to found universities in Bochum and Regensburg.
In the event, these did not reduce the student numbers in Cologne and Munich. The
new universities promoted regional university studies but could not compete with the
better location of the old universities.
124 W. von Humboldt, Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. IV: Schriften zur Politik und zum
Bildungswesen (ed. A. Flitner and K. Giel) (Darmstadt, 1964), 256.
125 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau 30 January and 19 February
1969.
104
In the years 1967–9, the students’ revolution that had started in the
USA swept through Western Europe. The motives that triggered it and the
main goals it pursued were external to university affairs.126 In Europe, it
began in Berlin on 2 June 1967, when, at a demonstration against the visit
of the Shah of Iran, Benno Ohnesorge, a student at the Freie Universität,
was shot by a policeman. A series of partly violent manifestations of grief
and protest broke out at West German universities.127 In November 1967,
the students’ revolution entered the universities, when protesters tried to
transform the lectures of Carlo Schmid, then professor of political science
at the University of Frankfurt and a social democratic federal minister,
into a tribunal against the emergency laws that the federal government
was preparing at the time. The attempt failed but it was widely publi-
cized. This started a series of US-inspired ‘direct actions’, such as go-ins,
teach-ins and sit-ins.128 Their declared goal was to unmask the repressive
violence and intolerance of the academic and state authorities.129 Both
from an ideological and organizational perspective, these actions had
their basis in Marxist student groups, which since 1961 had promoted a
counter model to the governmental university reform advocated by the
Science Council. They wanted a university democratically constituted,
co-governed by students and assistants, and independent of government
and the capitalist economy.130 However, it was only after the demonstra-
tions against the ‘police state’ of the summer of 1968 that their proposals
for university politics met with widespread interest among students and
a few professors.
In FRANCE, on the contrary, the students’ revolution was first sparked
by a situation within the university that was felt to be intolerable; but it
soon expanded into a broad protest against the political and social sta-
tus quo. Between 1960 and 1967, student numbers at the fifteen French
universities had soared from 214,672 to 586,466.131 In the autumn of
1967, the government prescribed reforms that provoked an ongoing
series of protests by students and assistants in the academic ghetto of
126 For details of the student revolt see chapter 9. This chapter is concerned with its impact
on the relations between the university and the authorities.
127 J. Hager, Die Rebellen von Berlin: Studentenpolitik in der Freien Universität. Eine
Dokumentation (Cologne and Berlin, 1967).
128 Anleitung zum Handeln: Taktik direkter Aktionen. Übersetzt aus dem Amerikanischen
von Dr. E. Krippendorf (Berlin, 1967).
129 W. Rüegg, Die studentische Revolte gegen die bürgerliche Gesellschaft (Erlenbach and
Zurich, June 1968). Reprinted in W. Rüegg, Bedrohte Lebensordnung: Studien zur
humanistischen Soziologie (Zurich and Munich, 1978), 225–39; Cf. W. Rüegg, ‘The
Intellectual Situation in German Higher Education’, Minerva, 13:1 (1975), 103–20.
130 Hochschule in der Demokratie: Denkschrift des Sozialistischen Deutschen Studenten-
bundes (1961; new edn, Frankfurt/Main, 1965); Rüegg, ‘Epilogue’ (see note 32), 234.
131 P. Salmon, ‘France: The loi d’orientation and its Aftermath’, in Daalder and Shils,
Universities (note 3), 64.
105
the Faculté des lettres et sciences at Paris-Nanterre, a densely overpopu-
lated faculty with some 12,000 students. Beginning with a ‘lecture strike’
in November 1967, these protests soon escalated into anti-authoritarian,
anti-technocratic and anti-bureaucratic ‘direct actions’ that included chal-
lenging the police forces and culminated in the occupation of the central
administration building on 22 March 1968. The militant movement that
adopted this date as its name worked towards the spread of the revolt to
other universities, ‘so that criticism towards the university, as in Germany,
may lead to radical and permanent political action in the context of the
Critical University’.132 This was accomplished in May, when the campus
of Nanterre was closed indefinitely. The unrest immediately spread to the
Sorbonne and, later, to the universities in the provinces.
When the trade unions rallied to the students’ revolution, de Gaulle
had trouble preventing a state crisis.133 In mid-May, by a hurried visit
to the French occupation troops in Germany, he ensured that he had
the backing of the army, and in June, through parliamentary elections, he
obtained a vast majority. He then set up a new government and appointed
as its education minister Edgar Faure, who had the task of drawing up a
general university law. The resulting ‘loi d’orientation de l’enseignement
supérieur’ was to have ensured the reform of the French universities
according to de Gaulle’s basic principles of participation and autonomy. It
was presented to parliament in July and passed on 12 November 1968.134
The law did just enough to accommodate the revolutionary enthusiasts’
claims for participation so that the government achieved the short-term
goal of taking the riots off the street and starting the new academic year
in November without fear of student revolts: the students were granted
a 50 per cent membership in the corporate university bodies, apart from
those dealing with the selection of teaching staff, research and exams, on
condition that a suitable number of students took part in the election of
their representatives. At the same time, the law fulfilled the main goals
of the academic and governmental reformers, and therefore serves as
a relatively moderate example of the avalanche of university laws that,
during the 1970s, covered the university landscape in Continental Europe.
In March 1971, some twenty-six months after the promulgation of the
law, the ‘Implementation of the Reform’ that it stipulated had been carried
out: the fifteen old universities had been replaced by fifty-six new ones,
132 ‘Bulletin der Bewegung des 22. März’, quoted in J. Bourges (ed.), Aufstand in Paris
oder ist in Frankreich eine Revolution möglich? (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1968), 102.
133 Bourricaud, ‘France’ (note 10), 31–61; F. Bourricaud, Universités à la dérive (Paris,
1971); R. Aron, La révolution introuvable: Réfléxions sur la révolution de mai (Paris,
1968).
134 Loi no 68.978 d’orientation de l’enseignement supérieur, Journal officiel de la
République française (13 November 1968).
106
together with nine university centres affiliated to nearby universities. The
multiplication had been achieved by new foundations and by splitting
up existing universities in the larger cities. The huge conglomerate in
Paris and its surroundings, with its 150,000 students, was replaced by
thirteen universities, three of which kept the designation ‘Sorbonne’ in
their names.135
The basis and starting point of the reform lay in merging related disci-
plines into ‘Teaching and Research Units’ (UER: Unités d’enseignement et
de recherche). It was from these units that the universities created them-
selves. The government granted its authorization after an examination of
the proposed statutes by the newly founded consultative bodies of the
regional councils for teaching and research and the national council of
the same name. Henceforth the universities had the status of public insti-
tutions with their own legal responsibility and their own administrative,
financial and teaching autonomy. They were no longer directly controlled
by the state-appointed recteur who, in his or her regional administrative
district called the académie, represented the minister of education and
oversaw teaching from the elementary school to the university level. As
‘chancellor of the universities of the académie’ he or she continued to
represent the education minister’s supervisory function. But the whole
administration of the university was in the hands of a president elected
for a five-year period among the full professors by the university council.
To what extent the ‘Loi Faure’ actually achieved the aims its author had
extensively justified136 remains a point of controversy.137 The universities’
autonomy, which represented the second pillar of the reform, remained
weak and was not strengthened by the long series of decrees and laws
that followed the loi d’orientation. Moreover, although it had repeatedly
been asserted that research within the ‘Teaching and Research Units’ was
of fundamental significance for the reform, research actually remained
the domain of another state institution, the CNRS. The latter’s existence
did lead to an increase in autonomy and competition among university
members engaged in research, but not among the universities themselves.
University autonomy was also not helped by the founding of a national
conference of university presidents, chaired by the education minister. The
objectively dubious circumstance that the law did not apply to the grandes
135 In 1977, there were sixty-four universities in France, while there had been fifteen in
1945/46. At the same time, the state increased the teaching staff from 26,166 teachers
(1967/68) to 41,511 (1980/81), especially the tenured maı̂tres assistants from 6,513 to
16,771, the professors from 7,134 to 12,134, while the number of assistants remained
practically unchanged (12,519/12,417). See J. C. Passeron, ‘1950–80: L’université mise
à la question: changement de décor ou changement de cap?’, in J. Verger (ed.), Histoire
des universités en France (Toulouse, 1986), 382, 403.
136 E. Faure, Philosophie d’une réforme (Paris, 1969).
137 Compare the title of Passeron’s quoted chapter (note 136).
107
écoles, which produced high government administrators and influential
politicians such as Faure himself, shows how hard it had been to win
over a parliamentary majority in favour of the law. As early as 1945,
de Gaulle had abandoned the plan, recommended by his government in
exile, to reform these ‘cadre’ schools.
Analysing the ‘Loi Faure’ according to the criteria of democratization
leads to less ambiguous results. This term is not found in the text of
the law, in contrast with public discussion in France and elsewhere at
that time. The revolutionary student groups were not just seeking greater
participation in the universities; rather, their goal was the fundamen-
tal reform of society and its institutions. As a think-tank close to the
Paris Revolt of May 1968 proclaimed: ‘The era of democracy has begun.
Throughout the entire world, the masses want to take their destiny into
their own hands.’ To realize this, the manifesto continued, what was
needed was completely autonomous universities able to renew themselves
in competing for students and teachers. For this think-tank, the intellec-
tual and moral future of society directly depended on the universities, as
too, in the long run, did its economic and political future.138
Since 1945, two meanings had been associated with the concept of
the ‘democratization of the university’. Firstly, this concept referred to
the task of providing equal university access for all social strata. This
goal was to be forwarded, if not yet fully achieved, by increasing the
number of institutions of higher learning and spreading them geographi-
cally. Secondly, the influential American educator John Dewey had called
‘democratic’ a certain type of behaviour that a teacher should observe in
class: instead of disciplining the students personally and with reference to
the content of the course, he should permit responsible self-learning and
communicative interaction. At the university level, this was widely conso-
nant with Humboldt’s ideas.139 Accordingly, in his final speech defending
the loi d’orientation at the National Assembly, Edgar Faure stated: ‘if
teaching is to be democratic, it is important that it should be dialogical’.
According to Faure, many university teachers would have practised this
if student numbers had permitted it.140 By orienting the reform towards
the UER, while simultaneously splitting up universities with large student
populations, better circumstances were created, even if only temporarily.
The French universities, however, could not limit their student numbers
in the way that the grandes écoles or the British universities did.
138 Club Jean Moulin, Que faire de la révolution de mai? (Paris, 1968).
139 See above, 104.
140 ‘Il importe, par conséquent, que l’enseignement soit dialogué si l’on veut qu’il soit
vraiment démocratique’ (Faure, Philosophie (note 137), 74, followed by the advice for
group work).
108
For the students’ revolution, the concept of the ‘democratization of the
university’ signified transferring democratic forms of rule and decision-
making to the university. This conception remained alien to the ‘Loi
Faure’ – and not just terminologically. The participation of the students,
the assistants, the administrative staff and representatives of public life
opened up the consultative and administrative corporate bodies of the uni-
versities. But they continued to be subjected to the politically legitimized
office holders of the democratic state. The ‘university within democracy’
was not replaced by a politically ‘democratized university’.
Last but not least, the ‘Loi Faure’ achieved a university goal that had
only exceptionally been attained previously: although professors of for-
eign nationality did not receive exactly the same status as their French
colleagues (as practised in other states), they were granted the right to join
the teaching staff of the French universities. In 1969, the protest wave
hit the other Western European countries, spilling over into Yugoslavia,
Poland and Czechoslovakia.
The UNITED KINGDOM experienced the partly violent demonstra-
tions of the neo-Marxist inspired ‘student power’.141 But the riots did
not change the universities’ autonomy in transmitting and increasing sci-
entific knowledge according to their own rules under the control of the
democratically constituted public powers; although students and staff
were given participation rights on corporate bodies, their numbers and
their rights remained far below those accorded by most other states in
response to the riots – often all too hastily.142
In ITALY the government tried to counter the two sources of insur-
gence by equalizing the status of the non-professorial teaching staff with
that of the students. In November 1969 it extended the general right to
study at university to holders of all types of rigorous higher-school leaving
examinations. At the same time, all teaching staff hired on a provisional or
temporary basis received the status of lifetime civil servants. Both actions
proved to be counterproductive: university teachers whose aptitude had
not been ascertained either by the national qualification tests or by the
local appointment procedures customary in Italy filled up the teaching
staff and blocked its renewal for years. This negative effect was exacer-
bated by the second action, which immediately doubled student numbers,
thus further overcrowding the mass universities. The quality of education
dropped in many disciplines; private and state employers protested. After
two new university laws failed to pass in parliament, in 1973 ‘Urgent
Actions for the Universities’ re-established many of the old rules and
141 A. Cockburn and R. Blackburn (eds.), Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action
(Harmondsworth, 1969); K. Jacka, C. Cox and J. Marks, Rape of Reason: The Cor-
ruption of the Polytechnic of North London (London, 1975).
142 Shils, ‘Great Britain’ (note 9), 618.
109
allowed participation in governance only on the basis of ‘qualitative rep-
resentation’ in the sense of the ‘Loi Faure’.143 Thus, appointments and
important executive oversight remained exclusively the domain of the
professors with tenure.144
In FINLAND, the other extreme in the spectrum of students’ claims,
the National Student Association proposed at the end of 1968 that every
member of the university have a vote in the elections to the university
councils. In June 1969 an official reform commission adopted the pro-
posal. Later, the government failed twice in an attempt to carry its reform
proposals through parliament. In 1975, the parliament adopted a univer-
sity law that replaced the general suffrage of ‘one man, one vote’ with
the principle of ‘participatory democracy’. This meant the election of an
equal number of representatives for each group of university members.
In the FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY, in 1968, there were
proposals to put university teachers, academic staff and students on
an equal footing in a tripartite division. This was presented by some
professors as a positive contribution to the ‘democratization of the
university’.145
In THE NETHERLANDS, in 1970, the government reacted to the
insurgency with a University Government Reorganization Act, which
brought together all academic teaching staff into one group and gave the
non-academic staff a place in the tripartite division.146 In 1975 Finland
and the other Nordic states followed this example. Other countries con-
sidered a four-part division or the additional participation of representa-
tives from public life.
In 1978, Gerrit Vossers, rector of Eindhoven University – later to be
president of CRE – drew the following conclusions from his experiences
of the preceding years:
The universities’ effectiveness has declined; the law has drained the execu-
tive boards of their experience, continuity and competence. Mediocrity has
spread. The decision-making competencies have been spread thin and scat-
tered. Thus, decisions are not taken or require much time and effort. The
concerned people seem to lose interest. It is not primarily the politicization
143 See: ‘Kriterien der qualitativen Repräsentation der Mitglieder der Universität in den
Organen der akademischen Selbstverwaltung’, reprint in W. Becker (ed.), WRK, Stel-
lungnahmen, Empfehlungen, Beschlüsse 1960–1989 (Bonn, 1989), vol. I, 67f. This
document, dated 22 May 1968, as well as other WRK recommendations for university
reforms, was known in Faure’s ministry; see J. Fischer, Hochschulreform in Frankreich:
Rahmengesetz 1968, Dokumente zur Hochschulreform, 7 (Bad Godesberg, 1970), 17.
144 Malintoppi, ‘Italy’ (note 11), 111–21.
145 J. Habermas, ‘Heilige Kühe der Hochschulreform’, Die Zeit, 17 September 1968.
Reprint J. Habermas, Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform (Frankfurt/Main, 1969),
221f.
146 H. Daalder, ‘The Netherlands: Universities between the “New Democracy” and the
“New Management”’, in Daalder and Shils, Universities (note 3), 173–231.
110
that is paralyzing the universities, but rather their obesity and loss of move-
ment and dynamism. This wrong turn that the development of university
structures took is possibly the greatest causal factor in the depression of our
universities. The problems that universities have to face in times of dimin-
ished or even static economic growth require even greater competence from
the executive boards, so that difficult decisions about the redistribution of
resources can be made.147
In fact the arrangements by ‘university’ group put the professors with

tenure in a minority position. This fact is illustrated by a law that assigned
one-third of board representatives to the group comprising all teaching
staff; it was necessary also to require that these representatives include at
least one to three professors.
Later, the ‘three-thirds’ or ‘four-fourths’ participatory laws were
revised and the group of professors with tenure received special rights.
In the Federal Republic of Germany, it took an appeal to the Constitu-
tional Court by a group of university teachers from Göttingen to bring
this about.148 In order to realize their constitutional right of freedom
in research and teaching, the professors with tenure were to have ‘deci-
sive influence’ (‘ausschlaggebenden Einfluss’, de facto 51 per cent of the
votes) in topics concerning research and the appointment of professors,
and a ‘leading influence’ (‘massgeblichen Einfluss’, 50 per cent) in teaching
matters.
Over time, the numeric composition of the committees lost more and
more of its significance. The prophecy of an American historian, ‘partici-
patory democracy would soon transform into participatory boredom’,
had come true.149 And the defence of interests that had sparked the foun-
dation of the ‘group university’ gradually lost its significance compared
with the defence of the interests of the entire university in the face of the
worsening financial conditions.
In this context, it was not helpful that university teachers with tenure
only participated in common university affairs through their delegates.
In the traditional university, the vice-chancellor or rector could always
make an appeal to the goodwill of competent colleagues whenever he
had to draw up important position papers or prepare structural or study
reforms with input from the assistants and students. In the ‘democra-
tized university’, by merely electing their representatives the professors
acquitted themselves of their corporate duties and turned their attention
147 G. Vossers, ‘Die Rolle der Hochschule im Bildungssystem in Europa’, in Westdeutsche
Rektorenkonferenz, Die deutsche Hochschule in der Kritik des Auslands, Dokumente
zur Hochschulreform, 33 (1978), 35.
148 Bundesverfassungsgericht 1 BvR 424/71–1 BvR 325/72, 27 May 1973, V.4.a,b.
149 F. Stern, ‘Die deutsche Hochschule 1978 in internationaler Sicht’, in Die deutsche
Hochschule (note 148), 52.
111
to personal academic and professional interests. While in the past it had
been the professors’ experience and competence that had contributed to
the university’s image and prosperity, in the group university a huge pro-
fessional and clerical staff dominated. In a middle-sized university after
1970, the new election office alone required as many administrative staff
as the entire rector’s office had done previously.
The complex, often inefficient decision-making processes at the uni-
versity required the counterpart of a strengthened state bureaucracy. At
no other time in the history of the university did higher-education laws
supplant each other so rapidly as after 1968. Previously, the state had
contented itself with setting framework laws, often for the entire school
system; or it had stipulated the tasks, rights and organizational structures
of single universities in their founding charters, while regulating specific
issues in the statutes. These were usually presented by the universities
themselves to the government for authorization and could be revised
with little bureaucratic effort. After 1968, the proportion and relative
weight of laws and statutes were reversed.
When it became apparent that the new university laws had failed, some
governments preferred to limit the damage by increasing state control
rather than run the risk of sparking new protests by revising the laws.150
Nonetheless, in most Continental countries, successful and unsuccessful
law revisions succeeded each other well into the 1990s.
Originally, ‘democratization of the universities’ referred to opening
them to the largest possible number of people. After 1968, these intentions
were congruent in their results with the previous economically motivated
growth of academic professional training. Hence governments continued
their expansive university policies, or sometimes even increased them with
breathtaking speed.151
The expansionist policies towards universities also resulted in diversi-
fication of university education in both location and curricula. Most new
universities were upgraded from the secondary sector or expanded spe-
cialized universities. Technical colleges were given faculties of medicine,
law, economics and social sciences and became universities by character
and often by name as well. Something similar occurred in the case of
trade and economics colleges. The new institutions differed from their
traditional counterparts by incorporating technological and other mod-
ern disciplines. The old universities, on the other hand, limited themselves
150 M. N. Pedersen, ‘The Irreversible Process of University “Democratisation”: The Danish

Case’, International Journal of Institutional Management in Higher Education, 12:1
(1988), 115–28.
151 See chapter 2 (‘Patterns’), as well as the list of the universities founded between 1945
and 1995 in the Appendix.
112
to their traditional disciplines or simply retained one or several faculties,
as in the case of the division of the Sorbonne.
In most countries, the universities were complemented by other types
of higher education, such as the polytechnics and colleges of education in
Great Britain, the Fachhochschulen in the German Federal Republic, the
IUT in France, and the regional colleges in Norway and Sweden. Such
institutions could neither grant academic titles nor pursue basic research.
But in contrast to the traditional universities, they were able to limit their
student numbers and to impart in three years a scientifically grounded
professional training to most students.
Governmental university politics of the 1970s had three positive results.
Firstly, the distribution of facilities for secondary and higher education
across the whole country lessened the imbalances between the centre
and the periphery; secondly, as schools with only a few special disci-
plines were upgraded into polytechnics or universities, they could offer a
greater choice of disciplines; and thirdly, these two types of diversification,
together with other actions such as provision of study grants, facilitated
access of a wider population to professions requiring a higher-education
background. However, these three positive outcomes were counterbal-
anced by three negative ones: overcrowded mass disciplines with longer
degree periods and higher drop-out rates; the bureaucratization of aca-
demic self-administration; and the loss of solidarity among the teaching
staff of the group universities.
towards a harmonised european model, 1983–1995

Autonomy as scarcity management in Western Europe
The problems of the educational explosion that had not been solved by
the university laws of the 1970s worsened over the following decade as
the university politics of Western European governments felt the effects
of shortfalls in public budgets.
In 1982, an internationally known university politician declared:
Within three years, the British universities will have to handle a 12% net
decrease in the public funds they can spend. Hundreds of tenured university
teachers are laid off with severance pay. Universities are closed down.
The ratio between teachers and students is rapidly deteriorating. The real
income of the teachers is dropping, just as the real value of the scholarships.
In three years, numerous disciplines, including natural sciences, will only
be taught in half as many universities as today.152
152 R. Dahrendorf, ‘Die europäischen Universitäten in einem veränderten sozia-

lökonomischen Klima’, in W. Kalischer (ed.), Die Internationalität der Universität:
113
Facing this dramatic situation, the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and
Principals commissioned a study of the effects that the cuts would have
on the effectiveness of the university system. Published in 1985, the Jar-
ratt Report recommended the introduction of private business methods of
accounting and assessment to strengthen competition among the faculties
and institutes within the universities and between the universities them-
selves in a national and international context. Consequently, like private
companies, the British universities received state funds on the basis of the
contracts that they signed – within the context of the country’s scientific
policy – with the descendant of the University Grants Committee, the
Universities Funding Council. In the academic year 1988/9 it contributed
53% of the average university budget to ensure the infrastructure needed
to maintain a high standard of research and teaching; 15% was income
from student fees, paid for British students by the local authorities, 7%
was made up of research grants from the national research councils, and
25% came from private contracts and subsidies.153
The idea of competition that had found an extreme manifestation in
the British university system lay at the heart of the recommendations
that the West German Science Council issued in 1985 on the topic of
competition in the German university system. The same was true for the
report that a group of professors from the Collège de France produced
on behalf of President Mitterrand, and which resulted in the creation of
the Comité national d’évaluation des universités.154 In other countries
the governments intervened by concentrating single disciplines in a few
universities (as in the Netherlands), or by differentiating between a rigid
curriculum that was to prepare the majority of students for professional
life and a more demanding curriculum geared towards research for the
minority interested and talented enough to profit from it (as in Sweden).
Collectively, all the reforms that the various governments planned and
partly carried out in the 1980s had the aim of differentiating between
the universities according to their productivity, and of allowing them to
define a focus and thereby improve their competitiveness, not only on the
European market but also in comparison with the North American and
Japanese universities.
Jahresversammlung 1982. Ansprachen und Referate, Zusammenfassung der Ple-

nardiskussionen. Konstanz, 3. und 4. Mai 1982, Dokumente zur Hochschulreform,
50 (Bonn and Bad Godesberg, 1982), 12–139, quotation 136.
153 J. Brennan and T. Shah, ‘Higher Education Policy in Great Britain’, in Goedegebuure,
Higher Education (note 93), 176–93.
154 W. Rüegg, Zementierung oder Innovation: Effizienz von Hochschulsystemen,
Österreichische Rektorenkonferenz, Hochschulpolitische Reihe, 1 (Vienna, 1987), 39f.,
44; A. Bienaymé, ‘France’, in P. G. Altbach (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Com-
parative Higher Education (New York, 1991), 657–70.
114
Competitiveness implies two conditions: first, a wide-open market in
which the competition can take place. With the enlargement of the Euro-
pean Union and the disappearance of the Iron Curtain, the market existed.
Second, the freedom of action of the competing actors to implement the
far-reaching autonomy of the universities in their choice of students and
teachers, in planning their curricula and research, and in managing the
necessary financial resources. The reform laws had sworn by university
autonomy – it was not just a question of mere lip service. Increasingly, the
transfer of a global budget replaced the bureaucratic financial administra-
tion that had required administrative authorization for every expenditure.
But from the 1980s on, this responsibility made austerity packages ne-
cessary. At first they were excused as ‘temporary’, but they soon became
the norm. Thus, for the universities, financial autonomy meant having to
learn how to manage scarce resources and, following the British example,
to become contract partners of the government on the basis of periodic
development plans and their evaluation in order to receive state funding
and attract other monies.
Competition for the best students, however, which represented a sig-
nificant aspect of British universities, did not come into play strongly on
the Continent. Only exceptionally and in single disciplines were the uni-
versities able to select incoming students. Paradoxically, the growth of
the university system led to a decrease in student mobility. Thus, there
had been no substantial extension of the pool of eligible excellent stu-
dents beyond state borders. Quite the contrary: in 1965/66, 6.5 per cent
of the students of the six EC states had done an exchange at a foreign
university;155 in the 1980s, these numbers had dropped to less than 1
per cent.156 This cannot be attributed solely to the democratization of
university studies, for in the same period there was a significant increase
in programmes that facilitated student exchanges. Countless partnership
agreements among universities of different countries from all parts of the
globe were signed, as well as simultaneous bilateral agreements for the
recognition of class attendance and study tests that the students com-
pleted at the partner countries’ universities.157 Despite these initiatives
and despite the increased availability of foreign exchange scholarships,
the majority of students from the new educated classes attended the near-
est university – much as in the later Middle Ages. The causes were not
155 J. Fischer, ‘Hochschulreformen durch europäische Hochschulpolitik?’, Deutsche Uni-
versitätszeitung, 1 (1972).
156 Deutscher Bundestag, 10. Wahlperiode, Drucksache 10/6419’ 11 12.11.86, Probleme
der Hochschulpolitik im Bereich der Europäischen Gemeinschaft, insbesondere der
Forderung der Mobilität von Studierenden und Wissenschaftlern.
157 Erasmus Bureau, Akademische Anerkennung von Hochschuleingangs-, Zwischen- und
Endqualifikationen in der Europäischen Gemeinschaft, vorbereitet für die Kommission
der Europäischen Gemeinschaften (Brussels, 1990).
115
exclusively financial. Rather, these students found the university a foreign
world hard to adapt to, even in a familiar regional context. Those willing
to risk the additional insecurity of doing part of their studies in a foreign
culture were therefore rare.
From decline to renewal – the development of higher education in

The year 1989 marked a new geopolitical reality with direct consequences
for Central and Eastern Europe and its higher education and science. In
place of the bankrupt concept of communist ideological order, the coun-
tries in this region became unambiguously committed to the processes of
democratic change based on respect for the individual and group aspira-
tions for freedom, political pluralism and a market economy. Students and
academics often played crucial roles in the more-or-less bloodless revolu-
tions (except for Romania), proving once again that academic institutions
can be hotbeds of social and political change. They called for immediate
changes in higher education and the relationship between the universities
and authority. Consequently, ‘higher education in the region has had to
be radically reconstructed on a scale, and at a speed, never attempted in
Western Europe. Adjustments that required long gestation in the West
have had to be accomplished within four or five years.’158 These ‘adjust-
ments’ had to be made when these countries were almost bankrupt and
their social institutions largely dysfunctional.
After more than a decade, the reforms undertaken have achieved the
desired number of students and institutions, the diversification of the
system through the emergence of private higher-education institutions,
and respect for academic freedom and institutional autonomy. These
gains may be itemized in nine common trends:
1. introduction of an admissions system based primarily on academic
criteria for student selection combined with an educational pol-
icy directed towards eliminating selectivity at the lower levels of
schooling;
2. diversity in the collective representation of both academics and stu-
dents, not only in the governing bodies but also in the growth and
diversification of professional associations, student organizations,
fraternities, etc.;
3. implementation – even if at a timid pace – of long-overdue reforms in
the organization of curricula accelerated by a desire to comply with
158 P. Scott, ‘Higher Education in Central and Eastern Europe: Analytical Report’, in Ten
Years after and Looking ahead: A Review of Transformations of Higher Education in
Central and Eastern Europe (Bucharest, 2000), 341–407.
116
the objectives of the university policy established by the European
Conference of Ministers of Education, which later culminated in the
Bologna Process;
4. introduction of some key political changes, such as the dissolution of
the so-called ‘party schools’;
5. emergence of a completely new sector of higher education comprising
private university-level institutions;
6. modification of the concept of ‘free higher education’ to reflect the
need to adopt a cost-sharing approach to financing the whole system
of higher education;
7. consolidation of international relations no longer dependent on cen-
tral political approval or subject to ideologically determined foreign-
policy objectives, but designed on the basis of academic potential,
individual interests and available resources;
8. clear distinction between intellectual study and debate, on the one
hand, and political activism on the other: ‘politics stops at the uni-
versity gate’;159
9. replacement of the political accountability of the leaders of higher-
education institutions by academic and economic accountability.
The implementation of such systemic changes required a major over-

haul of national legislation. In some cases, changes in the laws were done
hastily, and subsequent modifications were frequent.160 During the early
years of the process, the expertise and support brought by ‘foreign experts’
and international organizations such as the World Bank, the OECD, the
Council of Europe and UNESCO were welcomed, provided that the advis-
ers understood the local environment. However, their involvement could
not replace the need for home-grown expertise, especially when reforms
came to be implemented.161
Generally speaking, relations of the university with authority had
reached a certain pattern of ‘normalcy’ which required, on the side of
the university, much better articulation of its mission and functioning,
while having, on the side of the authority, better understanding of the
necessity of respect for institutional autonomy, academic values as well
as long-term opportunities coming out of the high quality of teaching and
research.
159 A. Marga, University Reform Today (Cluj, 2001), 103.

160 A. Marga, ‘Reform of Education in Romania in the 1990s: A Retrospective’, Higher
Education in Europe, 27 (2002), 123–35; D. Farrington, Legislative Initiatives in the
Context of the Bologna Process: A Comparative Perspective (Bucharest, 2005).
161 L. Cerych, ‘Higher Education Reform in the Czech Republic: A Personal Testimony
Regarding the Impact of Foreign Advisors’, Higher Education in Europe, 27 (2002),
111–21.
117
concluding remarks: the universities’ europe

Das Europa der Universitäten/L’Europe des universités/The Universities’
Europe – thus ran the title of a documentary volume on the foundation of
the CRE, published by the West German Rectors Conference in 1964.162
This title, of course, did not refer to the current state of affairs but rather
to a long-term goal at the end of a lengthy path.
In 1991, there were ninety-eight organisations actively engaged in edu-
cation and research at a European level.163 Without question, many of
them helped to probe and demarcate the path; some of them trained
later trailblazers. But the path could not be broadened and paved in
the absence of institutions endowed with the necessary competence, the
human and financial resources and, last but not least, the decisive political
instruments.
Such an institution was established in 1957: the Commission of the
European Communities at Brussels. Its remit in education politics, how-
ever, had been strictly limited to two items by the Treaties of Rome. On
the one hand, it was to found a European University; on the other, it was
to work towards the mutual recognition of academic diplomas, so that
European graduates could practise their profession throughout the com-
munity. Politically speaking, these tasks were put under the umbrella of
the Council of Economics Ministers. In 1971, for the first time, the edu-
cation ministers held a common meeting. University and research politics
became increasingly important. From 1991, talks were no longer limited
to professional training but included general education as well. The shift
towards university politics within the EEC/EC/EU is illustrative of the
great movements in the process of Europeanization that the universities
themselves have undergone. It will therefore serve as an illustrative case
study to close the present chapter.
The two projects pertaining to the universities included in the Treaty
of Rome reached an impasse. In 1969, the European Commission sub-
mitted the first draft of guidelines for the mutual recognition of academic
leaving certificates. In it, the free exercise of the medical profession was
conceded to anyone who had successfully completed a precisely deter-
mined curriculum with a defined number of teaching hours in the cus-
tomary topics. If adopted, these guidelines would have destroyed the
autonomy of the universities in their special domain. The rectors’ confer-
ences and universities of the EEC states put up strong resistance and the
proposal was withdrawn. With the help of a liaison committee established
162 Steger, Das Europa der Universitäten (note 66).

163 J. U. Clauss (comp.), Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, Informationsdienst – Dokumen-
tation, 12 (1991).
118
in Brussels in 1971 (which later on took the name of ‘Confederation of
European Union Rectors’ Conferences’), the rectors’ conferences parti-
cipated in drawing up more flexible guidelines oriented towards quality
rather than quantity.164
The European University, which the Euratom Agreement had planned
for 1958, also failed, mainly because of the opposition of the universities
themselves. They looked on themselves as European institutions. In 1972
the Italian government’s efforts to fulfil the Euratom scheme in Florence
had a partial but innovative result: rather than a European University, the
EC agreed to found a graduate college for advanced social studies, as the
rectors’ conferences had suggested.165 The European University Institute
at the Badia Fiesolana of San Domenico near Florence was inaugurated
in 1976. A decade later it was admitting 100 applicants annually, for a
one- to three-year graduate programme, and some 20 research fellows.166
The failures in implementing the educational provisions of the Treaty
of Rome motivated the EC to call a first conference of education ministers
of the six member states on 16 November 1971, and to have the Commis-
sion investigate the chances of a common policy in education and science
in the context of the Treaty.167 In July 1972, the Commission asked the
former Belgian education minister and professor, Henri Janne, ‘to ascer-
tain the basic features of education policy on the level of the Community’
on the basis of statements from leading spokesmen for education politi-
cians in the member states. The report, published in 1973, stated that ‘the
application of the Treaty of Rome compels us to deal with the whole issue
of youth and adult education, as they are correlated to the imperative of
the best possible economic development’.168 More generally, the Janne
Report presented considerations and recommendations on how the EC –
subsequently the EU – could extend its activities to the framing of Euro-
pean policies on culture, education and research.
In its introductory remarks, the report raised a question that directly
concerned the universities:
164 W. Rüegg, ‘La coopération entre les universités européennes. Kolloquium in Grenoble.
Tagungsbericht’, Integration. Vierteljahreshefte zur Europaforschung, 4 (1970), 323–
6; W. Rüegg, ‘Les relations entre les Communautés européennes et les établissements
d’enseignement supérieur en Europe. Le point de vue des universités’, in Semaine de
Bruges 1973: Université et société. Pour une politique européenne de l’enseignement
supérieur, Cahiers de Bruges, n.s. 32 (1974), 253–60.
165 Rüegg, ‘Relations’ (note 166), 256f.
166 Europäisches Hochschulinstitut, Promotionsstudium in Geschichte und Kul-
turgeschichte, Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Politikwissenschaften und Gesellschaftswis-
senschaften, Akademisches Jahr 1996/97 (Luxemburg, 1995).
167 Kommission der Europäischen Gemeinschaften, ‘Für eine gemeinschaftliche Bil-
dungspolitik’, Bulletin der Europäischen Gemeinschaften, Beilage, 10 (1973), 9f.
168 Ibid., 11.
119
The growth of the size of companies, the increase in specialization and
international interdependence goes hand in hand with the development of
science and technology. Is it really possible to envision an economic integra-
tion of Europe that takes these factors into account without envisioning a
‘Europeanization’ of the great universities? By ‘Europeanization’ we mean
that these universities should be able to recruit their teachers, researchers
and students and to provide their facilities – in other words, that they can
organize their own policies and initiatives – ‘as if’ all nine countries of the
European Community represented their true habitat, just as the enormous
American national territory does for the American universities.169
This vision, which culminated in the ‘Bologna Process’, was not fleshed
out in the report. The grading of university study would have entailed the
harmonization of undergraduate studies. At the time it seemed impossi-
ble that the Continental universities would reduce their customary four
years to three, or that the British universities would be willing to extend
their three years to four. But common educational policy agreements with
the participation of European states outside the EC were proposed, espe-
cially by the British vice-chancellors Asa Briggs and Albert Sloman, and
were accepted.170
The report recommended the foundation of a ‘common research cen-
tre’ and a ‘European Science Foundation’.171 But English and Swiss
researchers convinced the Commission that this cooperation should
include the whole of Europe, at least its free part. Thus, the European Sci-
ence Foundation (ESF), with its headquarters in Strasbourg, was founded
in 1974 with the approval of the European Communities but indepen-
dently of them. As an umbrella organization of the national institutions
for the promotion of scientific research, it initiated and coordinated com-
mon research projects into innovative fields of inquiry pertaining to sci-
ence and society.172
Five years later, the EC started its own programme for the promotion
of European research cooperation: FAST (Forecasting and Assessment in
the field of Science and Technology) was founded in 1979, followed by
ESPRIT (European Strategic Programme for Information Technology) in
1984, by EURECA (European Research Common Action) in 1985 and by
Comett (Community Programme for Education and Training for Tech-
nology) in 1987. Starting in the same year, student exchange programmes
within the EC and EFTA were promoted by the Erasmus programme
(European Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students). By
creating a European network of participating disciplines and profes-
sors and a scholarship programme, it sought to increase inter-European
169 Ibid., 12. 170 Ibid., 23. 171 Ibid., 53.

172 European Science Foundation, Report 1975 (Strasbourg, 1975).
120
student mobility from 1 to 10 per cent (this last figure amounted to the
estimated percentage of mobile students in early modern times). In 1989,
the Erasmus programme was supplemented by the Lingua programme
for the promotion of foreign language skills of both students and high
school teachers, and by the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) for
student workload. By 1994, 300,000 participants from 1,300 faculties
had spent at least one term studying in another EC or EFTA state, thanks
to 2,500 Erasmus and Lingua inter-university programmes.173 Although
these numbers are significant, they accounted for only 5 per cent of West-
ern European students. The non-material deterrents to mobility men-
tioned earlier still operated.
In 1992, the Treaty of Maastricht marked the transition to the Euro-
pean Union and extended common competence beyond professional
training to include general education as well. In 1995, the Erasmus pro-
gramme and the Comenius programme for school education were inte-
grated and enlarged to form the Socrates action programme: exchange
activities were supplemented by the Europeanization of the curricula, the
common development of European modules, and the creation of the-
matic networks across the whole of Europe for the 95 per cent ‘of those
students who cannot be mobile for whatever reasons’.174 Additionally,
responsibility for the exchange programme was transferred from the rep-
resentatives of the faculties to the central administration. This, however,
did more to further bureaucratization than the scientific and educational
support of the programmes.
The universities welcomed this initiative of the EC/EU, but at the same
time, by means of their rectors’ conferences, they lobbied to ensure that
the principle of subsidiarity would not fall prey to a bureaucratically
enforced conformity. In December 1991, a ‘Memorandum on Higher
Education in the European Community’ was published. After some con-
sultation in 1992, the Confederation of European Union Rectors’ Confer-
ences and the CRE put forward a detailed position statement on the Mem-
orandum. While welcoming the orientation towards Europeanization, the
rectors warned against the dangers of harmonizing the curriculum, as this
would depreciate both European diversity and university autonomy. The
rectors declared their readiness to make a series of concrete proposals
for the continuation and extension of the mutually beneficial cooperation
that had begun in 1971. The outcome was positive.
173 H. van Ginkel, ‘International Cooperation and Mobility and the Enhancement of Qual-
ity: The Modern University Coming of Age’, CRE-Action, 104 (1994), 57f. (A Univer-
sity Policy for Europe, 10th CRE General Assembly Budapest).
174 U. Dolezal, ‘Das ERASMUS-Programm als Teil von SOKRATES’, Forschung & Lehre,
8 (1996), 416.
121
The pilot project proposed by the CRE on the application of qualita-
tive criteria in the evaluation of university structures and performance was
accepted in 1994 by the Education Council of the EU, and the coopera-
tion of universities in the EU and EFTA member states was welcomed.175
In addition, the CRE initiated a corresponding pilot project in three uni-
versities from different countries (Gothenburg, Porto, Utrecht).176 The
experiences of implementing the EU programmes were discussed in a
number of seminars by the national rectors’ conferences177 and in the
regular meetings of the CRE.
This was the beginning of a new chapter in the relationship between the
European Commission and the universities. The Confederation of Euro-
pean Union Rectors’ Conferences in Brussels took on ever more work.
And when signs of an upcoming eastward expansion began to appear,
the CRE, with its secretariat in Geneva, merged with the Confederation
of European Union Rectors’ Conferences to form the European Univer-
sity Association (EUA), with its secretariat in Brussels, at the heart of the
administrative structures of the European Union.
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York/London, 1991.
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Farrington, D. Legislative Initiatives in the Context of the Bologna Process: A
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175 See, e.g., Europäische Pilotprojekte für die Qualitätsbewertung im Bereich der
Hochschulen: Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Nationaler Bericht, Dokumente zur
Hochschulreform, 105 (Bonn, 1995).
176 F. van Vught and D. Westerheijden, ‘Institutional Management for Quality. The CRE
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177 See EG-Hochschulmemorandum und Credit Transfer in Europe, Seminar der
Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, Bonn, 7. und 8. November 1992, Dokumente zur
Hochschulreform, 83 (Bonn, 1993).
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Europe, Frankfurt/Main, 1995.
Kardos, J., Kelemen, E., and Szogi, L. Centuries of Hungarian Higher Education,
Budapest, 2001.
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Francisco, 1977.
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die Universitäten der deutschen Besatzungszone ‘sowjetisierte’: Erinnerun-
gen des Sektorleiters Hochschulen und Wissenschaft in der sowjetischen
Militäradministration in Deutschland, Edition Bildung und Wissenschaft 6,
Berlin, 1997.
Phillips, D. (ed.) German Universities after the Surrender: British Occupation
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Sadlak, J. Higher Education in Romania 1860–1990: Between Academic Mission,
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Universities’ Europe: Entstehung der ständigen Konferenz der Rektoren und
Vize-Kanzler der europäischen Universitäten 1948–1962, Dokumentation,
Bad Godesberg, 1964.
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Occupied Germany, Chicago, 1982.
123
CHAPTER 4
MANAGEMENT AND RESOURCES
GEOFFREY LOCKWOOD
introduction
The basics of the management of a university in Europe are little dif-
ferent now than in 1945, and little different whether in Malta, Tromsø,
Limerick or Kiev. The needs are to allocate scarce resources and insuffi-
cient facilities, to understand and motivate staff, to approach, persuade
and satisfy sponsors, to provide and maintain a learning environment for
students, and to balance external influences and internal culture in a per-
manent institution. Those are constants in university management. It is
the circumstances in which those needs are pursued which have changed
dramatically over the years since 1945.
The term ‘management’ was not part of the cultural vocabulary of the
university in 1945 except to describe a process or method of organization
alien to a public institution as opposed to a business firm. The university
was governed and administered but not managed. The history of the
internal organization and culture of the university since the war is reflected
in the gradual acceptance of the applicability of the term ‘management’
to the processes of decision-making and decision-implementation within
the university. Broadly, ‘administration’ was the characteristic term until
the early 1970s, with ‘governance’ having a phase of dominance in the
later 1960s and again in the 1990s. ‘Management’ began to feature in
the literature and conference papers in the 1960s. Its acceptability and
usage within the university came in the 1970s, firstly as a reaction to
the student-led wave of concentration upon the politics of governance
as the focus of internal organization in the late 1960s, secondly under
the impact upon universities of the oil-inflation-inspired world economic
crises of the mid-1970s.
124
Management and resources
A further indication of the cultural reflection of the trends in organizing
activity within the universities of Western Europe was the emergence in
the latter half of the 1980s of the term ‘managerialism’ – an American
expression implying not only the existence of management within the
university, but also of a philosophy based upon the dominance of man-
agement over collegiality, a preference for the ‘executive’ rather than the
exchange model of conducting business.
The first major work to have impact in Europe was The Managerial
Revolution in Higher Education1 which described the situation whereby,
in place of the loose, unstructured and somewhat casual methods of
management practised in colleges and universities in the past, there was a
growing commitment to data-gathering and research as a basis for policy-
making, and an expanding effort to develop objective criteria for making
decisions on the allocation of resources instead of leaving these matters
entirely to the play of campus pressures or the forces of tradition. In
cumulative effect, these innovations will certainly be regarded by future
historians of higher education as giving an entirely new character to
university administration. Despite the title of the book, and the impact it
would have on practitioners of management in the universities, the text in
1966 still referred to ‘university administration’. Over twenty years later
the UK Conference of University Administrators Report on ‘Corporate
Strategies for Change in Higher Education’ titled its opening chapter ‘The
Managerial Revolution’.2
The analysis of the vocabulary used by members of the university to
describe the decision-making structures impacting upon them is a fas-
cinating and revealing study in its own right, but it is only touched upon
here to reflect the broad trend in the development of management in the
university since 1945.
the university as an organization

In order to assess that history of management it is necessary to first con-
sider the nature of the university as an organization. The university is
multi-formed. It is an organization: a legal rational entity which employs
labour and capital in formal processes and structures to generate the out-
puts of teaching and research. It is an institution which maintains perma-
nent and intrinsic values of scholarship and service vested in collegiality.
It is also a community: it develops relationships between various cate-
gories of members and provides social infrastructure and cohesion. These
1 G. E. Rourke and G. E. Brooks, The Managerial Revolution in Higher Education
(Baltimore, 1966).
2 P. Temple and C. Whitchurch (eds.), Strategic Choice: Corporate Strategies for Change
in Higher Education (London, 1989), 5.
125
Geoffrey Lockwood
three forms of corporation coexist in most universities, and approaches
to management are conditioned by the form which an external agency or
an internal group believes should be dominant.
An early work in Europe was Planning and Management in Univer-
sities. The authors deliberately chose the phrase ‘Planning and Manage-
ment’ partly because those terms were being used ever more widely in
educational circles.3
Representatives of the state, whether in the Soviet Union in 1945 or
the United Kingdom in 1985, thought in terms of the university as an
organization. Their basic concerns were the efficiency with which those
organizations served the demands of the state or the needs of society.
In that essence the technocratic and rigid manpower planning models of
Central and Eastern Europe were no different from the student number
projection models of Swedish, British and other governments. One was
supply-determined and the other demand-led, but both saw universities
primarily as organizations for producing graduates and other outputs.
As the period developed, the states paid increasing attention to the input
costs per student; they became more concerned with efficiency rather than
just with output.
Students, whether in Paris in 1968 or Rome in 1989 at the time of
the Pantera rossa movement, approached management with the domi-
nant community form in which relationships are key, whether social or
political. The emphasis amongst students tended, therefore, to be upon
internal government, with equality of rights and participation amongst
all categories of members of the university being the generic aim. Democ-
ratization would not only reflect the true nature and needs of the inter-
nal community, but would strengthen that community in the struggle
against the nation state and in support of broader international and rad-
ical actions. Most professors, whether in Germany in 1956 or Ireland in
1976, behaved in terms of the institutional form in which management
should be characterized by the values of the permanent body of the col-
legium. In their eyes, the role of management was to serve the collegium:
to do those limited things necessary to ensure the resourced freedom of
the academic staff. The influences of those differing views of the nature
of the university can be traced in the actual practice of management in
the university since 1945, but it is sufficient to note at this point that each
of the forms has legitimacy since the university is multi-formed.
The university is pluralistic and fragmented because of the nature of
its activities. The pursuance of teaching and research is reliant upon the
skills and motivation of individual members of the academic staff and
3 J. Fielden and G. Lockwood (eds.), Planning and Management in Universities (London,

1973), 14.
126
students functioning in an institution possessing autonomy and within the
requirements of academic freedom. The working environment involves
inputs which have variable and joint effects upon outputs, which are
themselves capable of only limited measurability and weak assessment
feedback from society. Those features have been present in the central
tradition of the European university over this period, and all of the devel-
opments in internal university management (as opposed to the external
regulation of or influences upon the universities) have sought to protect
and develop them.
Thousands of university managers across Europe since 1945, regardless
of the state systems in which they have been working, have sought to use
their industry and expertise to maintain the central core tradition of
the European university under a wide variety of external and internal
influences and pressures. If there is any one measure of the effectiveness
of university managers it is the extent to which they have been responsible
for the maintenance of the conditions of autonomy and academic freedom
in the liberal tradition under which creativity and education flourish.
Clearly the degree of success in that endeavour has varied accord-
ing to the nature of the external environment, but recent evidence from
one country is probably of general validity: in the United Kingdom, the
greatly strengthened administrative leadership of universities which has
grown out of the movement I have called ‘soft managerialism’4 is the best
defence of university autonomy, and in current circumstances nearly its
only defence. The study referred to above (note 3) shows how effectively
administrators, especially the professional managerial staff, defend their
universities in a game whose rules are invented by others and are con-
stantly changing. Yet the continuing decline in the unit of resource has
gradually widened the gulf between the administration and the academic
staff.
There are, under the best of circumstances, inevitable tensions between
the administrators and the academics, arising out of their different values
and interests. In most universities, there is a healthy tension between
spontaneity and predictability, creativity and accountability, centrifugal
and centripetal forces. But it makes all the difference to the life of the
institution whether the administrators who ‘manage’ the university and
take responsibility for the whole of it are inside or outside it.5
The conclusion of the article referred to in note 5 is relevant to later sec-
tions of this chapter but its main point is that the development and focus
of internal university management have been directed at the protection
4 Fielden and Lockwood, Planning (note 3).

5 M. Trow, ‘Managerialism and the Academic Profession: The Case of England’, Higher
Education Policy, 7:2 (1994), 17.
127
Geoffrey Lockwood
of the autonomy of the university, whether through economic efficiency,
political effectiveness or educational proficiency.
The thousands of administrators and managers referred to above came
from a variety of backgrounds into a variety of positions that differed
widely from one university to the next. One of the basic differences
across Europe was whether the managers were appointed by and were
employees of the university or were effectively appointed by and formally
employees of the state. It is arguable that the British ‘soft managerialism’
of university-appointed managers would not have been successful in Con-
tinental Europe where the culture required managers to be on the ‘inside
track’ with the state.
Another basic difference was the formal length of the appointment. A
vice-chancellor aged forty-five years, who was appointed to the normal
age of retirement at age sixty-five, was in a very different position of
authority and influence from that of a rector elected for shorter periods.
In practice, both might have been in office for the same number of years,
but one had the crucial advantage of tenure.
A further key difference was the extent to which university managers
were supported by being members of recognized professions. A university
officer, who was a lawyer, an accountant, an engineer and so on, was in
a different position vis-à-vis both the collegium and the state from an
officer who was a generalist administrator in the specialist service of the
university.
images of change
The daily physical environment of the senior university officer provides
evidence of change, in the means rather than ends of management.
Today’s senior university manager is typically located in an executive
suite surrounded by colleagues in a modern office building. Located on
a paper-free desk is the computer terminal which is used to check the
state of the institution’s £100 million annual income and expenditure, to
communicate electronically and to develop policy papers and speeches;
nearby is the printer and fax machine for speedy communication to main-
tain the global business of the university. In the corner of the office there
is a satellite TV to keep in touch with world events and markets now that
national bodies provide only 70 per cent of the university’s income.
The senior manager in circa 1970 would more likely have been in
an office with a personal secretary adjoining but with main colleagues
more distanced and in a building, if not being constructed, surrounded by
building works. The desk would have been dominated by paper, including
sheaves of computer printout, but with a pocket electronic calculator
and possibly a memo-dictating machine evident. The communications
128
controlling the £20 million annual turnover would have been dictated to
the personal secretary in the main, and the dealings with national bodies
from which 90 per cent of the university’s resources were derived would
be time-consuming.
In the late 1940s, the senior manager might have been sharing an office
whilst others were being repainted, and with the personal secretary in
another shared office along the corridor. The communications, mainly
internal to the university, would have been done on a manual typewriter,
but many of them would have been oral on the telephone or face-to-face.
The university’s £2 million budget would have been more the concern of
the financial administrator, with the rector or vice-chancellor concentrat-
ing on what salary level could be afforded for a new member of staff.
Those images reflect the development of technology, the shift from the
local to the national to the global concern, and the growth of the typical
university from the scale of a school to a village to a town.
The images evident in a typical day in the diary of a senior manager
have similar messages. The day in the late 1980s might have started at
8.30 a.m. with a meeting with the university fund-raising appeal director,
followed by a policy meeting with internal colleagues on equal opportuni-
ties at work and a board meeting of the university’s commercial company
or science park board. Lunch with visitors from a collaborating Japanese
university, then an internal meeting on teaching quality audit followed
by the formal signing of European Community research applications
and a meeting of the institutional strategic planning team. Dinner could
be with a group of local businessmen and politicians on regional eco-
nomic development, including a media presentation, then a few late night
faxes or telephone calls about the recruitment of a new professor from
the USA.
The early 1970s day might have started, after dealing with the morning
post with the secretary, with a 9.30 a.m. meeting with the president of
the students’ union about student representations on the Senate followed
by discussions with senior colleagues in the physical sciences concern-
ing applications to national research councils. Then meeting a delegation
of institutional trade unionists before addressing the local Rotary Club
lunch. The afternoon could have commenced with the appointment com-
mittee for a dean of a faculty, then a press conference on the university’s
policy on drugs on campus, before a personal visit to the department
of chemistry. Dinner might have been with a group of regional vice-
chancellors to exchange views on the politics of influencing national bod-
ies, and then late night reading of a pile of internal committee reports.
In the late 1940s, the senior manager might have been free from all
but the morning post until around 10.00 a.m. when he had a visit from
a state official about the funding and architecture of a new building,
129
Geoffrey Lockwood
followed by a meeting with a group of senior professors concerning the
next session of the Senate. Lunch could have been a social occasion in
the senior common room after which there were two appointing commit-
tees for lecturers to chair and a meeting of the university committee on
student residence. Dinner was likely to be at home, possibly entertaining
a few new colleagues, after which the night would be free for personal
professional activity.
Those glimpses of the possible daily diaries of the university senior
manager in the late 1980s, the early 1970s and the late 1940s contain
broad generalizations about the development of management over those
years. The shifts have been about the increasing time pressures or work-
loads on managers, about needing to focus attention more on the external
than the internal, and about the role being full-time rather than part-time:
in essence about the change from an amateur to a professional role.
Since 1945, the university has gradually moved from being a closed
community of scholars to a knowledge firm. This shift is true all over
Europe, even in universities that have close ties to the ministry of edu-
cation, as in Austria, France, the Netherlands, Spain or Italy, since gov-
ernments increasingly insisted on the ‘professional’ use of the resources
made available to higher education and research. In a number of univer-
sity towns the prestige of the institution was also measured in terms of
the old ‘seats of learning’; in such cases, modern executive styles have to
take into account endemic factors such as the size of the chambers and
ante-chambers, the number of support staff needed to maintain them, or
the rows of official portraits that bear witness to the age and quality of
the institution.
academic structure
The basic cell in the structure of the university has remained over the
period that of the academic discipline. The elementary particle in aca-
demic life is the individual faculty member, but it is the subject discipline,
reflected in a faculty or department, which is the basic organizational
unit. This unit contains sub-groups concerned with particular courses or
research areas, but the academic discipline provides a boundary around
the department. The internal structure of the unit has varied from subject
to subject; for example, the research groups in physics would be fewer
and larger than the research groups in history, because research in history
is predominantly conducted by individuals, not teams.
Similarly, the strength of the boundary around the unit has also varied
depending upon the degree of external recognition awarded to the particu-
lar academic discipline. The boundary which defines and protects a faculty
or department of law is sharper and stronger than that which surrounds
130
philosophy, because the former discipline has greater differentiation from
its neighbours and a closer relationship with an external profession.
There have been many attempts to replace the academic discipline as
the base unit in the European universities since 1945: for example, the
development of the state research institutes separate from the teaching
universities in the socialist countries; the innovations (e.g., at the Uni-
versity of Sussex in 1961) with emphasis upon interdisciplinary schools
of studies replacing the traditional department/faculty model; and the
creation of Unités d’enseigement et de recherche under the French ‘loi
d’orientation de l’enseignement supérieur’ in 1968. In Spain, the social-
ist government decided in the late 1970s to reorganize the various ele-
ments of teaching and research into a matrix specialization, and then into
‘schools’, with each school asking the respective departments for the nec-
essary teaching staff. The idea was to reduce overlaps in faculties wishing
to control all their taught courses, especially those required by a number
of disciplines, such as mathematics, physics and languages. Flexibility and
efficiency were to be based on interdisciplinarity and a greater separation
of teaching and research, thus reducing the dominance of the discipline,
faculty or department that had prevailed in 1945. Across Europe, it is
clear that interdisciplinarity and the greater separation of teaching and
research meant that the discipline faculty or department was no longer
as dominant in 1990 as it had been in 1945, but it remains the model
state.
The structure attempting to integrate those base units into a single insti-
tution has been and remains complex. In some countries the number of
faculties multiplied, and a large university like Belgrade was divided into
many autonomous faculties, while other institutions tried to adapt the old
structures to new scientific demands without duplicating the structures.
The units were protected by professional competence, fragmented but
not discrete. Although the units vary in size and importance, the struc-
ture generally was and is characterized by a high number of small units.
University management was complicated by the fact that the units shared
few corporate tasks compared with most other forms of organization
but were linked by an interlacing of cross-memberships. This has had a
conservative effect against institutional management innovation.
The extent to which the university as an organization possessed man-
agerial authority over the internal basic units of activity or production
has been a key issue over the period; and that issue turns largely upon the
degree of institutional autonomy provided to the university by the state.
The latter theme is the subject of other chapters in this volume, but
from the viewpoint of the institutional management of the university in
Europe since 1945, it is important to note that, although the degree of
institutional autonomy has obviously varied over that period and amongst
131
Geoffrey Lockwood
the different states, the degree of autonomy has also varied according to
the field of decision-taking.
In broad terms, the university has had greater freedom of decision-
taking in relation to the assessment of student performance, the structure
of courses or the selection of research areas to be pursued than it has
had in the admission of students, the reward structure for staff or the
purchase of technology; and than it has had in the allocation of finance,
the purchase of sites and the construction of buildings.
The reason for considering the internal characteristics of the university
as an organization and the varying extents of institutional autonomy vis-
à-vis external authority is that the period since 1945 in most of Europe
has seen the spread of the influence of university management – seeping
downwards in the institution from the university, to the faculty, to the
department and to the individual; spreading horizontally across all of the
activities of the university; and strengthening the institutional boundary in
relation to external authorities. The major exception to that broad trend
is in the universities of Eastern Europe, where management dominated
from 1945 as part of the philosophy and mechanisms of the organization
of the state, and where recent reforms in those states have led to a reac-
tion to management within the university not dissimilar to the student-led
political or governance model in the rest of Europe in the late 1960s. By
the end of the twentieth century, however, most countries were making
use of the same tools and concepts to manage higher education, and uni-
versities experienced similar periods of expansion or contraction in order
to meet the common challenges of paucity, overcrowding and relevance.
forces of change
The reason for that development of management has been the increased
scale and complexity of the university stemming from institutional
responsiveness to environmental change. The broad forces of and for
change have, in the main, been common across Europe, though impact-
ing with different timescales in different countries. One force for change,
to which the work of the university itself contributed significantly, was
the explosion in knowledge and the associated fact that much of the
growth occurred at or across the traditional boundaries of the disci-
plines. The organization of curricula thus necessarily had to be more
selective and interdisciplinary in 1995 than 1945 and had to develop
processes for its speedy renewal and quality assurance, factors strength-
ening the need for organization and the involvement of management. This
became especially so as individual students were recognized as being able
to determine their own curricula paths to a degree qualification. ‘One
of the paradoxes of student-based modular course structures with credit
132
transfer is that the greater flexibility it offers students entails more man-
agement by course organisers.’6 The same argument about the increased
management requirement applies to the usage of information technology
in teaching and the greater attention to teaching timetabling necessitated
by the costs of space and interdisciplinarity.
In addition to such internal change, the sources of the development and
transmission of knowledge were such by the 1980s that the university was
losing its monopoly position in its main field of activity. The academies
of science in the socialist countries and public or governmental research
centres in Western Europe had long challenged the research function of
the university, but as commercial and industrial activity became more
knowledge-based so the research laboratories and in-company training
schools of private corporations were becoming competitors of the uni-
versity towards the end of the period.
It was not surprising, therefore, that the extent of partnership between
the university and economic enterprises increased significantly in the latter
part of the period.7 ‘In the future the interaction between institutions of
higher education and their economic environments is likely to become as
important for management as relations with government.’8 The factors
affecting knowledge thus illustrate two of the reasons for the rise in
the growth of management, that is, internal complexity and external
competition. This makes a strong case for high-level practice and passing
on of science and scholarships, but should this necessarily take place in
the university? Will company training and company laboratories simply
take over the role of the university?9
A second and major force for change has been the pressure for expan-
sion which was initially led by the need to offer opportunities for uni-
versity education to those whose education had been interrupted by the
Second World War. It was then fed by the demographic increase in the
university age group, and by the need to achieve the skilled manpower
targets in the five-year plans of the totalitarian countries; when those
factors declined, expansion continued to be accelerated not only by the
wishes of more individuals to be educated, but by social demands (for
example, to improve the proportion of women receiving education) and
6 G. Williams, ‘Total Quality Management in Higher Education: Panacea or Placebo?’,

Higher Education, 25:3 (1993), 229–37.
7 Karl Heinz Beckurts-Stiftung (ed.), Partnerschaft zwischen Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft:
Vortragsabend und Symposium am 25. und 26. Oktober 1988 in München (Munich,
1988).
8 P. Le Vasseur, ‘The IMHE Programme – A Look ahead’, International Journal of Insti-
tutional Management in Higher Education, 5:3 (1981), 181.
9 H. Van Ginkel, ‘University 2050. The Organisation of Creativity and Innovation’, in
J. Raisman (ed.), Universities in the Twenty-First Century: A Lecture Series/Paul Hamlyn
Foundation (London, 1994), 65–86.
133
Geoffrey Lockwood
industrial requirements as the nature of work shifted to the knowledge-
based variety.
Thus, although most countries saw short periods of stagnation due
to demographic factors or governmental economic restraint, the history
since 1945 has been one of major expansion, which is well documented
elsewhere in this volume. In broad terms, a typical university of 1945
doubled in size by the late 1950s, doubled again by the early 1970s and
had doubled again by the late 1980s. Equally important to the role of
management at the institutional level was that the expansion increased
the number of universities very considerably. Brand new universities with
challenging innovative courses and structures were created, and many
colleges with firm reputations in particular fields were upgraded to uni-
versity status. Expansion thus facilitated or necessitated the development
of management through two main factors: the increase in institutional
scale with the growth of external competition, and the need to increase
public accountability.
The point made in the opening paragraph of this chapter, concerning
the similarities in the basics between 1945 and 1990 in the circumstances
faced by university managers, nevertheless has to be kept in mind and
can be evidenced in two quotes which could have referred to, say, the
mid-1980s but were stated in August 1949:
The administrative structures of the universities have been put to a very
serious test over the past few years. A sixty-six per cent increase in student
numbers, ambitious new schemes of capital development and the necessity
for appointing large numbers of new staff have all subjected the organiza-
tion of the universities to a great strain.
The increased dependence on public money makes it necessary for the
administrative efficiency of the universities to be visible to the outside
world.10
In several countries with limited capital resources, the trend towards
mass education also created bottlenecks, especially in the former socialist
systems affected by an important brain drain owing to the loss in prestige
of the academic profession. This often led to the ageing of staff so that,
by the end of the century, the average age of teachers in many institutions
was well over sixty.
The third force for change was the development of technology and its
impact upon the university. The technological scale of scientific research,
with its high equipment and infrastructure costs, was one reason for the
individual university needing to be much more selective about the areas
of research on which it should concentrate, a process of selection which
10 S. Wythenshawe (ed.), ‘University Administration – An Investigation’, Universities Quar-
terly, 3 (1949), 796–7.
134
required management to develop the particular elements of distinctiveness
on which institutional mission should be based, to strengthen corporate
planning, and to create internal budgetary systems that enabled units to
mix labour, equipment and space costs rather than abide by traditional
line item budgets for those elements. The impact was very variable accord-
ing to the nature of the academic discipline. All disciplines were subject
to much the same degree of change, but the management implications
of that change were very different. For example, the changes affecting
teaching and research in history could be managed broadly within con-
stant resources, whereas the changes impacting upon physics required
major resource adjustments and enhancements.
The development of technology first influenced the research function
but, by the 1970s, it was affecting the teaching function in ways which
required management development. Even leaving aside the major devel-
opment of technology-based distance learning (as in the British Open
University), student learning by the late 1960s had begun to provide the
individual student with access to educational films and videos in addition
to that provided by teachers directly. The impact of computing systems
upon the library and other learning resources in the 1980s meant that an
information technology approach was becoming as relevant to teaching
as to research, with the consequential need to adjust curricula, teaching
methods, the mix of inputs into learning from academic staff, resource
staff, equipment and so on. The impact of technology directly upon man-
agement, including the large-scale data-manipulating planning computer
models of the 1960s and the fourth-generation integrated data systems of
the late 1980s, will be dealt with later in this chapter.
In general, the role of technology in this rise of institutional manage-
ment has been due to the fact that, if it offered widened choices, its costs
required planning to be focused, all the more so as it significantly changed
the delivery systems for the basic activities of the university (teaching and
research). Technology increased complexity and choice, both of which
increased the importance of management.
The fourth force for change can be termed the socio-political. Under
this heading fall influences as different as the control of the university as
part of the state politics of a communist/socialist regime or the focus of
more internal pressures by student movements (which at some times in
the period did not seem to be that different); as different as the demands of
customers (whether individuals, firms or states) for assurances about the
quality processes and checks, a matter for debate amongst the academic
staff about whether the university serves society or vice-versa; as different
as the roles of university members in national political change, indeed
revolutions, compared to the influence of civic representatives on the
planning of the university; as different as the impact upon the university
135
Geoffrey Lockwood
of the policies of the European Community was from the pressures of the
local trade unions.
In terms of the impact upon university management, those influences
present sub-themes to do with the growth in the international dimension
of the university (and therefore, the need for management to be globally
informed and sensitive) and the switch in emphasis over the period from
the internal to the external. However, the main factors were the grow-
ing complexity, and the rise in the demand and need for socio-political
accountability. It is interesting to note that the term ‘accountability’ did
not appear in the literature of higher education in Europe before 1970
at the earliest. The growth in the scale and social importance or rele-
vance of the university now required the institution to explain itself more
fully to society, whether that was to do with the university’s distinctive-
ness, its quality assurance mechanisms, its stand on particular national
or international issues or its role in the local or regional community. The
fulfilment of the requirement for accountability was another factor in the
development of management.
Accountability to the state also changed in character over the period.
Outside the socialist states, at the opening of the period the state sought
broad steerage influence upon the university; although it was not then
termed ‘accountability’, the state wished to be assured that the university
was using its resources to meet generally the policy objectives of the state.
Gradually over the period the state moved from ‘steerage’ to ‘instruction’
and from broad policy objectives to specific financial and output targets, a
shift due largely to the increased importance and scale of higher education,
but also due to a growing tendency on the part of governments to perceive
that the universities were not adjusting sufficiently to the economic and
social needs of the state. Prescription and control began to take over from
policy advice in many countries in Europe somewhere between the oil-led
inflation crisis of the mid-1970s and the public finance difficulties of the
early 1980s.
The fifth force for change was the economic impact of the growth of
the university. In essence, over the period and throughout Europe the uni-
versity consumed an increasing proportion of national wealth (no longer
necessarily allocated directly by the state) while being required to reduce
its unit costs. There were times in every country when investment was
on generous terms, but over the whole period, and particularly since the
mid-1980s, the price of increased investment has been greater institutional
productivity or efficiency, a price which led to a clearer separation of the
management and development of teaching from that of research, and also
to concentration upon the economic costs of different ways of delivering
teaching and research. Furthermore, it gave greater impetus to the search
for funds from new sources (including students or their families paying
136
for more of their education) and led to a stronger institutional focus upon
new developments and historic costs.
The twin needs for institutional economic efficiency and for full
and effective accounting to investors (whether states or individual stu-
dents) considerably increased the role of management, as can be seen
from the widespread introduction of development (fund-raising) offices,
the extension of finance offices into audit/value-for-money activities,
and the major increase in attention paid to external reports on the finances
of the university (and its standing with respect to comparative perfor-
mance indicators). In general terms, the exercise of choice within the
university about the usage of scarce resources in the face of unlimited
aims and the need to explain or defend such choice to external bodies has
been a significant factor in the rise of university management.
In summary, the features which the above environmental forces for
change created within the university which facilitated or required the
development of management in the university were increases in scale,
complexity, competition, choice and accountability.
effective autonomy
Those forces impacted more upon the executive elements of management
or administration than upon the legislative elements of management or
governance, even though greater attention has been paid to the latter,
both within and outside the university. Over the period since 1945, the
university and society have been exercised about the degree of autonomy
of the university vis-à-vis the state (i.e. the extent to which the individ-
ual university was responsible for responding to the above forces for
change rather than being instructed by the state) and the internal political
structure of the university (i.e. the balance of forces and interests in the
mechanisms through which the university responded). The subject of rela-
tions with the state forms the object of other chapters in this volume. In
relation to this commentary upon management at the institutional level,
the crucial question concerns the extent to which university management
felt it was responsible for the constitutional standing of autonomy. At
the extreme, a university management whose members were close to the
national levers of power under a political system in which the university
had little constitutional autonomy might have possessed more effective
autonomy than a university management in a political system where the
institution had autonomy but no influence over the key external deci-
sions affecting the university. Such a surmise is not provable, but it draws
attention to the difference between the formal and the informal.
The formal situation in the Federal Republic of Germany has been that
the general shift over the period was towards deregulation by the state.
137
Geoffrey Lockwood
However, the constitutional position by the end of the period remained
that the university was obliged to detail its intentions to the Länder (in
the Rahmen-Prüfungsordnungen)11 and the Länder still pay directly the
salaries of university staff (70–80 per cent of the total running costs of
the university). The formal situation in the United Kingdom over the
period has been one in which the university has remained autonomous,
with freedom to initiate courses, hire and pay staff, and so on, without
reference to the state but subject to subsequent accountability.
However, the informal, or effective, situation in these two countries
was much closer, and university management in both behaved with much
the same degree of responsibility. Informally, in the Federal Republic,
institutional action took place in advance of Länder approval through
understandings developed by university management. In the United King-
dom, consultations before action with the state or its agencies became
necessary under ‘advisory’ or ‘guidance’ procedures initiated by the state.
In university management terms, the constitutional position on auton-
omy has been important, but the principal concern has been about effec-
tive autonomy; and there has been more in common across Europe about
the latter (i.e., the extent to which university management felt it was
responsible) than about the former (the constitutional statements on
autonomy). The general trend was towards the state recognizing that the
delivery of teaching and research in response to environmental changes
could be more productive and responsive if the university was perceived
to be responsible and not fettered by state regulation. A distinguished
rector was able to state in 1989 that ‘it must be noted that intellectual
independence vis-à-vis official ideologies now rarely causes problems in
universities’.12 Given the situation in 1945, when a significant number of
universities were directly under the ideologies of the state or the church,
that marks a major shift over the period, especially in Eastern, Central
and Southern Europe. By the end of the period, across Europe, there was
an understanding that, whatever the formal state of constitutional auton-
omy, it was best to leave delivery and responsiveness to the individual
university provided that the university could demonstrate its economic
efficiency and quality standards, a proviso highly dependent upon its
management and the external trust placed in that management. There
was a plethora of national reports on the subject, as the following few
examples indicate.
The 1977 reform in Sweden was based upon ‘a growing awareness
that to have any significant impact most changes and adjustments should
be made by the higher-education institutions themselves. Generally there
11 On the German Rahmen-Prüfungsordnungen, see chapter 7.
12 R. Dillemans, ‘Autonomy, Responsibility and Responsiveness of Higher Education Insti-
tutions after 1992’, European Journal of Education, 24:4 (1989), 333–43.
138
seems to have begun a swing away from the centre–periphery “social engi-
neering” reform strategy towards a more dynamic process-oriented per-
spective where self-evaluation (Verksamshetsuandering) and the capacity
for self-renewal are key concepts.’13 The 1985 decisions of the Nether-
lands government meant the complete abolishment of all direct govern-
mental supervision of curricula.14 The General Plan for Further and
Higher Education in Denmark was directed at individual universities
re-orientating their systems more explicitly to the needs of the labour
market and to improving their efficiency and productivity. The Hermes
Commission in Norway in 1987 placed emphasis upon the need for indi-
vidual universities to relate the general goals and priorities through their
efficiency, quality and flexibility in the development of individuals and
skills. In France in the 1980s, accountability and planning were trans-
lated into ‘four-year contracts’ negotiated directly with the ministry by
each institution; the government ensured the agreed level of support for
development priorities over the four-year period, thus making long-term
strategies more feasible. In 1985 the Jarratt Report15 in the United King-
dom stressed the corporate planning responsibilities of accountable indi-
vidual universities. The view was succinctly expressed at a European
Commission-sponsored conference in Siena in 1991, that is, strategic
management by individual institutions is the key to a generalized pro-
cess of change in Europe.16 In that sense the universities’ Magna Charta,
signed in Bologna in September 1988 by rectors from all over Europe,
was more the setting of a seal upon the trend than the raising of a stan-
dard of autonomy to be struggled towards. State planning in the Western
democracies had been replaced by a reliance upon the responsibilities of
individuals and institutions, and that change was to be shortly brought
about dramatically in Eastern and Central Europe.
An interesting question is when did it emerge in the universities that
they had to set their own strategies for survival and development? The
timing differed across Europe. Broadly the concept of strategy came in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, under the combined impact of student
radicalism, which forced the university to be more explicit about what it
stood for, and of the managerial revolution in large-scale organizations,
where the idea of corporate planning developed at that time. Whatever
13 A.-M. Furumark, ‘Institutional Self-evaluation in Sweden’, International Journal of Insti-

tutional Management in Higher Education, 5:3 (1981), 208.
14 F. van Vught, ‘State Regulations and Innovations in Higher Education’, Higher Educa-
tion Management, 1:1 (1990), 34.
15 Jarratt Report = Report of the Steering Committee for Efficiency Studies in Universities
in the United Kingdom (London, 1985).
16 ‘Higher Education in the European Community towards the Year 2000’, Universitas
Quaderni, 9 (1991), 53.
139
Geoffrey Lockwood
the differences at that time between Nanterre, Sussex, Trier, Trondheim
and Louvain-la-Neuve, they were each setting out strategic concepts.
the management quadrilateral

If autonomy vis-à-vis the state was not as great a concern for university
management in practice as it was for the commentators upon higher edu-
cation, what was the situation in regard to the university management
and the internal politics of the university? Viewed over the period as a
whole, the conclusion is one more of stability than fundamental change.
Despite periods of considerable turbulence and debate, the internal gov-
ernance of the university in Europe since 1945 has been based upon a
quadrilateral of power or authority, the first of the four points of the
quadrilateral being a governing body or council normally composed of
internal and external representatives. In the United Kingdom that body
typically had a majority of external members. In Continental Europe the
body was more typically internally dominated, partly because its deci-
sions were more subject to ratification by state authorities, but external
representation was strengthened over the period. For example, the French
Law in 198417 adjusted the basic law of 1968 to add external members
to the Conseil universitaire (or Conseil d’administration depending upon
the institution) as part of the 1980s shift towards improving the efficiency
and responsiveness of responsible institutions.
The second point of the quadrilateral was the senior internal academic
authority, or parliament, of the Senate, normally one body but some-
times a divided authority (as is the case in France with the separation of
authority between teaching and research in the Conseil scientifique and
the Conseil d’études et de la vie universitaire).
The third point of the quadrilateral was the individual head of the
university, disregarding ceremonial heads: the rector or vice-chancellor
or president possessing the executive responsibility for both the academic
and management leadership of the institution. The extent to which the
rector had full authority over both the academic and management aspects
of the university varied from country to country and within countries
over the period, but the full leadership role became the norm by the end
of the period.
The fourth point of the quadrilateral was the role of the professional
head of the administration, variously titled registrar, secretary, Kanzler,
questor, gerente, secrétaire-général, pro-rector (administration) and so
forth. Originally such officers were representatives of the state placed
inside the university (the Prussian Kurator model) to control resource
17 ‘Loi no. 84–52 du 26 janvier 1984 sur l’enseignement supérieur’.
140
management (separate from the rector’s responsibility for academic man-
agement). The general trend since 1945 across Europe has been for them
to be internalized constitutionally under the governing body and the rec-
tor, but remaining as a fourth point in the management quadrilateral
because of their joint responsibilities to the council, the Senate and the
rector, because of their special relationships to the state in many countries,
and because the combination of their professionalism and comparative
permanency gave them influence far beyond their formal authority.
The history of the internal politics or governance of the university in
Europe since 1945 has been to do with the changing nature and roles of
the four points in that quadrilateral. There is considerable literature on
the subject, and the state of the balance has been the object of debate,
legislation and militancy throughout the period. However, the basics of
that generic structure have been in place in most countries in Europe for
most of the time since 1945, though, in common with the cycles of all
permanent institutions, the pendulum effect has operated in European
universities. Over time, even under stable environmental conditions, the
balance of effective power amongst the four points of the quadrilateral
has changed. The relative situations of governing bodies (councils) and
the internal academic ‘parliament’ (Senate) has shifted basically in tune
with the changes in the strength and nature of the external pressures
upon the institution. In broad terms, when those pressures have been less
intensive or less direct, the Senate has predominated. When those pres-
sures have been intensive or direct, the council has been forced to be more
active. Senates, therefore, were at their high point in the late 1960s/early
1970s, when the relatively generous economic terms for expansion avail-
able from governments were in vogue. Councils had to re-assert their
authority from the early 1980s when the economic conditions for sur-
vival, let alone expansion, pressed hard upon the university, requiring
difficult selective decisions on academic priorities and employment prac-
tices within the university. The growing relationship between the univer-
sity and local/regional economic development also helped to switch the
balance of influence in the 1980s towards the externally related governing
body and away from the internally focused academic parliaments.
A similar trend can be perceived in regard to the effective rather than
the constitutional position of the rector or vice-chancellor. Such officers
were clearly seen as directive leaders of their institutions in the 1940s and
1950s but, in the surge of participatory internal democracy in the 1960s
and in the period of industrial democracy in the 1970s, they became
characterized as ‘chairmen’ of assemblies or the heads of one side of
university governance (the management as opposed to the leaders of ‘the
workers’). They returned in the 1980s, in adverse economic conditions,
to being recognized as the managerial heads of unified institutions, ‘chief
141
Geoffrey Lockwood
executives’ in the jargon of the day. The tradition of vice-chancellors
being scholars first and acting as chairmen of the Senate carrying out its
will, rather than leading it strongly, is changing. The shift to the style
of chief executive, bearing the responsibility for leadership and effective
management of the institution, slowly took precedence.18
As with many other aspects of management covered in this chapter,
the states of Central and Eastern Europe were an exception to the timing
of that trend with ‘democratization’ impacting not in the late 1960s but
in the late 1980s. For example, in the USSR in 1969, ‘rectors were given
overall administrative power’,19 whereas in Czechoslovakia after the Vel-
vet Revolution, ‘rectors are elected by Academic Senates and appointed
by the head of state, whilst deans are elected by Senates in individual
schools, but appointed by no-one, and therefore seem to be subordinate
to nobody. Rectors, as chief administrators, have no say in the process of
hiring and firing faculty.’20
This cycle of change was reflected in the method and terms of the
appointment of rectors: broadly from being appointed by the governing
body to being elected by the internal community to being again appointed
by the governing body. Over most of the period, most rectors, whether
appointed or elected, were effectively selected by internal bodies for rela-
tively short periods of office (the UK vice-chancellors being the principal
exception having been in the main appointed until the normal age of
retirement in most cases over the period). Rectors functioned through
the high public status of their office and their personal academic stand-
ing rather than through specific powers of the office (which tended to
be fewer than those attached to a chief executive in most other types of
organization).
Leadership was thus more a matter of consent, particularly by
Senates, than authority, a situation attuned to the traditions and times
when rectors were primarily responsible for the leadership of the aca-
demic community rather than for the whole of the management of the
university (e.g. in times when Kuratoren had a separate responsibility to
the state for the finances and physical management of the university).
The effects that rectors being recognized by the state, and the council,
as the full managerial heads of their universities had upon the office of
the rector and their relations with Senates were still evolving at the end
of the period. For example, in Finland ‘the system of internal decision-
making will now be developed to give the heads of the institutions and
18 Jarratt Report (note 15), 26.

19 B. Holmes, ‘The Development of Higher Education’, Paedagogica Europaea, 7 (1972),
22.
20 J. Jarab, ‘Higher Education and Research in the Czech Republic’, Higher Education
Management, 5:2 (1993), 312.
142
Faculties more decision powers, especially in financial matters. Some uni-
versities have adopted a decision-making system that gives the Rector
power to decide on the allocation of the institution’s appropriations and
the deans to decide upon the allocation of resources within their Fac-
ulties. All of the institutions were not prepared to adopt this system.’21
In the Dutch universities, following the upheaval of 1968, the pendulum
swung in the other direction. A system of shared decision-making gave
considerable influence to the students and administrative staff through a
common council, the academische raad, while the university leadership
was entrusted to a troika consisting of the rector (an academic responsible
for institutional development), the president (usually an outsider with a
career in government or industry, who was responsible for links with the
external world) and a third member in charge of the administration. In
the mid-1990s, this participatory democracy was replaced by streamlined
authority, with the minister appointing the board of outsiders responsible
for the welfare of the university as a whole. This board nominated the
rector – and sometimes the other members of the troika – after negoti-
ating the strategies to be implemented within the university, while the
rector chose the deans and agreed with them the resources they would
be allocated. Students and administrative staff retained positions on a
number of committees, but the latter were now consultative rather than
executive.
The trends in the role and position of the registrar or Kanzler were
no less complex and interesting than in the case of the rector or vice-
chancellor. The main changes were in the content and context of their
professional work. In regard to this summary of the internal political
changes and interest, the first point to note is that the roles of such officers
converged across Europe over the period. In the early part of the period,
the situation in the different states was very divergent. In some, the role
of general management was in effect performed by state officials outside
the university, with internal officers of minor responsibilities reporting
to them (e.g., in France). In others, the state required the senior internal
professional manager to be directly responsible to its officials and had
influence upon the appointment (e.g., the Federal Republic of Germany).
In others, the officer was appointed by, and entirely responsible to, the
university authorities (e.g., in the United Kingdom).
Although exceptions can be quoted, the general trend across Europe
over the period has been towards the professional head of the general
administration of the university being appointed by, and entirely respon-
sible to, the university as a senior member of the rector’s management
21 A. Jappinen, ‘University and Government in Finland’, Higher Education Management,

1:1 (1989), 336.
143
Geoffrey Lockwood
team, albeit often still with a special recognition by the state (e.g., in
Austria) or with a direct responsibility in certain matters to the council,
not through the vice-chancellor (e.g., in the United Kingdom).
The second point to note in regard to the role of the registrar or equiv-
alent over the period is that the role broadened. As environmental factors
(e.g., technology) and internal management techniques (e.g., planning)
clarified that most decisions in a university have academic, resource,
physical and social dimensions and effects, and also provided the means
to utilize information on those dimensions in integrated decision-taking,
so the managerial structure changed. The administrative resources and
expertise of the university could no longer be divided between the ‘aca-
demic’ and the ‘resource’ fields, and over the period, the professionalism
of the Kanzler in the Federal Republic of Germany was extended into aca-
demic administration, while the offices of bursar (resources) and registrar
(academic administration) were combined in the United Kingdom, and so
on. Thus, more unified and comprehensive professional administrations
were developed.
A third point about the role of the senior professional manager is that
the growth in the scale and complexity of the university, the applica-
tion of new management techniques to the university and the changing
nature of the politics, rules and regulations relating the university to the
state and society all forced the professional managers or administrators,
who were normally in office for periods far longer than the academic
officers (including rectors), to master knowledge, techniques and rela-
tionships which were essential to the efficiency and survival of the uni-
versity, a trend which required a concentration and continuity beyond
that capable of being achieved at the other three points of the quadrilat-
eral. The history of the period is thus one of a growing political tension
between the ‘professionals’ or ‘technocrats’, led by the Kanzler or equiv-
alent, and the internal academic community and its short-term officers.
Although the internal political climates and trends in the university over
the period across Europe could take volumes to summarize, it is time in
this chapter to turn attention to the contents of management rather than
its politics.
management and governance

University officers and administrative services were concerned over the
period with the management of the primary activities of the institu-
tion (teaching and learning, research and scholarship, public service)
and the support services and infrastructure necessary to those activities
(resource availability, allocation and usage; student recruitment, record-
ing and assessment; provision and maintenance of buildings, equipment
144
and grounds; development of social services for the university commu-
nity). Aspects of those roles of management are referred to in this chapter,
but no attempt is made to describe the changes in the ways in which they
were performed and the effects those changes had on the structure and
the image of university management. Such a description would require a
separate volume; but it has to be recorded that for much of the day in
each of the years over the whole of Europe it was those basic operational
tasks which dominated the work and lives of most university managers.
This section selects one such role as an example of the changes that
impacted upon the operations of management: the role of maintaining
and adapting the constitutional governance of the university in the light
of external pressures for change and of internal political movements.
Notwithstanding the assertion made earlier in the chapter that the uni-
versity over the period increased its freedom from state doctrinal politics,
the rise in the influence of the law upon the operational management
in this field was considerable. Despite the significant differences across
national boundaries in the legal relationship between the state and the
university, institutional managers year by year had to increase their ref-
erences to legislation before undertaking activity or advising committees.
Checks on compliance with legislation (including by the end of the period
the regulations and codes of the European Community) not only became
the norm prior to activity, but inevitably placed constraints upon decision
options. In part, that was no more than the university facing the same
situation as all other private and public organizations, as states legislated
in fields such as health and safety at work, equal opportunities, privacy
and confidentiality of information, race relations, accounting standards
and so on. In part it derived from state legislation specific to the univer-
sity with particular reference to their structure of governance. Even in
those states which did not pass general ‘framework laws’ on that subject,
there was a growth in the ‘guidance’ on governance attached to funding
allocations, which in practice had much the same effect as legislation.
A further aspect of the increasing impact of legislation on university
management arose from the growth in the role and scale of contracts.
Whereas in 1945 relations with research funding bodies, equipment sup-
pliers or industrial partners would typically have been on the basis of
‘gentlemen’s agreements’ (often with individual staff or particular insti-
tutes), by the mid-1980s such relations were normally embodied in formal
contracts, licensing agreements and so on, which the university negotiated
and were signed by management.
Further, whereas most activity amongst members of the university
remained either on an informal collegial basis, or was governed by inter-
nal regulations, there was an increase by internal parties in the resort to
law to resolve internal disputes and complaints. In its operational activity
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Geoffrey Lockwood
in support of governance, management had to take into account more
frequently and more seriously the possibility of dissatisfied members of
committees challenging processes and decisions in the courts, dissatisfied
staff or students contesting at law the actions of university bodies, and so
on.
In summary, university management over the period had to devote
more of its expertise and resources to being knowledgeable about a wide
range of laws and litigation, and to employ that knowledge in its support
of institutional governance and in its own activities. In general that trend
increased the influence of management, as the ‘legal office’ of the univer-
sity, but reduced its standing as part of the community of the university.
Internal members resented the increase in bureaucracy and constraint by
management, but also wished to distance themselves from management
as the focus for complaint by external agencies or for internal litigation.
Thus, in coping with externally stimulated change, management increased
both its influence and its isolation.
The trends and cycles of political movements within the European
university since 1945 are dealt with elsewhere in this volume,22 and the
object here is simply to draw out a few illustrative generalizations of their
impact upon the role of university management in relation to governance.
The first point to note is that management’s role in governance was
required over the period to become more explicit and more open; often
that process was gradual, but occasionally it was sudden under the impact
of revolutionary political movements. There had always been balances in
the university between devolution and integration, between leadership
and participation, between authority and collegiality, and also in regard
to the internal political representation in decision-making of the various
classes of members and employees of the university. Those balances were
the subject of discussion in the 1940s and 1950s, typically in closed
and informal groups, but by the mid-1960s they became the subject of
debate, and direct action, in public and formal arenas. Management had
to adjust to that in various ways, only two of which are recorded here for
illustrative purposes, both of which had continuing relevance at the end
of the period.
In its internal leadership role, university management had to change its
style, and to some extent its philosophy or rationale, in recognition that
whereas the basis of its constitutional authority might or might not have
changed (depending upon the state in question), its effective authority
had become much more reliant upon its ability to both develop methods
of influencing members and staff (to create a broader consensus) and to
control or mitigate extremes of political action within the institution. It
22 See chapter 8 (‘Student Movements and Political Activism’).
146
was, for example, no longer sufficient for a rector or vice-chancellor to
be proficient in chairing committee meetings without also being effective
in mass meetings or on internal media.
In its administrative role, university management had to learn new skills
as the secretariat to the institution. Officers in the early part of the period
serviced stable constitutions, whether stemming from state legislation or
instruments of governance specific to the individual institution, but from
the middle of the period they were required to become expert in drafting
regulations and procedures previously outside their experience. Whether
those of parliamentary democracy (broadly 1968–75 in most Western
European universities) or private company statutes (1980s), university
secretaries who had previously possessed only lay knowledge of alterna-
tive forms of governance had to become expert in them in order to adapt
them to the institution. Furthermore, in the 1980s and 1990s, the cre-
ation under private law of spin-off companies, technology parks or other
university training initiatives, such as continuing education, required the
support of staff well versed in commercial activities and with some legal
training – even in countries where the universities remained state institu-
tions incorporated under public law.
A particular impact upon management was the requirement to cope
with internal disorder or militancy which arose from the late 1960s. This
requirement both changed the image of management and extended its
role. Such disorder was not unknown in the medieval European univer-
sity, but its outbreak in this period was not within the experience of most
members of the university. Such action placed activities within the uni-
versity into the spotlight of the external media and faced management
with the task of creating or strengthening the machinery for counter-
acting disorder. Management established information or public relations
offices and, in some countries, brought their security forces more up to
the level of those in place in the external community. These two reactions
were not caused uniquely by direct political radicalism, though it was the
latter which accelerated their development, and the management roles
which they stimulated were key functions in the latter part of the period.
The university became much more a part of the external community and
reflected its standards of behaviour. Thus it became crucial for the uni-
versity to have public relations and marketing capacities in place23 and
to have internal security and disciplinary forces capable of dealing with
a normal level of societal crime. University managers who had little or
no experience of handling internal disorders in the 1940s and 1950s but
who had to develop skills and machinery to cope with revolutionary direct
23 See W. Rüegg, ‘Die Sprengung des Elfenbeinturms’, in R. C. Schwinges (ed.), Univer-
sität im öffentlichen Raum, Veröffentlichungen der Gesellschaft für Universitäts- und
Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 10 (Basel, 2008), 469–85.
147
Geoffrey Lockwood
movement in the 1960s and 1970s then became responsible in the 1980s
for attempting to control drug abuse, petty theft, sexual harassment, car
parking offences and so on.
Similarly, university managers in the 1950s might have occasionally
had contact with the media, but the attention of the media attracted by
the political movements in the university in the 1960s forced managers
into external public roles which became the norm in the 1970s and 1980s,
partly because of the growing importance of universities to society and
partly because of the growth in competition amongst universities. The
latter required the individual university to market itself in a wide variety
of arenas, not only to counteract media publicity but to promote positively
its image in the media.
If student militancy provided a challenge to university management,
that was more than matched by political movements within the staff
of the university. The former was intensive and sporadic whereas the
latter was steady and persistent, but more varied in its thrusts. Firstly,
there was the same thrust as with the student militants: the demand for
full democracy within the university rather than the participative but
corporate governance normally provided by the constitution. Secondly,
there was pressure for the industrial relations model to be replicated in
the university: a partnership of governance between the representatives
of authority (the management) and the representatives of the workers
(the trade unions). Thirdly, there was the demand from staff, and their
representatives, not for participation but for negotiation – negotiation on
anything that affected staff (which left little out of its scope), in a labour
versus management mode.24
Although those three thrusts are contradictory, the reality is that man-
agement faced them simultaneously in the individual university for the
past quarter of a century. The impact upon the structure of manage-
ment was mainly by the third of the above thrusts, that of unioniza-
tion. The university management of the 1950s perhaps had a small staff
office, in those states where staff were employed by the university, to
handle the mechanics of recruitment and contracts. The university man-
agement of the 1980s had to put in place offices and expertise covering
not only establishments (the authority for staff positions and the fill-
ing of those positions) but personnel (the handling of welfare, grievances,
review, appraisal) and labour relations (negotiating with the trade unions,
determining the contracts and conditions of employment). In addition to
that growth in the institutional-level management capacity for handling
staff affairs, the impact upon management was reflected in two other
main areas. Firstly, in those states where these matters were not already
24 See chapter 5 (‘Teachers’).
148
handled largely by the offices of the state, the universities formed regional
or national consortia to handle these and other matters. The creation of
consortia by independent universities is a separate theme in the develop-
ment of university management since the 1960s, and it covers matters as
disparate as the organization of university admissions, purchasing, com-
puter networks, management training, graduate employment and so on.
A major field has been that of dealing with the conditions and contracts
of staff through regional or national consortia. Secondly, the response
to staff pressures has been to increase the tendency towards devolution
within the university, to judge that the thrusts for democracy, partnership
and negotiation can each be better met or dealt with at the level of the
department, institute or faculty, a shift requiring that level to be given the
necessary governmental and managerial authority, including control over
planning, resource utilization, rewards to staff and so on – but usually
within the framework of constraints fixed by the institution or by the
supervisory government, whose influence was exerted through regular
audits that also covered departmental organization.
The foregoing has indicated a few illustrative examples of the changes
arising from the impact upon the role of management in support of
governance. In general, that impact extended the range of modes through
which management has functioned. The levels of those modes have been
broadly constant over the period. The three basic levels were those of the
clerk (the recording of activity), the administrator (the organization of
an activity within the decisions of a regularly present authority) and the
manager (decision-taking management of an activity within broad policy
guidelines). Over the period more activity of management moved from
the clerical to the administrative to the managerial, but also the range at
each level was extended.
Managers functioned as civil servants, but sometimes as politicians,
sometimes as bankers but sometimes as investors, sometimes as police
but sometimes as counsellors, sometimes as entrepreneurs but sometimes
as consumers, sometimes as legislative drafters and sometimes as prose-
cutors. In essence, the role of management became more complex, and
more difficult for the members of the university to understand and relate
to as they confronted or heard about it in the expanding and various
modes through which it functioned.
As duties and qualifications changed, so the need for professional sup-
port increased, and national and European associations began to develop
with the aim of comparing practices and ideas between institutions and
systems. In July 1967, the OECD governments inaugurated the Cen-
tre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) to help ministries
compare the educational policies. CERI in turn set up the Institutional
Management of Higher Education (IMHE) programme on the basis of
149
Geoffrey Lockwood
pilot experiments in higher education begun in 1969. This decentralized
IMHE programme involved not only public officials, but also the univer-
sities themselves, and it was supervised by a directing group consisting
of representatives from the participating countries and institutions. Over
the years, IMHE became an important sounding board for new ideas
in university management, bridging the Atlantic divide. In Europe, more
specialized groups were created around specific management tasks: some
examples of this are FEDORA, an association of people dealing with
student orientation; the EAIA, an association of persons in charge of
international relations; and EUCEN, an association for specialists of con-
tinuing education and lifelong learning. Many have national ‘chapters’
or close contacts with other national organizations with similar inter-
ests, such as the Conference of University Administrators (CUA). Then
there are the ‘thematic’ associations like the European Centre for the
Strategic Management of Universities (ESMU) – a network of institu-
tions interested in new forms of planning and a long-term understanding
of possible future scenarios. This national and international consolida-
tion of professional interests has both strengthened the managerial and
administrative community of universities and promoted implicit competi-
tion with the academic leaders of the institutions, many of whom belong
to their own international circles: non-governmental examples of these
are the International Association of Universities (IAU) set up in 1951, and
the Association of European Universities (CRE) founded in 1959, while
government-sponsored groupings include the Council of Europe’s Com-
mittee for Higher Education and Research (CHER) set up in 1963 and
UNESCO-CEPES, the Centre européen pour l’enseignement supérieure
founded in 1973. Such bodies also deal with questions linked to the
management and efficiency of higher-education establishments.25
resources
The history of the management of resources over the period reflects the
increasing scale of the university, rising societal expectations of increased
productivity, the growth in accountability, and the impact of technology.
A key aspect has been the integration of resource management into the
broader concept and practice of corporate planning. At the beginning
of the period, resource administration was an activity conducted sepa-
rately from academic administration and tended itself to be divided into
the accounting for recurrent or operational funding and the planning of
capital financing (especially building programmes).
25 See chapter 3 (‘Relations with Authority’).
150
This clear separation was reflected in the roles of officers as between the
rector (academic) and the Kanzler (resources) in Germany or between the
bursar (resources) and the registrar (academic) in the United Kingdom.
By around the late 1960s the concepts of corporate planning, devel-
oped in other fields of enterprise, began to influence the university partly
because of the increased scale and societal importance of the university
and partly because the external practitioners of such concepts became
interested in their application to the university. The essence of the con-
cept of corporate planning is the necessity to take into account all key
aspects and factors bearing upon the institution in the process of struc-
tured discussions and analyses leading to decisions which shape or affect
the future of the institution. The following definition of the term was
stated in 1985: ‘Planning is the continuous and collective exercise of fore-
sight in the integrated process of taking informed decisions affecting the
future.’26 Many changes, therefore, occurred in and to the management of
resources. Firstly, it became the concern of the many rather than the few.
The technical financial aspects of resource management (e.g., the pro-
fessional accounting function, the detailed investment policy) tended to
remain with the few specialists, but the tasks of maximizing the resources
available, the economic decisions exercising choice in the usage of scarce
resources across multiple needs, and the analysis of and accountability
for that usage of resources against performance became the concern of
the many.
At the beginning of the period, the dean of a faculty or the head of
a department would need to discuss with the rector his wish for a new
or replacement appointment or to talk to the finance officer about how
to pay a bill for a member of staff attending a conference. By the end
of the period, such officers were the managers of significant resources
who needed to understand the university’s resource situation (sources of
income, objects of expenditure, the conditions attaching to the usage of
resources, the processes of the internal allocation of monies, etc.) and who
was accountable for the resource health of their department or faculty. A
significant proportion of their time would be spent with the professional
administrative staff in finance and planning, obtaining information and
advice necessary to take decisions on staffing, the purchase of equip-
ment, the allocation of space, the meeting of student number targets, the
formulation of research funding applications and, in particular, on the
usage and effectiveness of the primary resource (the time of the academic
staff).
26 G. Lockwood and J. Davies (eds.), Universities: The Management Challenge (Windsor

and Philadelphia, Penn., 1985).
151
Geoffrey Lockwood
Such change stemmed partly from the integration of resource plan-
ning and budgeting into the open and participative process of corporate
planning, and partly from the spread of devolutionary management in
the university. The balance between the devolutionary thrust and the
integrated framework changed over time even within an individual uni-
versity. Generally, the result over the period was that the department or
faculty (cost centres or budgetary units in the language employed) became
much more responsible for maximizing and managing the resources avail-
able to it. The second key change in the management of resources was
the shift from predictability, if not certainty, to flexibility, if not insta-
bility. At the institutional level in the early part of the period, the bulk
of income was a matter for negotiation with the state, typically annually
but with three or four further years’ allocations at least agreed in princi-
ple. Once the allocation was agreed, it was guaranteed, sometimes with
an automatic increase to match national inflation over the year. By the
end of the period, although the annual allocation by the state remained
the largest source of income, the allocation might not be guaranteed in
advance but was dependent upon performance during the year (e.g., the
number of students enrolled). A significant proportion of income would
be dependent upon the university competing in the market, or quasi-
market. In an overview of the analysis of university growth effects across
Europe in the 1980s, the ‘decline in government funding shown here has
induced institutions to find other sources of income to supplement their
budgets’.27
Resource managers used to dealing with state bureaucrats for grants
(whether of the block nature as in the United Kingdom or the line item
allocations as in the Federal Republic of Germany) had to learn new
skills as they sought to maintain income from the competitive sources of
student fees, research grants, development contracts, commercial trading
and donations from charitable bodies or individuals. Corporate plan-
ning, including resource forecasting and allocation, thus shifted from
rigid blueprints for five or so years ahead based upon predictable income,
inputs and outputs, to establishing broad concepts of mission and objects
but seeking to fulfil them through processes and means adaptable and
responsive to environmental change and opportunities.
That shift at the institutional level had major effects upon resource
management. Frequently the initial result was ‘crisis management’. These
short-term horizons led universities to put considerable effort into cri-
sis management and, more importantly, often led to the abandonment
of desirable developments to accommodate some new specific advice
27 L. Goedegebuure, F. Kaiser and F. van Vught, ‘Disaster Warning’, Times Higher Edu-
cation Supplement, 7 October 1994, 1–3.
152
from government.28 However, the changes had more lasting and sig-
nificant effects, particularly at the faculty or departmental level. In the
1940s and 1950s approximately 80 per cent of budgets at that level were
devoted to academic staff salaries, and the predictability of institutional
income, along with other historical factors, meant that most such staff
were granted appointments up to the normal age of retirement (tenure).
Resource management was therefore about handling the 20 per cent avail-
able in support of the permanent academic staff and about how to utilize
the occasional opportunity for a new appointment arising from a vacancy
or expansion.
By the mid-1980s, the loss of predictability, together with factors such
as the impact of technology and the emphasis upon learning rather than
teaching, meant that not only was less of the departmental or faculty
budget consumed by academic staff, but a significant proportion of that
staff were not on lifetime appointments. In a large science faculty it
was not untypical by that time for the majority of the scientific staff
to be on three- or five-year postdoctoral contracts. Thus, the head of
department or dean of faculty had both the freedom and the responsibility
to manage resources in circumstances which required constant adjustment
to the employment of capital and labour of various kinds rather than
being concerned simply with the annual marginal adjustment capability
available to his predecessor. At both the institutional and the unit level,
the decline in predictability increased the role of management, its external
accountability and its internal exposure to criticism and pressure.
Towards the end of the period, those shifts were intensified as both the
concern of the states about the effectiveness of their funding and the con-
sumer markets focused attention upon qualitative rather than just quan-
titative performance. This is evidenced by the growth in the development
and usage of performance indicators.29 Further, it became recognized that
it was no longer sufficient to justify to the suppliers that their resources
had been used legitimately and had funded quantifiable inputs into teach-
ing and research. Those funders now needed to be assured about the
quality of outputs. Institutional resource management thus became not
only more important, but it had also to become more transparent within
the university.
The area of resource management least affected by internal devolu-
tion and perhaps most affected by the increased scale of activity was
that of the management of a university’s buildings and estates. In some
28 Jarratt Report (note 15), 13.

29 M. Cave, S. Hanney, M. Henkel and M. Kogan, The Use of Performance Indicators in
Higher Education, Higher Education Policy Series, 34 (London and Bristol, 1988; 2nd
edn 1991).
153
Geoffrey Lockwood
countries that management was provided by the state external to the uni-
versity, but where the latter was responsible for its capital property, the
pressures were considerable. In the first half of the period the pressure
was mainly about expanding the estate whilst struggling to keep older
buildings usable. In the middle part of the period, Europe witnessed the
architectural flowering of many new campuses from the technical univer-
sity in Denmark to the autonomous university in Madrid, from Sussex
to Tromsø, from Trier to Malta. In the latter part of the period, the
challenges were more related to economizing on space usage and alloca-
tion, using computer models measuring utilization and occupancy levels,
timetabling activity maximally and attributing space costs to the opera-
tional budgetary centres. A further focus was on meeting the long-term
maintenance and repair costs of the buildings erected in the earlier part
of the period.
The technical services within the estate were the major developmental
factor, increasing vastly in scale, complexity and cost. They became vital
for activity, but came under counter-attack from the 1980s by the envi-
ronmental pressure groups, the latter taking estate management into the
internal political arena for the first time since conflicts over architectural
style and materials in the 1960s as energy costs and concerns clashed with
the growing demands for energy for academic activity and social comfort
on the campus.
Estate management over the period also reflected the university’s posi-
tion in society. Firstly, university managers had to contend with pressures
common to any large-scale organization, ranging from increased state leg-
islation in fields such as health and safety, laboratory inspection, or food
hygiene to the impact of the growth in the ownership of private motor
cars on estate roads and parking provision. Secondly, the period saw a rise
in the location within the university estate of interface organizations with
society whether science parks, technology teachers, innovation centres or
joint university/public sports and leisure facilities.
In summary, the stewardship or custodial role of estate management at
the beginning of the period had been extended by the end of the period
into a technical organization capable of delivering and maintaining a
broad range of services essential to the university as an organization and
a community. The developments can be illustrated under three headings.
Firstly, the management of the estate became more central to the internal
financing of the institution and, therefore, most closely integrated into
its corporate planning and general resource management. Typically, the
estate and its services consumed 15–20 per cent of the university’s annual
budget by the 1980s, leaving aside capital development. Secondly, the
management became more professional; the generalist, architectural and
engineering skills of the 1940s’ estate management were enhanced by
154
the end of the period with safety and radiological protection officers,
security experts, environmental advisers, computer specialists, transport
economists, cost accountants specializing in option appraisal, capital eval-
uation and so on.
Thirdly, the impact of technology was massive and reduced the limita-
tions of the institutional boundary. Technology provided the individual
student or researcher with the ability (e.g., through Internet or online
public access catalogues) to use information from global sources or to
access a CD-ROM with data equivalent to 200,000 pages of typewritten
script, or to utilize satellite television. Technology shifted the adminis-
tration of estate management from manual records, to cardex systems,
to first-generation computer programs on particular activities, to second-
generation computers with magnetic tape storage for interaction across
activities, to computer systems with integrated databases with remote
online terminals, and to CAD-CAM for building design.
By the end of the century, this usually meant ‘wiring’ all buildings –
including the dormitories – so that all members of the university –
students, teachers, researchers and administrators – could have access to
the Internet and use electronic mail. In management terms, this implied
different access codes so that information could be both exchanged and
protected.
management techniques
The rise in the role of management in the European university since 1945,
the scale and complexity of the tasks undertaken by management and the
closer relationship of the university to other forms of organization were
all reflected in the techniques employed by management. Up to the 1960s,
administration in the university remained almost exclusively an art whose
practitioners developed skills in the traditional fields of minute writing,
bookkeeping, records maintenance and so on. The professional roles of
the accountant, architect, engineer, and so on, were either confined to
a few specialists or were conducted for the university by external agen-
cies, with the role and techniques of the lawyer dominating the internal
administration of the university in most countries.
Yet for the previous twenty years, members of the universities had
been closely involved in the development of a whole range of planning
and management techniques being employed by the state or by private
enterprise. The systems approach to management and the tools and tech-
niques it spawned (e.g., operational research and computer modelling)
were created largely by university academic staff, though often working
outside the university, especially during the Second World War when
many of the tools were created for military application. However, until
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Geoffrey Lockwood
the 1960s neither those academic staff members nor the institutional
leaders and administrators saw the need to apply the techniques to uni-
versity management. The expansion in student numbers, the increasing
scale of research and the greater public focus upon the university in
the 1960s changed that situation. Management remained an art, heavily
reliant upon human judgment, but it became increasingly necessary to
ensure that judgment was based on adequate information and was exer-
cised by individuals and groups aware of the environment in which the
university functioned and of the choices or alternatives available to it.
The university turned to management science to provide that systematic
information and the training of decision-makers, a process which both
reflected and strengthened inter-university cooperation in management.
The first major international conference on planning and management
techniques was convened by the OECD in April 1969, when practition-
ers from twelve European countries exchanged experiences and ideas with
colleagues from North America.30
Although no European university implemented the full PPBS (Planning,
Programming and Budgeting Systems) developed by the US government
and applied in many North American universities in the second half
of the 1960s, many European universities introduced planning systems
based upon similar principles: the formulation of an institutional mis-
sion, the setting of objectives under that mission, the creation of strategic
and operational plans to achieve those objectives, following the explicit
analysis of alternatives, assigning activities to programmes, reformatting
the annual budget to match those programmes and building in a process
of evaluation and feedback in order to adjust the forward plans in the
light of performance. They also adopted similar techniques: for example,
computer models of university resource allocation and usage, student
enrolment forecasting techniques, cost-simulation exercises, staffing pro-
jection models and capital utilization studies. It is not necessary to detail
the full range of techniques which impacted upon the management of the
university in the 1960s and 1970s. An illustrative summary can be found
in the author’s article published in 1978.31
In the area of institutional structuring, organization and methods, tech-
niques were used to examine the purpose and efficiency of each unit
within an institution in the context of overall institutional objectives –
techniques covering such topics as the division of work, the delegation of
authority, the line of authority, spans of control, coordinative functions,
the balance of centralization and decentralization, and so on. Work study
30 G. Lockwood, University Planning and Management Techniques (Paris, 1972).

31 G. Lockwood, ‘Planning’, International Journal of Institutional Management in Higher
Education, 2:2 (1978), 135–6.
156
was employed as a range of subsidiary techniques in this field: for exam-
ple, work measurement, activity sampling, time and motion studies and
ergonomics. Manpower planning, job evaluation, productivity bargain-
ing, management by objective, and management by exception provided
another range of techniques made available to the university in planning
the use of its main resource, that is, labour; management by objectives, for
example, maximized institutional effectiveness by the setting of specific
targets for individuals and groups.
Quality control, management ratios, cybernetics, forecasting stud-
ies, market research, feedback surveys, communications techniques also
became valuable aids to university management. Communications tech-
niques, for example, were increasingly utilized in the university context
where internal democracy had to be combined with business efficiency.
The techniques range from simple aids concerned with the selection of
items to be communicated, to the complex mathematical information
theories.
In the area of finance, the techniques developed included marginal cost-
ing, discounted cash flow, net present value, budgetary control devices,
variable budgeting, cost–benefit analysis, input–output budgeting, pro-
gramme budgeting, value analysis, cost-control scheduling and manage-
ment accountancy. Cost–benefit analysis, for example, involved a system-
atic comparison between the costs of an activity and the value or benefit
of the activity, the costs and benefits as far as possible being quantified
and extended beyond the direct and financial ones to the indirect and
social ones. Problems of physical and capital development and use over
the period were assisted through the use of network or critical path anal-
ysis, cybernetics, traffic flow techniques, and so on. Network analysis,
for example, enables a complex project to be planned through the logical
analysis of its component parts or steps and through their recording on
a network diagram, which is then used to order and control the steps in
the carrying of the project to completion. In the fields of teaching, learn-
ing and research, the techniques available assisted in the designing of a
curriculum, in reviewing the effectiveness and relevance of curricula, in
checking assessment methods, in determining the mix of teaching inputs,
in establishing and controlling research projects, and so on. Computeri-
zation of timetabling provides one example.
Other techniques ranged from the simple ones concerned with the
design of forms, the arrangement of statistics, and so forth, to intricate
ones such as the use of game theory decision logic tables, policy analysis
and techniques for diagnosing organizational ills. Together they changed
the style and language of university management and, more significantly,
extended its role and influence. Although the planning models and tech-
niques made choice more open and decision-making more participative,
157
Geoffrey Lockwood
their integrated and comprehensive nature pushed management control
out from its traditional bases (resource allocation, legal/constitutional
authority) into all areas of activity, including the usage of academic staff
time, the development of curricula and the selection of research priorities.
The quantitative analysis plus many of the qualitative assumptions neces-
sary for the planning and the operation of the techniques were provided in
the main by managers. A subsidiary effect of that impact of management
science upon the university was the attraction into university manage-
ment of members of the academic staff experienced in the models and the
techniques, either through their disciplines or their work with external
organizations.
In that period, professors of operational research, economics, com-
puting, production engineering and so on were drawn into pro-vice-
chancellor, vice-rector or directors of planning roles. Whilst no partic-
ular set of techniques became central to the management of the European
university, as opposed to the management of particular universities at spe-
cific times, the general systems approach had broad impact and reflected
the growing professionalization of university managers, including the
exchange of information and the transfer of experience amongst them not
only nationally, but across Europe (through bodies such as the OECD,
UNESCO and the European Commission). They also led to the increased
interest of external parties (whether governments or management con-
sultants) in the process of university management, which indicated that
the ‘ivory tower’ had been breached by the forces of change referred to
earlier in the chapter.
The systems and techniques employed in the 1980s differed markedly
from those outlined above, but did not change the breadth and depth
of that initial impact of management science upon the university. The
first generation of techniques were too mechanistic, assumed predictabil-
ity in the directions of change rather than the certainty of change, and
underestimated the centrifugal forces within the university.
The succeeding generation of systems and techniques retained the prin-
cipal elements of corporate planning (with even greater emphasis upon
mission, objectives and resource planning) but focused more upon creat-
ing the capacity to adapt to unpredictable change, upon enhancing and
monitoring the quality of performance, and upon positioning the univer-
sity favourably with external agencies and markets.
Thus the institution’s capacity to change became the main focus of
the assessment programmes developed by the universities themselves in
an effort to strengthen their autonomy: such was the case of the evalu-
ation programme that the Association of European Universities (CRE)
offered its member universities from the early 1990s, or the EQUIS
programme specifically tailored to the assessment needs of business
158
schools by the European Foundation for Management Development
(EFMD).
The language relating to systems and techniques shifted to terms such
as Total Quality Management (TQM), performance indicators, human
resource management, option appraisal, value for money, market analy-
sis, consumer evaluation and process re-engineering. In essence, the first
generation of techniques introduced science, or the systems approach,
into university management but were largely concerned with internalities
(obtaining change and efficiency within the university in a presumed sta-
ble or predictable external environment), whereas the second generation
reflected the responsibilities of management to interact with and persuade
the external environment (whether the state or individual customers) of
the values, performance and potential of the institution.
The second-generation techniques, therefore, tended to concentrate
upon internal quality management and techniques for meeting evalua-
tion standards acceptable to the external environment. For example, in
regard to quality, ‘commercial competition and its partner, value for
money, involve a combination of quality and price. Market pressures
for quality enhancement and price reduction, and a perceived need for
collective action to prevent exaggerated claims about quality misleading
consumers, and damaging public perceptions of the sector as a whole,
provided the context for the rigid growth of interest in the possible appli-
cation of TQM in the management of Universities.’32 Further, in regard
to evaluation, ‘the authorities, in an attempt to achieve transparency
in resource allocation, rely to a considerable extent on evaluations con-
ducted by experts or by the institutions themselves’.33 Quality assessment
procedures for the university management began in the United Kingdom
in 1991 under university sponsorship. In France, the Comité national
d’évaluation, set up in 1984, reported directly to the President of the
Republic on the state of higher education around the country. In the
Netherlands, the Association of Dutch Universities (VSNU) developed its
own quality assessment services, especially for teaching. Thanks to the
support of the European Union in the 1990s, these three models in their
various forms were later emulated by most countries in Europe, including
those of the former Soviet bloc.
the arrival of management

Few general conclusions have validity for the hundreds of European uni-
versities over a period of half a century. Experience somewhere at some
32 Williams, ‘Quality Management’ (note 6), 229–37.
33 P. Tabatoni, Evaluation and the Decision-Making Process in Higher Education: French,
German and Spanish Experiences (Paris, 1994), 197.
159
Geoffrey Lockwood
time would confound such conclusions. However, the period since 1945
witnessed the arrival of management in the university. A key change was
the realization by a few members of the university, and then the accep-
tance by the many (no matter how reluctantly), that in order to fulfil the
academic objectives of their institution in the political, social and eco-
nomic environment pertaining, there was a need for management rather
than just internally focused administration.
Much of the managerial experience of the European university since
1945 has not been covered in this chapter, such as the experience of
merging institutions under the pressures of the economies of scale, or the
major differences in adapting a medieval university to societal trends,
from the challenges of upgrading a collection of colleges of higher
education into a university. No summary can encapsulate the managerial
situation of the University of Manchester in 1945, the University of
Paris in 1968, the University of Rome in 1985, but the chapter has
evidenced trends in the experience of the development of management in
the European university since 1945.
The experience summarized in this chapter illustrates, however, the
adaptability of the European university. The development of management
was crucial to the ways and means through which European universities
adjusted to major changes in their political and economic relations with
the state and society, and to the equally major shifts in the structure of
knowledge, the development of technology and the massive increase in
the demand for university education.
European universities adopted and adapted management concepts,
developed in the private sector, in order to maximize their permanency,
autonomy and efficiency. The fact that at the end of the period universi-
ties were thriving, and the extent and appreciation of university education
was unprecedented, is a testimony to the success with which their man-
agement developed to respond to external change.
select bibliography
Agoston, G. et al. Case Studies on the Development of Higher Education in Some
East European Countries, Paris, 1974.
Becher, T. and Kogan, M. Structure and Process in Higher Education,
London and New York, 1990, 2nd edn.
Cerych, L. and Sabatier, P. Great Expectations and Mixed Performance: The
Implementation of Higher Education Reforms in Europe, Stoke-on-Trent,
1992.
Cornford, F. M. Miscroscosmographica academica, London, 1949.
Dreze, J. and Debelle, J. Conceptions de l’université, Paris, 1968.
160
European Commission. Memorandum on Higher Education in the European
Communities, Com(91) 349 Final 1991.
Fielden, J. and Lockwood, G. Power and Authority in British Universities,
London, 1973.
Gellert, C. (ed.) Higher Education in Europe, London, 1994.
Halsey, A. H. and Trow, M. A. The British Academics, London, 1971.
Lockwood, G. and Davies, J. Universities: The Management Challenge, Windsor
and Philadelphia, Penn., 1985.
Ortega y Gasset, J. Mission of the University, London, 1946.
Rice, A. K. The Modern University: A Model Organisation, London, 1970.
161
CHAPTER 5
TEACHERS
THOMAS FINKENSTAEDT
introduction
The extraordinary development from an elitist university system to an
open system of higher education since the Second World War has brought
about quantitative and qualitative changes for teachers in European uni-
versities that nobody could foresee in 1945 and that, in 1945, nobody
would have believed were possible or even sensible. It has been a devel-
opment from a more or less steady state, consisting of mostly professorial
staff structures, towards systems with many more and new types of teach-
ers and support staff. The changes that have occurred over the last two
generations are, to some extent, due to the intrinsic developments that
have occurred in the sciences and the humanities. They also stem from
external factors, such as funding and social forces. Some trends seem to be
universal, while others are a result of the European post-war situation. It is
the university teachers, both as individuals and as a profession, who must
resolve the tension between the intrinsic demands of their subjects and the
demands of society, for governments can only regulate to a limited extent.
The years following 1945 signified a break with tradition in Eastern
Europe. In the West the post-war period until about 1960 was a time
of reconstruction, of ‘back to normal’ policies in most countries; but the
origins of many later developments and difficulties lie in the period before
the Second World War and in the war period itself. Apart from the effects
of the expulsion of Jewish university teachers and post-war ‘purges’, the
age structure of the teaching staff was distorted through losses of junior
staff and students during the war. The bulge of the post-war baby boom
reached the universities at a time when it was difficult to find enough new
staff. Whether the new demand for higher education could have been
predicted earlier is difficult to say. By and large, university teachers of the
162
Teachers
post-war period were unwilling to consider a notable increase in student
numbers as advisable or necessary (‘more means worse’, was the English
phrase). More important, though perhaps less noticeable at first, was the
expansion of science as a system and the growing importance of science
for society and in society; the university ivory tower had to be provided
with many new doors to allow the public easier access to its facilities,
and the university teacher improved access to the public, with this public
growing to international dimensions very rapidly.
In the post-war period a number of more general social changes and
attainments were beginning to affect the universities and their teachers:
for example, the question of job security (tenure), unionization and the
changing role of women in society and within the university. Another, but
no less important, aspect was the changing climate of opinion in which
the academic was expected to work. This changed from an optimistic
view of science and learning, with the professor as the symbol of progress
and expertise, to a sceptical and sometimes anti-science attitude. In most
countries the prestige of the university teacher has declined steadily. There
is also growing demand for public accountability of the university and
for control of its teachers.
This chapter deals primarily with full-time teaching staff. Since the
available data cannot, as a rule, be transformed into comparative tables,
quantitative statements are usually given as rough percentages only. In the
absence of detailed research into many aspects of the post-war teaching
profession in the majority of European countries, the chapter can only
try to describe and analyse the main trends. It starts with quantitative
developments and their impact on staff; this is followed by a discussion
of different staff structures and their changes. The third section deals
with the duties and working conditions of the academic as university
teacher, and the final section looks at the European university teacher in
society. Basic information on staff structures and numbers in all European
countries can be found in the Encyclopedia of Higher Education.1
More often than not the examples are drawn from the British, French
and German university systems because of the availability of data. The
enormous changes in the countries of the former Eastern bloc countries
throughout the last decade cannot yet be presented adequately.
new quantities – new qualities

Expansion
The expansion of the university system and its teaching staff that began
around 1960 varies considerably from country to country and between
1 Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I.
163
Thomas Finkenstaedt
the various subjects. For the period from 1960 to the end of the 1970s
we find a growth rate in teaching staff numbers ranging from 175% in
the Netherlands to 600% in Italy and 700% in Portugal. Even the con-
servative university system of Finland shows a trebling and Norway a
fourfold increase in staff.2 Staff expansion of more than 200% is found
in the countries of the former Eastern bloc as well as in the major Cen-
tral European countries: Poland, for instance, experienced an increase of
more than 300% from 1960 to 1985. The former Czechoslovakia shows
less than a doubling of staff, while in Romania total staff numbers actu-
ally decreased after 1980, resulting in an overall growth from 1960 to
1980 of 146%, but this almost doubled from 11,696 in 1989 to 20,810
in 1992.3 A fairly moderate expansion in Britain was due to the planning
ideas behind the Robbins Report of 1963,4 and the modest expansion
in the Netherlands is a reflection of the small increase in student num-
bers and a parsimonious ministry of education. The German and French
developments reflect the aftermath of the events of 1968.5 The expansion
of individual disciplines deserves to be studied too. Very little ‘hard’ evi-
dence is available. There is a more or less complete set of data for English
studies in Germany from 1825 to 1990: teaching staff numbered about
65 from 1900 to 1950, rose to approximately 300 in 1966, reached 600
in 1970 and almost 1,200 in 1982.6
The overall picture is quite clear. In the countries of the former Eastern
bloc, staff development was part of a planned economy, and that usually
meant limited numbers of staff and students in all fields of study, while
in the West staff increases were independent of political systems and
the size of the countries concerned, and they were also independent of
the particular structure of the respective university systems in 1960. The
growth can be explained, by and large, not as a planned expansion of staff
against a background of the idea of manpower planning, but rather as
the consequence of developments in the sciences (e.g. specialization); but
2 G. Neave and G. Rhoades, ‘The Academic Estate in Western Europe’, in B. R. Clark (ed.),
The Academic Profession (Berkeley, 1987), 230; Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I.
3 J. Sadlak, ‘Planning of Higher Education in Countries with a Centrally Planned Socioeco-
nomic System: Case Study of Poland and Romania’ (PhD thesis, State University of New
York at Buffalo, 1988), 341, 350; J. Sadlak, ‘Legacy and Change – Higher Education and
Restoration of Academic Work in Romania’, Technology in Society, 15 (1993), 86.
4 A. H. Halsey and M. A. Trow, The British Academics (London, 1971), ch. 7; M. Moss,
‘The Staff of Scottish Universities in the Post-1945 Period’, in The History of the Univer-
sity in Europe after World War II. International Conference,University of Ghent, 28–30
September 1992, mimeo.
5 F. Mayeur, ‘Les carrières de l’enseignement supérieur en France depuis 1968’ and W.
Weber, ‘Multiplizierung, Differenzierung, Diversifizierung: Die “personelle” Transfor-
mation der deutschen Universität seit 1945’, in Conference Ghent (note 4).
6 A. Mayer and T. Finkenstaedt, Anglistenregister 1825–1900 (Augsburg, 1992); T. Finken-
staedt, Kleine Geschichte der Anglistik in Deutschland (Darmstadt, 1983).
164
Teachers
it was also a reaction to the vast and fast-growing student body, whose
members in many countries were free to choose their subjects of study,
so that an unpredictable situation arose for teaching-staff growth across
the whole spectrum of subjects. Such a situation could be – and indeed
was – exploited by a number of professors for ‘empire building’ purposes
in their own field.
To some extent, staff growth was also due to the upgrading of insti-
tutions of higher education, which thus gained ‘university status’: the
English CATs (colleges of advanced technology) and, in 1992, the poly-
technics, or the German pädagogische Hochschulen are examples of this
upgrading. The argument that such changes are only a shifting of num-
bers within statistical brackets and not an actual increase in personnel
misses the point. The upgrading does indeed change the overall staff
picture because the size of the whole system necessarily influences its
internal structure and quality. It should also be mentioned that such qual-
itative, and sometimes profoundly anti-elitist, changes were not always
unintended.
Another quantitative change influencing the characteristic quality of
the system, if not necessarily its standards, is the size of the individual
institution. Ten new universities with 3,000 students each (the Robbins
idea) provide the same number of posts for staff as three with 10,000 each
(the German proposals of 1960), but working conditions for staff, the
communications situation among staff, and the staff–student relationship
as distinct from the staff–student ratio are completely different.
Did more mean worse? It did not as far as the growth of student
numbers was concerned.7 The increase in teaching staff presents a more
complicated picture. If there have been problems, it is not because not
enough intelligent people were available to take up a university career, but
rather because they were not available at short notice and in the disciplines
requiring them. Manpower planning for university staff is difficult if not
impossible even in a steady-state system. The sudden demand of large
numbers could not be met satisfactorily in more than one country and in
more than a few subjects; ‘barrel-scraping’, as the English called it, was
resorted to, and as a result junior staff found themselves rapidly promoted
to senior posts.
Age structure
It is not feasible to devise a model age structure for university teaching
staff so that prospective staff can be encouraged and trained according to
a plan. Attempts at such planning in the socialist countries failed, if only
7 See chapter 6 (‘Admission’).
165
Thomas Finkenstaedt
because they eliminated the essential element of competition once a junior
post was obtained. Too many variables come into play, not least those
specific to particular disciplines: mathematicians and musicians may be
ready for a professorship much earlier than junior staff in an experimental
science or in history.
On the whole, the age structure should give junior people a reasonable
chance, but not a guarantee, of obtaining a senior post. It is good to
have a mix of younger and older teachers; it is good for the students
taught and for the administrative duties that require experience, but also
for the general communication within a discipline and a university. It is
not by chance, nor just as a means of establishing and securing some
kind of hierarchical order, that seniority plays such an important role
in many universities. Experience is of great importance in university life,
administration and teaching because of the informal nature of so many
of the activities.
The expansion of the 1960s brought increased opportunities to a spe-
cific age group and decreased those of the succeeding, ‘lost’ generation.
A few figures clearly illustrate what happened: in France 9,800 assistants
were recruited between 1967 and 1971, which is about one-third of the
work force in this group. In such a situation, in a system that is no longer
expanding, new staff can only be hired if there is rapid selection among
the newly appointed staff of those who have the ability to reach the
higher echelons, and even if there are many able young scholars, it is wise
to make a selection in order to facilitate new entries. What happened
was the opposite. Tenure was granted freely, and the time for further
qualification lengthened. Thus in the late 1980s in the French universities
the average age in the ‘junior’ post of assistant was quite advanced, and
thirty-six to forty-one years old was quite normal for an assistant in a
humanities faculty; in the sciences 45 per cent had already served for
eleven years or more in the first position on the career ladder.8
A similar picture emerges for Italy. Staff growth meant expansion in
junior staff from 1950 to 1960: assistenti (assistants) grew from 10,000 to
almost 20,000, and incaricati (associate) professors from 2,500 to more
than 4,000. The number of full professors increased only after 1970,
and many of the assistenti and former lecturers moved up into the group
of associate professors. The 1986 statistics show 11,000 full professors,
22,000 associati and about 20,000 assistants or ricercatori. More than
two-thirds of all professorships were set up after 1970, and the chances
of obtaining one of these were limited.9
8 E. Friedberg and C. Musselin, ‘The Academic Profession in France’, in Clark, Academic
Profession (note 2), 109, 112.
9 Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 364; B. R. Clark, Academic Power in Italy: Bureau-
cracy and Oligarchy in a National University System (Chicago and London, 1977), 119;
166
Teachers
Yet the staff expansion of the 1960s generally favoured the more junior
ranks. The situation of junior staff in Germany was studied in 1977 and
it was found that, in the sixties, of a hundred Assistenten, seventy had
a chance of obtaining a senior post. By 1975 the odds were reduced to
nine out of a hundred.10 They have risen since to slightly more than
20 per cent. As the former very strict rules relating to the period allowing
for an Assistent to qualify as a university teacher through the doctorate
and Habilitation were not enforced in the 1970s, the age at Habilitation
increased steadily. Married life – very rare for an Assistent before his
Habilitation in the pre-war days – also took its toll and contributed to
a further slowing down of a career in its early stages. The increase in
average age means that in many countries an unprecedented proportion
of professors will retire in the first decade of the twenty-first century
and will thus have to be replaced – from a non-existent pool of junior
staff.11
In 1961 in the United Kingdom more than half of the professors and
a third of the readers and senior lecturers were over fifty years old; for
1969 the respective percentages were 44% and 26% only.12 A similar
picture emerges for other countries, with too many young professors
being appointed in the sixties. In the eighties the UK introduced a pro-
gramme of early retirement and created a number of ‘new-blood’ posts
to redress the worst effects of the imbalance. In Germany the ‘Fiebiger’
posts (named after a university president who proposed this programme)
and the Heisenberg chairs tried to offer any highly gifted Privatdozent
with a junior post a professorship outside the ‘ordinary’ staff quota. Yet
posts of this kind were too few; early retirement is a much more efficient
but expensive programme, and financial difficulties will probably make
such programmes no longer feasible.
Specialization
One of the most striking developments in the post-war university has
been the growing specialization of the teaching staff. The extraordinary
progress of science in the post-war period was made possible through a
specialized approach to new problems. As the qualification for a univer-
sity post is mainly, if not exclusively, gained through success in research,
U. Karpen and P. Hanske, Besoldung von Hochschullehrern im internationalen Vergleich
(Baden-Baden, 1994), 93ff.
10 G. Elstermann, Die Altersstruktur der Forscher (Bonn, 1977).
11 C. Weick and P. Meusburger, ‘Die Altersstruktur der Professoren an den baden-
württembergischen Universitäten’, Mitteilungen des Hochschulverbandes, 41 (1993),
142–6.
12 G. Williams, T. Blackstone and D. Metcalf, The Academic Labour Market (Amsterdam,
1974), 24.
167
Thomas Finkenstaedt
specialization is one of the answers to the problems created by the rapid
expansion of the body of knowledge and the internationalization of sci-
ence. The growth of higher education is another cause. Specialization has
thus become a ‘must’, at least in the natural sciences.
The differentiation and fragmentation of the old disciplinary structure
can be followed closely through a study of post-war lecture catalogues and
their lists of university teachers with the denomination of their posts. We
find – again the sixties seem to be the beginning of a new age – the gradual
dissolution of the old idea of ‘one professor – one discipline or subject’.
The idea of an Ordinarius publicus, a ‘professor in ordinary’ (whether
the name was used or not), was fundamental throughout the history of
the European university. It was based on the belief that a finite number
of fields of knowledge constitute the totality of human knowledge,13
and that this knowledge, these fields or subjects, should be taught by
qualified and salaried people. They were required to teach the ‘whole’
subject, and they were also expected to present it to the general public.
In the Germany of the 1920s the Ordinarius had to give an overview
of his subject in a three-year cycle (Triennium), and even the post-war
letters of appointment for a full professor in Germany stated that he was
expected ‘to represent his discipline in research and teaching’ (note the
order of words, dear to almost every German professor). Theoretically
this meant that there could be only one professor for each subject, and a
good university would have all the necessary professorships to elucidate
the world for the prospective scholar as well as the general public. The
idea in its pure form had to be given up for several reasons. The first
can be traced back to the early history of the university: it is the rise
of a class of unsalaried teachers with reduced rights and responsibilities.
One way for them to attain recognition – at least that of the students –
was to specialize in fields the professor himself would not treat in his
lectures.
A second reason for the splitting up of the old unity of professor and
subject may be found in growing student numbers and, perhaps, in the
American credit system, which does not require a unified course structure.
This allows specialization in teaching as well as in research. No single pro-
fessor could honestly say nowadays that he can master the whole of his
subject area, such as English, for example. So there is a first split into
linguistic and literary studies, and then into modern and historical lin-
guistics, and so on; in the end a large department can present ‘our Milton
man’ and ‘our Joyce man’. The fragmentation of a subject can of course
also be used to increase the number of posts in the name of learning, and
13 The interesting question as to which fields of study and scholarship were not included,
and why, is dealt with in vol. I, 41–5.
168
Teachers
there have been cases of second-rate university teachers creating a niche
for themselves. The German idea of coping with greater student numbers,
by creating ‘parallel chairs’ for professors willing and able to teach the
whole course, has not been successful – except in a few isolated cases.
Genuine parallels intersect only at infinity, but parallel professors will cut
each other here and now: specialization is a way of avoiding trouble.14
The following figures illustrate the movement towards new and ‘smaller’
disciplines: in the UK there were 123 different (‘statistical’) subjects in
1928; by 1953 the number had risen to 382; a German catalogue of
university subjects published in 1973 lists about 4,000 disciplines and
subdisciplines.15
Conclusion
It is too early to pass a fair judgment on the quantitative and qualitative
changes in the recent history of higher education. What is so important
for the university teacher is that it has brought an old problem to the
fore: the relationship of (specialized) research to (generalist) teaching. It
should not be forgotten in this context that, just as research is linked
to publication, so teaching is connected with examining, and as exam-
inations play such an important role in a meritocratic society, they not
only mean work for the examiner, but they also endow him with power.
It can be tempting to exercise such power by making a specialized field
or a discipline an obligatory part of an examination. Specialization must
also be seen in connection with the internationalization of science. The
partner in a scientific dialogue is as often as not no longer a colleague
in one’s own university, but rather a specialist somewhere else, and this
has led to new forms of communication and a partial loosening of local
attachment. This development is mirrored by the growing importance
of professional organizations for academic subjects and of the leading
international journals in many fields: they are the playgrounds in which
reputations can be gained.
In spite of the compartmentalization of many subjects, and in spite
of the counter-movement towards the interdisciplinary organization of
learning and research (which nevertheless presupposes the disciplines),
the ordering of disciplines by subject matter will live on, and the idea of
14 T. Becher, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Inquiry and the Cultures of
Disciplines (Milton Keynes, 1990). For the development of chairs for individual subjects,
see the disciplines discussed in vols. III and IV in the section on ‘Learning’. When the
University of Berlin was founded, Schleiermacher postulated ‘competition’ among the
chairs of theology. See vol. III, 407 (chapter 10).
15 Hochschulverband (ed.), Fächerkatalog (Göttingen, 1973; 2nd edn, 1977) (with an intro-
duction on the history of the idea of a ‘subject’ and its relation to the organized world
of learning in universities).
169
Thomas Finkenstaedt
a ‘natural’ link between a professor and his subject will not die. A good
example is provided by Austria, where the chair principle was abolished,
but where, in 1987, 500 out of 800 institutes which had been founded in
order to have larger and more sensible (or just more democratic?) units
were still one-professor shows.
Specialization and growth have also led to the idea of research and
teaching universities. Would such a development mean the splitting up
of a unified university staff into different groups? It is too early to say
which way we are heading. As a scholar and scientist can only rise in the
professoriate by being successful in research, it would be difficult to invent
a new type of university teacher without direct contact with research.
staff structure
Teaching staff
The best man or woman available for the post must be the guiding prin-
ciple, and it is probably true to say that universities by and large operate
according to this principle. For a number of reasons it is not easy to find
out who the best person is or – in the case of young candidates – will be
for the whole period of service. A ‘hire-and-fire’ type of a pure labour
market will not do for the university, and even where dismissal ‘for good
cause’ is possible, such dismissal is not easy, and rightly so. There must be
safeguards against wrong decisions for both the university teacher and his
or her employer. The university teacher must be secure from interference
by politics, parties, church and state; the whole idea of a university is
connected with this idea of freedom from interference and independence
and the tenure of – at least – the ordinarii and their medieval predeces-
sors, the magistri and doctores.16 Studies in the professoriate in many
different countries have shown how highly ‘intellectual freedom’, ‘free-
dom of inquiry’ or simply ‘freedom’ is valued.17 On the other hand the
employer and the students must also have some sort of guarantee that the
person selected has the ability to do what is expected of them. After all,
filling a professorship is a considerable investment in terms of money too.
One of the safeguards is ‘judgment by one’s peers’ before a candidate is
chosen, a second is the formalized process of qualification for prospective
16 See vol. I, especially p. 38 (chapter 2: ‘Patterns’) and pp. 161–5 (chapter 5: ‘Teachers’).
17 U. Teichler, ‘The Conditions of the Academic Profession’, in A. M. Maasen and F.
A. van Vught (eds.), Inside Academia (Utrecht, 1996), table 2.12; Z. C. Zubiete Irun
and T. Susinos Rada, ‘Causas de satisfacción e insatisfacción del profesorada univer-
sitario. La Universidad de Cantabria’, in J.-L. Guerena, E.-M. Fell and J.-R. Aymes
(eds.), L’université en Espagne et en Amerique-Latine du Moyen Âge à nos jours, vol. I:
Structures et acteurs (Tours, 1991), 470f., 475f.
170
Teachers
candidates, again including judgment by senior members of the ‘invisible
college’ of the scientific community in a particular subject.
Yet the need to secure the services of a great number of staff – many of
whom could easily find a job outside the university – has increasingly led
to the introduction of elements of a career structure in the strict sense of
the word.18 As a result a number of mixed types of staff structure have
developed. Characteristic elements of each type are – among others –
the background of the national civil service, formalized qualification
and selection procedures, duration of contract (part-time, short-term,
tenured), mobility, salary and status.19 The American model is nearest
to a genuine career path, and the majority of staff can reach the top
of the ladder, the post of full professor, in one place or another. But
such a career structure only works in a system of universities of varying
academic rank, with competition between these universities and a flex-
ible salary structure. The other extreme is the old German system with
only the ‘real’ professor (planmäßiger Professor) getting a salary, and a
pool of unsalaried Privatdozenten competing for free posts.20 In modern
staff structures there is always a mixture of the elements of job evalu-
ation, competition, qualifications, labour market21 and peer-judgment,
with political and government pressures reduced as far as possible.
European countries show much more state influence and therefore a
more homogeneous staff structure in each country and less competition
between the universities than the United States. A survey of staff structures
in Western Europe published in 1966 still shows the traditional types:
the predominance of full professors, especially in the German-speaking
and Scandinavian countries; the British lecturer (three levels), reader,
professor ranking; and a strict civil-service career structure in France.22
In the countries of the former Eastern bloc the traditional staff structure
of pre-war Europe (e.g., the Habilitation in Poland or Hungary, or a
structure more akin to the French system in Romania) soon came under
the influence of the Stalinist Soviet model.23
The following characteristics of the changes in staff structure from
about 1960 onwards are typical for most European countries: (a) the
growing importance of second degrees, (b) the move towards tenure at
18 For the French approach, see vol. III, 139f. (chapter 5: ‘Teachers’).
19 Karpen and Hanske, Besoldung (note 9), 11f.
20 C. von Ferber, Die Entwicklung des Lehrkörpers der deutschen Universitäten und
Hochschulen 1864–1954 (Göttingen, 1956); A. Busch, Die Geschichte des Privat-
dozenten (Stuttgart, 1959). For further literature, see vol. III, notes 31–41 (chapter 5:
‘Teachers’).
21 Williams, Academic Labour Market (note 12).
22 H. Sindal, Structure of University Staff: Schemes of Academic Hierarchy and Dictionary
of Terms (Strasbourg, 1966), with a detailed description for each country.
23 Sadlak, ‘Planning’ (note 3), 210–18. Cf. chapter 3.
171
Thomas Finkenstaedt
an earlier stage of the career than a professorship, (c) the decline in
the percentage and influence of (full) professors, combined with (d) new
types or grades of staff. The resulting staff structures usually show a
division into junior and senior staff, even in countries where tenure is
obtained early on in the career; (e) the period is also characterized by the
growing number of people outside the teaching staff body, namely those
with research contracts and the support, technical and administrative
non-teaching staff. On the whole the development of staff structures in
European universities has been towards a genuine career and towards
earlier tenure, but all systems seem to keep the division between junior
and senior staff, between the professoriate in the narrow sense of the
word and the non-professorial teaching staff. The first appointment and
the ‘rite of passage’ into the higher ranks deserve special consideration.
For both we find – as in all other areas of university life – more regulations
at the end of our period than in 1945.
Junior posts are still often filled at the suggestion of the academic
teacher, and such patronage is not the worst of selection processes for
prospective university teachers. It is, perhaps, most evident in Italy, with
the influential baroni and padroni among the full professors. The influence
of patrons and grands patrons in France is also well attested,24 but we still
know too little about the ‘machinery’ behind the formation of ‘schools’,
how the Lehrer-Schüler-Verhältnis or a degree from a particular institute
or college can lead to a university post.25 The influence of important and
powerful professors has been frequently decried as arbitrary, especially in
the post-1968 period. It is probable, however, that this type of individual
recommendation is a better way of finding a suitable young academic
than more formalized procedures.
The first post on the career ladder is probably always filled on the basis
of a short-term contract (usually three to six years), sometimes linked
to the requirement that the next higher degree must be obtained within
this period.26 Some countries have a specific group for the beginners
(the German Assistent, the junior teaching assistant in Poland, and the
probationary teacher in the former Soviet Union),27 or there exists – as in
the UK – a definite probationary period of three years at the beginning of
service as a lecturer. It was introduced in 1971 ‘with possible extension
24 Clark, Academic Power (note 9), ch. 3; P. P. Giglioli, Baroni e burocrati: Il ceto
accademico italiano (Bologna, 1979). Karpen and Hanske, Besoldung (note 9), 93;
P. Bourdieu, Homo academicus (Paris, 1984), 122, 125.
25 W. Weber, Priester der Klio: Historisch-sozialwissenschaftliche Studien zur Herkunft
und Karriere deutscher Historiker und zur Geschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft 1800–
1970, 2nd edn (Frankfurt, 1987).
26 Sindal, Structure (note 22), passim.
27 Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 570ff., 643ff.
172
Teachers
to four years in doubtful cases’,28 but this was felt to be ‘too short a
period in which to decide an academic’s fitness to hold a job for life’.29
There is a dilemma here: prospective university teachers must concentrate
on research because it is on the basis of their research that they will be
promoted. The research is, by necessity, highly specialized. In many cases
there is a danger that specialization becomes too great and the researcher
too old to find a post outside the university. This is another aspect of
the dangers of a distorted age structure and shows how important it is
for universities and for prospective university teachers to secure their first
post when very young.
Filling senior posts has always meant some comparative evaluation of
staff. On the whole, past performance counts far more than promise.
Past performance is ‘measured’ as scholarly and scientific work (e.g.,
publications or supervising doctorates) in relationship to the age of the
candidates. Other factors that have come into play in recent years are an
individual’s teaching record, the ability to attract research funds, mem-
bership in research teams or successful Big Science projects, the capacity
to work with industrial partners, and administrative experience. The mix
of abilities expected will also depend to some extent on the subject and
the labour market outside the university in a particular field. Senior posts
are usually awarded either by competition (concours) or on the basis of
a committee’s recommendation. Professorships are decided upon by the
Senate or another body beyond the faculty concerned, as is the case in
France, Italy and Spain.
For many reasons, the advertising of posts plays an increasing role in the
recruitment process. The number of applications for a particular post can
provide interesting information about the market in the subject concerned
as well as the reputation of the university or department advertising
the post. Even if there is now an overall tendency to try and find the
best candidate for a senior post among the junior faculty available at
home (quite apart from union pressure), there remains the feeling – and
probably the evidence – that it is a good thing to have mobility and
to recruit experienced staff from outside.30 At least for professorships,
self-recruitment, the Hausberufung (i.e., appointment from within the
university), is still not normal (the ‘personal chair’ is one way out of
the problem). For a well-established full professor it can be a tricky
business to apply elsewhere, because it could be interpreted as a sign of
dissatisfaction with the current place of work. In several countries it is,
28 D. C. B. Teather, Staff Development in Higher Education: An International Review and

Bibliography (London and New York, 1979), 44.
29 H. J. Perkin, ‘The Academic Profession in the United Kingdom’, in Clark, Academic
Profession (note 2), 37.
30 Karpen and Hanske, Besoldung (note 9) has a section on mobility for each country.
173
Thomas Finkenstaedt
therefore, possible to invite a particular professor to apply or to call them
without application. Of course, such a system can be – and indeed has
been – abused, but nothing better has yet been discovered.31
There are considerable differences in the degree of autonomy a uni-
versity has in selecting or proposing candidates. The UK has the highest
degree of autonomy, in France the university plays a minor role only,
while in Germany the minister of education of the Land concerned can
refuse to appoint, but it is difficult for him to propose a candidate. In
Switzerland the canton plays a similar role. In Italy a national concorso is
held and the faculties can choose from among the successful candidates.
By and large, direct political or party political influence on the filling of
academic posts has played a relatively small part. Even in the post-1968
period it was usually the faculty itself that was or became ‘left’ or ‘right’
and selected candidates accordingly. Some such faculties developed a rep-
utation for their political bias. Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that
party affiliation, denomination and social background are irrelevant com-
pared to the role played by first-class degrees and publications.32 With the
growing importance of measurable meritocratic elements (e.g., degrees or
concours), the social origin of university teachers has become less middle-
class. Even Oxford and Cambridge in 1971 had 23% of teaching staff
whose fathers were classified as ‘skilled manual’.33 Germany in 1931/32
had only 1% of professors from a working-class background; the per-
centage of staff possessing the Habilitation rose to 14% by 1945.34
The following paragraphs present a number of cases showing the vari-
ety of the European professoriate, the general trends mentioned above,
and some of the problems relating to staff structures.
The UNITED KINGDOM:35 The development here was probably the
most carefully planned of all our case studies, and yet the present situation
is considered to be less than satisfactory, owing to financial pressures and
the distorted age structure. A special problem is the recent abolition of
tenure. The four-tier structure of staff comprises professors and readers,
senior lecturers and lecturers. Tenure had become the norm (90 per cent
in 1987).36 By the end of our period the binary line (universities vs poly-
technics) had been abolished, and there is a unified staff structure with
31 A detailed study of the effects of the then newly introduced advertising of posts in
Germany is Hochschulverband, Das Ausschreibungsverfahren im Hochschulbereich
(Bonn, 1976).
32 A. H. Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion: The British Academic Professions in the
Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1992), 205.
33 Halsey and Trow, British Academics (note 4), 216.
34 Ferber, Lehrkörpers (note 20), 147, 177.
35 Halsey and Trow, British Academics (note 4); Halsey, Decline (note 32); Moss, ‘Scottish
Universities’ (note 4); Williams, Academic Labour Market (note 12).
36 Karpen and Hanske, Besoldung (note 9), 232.
174
Teachers
considerable internal differences of academic background and research or
teaching interests.37 The system is basically meritocratic, that is, appoint-
ment to the higher ranks is based on academic achievement (a first-class
degree, a PhD, well-regarded publications), and the number of books
published is a good indicator of the growing importance of research for
promotion. From 1964 to 1989 ‘the proportion who had published five
or more books rose from 4 per cent to 13.5 per cent’.38
In 1962/63 there were about 15,720 full-time university teachers. Of
these 12% were professors, 17% readers and senior lecturers; by 1968 the
percentage of professors had already declined to 10.1% out of a total staff
body of 30,755. The proportion of those under forty was 56%. By 1986
the total number of staff had increased to about 47,000. The percentage
of professors showed a further decline to 9.5%; 19.7% were readers
and senior lecturers. The percentage of those younger than fifty was only
23.5%, which illustrates the very limited availability of posts for new
junior staff.39 The influence of the ancient universities in producing staff
and on staff attitudes in general seems to be almost undiminished. The
Oxbridge tradition of ‘dons’, who are all equal, has diminished tensions
between the different groups of university teachers, but the extremely
poor chances that many lecturers have of obtaining a senior lectureship
or of becoming promoted to reader are frustrating. ‘New blood’ posts
and early retirement have changed prospects only slightly, because the
overall economic squeeze and the general climate do not bode well for
the new university sector.
France:40 The French situation is a good example of the change
from a professorial to a highly structured system: in 1875 professors
constituted 50 per cent of all staff, in 1975 only 12 per cent. The modern
four-tier staff structure distinguishes clearly between junior categories
(assistant and maı̂tre-assistant) and senior staff (maı̂tre de conférence and
professeur). It must be borne in mind that there exists a separate career
for researchers in the CNRS, and that the grandes écoles display an
extraordinary variety of staffing mechanisms and employ many part-time
teachers. One characteristic of university recruitment is the high degree of
centralized decision-making and the role played by nationwide concours
or listes d’aptitude (based on degrees). The ranking by these lists plays
a considerable role in the process of appointing staff; universities have
37 Halsey, Decline (note 32). 38 Halsey, Decline (note 32), 191.

39 Karpen and Hanske, Besoldung (note 9), 227f.
40 Friedberg and Musselin, ‘Academic Profession in France’ (note 8); P. Gerbod, ‘Sur notre
personnel universitaire’, Revue Administrative, 32 (1979), 475–9; Mayeur, ‘Carrières’
(note 5); F. Mayeur, ‘L’évolution des corps universitaires (1877–1968)’, in C. Charle
(ed.), Le personnel de l’enseignement supérieur en France aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris,
1985).
175
Thomas Finkenstaedt
Table 5.1 Categories of French university teachers in %
Maı̂tres de
Maı̂tre conférence +
Assistants -assistants professeurs Total
1970 47.3 25.9 26.8 100

1982 31.8 40.1 28.1 100
Taken from Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 223.
been granted a certain degree of influence since 1968. Grade and function
not infrequently fall apart, that is, university teachers are required to
fulfil the duties of a post for which a higher degree is needed than they
possess; they do not actually get the post before they have acquired the
relevant degree. The centralized and unified structure of the degree-ladder
(agrégation) makes it possible to second teachers from the secondary
schools. The years since 1968 have seen a vast increase in the percentage
of assistants, becoming maı̂tre-assistants by the 1980s (see table 5.1).
GERMANY:41 The (West) German university has probably experi-
enced – arguably suffered – the greatest changes. The old ideal of a purely
professorial system (plus assistants with short-term contracts) was out of
date already by 1945. The expansion after 1960 was at first not met by
founding new universities with a complete body of staff, but by expanding
existing institutions. And the number of professors was increased far less
than that of the assistants, creating a large pool of dissatisfied junior staff
with few rights and a considerable workload, which a professor could
use for his own purposes, if he so desired.
The present staff structure shows a mixture of the old-style profes-
soriate, with professors and Privatdozenten with the Habilitation, and
Assistenten as junior staff, with a new career for tenured teaching staff,
the Akademischer Rat or Academic Council. For these posts a first
degree (Staatsexamen, Diplom, Magister) is sufficient, and there is nei-
ther the obligation nor the right to do research. Promotion is more or
less automatic according to seniority. This new Mittelbau (middle struc-
ture between junior and senior posts) was highly diversified – a survey of
English studies in Germany in 1980 shows a total of forty-eight different
types of posts – and was sufficiently defined neither on a meritocratic basis
nor by function; repeated legislation by the federal and state governments
41 W. Thieme, ‘Die Personalstruktur der Hochschulen’, in U. Teichler (ed.), Das Hochschul-
wesen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Weinheim, 1990), 101–22; H. Peisert and G.
Frammheim (eds.), Higher Education in Germany (Bonn, 1994), 114–23. Weber, ‘Mul-
tiplizierung’ (note 5); W. Weber, Empfehlungen des Wissenschaftsrates zum Ausbau
der wissenschaftlichen Einrichtungen, vol. I: Wissenschaftliche Hochschulen (Tübingen,
1960).
176
Teachers
Table 5.2 Full-time staff in the universities of (West) Germany
1960 1965 1985 1991
Professors 5,200 8,800 24,500 21,400

Non-professorial 11,700 24,100 46,400 80,100
has not solved this unsatisfactory state of affairs. The federal Hochschul-
rahmengesetz (Higher Education Framework Law, 1976, amended in
1985) tried to create a homogeneous class of professors with equal rights
and duties but with three separate salary scales. The resulting staff struc-
ture is not very stable, and the distorted age structure will certainly create
problems in the future. After a period of ‘democratic’ and anti-degree
policies for filling vacant posts, there has been a shift to a more mer-
itocratic attitude, with the Habilitation almost gaining its former role
again. The most recent trend, however, is towards a pseudo-American
system with a six-year junior professorship leading to a permanent pro-
fessorship. The end of the DDR has not made things easier. With sixteen
separate Länder pursuing policies that are not infrequently widely differ-
ent, it is not possible to predict how staff structures will develop. There
is no early retirement for professors, and the ‘new blood’ posts (the so-
called Fiebiger and Heisenberg professorships mentioned above) are far
too few.42 Seventy-five of these were sponsored to encourage older staff to
concentrate entirely on their research, while 500 are dedicated to allowing
first-class junior staff to become professors early.
The shift towards a higher percentage of professors after 1970 is due
to the massive transfer of not formally qualified staff of the Mittelbau
into professorial posts, as well as the integration of the Pädagogische
Hochschulen (teacher training colleges). In 1991 the Mittelbau included
2% Oberassistenten (senior assistants) and Dozenten (university lectur-
ers), 7% wissenschaftliche Assistenten (assistants), 87% wissenschaftliche
Mitarbeiter (graduate assistants), and 4% other academic employees.43
AUSTRIA has experienced reforms similar to those in Germany; exper-
iments with a Mittelbau without Habilitation were unsuccessful, and
widespread tenure has lessened the chances for qualified junior people.
Tenure and the title of professor are more or less gained by seniority.44
THE NETHERLANDS reorganized its staff in 1986, moving further
away from the old professorial system. There is a three-tier staff structure
42 Peisert and Frammheim, Higher Education in Germany (note 41), 129.
43 Peisert and Frammheim, Higher Education in Germany (note 41), 123.
44 Universitäts-Organisationsgesetz von 1975; cf. W. Rüegg, Zementierung oder Inno-
vation: Effizienz von Hochschulsystemen, Österreichische Rektorenkonferenz, Hoch-
schulpolitische Reihe, 1 (Vienna, 1987).
177
Thomas Finkenstaedt
consisting of full professor, associate and assistant, with a quantita-
tive relationship of 1:1.5:2.5. But the purity of the original system is
spoilt by part-time professors and a growing number of non-tenured
posts.45
The Scandinavian countries have developed their teaching staff struc-
ture from a system similar to the old German one, with professors, lectur-
ers and assistants. SWEDEN introduced the tenured university lecturer
in the sixties, who was expected to have a doctorate (Habilitation), but
growing student numbers forced the authorities to suspend this qualifi-
cation bar. It is also worth noting that, beside the old type of professor
(‘appointed by the king’), a new type of locally appointed professor has
been introduced. FINLAND has differentiated the professorial group and
introduced a ‘chief assistant’. There is also a growing number of part-time
and temporary posts, such as the ‘special docent’.46
SPAIN, PORTUGAL and ITALY have staff structures that combine
meritocratic elements with seniority, that is, there is a certain right to
move into a higher position once the relevant degree has been obtained.
Tenure has become frequent even for the lower ranks, denying access
to new staff. The difficulties of changing traditional staff structures and
established recruiting procedures for professors are illustrated by devel-
opments in Spain with its high percentage of tenure and self-recruitment.
Professors in Italy can choose to work part time (a tempo definito) or
full time (a tempo pieno), and they frequently teach in several univer-
sities; the place(s) of work and the place of residence can be far apart,
resulting in frequent travel and little contact with students. Moreover,
junior academics often teach in more than one place as well (university
and/or school), in order to make a living. It is worth noting that in Italy
professors continue to work till the age of seventy, whereas most other
countries have the usual civil service retirement age of sixty-five (another
exception is Austria; Germany is switching from the Emeritierung with
full salary at sixty-eight to the normal Pensionierung at sixty-five).47
SOVIET SYSTEM: Developments in the former Eastern bloc countries
are much more difficult to describe. Not only do we lack reliable statis-
tics, but what was officially stated and the reality of university life often
differed in a way that is very hard for an outside observer to grasp. The
overall development is characterized by the introduction of the ‘Soviet
45 Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 491ff.

46 M. Klinge, Helsingfors Universitet 1917–1990 (Helsinki, 1991), 709–31.
47 For individual countries, see Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I. A. G. Hernández,
‘Recruiting of Spanish University Teaching Staff: From the Recent Past to a Possible
Future’, Higher Education Policy, 2 (1989), 50ff.; Clark, Academic Power (note 9), 83.
Karpen and Hanske, Besoldung (note 9), 102, 106.
178
Teachers
model’ after 1945, concentrating research in the academies, centralizing
decisions about teaching staff, and introducing a new and real career
structure for university staff. Of special importance was the aspirantura
for junior staff. The successful aspirants became candidates of science,
and instead of a university Habilitation or a concours, there was the
doctor of science awarded by a central committee of the Academy. The
model was or had to be adopted by most Eastern countries, but despite a
homogeneous terminology and overall structure many differences existed
or re-emerged.
The GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC (DDR) followed the
Russian model, with its aspirants and centrally controlled examinations
(Promotion A and B), most closely. POLAND introduced the ‘social-
ist model of higher education’ in 1951, but the ‘process of institutional
restructuring was slow and only gradually achieved’.48 New types of staff,
the aspirantura, the ‘scientific worker’ and the adjunkt, were introduced.
The degree of candidate in science and the doctor of science had a limited
appeal only.49 In recent years Poland has returned to degrees awarded by
universities (the Dr habil. has to be recognized, however, by the prime
minister’s Committee for Professorial Promotions). Today in Poland the
assistant (up to eight years) will become an adjunct for a maximum of six
years after taking his doctorate. After the Habilitation the adjunct can
become an extraordinarius and then an ordinarius. Political pressure has
more than once enabled people to stay in their posts without a Habili-
tation. A second career path in Poland is the lecturer – a senior lecturer
teaching career without research obligations. As in so many countries,
the language instructors are outside the career system proper.
ROMANIA, like Poland, adopted many features of the Soviet model
from 1948 until 1953, but the aspirantura and the title of ‘candidate of
science’ was quietly dropped again in the early 1960s; central control of
the awarding of higher degrees was retained. Staff structure distinguishes
professors and associate professors (conferentiar), lecturer, assistant lec-
turer and assistant.
In HUNGARY strict central control lasted from 1948 to 1964. The
right of the universities to award the doctorate and conduct Habilitation
was abolished in 1950 and replaced by the candidate and the doctor of
sciences. Reforms have been going on since 1964, but universities were
granted the right to award the doctorate again only in 1993. In 1985 staff
consisted of 1,651 professors (10.2 per cent), 3,219 associate professors,
6,352 principal assistants, 3,572 assistants and 448 others.50
48 Sadlak, ‘Planning’ (note 3), 171ff. 49 Sadlak, ‘Planning’ (note 3), 176f.
50 Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 298, table 15.
179
Thomas Finkenstaedt
Other staff
One characteristic of a university system is the fact that it is impossible to
maintain a completely uniform staff structure, even within the confines
of a national context. Universities must react in unpredictable ways if
they want to uphold their standards in the international world of science
and scholarship and adapt their staff accordingly. A number of recent
developments are worth mentioning, at least in passing. The number of
part-time teachers has grown, sometimes in order to fill gaps in a highly
specialized curriculum, more often in order to enlist the services of highly
qualified personnel from outside the universities, and such people may
secure one of the coveted honorary professorships (e.g., adjungerad pro-
fessor in Sweden or Honorarprofessor in Germany). Similarly, a ‘personal
chair’ can be a token way of honouring leading members of a faculty for
whom no salaried professorship can be obtained. An important post-war
development is the visiting professor from abroad (very rare before 1945).
The Fulbright Program, based on a motion by Senator Fulbright in 1946,
was set up in order to increase understanding between the USA and other
countries; its model helped to inspire a number of programmes financed
by the European Union, for example, Erasmus and Socrates, which have
staff mobility as one of their goals.51
RESEARCHERS: A very large and important new group of non-
teaching staff are those who are employed as full-time researchers. France
has a special career for people concentrating on research within the frame-
work of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); until
the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and the other Eastern bloc coun-
tries concentrated research in their academies. Research institutes outside
the universities in countries like the UK or Germany (e.g., the institutes
of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft) did not develop a specific career for
researchers. In countries with a strong research tradition in the univer-
sities, the period from 1960 onwards witnessed an enormous growth in
contract work, financed either by government (e.g., the research councils
in the UK, or the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research
Council) in Germany), or by private foundations or industry. Contract
work has been welcomed or even pressed upon universities by several
governments, in order to encourage closer links with industry and thus
better integrate universities into the economy, but also to save money.
This development has been particularly strong in the UK.
Research provides many of the necessary opportunities for the young
scientist or engineer working towards a higher degree or engaged in post-
doctoral work. The further training of graduates for work outside the
51 See chapter 3 (‘Relations with Authority’)
180
Teachers
university is one of the most important tasks of a university, and this
could not be fulfilled without non-teaching research staff. In recent years
young academics with short- or medium-term contracts have become, to
some extent, a substitute for junior posts occupied by an older generation
who were admitted to the profession after 1968. Social problems can and
do arise in this context, often because such researchers are paid less than
academics with the same qualifications and who occupy salaried junior
posts in the same department. Left-wing demands to make research posts
permanent miss the point and try to make one forget that current prob-
lems are often the consequence of previous trade union influence on staff
structure and university expansion.
NON-TEACHING STAFF: Modern science needs support staff to
an extent unknown before the war. This is not only true of medicine
and the natural sciences; large departments and the bureaucratization of
the university, like that of all other public institutions, require qualified
administrative staff. Little is known in detail about this important group
of people, which includes the registrar and the librarians, the head of
the computing centre as well as the technicians in the laboratories and
the catering people, not to mention an army of secretaries. The fictional
character Maureen the secretary created by Laurie Taylor in his weekly
newspaper column published in the Times Higher Education Supplement
(THES) is perhaps as good a representative of this group of people as
any: even though she is not the head of department, in a way she runs it.
Support staff seem to be taken for granted, and university teachers across
Europe are neither particularly satisfied nor dissatisfied with them.52 Nei-
ther the Robbins Report in Britain (1963) nor the first report of the Ger-
man Wissenschaftsrat (1960)53 nor monographs on other countries say
much about support staff. Statistics clearly show that at least in Germany
the rapid growth of this sector began rather late. The German figures may
not be quite average (the Federal Republic has a high proportion of sup-
port staff), but they illustrate the dimension. In 1990 the (West) German
universities employed 108,000 full-time teaching staff and 205,000 non-
teaching staff, and even the non-researching Fachhochschulen employed
12,000 support staff for 11,000 teaching staff.54 To quote another exam-
ple: in 1985 Ireland had 2,759 full-time teaching and 3,621 other staff.55
52 J. Enders and U. Teichler, Der Hochschullehrerberuf im internationalen Vergleich (Bonn,

1995), table 5.
53 Weber, Empfehlungen des Wissenschaftsrates (note 41). Higher Education. Report of
the Committee . . . under the Chairmanship of Lord Robbins (London, 1963). See also
chapter 3.
54 Personal an Hochschulen 1982 bis 1990: Fächergruppen, Lehr- und Forschungsbereiche,
Länder, Dienstbezeichnungen und Besoldungs- bzw. Vergütungsgruppen, Hochschu-
larten, Geschlecht (Bonn, 1992), 2.
55 Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 334ff., table 6.
181
Thomas Finkenstaedt
Actual working conditions for university teachers depend to a consider-
able extent on the well-oiled ‘machinery’ of their university, looked after
mainly by non-teaching support staff and administrators.
Women
The early history of women in higher education (students, women’s col-
leges and women as university teachers) is discussed in volumes II and III
of this history.56 Only a very slow growth in numbers can be observed.
During the Second World War the number of female students and prob-
ably junior teachers increased, if only because their male contemporaries
were soldiers. The post-war increase in the percentage of female students
is a natural result of the expansion of the secondary school system, even
though the result may not have been as envisaged at the start.57 The
growing student numbers were not immediately followed by a corre-
sponding increase in the number of female university teachers. This, and
the fact that female academics predominantly occupy the lower ranks in
the academic hierarchy, has led to occasionally heated debate about the
role of women as university teachers. A common explanation of the late
twentieth-century phenomenon is that there exists a clear case of discrim-
ination against women by the male establishment of university teaching
staff. More research on the history of women in the modern university is
needed in this context.58
The following figures illustrate the statistical state of affairs in a num-
ber of countries towards the end of the twentieth century. In 1990 in the
UK, of the junior posts, 40% were occupied by women, but only 1.7%
of the women became professors as opposed to 11.4% of the men.59 In
Hungary, about 30% of university posts were occupied by women; of
these 41% had made it to the ‘middle’ rank of principal assistant, but
only 2.4% had reached the rank of professor.60 The Netherlands had only
16% women staff: ‘in spite of official policy, female staff remain scarce,
especially in the higher functions’ and only 3% were full professors.61 In
Poland in 1987/88 about 28% of all doctorates were earned by women
and 20% of those who wrote a Habilitation were women.62 For Roma-
nia the percentage is 29% of staff, ‘many in high positions’.63 In Sweden
there is a clear male dominance of 95% for full professors, and the overall
56 See vol. II, 242f.: Laura Bassi was the first woman teacher at a university (Bologna 1732).
See also vol. III, 133.
57 See chapter 6.
58 Halsey and Trow, British Academics (note 4), has only a passing remark on p. 158.
For Germany, cf. F. Boedeker and M. Meyer-Plath, 50 Jahre Habilitation von Frauen in
Deutschland (Göttingen, 1974).
59 Halsey, Decline (note 32), 223. 60 Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 298, table 15.
61 Ibid., 501. 62 Ibid., 575. 63 Ibid., 601.
182
Teachers
percentage of women among the teaching staff was 28%.64 By way of
comparison, percentages in the United States are revealing: there were
28% women among full-time university teachers in the US in 1940; the
number had increased to 31% by 1988, but in the ‘research universi-
ties’ women had a share of only 20%.65 For the US a concentration of
women in the more ‘social’ studies like teacher training or certain fields
of medicine can be observed.66
These figures make it clear that there is no connection between the gen-
eral course of the emancipation of women in different countries and the
number of women teachers in their respective higher-education systems,
nor can a link be established between a political system and the percent-
age. The fact that certain subjects in medicine or teacher training have
a higher than average proportion of women can perhaps be explained
by the higher number of female students in these subjects. Pharmacy is a
well-known example of a ‘female’ subject, just like anaesthetics, as they
both allow part-time work. The low figure for the Netherlands is of spe-
cial interest: it corresponds to or is the consequence of a low quota of
female students – only 21% in 1971.67 A total of 23% female gradu-
ates in 1979 simply cannot ‘produce’ enough female staff to reach even
the low European average. In the UK no systematic difference could be
observed between male and female career patterns in a recent study,68
and it was even noted with some surprise that the data ‘led to the conclu-
sion that when women’s qualifications, publication rate and experience
are held constant it is impossible to demonstrate discrimination against
women’;69 the small minority of married women academics with children
had published books and articles at the same rate as the men, and far more
than the single and the childless married women. This suggests that a new
breed of women academics committed to both family and career is begin-
ning to emerge.70 Judging by the German experience, it is essential to
encourage gifted female graduates to go on to take a doctorate, and such
advice will be more readily accepted if proffered by successful women
university teachers. It is not improbable that the whole development sim-
ply takes a long time and is difficult to accelerate. The problem is a real
one, but it is probably not so much a consequence of discrimination as of
‘accumulative disadvantage’.71 More case studies and accurate statistics
64 Ibid., 694. 65 Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia III, 1683.

66 Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 787.
67 P. Rooij, Hollen of stilstaan (Amsterdam, 1985).
68 Becher, Academic Tribes (note 14), 124.
69 S. M. Lipset, in Williams et al., Academic Labour Market (note 12), 4.
70 Perkin, ‘Academic Profession’ (note 29), 35.
71 Becher, Academic Tribes (note 14), 125.
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Thomas Finkenstaedt
will also be indispensable ‘so that assumptions [can] be challenged and
policies built around accurate data’.72
Salaries
Like so many other aspects of university life, the salaries of university
teachers present a complicated, sometimes diffuse picture. This is due to
several factors. In many countries academic salaries are linked to civil
service career salaries, without quite fitting into the usual civil service
scales. There is the dichotomy of meritocracy vs seniority (or a mixture
of the two), and there is competition, in many subjects, with the gen-
eral labour market. There is also the difficulty of a just evaluation of a
university teacher’s work. ‘Same work – same pay’: but what really is
the work, and how is one to say whether it is the same in a profession
including engineers, surgeons and Assyriologists, a profession with no
fixed hours of work and with ‘products’ that are difficult to evaluate.
University teachers have been called ‘one-man businesses’ – and what
they sell is themselves.73
A description of university salaries and their development since 1945
must include both the internal aspect, that is, the salary scales within
the profession, and the external, that is, their development in relation to
other sectors of society. And it must always be borne in mind that in most
if not all countries there are emoluments other than salary for university
staff, which may sometimes be difficult to state in terms of money, even
though they constitute one of the major attractions of the profession.
The overall internal development of university salaries since 1945 has
been characterized by the following elements. A more regularized salary
structure has arisen, more similar to the regular civil service scales; there
has also been a marked decrease in the differences between salaries for
junior and senior staff. The figures for the UK show this quite clearly: in
1989 the average professor received 1.76 times the salary of the average
lecturer, and 2.74 times more than the average research worker.74 In
Germany in 1955 the professor had a (basic) salary at least 3 times that
of an Assistent, but by 1976 the relationship had been reduced to between
1.3 and 1.75. Professors could, and in many cases would, receive special
‘additions’ to the basic salary, but the overall picture is clear.75 A similar
picture emerges when we look at the range of salaries within the different
categories. This has narrowed too. Before the First World War in Prussia
72 Times Higher Education Supplement, 14 May 1993, 2.
73 Oral contribution by A. H. Halsey during Augsburg Symposium (note 98).
74 Halsey, Decline (note 32), 131.
75 G. Dorff, ‘Besoldung und Versorgung des wissenschaftlichen Personals’, in C. Flämig,
et al. (eds.), Handbuch des Wissenschaftsrechts (Berlin, 1982), 478–501.
184
Teachers
the top salary of an Ordinarius could be nine times that of the salary of a
full professor at the beginning of his career, and the average salary of the
full professor was twice that of an associate professor (Extraordinarius).76
It is said that ‘the academic profession was proletarianized after World
War II’.77 It could, of course, be argued that a profession that is basically
democratic, consisting of ‘peers’ only, must not have a salary structure
with too great a disparity. Alongside this narrowing of scales the dif-
ferences in pay between universities have been levelled or completely
abolished in most countries (apart from things like the so-called ‘London
weighting’). In Germany this has made it much less attractive to move to
the more expensive university towns, where any increase in the salary, or
more, must be spent on the far more expensive housing and the higher
costs of living.
Comparing university salaries with those of the civil service or income
in industry and commerce, we find a similar development: a lowering of
the top end of the scale, sometimes even of average salaries.78 A com-
parative study of university salaries in 1985 provides details for France,
Italy, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.79 It shows that in France
there was an average rise in salary of 80% in the private sector and 50%
in the civil service, whereas university salaries increased only by 36%
from 1962 to 1983. This development is making it much less interesting
to embark upon a university career. In Italy, on the other hand, it was
quite normal for university professors to do part-time work and to have
more than one post at a time; the total income of full professors was,
therefore, higher than in the other countries analysed.80 In the United
Kingdom the salary of a professor can be fixed within a flexible scale
by each university; salary scales for other groups are valid for the whole
system. British and Swedish staff, especially junior staff, are the least sat-
isfied with their salaries.81 A narrowing of the scales of income together
with high taxation is a characteristic of the Swedish situation, where the
average net salary of a full professor is only one-and-a-half times that of a
janitor.
The purity of the salary system (the same pay for professors in all fac-
ulties, for instance) cannot be maintained in practice because of market
forces.82 Engineers, mathematicians or economists with the qualifications
of a university teacher can command much higher salaries working out-
side the university. Governments, of course, have been forced to take
76 Ferber, Lehrkörpers (note 20), 112. 77 Halsey, Decline (note 32), 125.
78 Perkin, ‘Academic Profession’ (note 29), 46; Halsey, Decline (note 32), 131.
79 Karpen and Hanske, Besoldung (note 9). 80 Karpen and Hanske, Besoldung
(note 9), 38.
81 Teichler, ‘Conditions’ (note 17), table 2.7.
82 Williams et al., Academic Labour Market (note 12).
185
Thomas Finkenstaedt
notice of this. There are several ways of solving the problem. Univer-
sity laws or corresponding regulations may provide extra pay for ‘spe-
cial cases’; for instance, a sabbatical term without any teaching can be
a considerable bonus. In most countries there is the opportunity to earn
extra money through work apart from one’s teaching duties and research.
Medicine is naturally the most obvious example. But science and engi-
neering also offer many well-paid consultancies, and these can frequently
be justified as a necessary link between theory and practice. Even the
social sciences and the humanities offer their ways of earning a little – or
not so little – extra income through work as an expert on government
committees, as the author of popular books, through public lecturing,
and perhaps even as a ‘telly-don’.
The Eastern countries had interesting perks, such as better treatment in
hospitals, cheaper railway fares, foreign travel, or no military service and a
guaranteed university place for the son of a professor in the former DDR.
The situation in the former Eastern bloc countries has changed dramat-
ically over the last few years. Whereas during the communist period the
university professors belonged to a better-off category, especially because
of their open or hidden perks, the teaching profession now belongs to the
new poor. In 1986 the lowest-paid professors earned between DM60,000
(Austria and France) and DM90,000 (Italy); top salaries were in the range
of DM80,000 (Austria) and DM170,000 (Italy).83 Salaries in the former
communist countries are not infrequently 10 per cent of those in the West.
Considering the different systems of increments on the one hand and
taxation and contributions to pension funds and so on on the other, such
figures are only a rough indicator. It should also be noted that income
is a very subjective factor, too; Dutch and German professors as well as
junior staff are, on the whole, the most satisfied with what they earn.84
Honours and titles have lost some of their attraction during the post-
war period, if only because of the proliferation of professors. There
is a widespread feeling among university staff that working conditions
have deteriorated, and that public respect for academics is declining, and
yet, only 8 to 21% (Sweden – Great Britain) say that they would not
become an academic again.85 There is one attraction, frequently under-
rated, which until now is equally typical and valuable for the university
teacher: there are no fixed working-hours in this profession, and even
though he or she works many more hours than the average worker, the
university teacher is free to choose when and where to do the work. Time
being one of the scarcest commodities of modern life, this autonomy and
83 Karpen and Hanske, Besoldung (note 9).

85 Times Higher Education Supplement, 24 June 1994.
186
Teachers
freedom in doing one’s work is one of the greatest attractions of the
profession, whether its members realize it or not; whatever direction the
development of salaries might take, governments and funding councils
would be well advised not to interfere with this essential element of a
university teacher’s life; it would cost a lot to do otherwise.
Mobility
Staff mobility has generally been regarded as a valuable commodity in the
European university tradition, though real mobility has probably always
been less than expected or desired. Since the war many new developments
have occurred. The internationalization of science and air travel have
made personal contact between academics possible to an extent hitherto
unknown, and scientists need such contacts in order to actually see what
is going on in a particular laboratory or working group. In a number
of fields (e.g., physics) experiments require the cooperation of groups of
academics from several universities. Congresses and symposia are new
forms of communication, and attendance has become obligatory in many
cases.86 On the other hand, easy access to almost every location on the
earth’s surface has enticed many people to engage in what has been called
‘academic tourism’ (H. Markl). The old Residenzpflicht (obligation to
reside in one’s university town) is no longer strictly observed by a new
brand of ‘turbo-profs’,87 and the modern jet enabled at least one man to
have a full professorship in both Germany and the United States at the
same time in the 1980s.
Mobility between the university and industry or national research insti-
tutes (CNRS, Max Planck Institutes etc.) is indeed desirable, but it appears
to be difficult to achieve in view of the complex and often bureaucratic
regulations that have come into being with the emergence of modern staff
structures. For senior staff, especially in the sciences, it has often become
less attractive to move to a new place because it would take a number of
years to set up a highly specialized laboratory again and, as a rule, one
cannot take along assistants, technicians and the graduates working on
their doctoral theses.
Long-term mobility occurs more towards the university (especially in
medicine, the sciences and technology) than from the university to posts
outside, partly because of the degree of specialization of university staff.
Mobility is also being reduced in two ways that are definitely post-war,
and both can be found in practically every European country, whether
86 Becher, Academic Tribes (note 14).

87 Gerbod, ‘Personnel’ (note 40), 477. Karpen and Hanske, Besoldung (note 9), for the
countries discussed.
187
Thomas Finkenstaedt
East or West. One is the lack of adequate housing in many university
towns and the high costs of establishing a new home even where housing is
available. Even famous universities can find it difficult to attract celebrity
professors unless their spouses decide that they would like to live in that
particular town. (Exceptions are probably still Oxford, Cambridge and
Paris.) The second is the influence of new marriage and family patterns.
A growing number of academic spouses do not want to end their career
when the academic partner is offered a post elsewhere, or they have
difficulties in finding an adequate occupation in the new location.
Conclusion
The overall development of staff structures in European universities after
1945 has been characterized by several, sometimes conflicting, trends.
The trend towards a more democratic structure has indeed lessened the
prestige and influence of professors, but it has not abolished hierarchies.
Differences among staff may be less visible, but they still exist. Not every
member of staff can supervise graduate work (after all, a lot depends on
the names of the referees of a dissertation submitted), and the choice of
committee members can also be a subtle but effective way of differentiat-
ing staff. In countries where the process of democratization was enforced
by law (Germany now has three different but ‘equal’ classes of profes-
sors), the law also tried to establish differences: for example, who can
be the director of an institute, or who is decanabilis, and so on. On the
whole, ‘more democracy’ has meant ‘less autonomy’ for the individual,
but also for the institution.88
The second development is towards a more differentiated and regulated
staff structure, and towards a career based on degrees (the meritocratic
system); this has also brought earlier tenure in many countries, a form of
social security expected today and indeed necessary following the demise
of the old Privatdozent with a rich wife, or the scholarly gentleman of
independent means. Political and social developments have distorted the
age structure so that the system will face growing difficulties in the twenty-
first century. The age of appointment to full professor has remained fairly
constant and is similar in otherwise dissimilar systems, with the average
being around forty-five (though it is usually lower in new fields such
as information technology or modern linguistics), but the age for first
posts has risen, partly because studies have lengthened, partly because
junior posts are scarce and young academics have to spend several years
working on short-term research contracts. It is not yet clear whether the
different university systems will move towards a homogeneous European
88 Halsey, Decline (note 32), 125.
188
Teachers
staff structure and reach a steady state. But it is not very likely. Univer-
sities have always had trouble with their staff; the dancing-masters and
the Praeceptores linguarum exoticarum of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries did not fit in, nor did the Lektoren of the nineteenth century, not
to mention later examples. Whatever the system, some sort of ordinarius
will no doubt survive. There probably have to be independent university
teachers who guarantee continuity, quality and development, whatever
their individual shortcomings. Apparently, this scholarly and scientific
elite must have their home in universities and not in pure research insti-
tutions, that is to say they must combine teaching, research and the
supervision of research.
teaching
The term university teacher, some people feel, is a misnomer, because all
too frequently academics are said to be, and not infrequently are, inter-
ested far more in their research and their career – which depends to a
large extent on their research output – than in their teaching. Of course,
there are variations in the different national traditions: for instance, there
is still a fairly close connection between university teaching and a con-
scious university education in the British tradition. The other extreme is
the German Humboldtian idea of Bildung through Wissenschaft (impos-
sible to achieve, of course, for a student population of more than a few
per cent of the age cohort), and if possible Freizügigkeit, the unhampered
mobility from one university to another, as well as the Lernfreiheit, the
freedom to choose the individual teacher and the subjects most suited to
self-fulfilment through university studies. Some of the modern problems
of teaching go back to medieval times, some spring from the German
nineteenth-century tradition, while some are definitely post the Second
World War.
University teaching as a major problem that is widely discussed outside
the university is definitely modern. Many of the problems are caused by
the changes in numbers and structures discussed or alluded to above.
Some of the present concerns can be illustrated by a number of binary
oppositions which, of course, do not exist in pure form in the everyday
reality of universities, but which underpin the theory and to a large extent
the practice of university teaching. We find the disciplinary vs the inter-
disciplinary, a strict course-structure (the UK) vs credit systems of varying
degrees of freedom of choice, the canonical content of courses vs the ‘ad
lib’ approach focusing on the specialities of teachers, undergraduate vs
graduate teaching, lecturing vs project work. Some recent teaching prob-
lems have come into existence because we are no longer dealing with a
tiny elite group of students but with 30 and more per cent of an age group,
189
Thomas Finkenstaedt
and many of these students are ‘first generation’, with parents who had
no chance of having access to higher education. The opportunities of an
expanding tertiary sector have not always been exploited either, such as
the chance to discover gifted students and future graduate students right
at the beginning of their studies. There is some informal evidence that
potential university teachers were discovered by their tutors or doctoral
supervisors very early on in their careers. This talent-spotting probably
requires the presence of the senior teacher-researcher in undergraduate
teaching, yet another reason for not introducing the teaching-only uni-
versity. The sciences, with their practical laboratory work, have fewer
problems with teaching, and the British tutorial is, of course, an excellent
way of discovering the best without neglecting the less gifted. But it is
unfortunately true to say that in the majority of systems the dropouts are
of no concern to the teaching staff.
Teaching methods89
There are four traditional ways of teaching. The lecture is the oldest, fre-
quently said to be outmoded by the invention of printing (not to mention
more modern media), quite apart from its having been attacked as author-
itarian and anti-democratic. In some countries like Sweden or Germany
the lecture has indeed lost some of its former importance. Yet the lecture
is and will continue to be one of the most effective ways of teaching: it
is personal and reaches a great number of students; it forces the teacher
to acquire a broad survey knowledge of the discipline and the state of
research, and to find a balance between subject matter and presentation,
while combining information and personal evaluation.
The specialized seminar with the active participation of students was
a German invention of the nineteenth century, and it soon found its
way into many university systems. The Praktikum was developed in the
nineteenth century, too, and it is still the basis for teaching the sciences.
The tutorial is the British contribution to teaching methods, and it is
probably one of the most effective. In name it has been taken over into
the German system, but in a curiously adulterated form consisting of
small-group teaching by junior staff, preferably by students only.
Modern forms of teaching include project work, forschendes Lernen,
sandwich courses, team teaching and block seminars. Distance learning
deserves a special mention as it is one of the most successful innovations
in recent years, and the success of the Open University in Britain is well
89 As in the first two volumes, teaching is presented here in a separate chapter (7: ‘Cur-
riculum, Students, Education’) from the student point of view. In addition, it touches on
reactions by the teaching staff to problems caused by changes in traditional curricular
methods.
190
Teachers
deserved; it has set a public standard for the didactic quality to be expected
of successful university teaching everywhere.
The sometimes extraordinary global changes and profits brought about
by the Internet over the past few years will not leave the universities
untouched. Many people look forward to a worldwide network of aca-
demic instruction at many different levels, tailored to the needs of the
individual student, and to a new kind of creative freedom using such
instruction. It is still too early to make definitive statements about the
‘virtual university’, though a number of examples exist. In the context of
the present chapter, the following observations would seem to be justi-
fied: to make a virtual university or several competing such universities a
success, much more money is needed than originally envisaged. Commer-
cial interests play a major role, and economies of scale necessarily restrict
the number of subjects taught and the languages used. The new medium
will probably require and train a new type of academic teacher, but the
old-style professors who combine teaching and research will probably
survive as an essential element of the university world because of their
independence.
Teaching conditions
The number factor – and concern about numbers – is the most important
aspect here. Student numbers in a particular course or a particular lec-
ture have risen to extraordinary heights in some countries. The Carnegie
Foundation Survey gives average numbers for introductory courses rang-
ing from 61 (Sweden) to 128 (Netherlands), and even graduate courses
average from 15 (Sweden) to 22 (United Kingdom).90 A quantitative
approach to teaching is typical of post-1945 developments. There is a
numerus clausus in many countries and subjects, as well as FTEs (full-
time equivalents), staff–student ratios, and rules about admissible num-
bers of students in different types of courses and seminars. In Germany all
this is regulated, enforced and controlled by law. In the UK the financial
approach to teaching conditions (‘costing’) has won doubtful victories in
recent years. Another modern aspect of teaching is the omnipresence of
technology: microphones in huge lecture theatres, overhead projectors,
video screens, duplicated hand-outs, and computers for both teachers and
students. The modern university teacher has exchanged his nineteenth-
century private study for an office and – if working in a rich country and
a rich department – the services of a secretary (though this service is fast
disappearing, thanks to word processing!).
191
Thomas Finkenstaedt
A necessary by-product of modern teaching and examining is the
increase in administrative work, which, in the case of large departments,
can reach the scale of public administration or industrial management. In
many ways life has become easier for the university teacher. On the other
hand, from the sixties onwards there have been complaints about univer-
sity teaching to an unprecedented extent. These complaints concern the
forms of teaching as well as the content.
Teaching load
It is not easy to measure, to describe or to prescribe the workload of aca-
demic staff. In line with more bureaucratic arrangements in other fields,
many governments have tried to do more about regularizing the workload
of university teachers. There is a widespread feeling among the general
public that professors do not work hard enough, partly because one
sees so little of the work accomplished, partly for financial reasons, but
also because of the change from the old elite university to the new mass
higher-education system and the subsequent squeeze on teaching staff. It
is, of course, impossible to introduce a ‘nine to five o’clock’ university:
research would immediately come to an end, and teaching would not
improve. Communist Romania tried to introduce regular working hours,
specifying the percentage spent on teaching, examinations, research and
so on. It was not a success.91 University teachers everywhere are quite pre-
pared to work more hours than average civil servants. For full professors
fifty hours per week during term time and a few hours less when classes
are not in session is a realistic average for Europe. Junior staff work on
average about five hours less than professors. Contrary to public opinion,
teaching definitely has priority during term time.92
Nevertheless, governments try to achieve higher efficiency or at least
productivity by controlling and rewarding research output (the British
way), by increasing the number of students per head of staff (the British
and German and probably French way) and by increasing the number
of hours spent teaching (the German way). Teaching hours per week
vary between different countries and vary considerably between different
groups of staff, even within the same group of professors. Traditionally,
professors taught about four to six hours a week (Belgium, Norway five
hours), and this was supposed to constitute about a third of their total
workload including class preparation time, calculated as an annual aver-
age. In Germany this meant – in the humanities or the social sciences – a
two-hour lecture plus a seminar for the advanced students and a prosem-
inar for the beginners. In some countries only the total number of hours
91 Sadlak, ‘Legacy’ (note 3), 86. 92 Teichler, ‘Conditions’ (note 17), table 2.9.
192
Teachers
per year was fixed: Finland 144, the Soviet Union no fewer than 150
for lectures and seminars, France 128 hours of lecturing (i.e. four hours
per week) or 192 hours of seminars. The number of hours per week has
been increased to eight for university professors in Germany; professors
in the Fachhochschule system teach a higher number of hours (eighteen)
and so did polytechnic teachers in the UK. The reason is that no research
work is required of such staff. Differences between the groups can be
illustrated by the traditional arrangements in Finland: full professors 144
hours, associate professors 186, lecturers (i.e., teaching only staff) 396–
448, assistants (who must concentrate on their doctorates) only 60–120
hours a year.93
Research
Research reputation is probably the most important element in the career
of a university teacher.94 This is not only because it is easier to evaluate
the research of a scientist than his or her ability to teach, but because there
is a ‘symbiotic relationship between teaching and research’ (J. Ziman),
that is to say, teaching energy is renewed through contact with research,
especially active research, by the university teacher. This fact is the basis
for the meritocratic staff structures based on degree work and the impor-
tance attributed to a candidate’s research ability when a professorship
has to be filled. In fields like architecture or engineering visible success
(i.e., buildings, bridges etc.) takes the place of research. The monopoly
right of universities to confer the doctoral degree means that at least
graduate teaching has direct links with research, and it is highly probable
that overseeing research work (one of the most important of all teaching
tasks) requires a supervisor who has successfully done his or her own.
However much teamwork may have been praised in recent years, the fact
remains that most research – at least until the late sixties – remained a very
personal activity. Even chemistry, a subject notable for cooperation, had
32% of publications with single authorship in the UK, while sociology
had 61% and mathematics 86%.95
The role played by research for the individual teacher varies consid-
erably according to country and subject, but most professors are active
in research and are often awarded external research grants.96 In France
there exists a separate career for researchers, but even there improved
mobility between the teaching careers, the CNRS and industry has been
93 Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 214.

94 R. Merton and J. Daston, The Sociology of Science in Europe (Carbondale, Ill., 1977).
95 Becher, Academic Tribes (note 14).
193
Thomas Finkenstaedt
urged.97 In other countries the number of research institutes outside the
universities has increased; in Germany the slogan ‘Die Forschung wan-
dert aus’ (‘research will emigrate’) alludes to this development. The old
dichotomy of pure and applied research is no longer as clear-cut as it
was fifty years ago. Many university teachers find that close links with
industry do not lead to a loss of freedom of inquiry, but rather provide an
opportunity to explore new ways of problem solving, not infrequently in
collaboration with their graduate students. The long-term effects of grant
money coming not from research councils but from the private sector (and
the expectation that more money should come from this source, and that
the percentage of such money is a good indicator of successful research)
cannot yet be fully assessed. It is, however, clear that the growth of R&D
co-sponsored with industrial partners has already transformed the place
and role of professors with the entrepreneurial talents to promote their
field of study. But it is also clear that the old idea of an ordinarius with a
guaranteed sum of money for his independent research must not be com-
pletely abandoned. A university teacher – all other things being equal –
generally ranks higher as a researcher in the estimation of the scientific
community than the more dependent people in other institutions.
Combining teaching and independent research is probably one way
of ensuring that new ideas are born and that traditional knowledge and
achievements are not forgotten, because they are transmitted to the next
generation in the teaching process. A separation of research and teaching
would also reduce the chances of discovering the outstanding students
early in their studies. The problem for modern universities seems to be the
following: how to offer the opportunity of performing first-class research
to a selected group of university teachers, who will then probably play a
major role in the training of prospective university staff, while enabling
the others to have access to research facilities beyond a ‘reading up of the
literature’, that is, how to offer scholarship for all. It must also not be
forgotten that pure research across the whole spectrum of science can only
be done successfully within the framework of universities and academies
under the control of academics, because an economic evaluation of pure
research, with its frequent long-term effects on industry, is simply not
feasible. For pure research in specific fields there are public or private
institutes under the leadership of independent academics, such as those
of the CNRS in France, the MPG in Germany, the Wellcome Institute in
London, and IBM in Zurich, all institutes that have produced a number of
Nobel Prize winners. The internationalization of science and international
competition for reputation has made research even more important in
97 Times Higher Education Supplement, 1 July 1994, 11.
194
Teachers
countries that hope to keep their academics on a higher than provincial
level.
Evaluation and staff development

Our period has seen a growing demand for the public accountability of
the university as a system, as an individual institution, and as a group of
individual teachers and researchers. Such demands have been put forward
not only by administrators in the ministries, who far too often cannot
understand university autonomy. The vast sums of public money spent
on universities and also the absence or abolition of fees in most countries
require the control of the public auditor. And it would be foolish to
deny that there is any government or national interest. It is necessary
for a country to know about the strengths and weaknesses of national
research, particularly in fields of interest to the economy or the military
establishment, as the case may be. Evaluation and planning go hand in
hand today. And, finally, it is the public at large who want to know what
is happening. Non-quantitative evaluation is no longer sufficient, even
though peer review will no doubt remain a basic element in the whole
process.98
Evaluation of university research and university staff has its origin in
the United States. Research evaluation came first. There will be few aca-
demics nowadays – at least outside the humanities – who would deny the
possibility of a fairly objective evaluation of the research performance of
individuals or departments. The large and by now sophisticated literature
on the subject has uncovered many details of how research is organized
in different fields and the necessary conditions for success. In Europe, the
UK, the Netherlands and Germany have been the most active countries
in this respect.99 Research evaluation can also discover specific career
patterns, such as early success in mathematics, the books of a mature
historian, the shift of interest from research to supervising, or the retreat
into ‘senior statesmanship’ or time-consuming committee work. Long-
term studies may also discover that there is less research output than
universities would like to claim, but they will also provide evidence for
the importance of leading researchers among the university staff for the
well-being of the whole institution.100
98 Halsey, Decline (note 32) referring to Proceedings of the Symposium on the University
Funding Council’s 1989 Research Assessment Exercise in Augsburg on July 26–27,
1990, Beiträge zur Hochschulforschung, 4 (Munich, 1990).
99 Proceedings (note 98); H.-D. Daniel and R. Fisch (eds.), Evaluation von Forschung
(Konstanz, 1988).
100 Becher, Academic Tribes (note 14), 119f., and, for a detailed longitudinal analysis
of English studies in Germany, T. Finkenstaedt and M. Fries, in Daniel and Fisch,
Evaluation (note 99), 151–76.
195
Thomas Finkenstaedt
Evaluation of university teaching seems to be much more difficult. The
debate over whether teaching can be taught has a long tradition. In the
universities the problem was more or less ignored before the sixties, or
at least there was little official discussion. Attempts to ‘train’ university
teachers in the Soviet Union in the early seventies were a failure. In the UK
the Association of University Teachers took an early interest in teaching
methods and staff development, and a probationary period for lectur-
ers was introduced in 1971. Today ‘virtually all the universities make
some kind of provision for staff development or training’.101 In Swe-
den a ‘Committee for University Teaching Methods’ was set up in 1966;
staff development was not concentrated on teaching only, but introduced
courses for non-teaching staff as well, including courses in administration
for new heads of department.102 In (West) Germany ‘university didactics’
became an important topic for the student movement; after 1968 it was
primarily a cause for the Assistenten, and fifteen Centres of University
Didactics were set up.103 In Germany staff development became linked
with general university reform very early on, and the working group for
Hochschuldidaktik was soon less interested in helping university teachers
than in a thorough overhaul of the whole profession. With a less progres-
sive climate in the 1980s, staff development lost much of its influence, not
only in Germany, but in its more down-to-earth form it is here to stay.
Teaching evaluation is still hotly debated, and ranking-lists of univer-
sity subjects and universities based, among other data, on student reports
have been fiercely attacked. But students rightly claim an influence on
how and how well things are taught. Evaluation will continue in one
form or another, and university staff will be well advised to cooperate
in finding satisfactory solutions for this problem, preferably within the
confines of university autonomy.104
Other duties
The idea of a university implies academic self-governance. Modern devel-
opments have led to a huge increase in administrative work, and a large
part of it must be done personally, or at least be decided upon by univer-
sity teachers. In the United Kingdom full professors spend 24 per cent of
101 Teather, Staff (note 28), 42. 102 Teather, Staff (note 28), 201ff.
103 C. Führ and C.-L. Furck (eds.), Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, vol. VI:
1945 bis zur Gegenwart, part I: Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich, 1998), 432. Cf.
D. Spindler (ed.), ‘Hochschuldidaktik’: Dokumente zur Hochschul- und Studienreform
(Bonn, 1968). Arbeitskreis für Hochschuldidaktik (ed.), Mitteilungen (Bonn, 1967ff.).
Arbeitskreis für Hochschuldidaktik (ed.), Blickpunkt Hochschuldidaktik (Bielefeld,
1969ff.).
104 Times Higher Education Supplement, 28 February 1992, on the British ‘audit unit’
owned by the universities themselves.
196
Teachers
their time on administrative duties and around 15 per cent in a number of
other European countries.105 University teachers are often considered to
be bad administrators, but apparently no university administration can
do without the academic teacher. In the UK, with the most autonomous
university system in Europe, there is high mobility between academic
and administrative posts, whereas in German universities the adminis-
tration is more or less part of the civil service. One obvious academic
area in administration is the examination, which is most closely linked
with teaching itself. The great importance of examinations and degrees in
attributing roles to graduates in a meritocratic society has made examin-
ing a complicated, time-consuming and sometimes nerve-racking business
for the academics of today. Student counselling should also be mentioned
in this context. In a number of countries it has been professionalized, but
the teacher of a particular subject can more often than not give the best
advice in matters of study problems and a later career.
Of perhaps equal importance is the work of university teachers outside
the university for the benefit of the general public, by serving on commit-
tees as experts in their particular fields. Work as an external examiner, in
the research councils and the funding committees of foundations, in inter-
national organizations, in ministries and voluntary organizations often
requires and obtains the expertise and independence of the university
teacher. Membership can be based on election, co-option or delegation.
In the majority of cases this type of work brings little remuneration,
apart from the reimbursement of expenses. There is also a wide range of
income-earning as well as status-linked work, not to mention the work
carried out by university teachers within their communities, where spe-
cialized knowledge is often highly welcome. However, abuse can occur
in these areas, too.
the university teacher in the modern world

Politicization106
Universities and academics have never been as politically neutral as they
may have thought or proclaimed. Generally speaking, however, univer-
sity teachers have kept their distance from active life as ‘political animals’,
because such a life would interfere with their work. Italian professors with
106 M. J. Mulkay, ‘Sociology of the Scientific Research Community’, in J. Spiegel-Rösing
and D. de Solla Price (eds.), Science, Technology and Society: A Cross-Disciplinary
Perspective (London, 1977); J. Ziman, An Introduction to Science Studies (Cambridge,
1984); T. Finkenstaedt, ‘The Political Rôle of the University Teacher and the Politiciza-
tion of Universities’, in H. Bouillon and G. Radnitzky (eds.), Universities in the Service
of Truth and Utility (Frankfurt, 1991), 85–100.
197
Thomas Finkenstaedt
their frequent involvement in all sorts of public concerns and organiza-
tions would seem to be an exception. There have been famous and less
famous cases where governments tried to curb or evict university teachers
who meddled with politics too much.107 But the Nazi period, the war,
Soviet rule and, in post-war years, the events of 1968 and the dissolution
of the Eastern bloc brought a new dimension and a qualitative change to
the relationship between learning and politics: many university teachers
no longer felt that ‘belonging to or taking sides in politics’108 within the
university and the lecture room should be avoided. At the same time,
political parties and governments have increasingly tried to use universi-
ties for their own purposes and to make them adhere to the party line. It
is in this context that the new word ‘politicization’ was coined.109
The expulsion of Jewish teachers from German and Austrian univer-
sities in the 1930s (about one-third of the staff in the humanities) was
accompanied by the rise of professors with National Socialist party mem-
bership or sympathies. And there were the collaborateurs in the occupied
countries, as well as the inevitable post-war purges and the return after
1945 of many of those who had been dismissed in 1945. The Jewish
emigration and expulsion has been researched very thoroughly,110 but
the politicization of the teaching staff before and after 1933 has not been
studied in the same way.
What is even more disconcerting is the lack of detailed studies of
the denazification process and the return of professors who had been
dismissed.111 And there is little published evidence for the occupied
territories.112 From what can be gathered so far, it seems that we must be
very careful before passing judgment. Very few martyrs are to be found.
A surprising number of scientists and scholars have survived dictatorial
regimes in both the West and the East without suffering much harm. Not
many first-class scientists embraced the opportunities offered to them.
There were many fellow travellers and a few cases of people joining
the party or signing declarations in the occupied countries in order to
camouflage their department. Explicit pro-Nazi passages in letters and
107 E. Shils, ‘Academic Freedom’, in P. G. Altbach (ed.), International Higher Education,
vol. I (New York and London 1991), 1–22.
108 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘political’.
109 OED, Supplement s.v. ‘politicization’. First occurrence 1934, with reference to the
church in Nazi Germany.
110 H. H. Christmann and F.-R. Hausmann (eds.), Deutsche und österreichische Roman-
isten als Verfolgte des Nationalsozialismus (Tübingen, 1989). See also vol. III, 653–9
(Epilogue).
111 T. Finkenstaedt, ‘Anglistik 1945 – Blick zurück ohne Zorn’, in Valete: Festschrift zum
Eintritt in den Ruhestand von Thomas Finkenstaedt (Wildsteig [privately printed],
1992), 15–35; many details in G. Haenicke and T. Finkenstaedt, Anglistenlexikon
1825–1990 (Augsburg, 1992).
112 A. Wolf, Higher Education in German-Occupied Countries (London, 1945).
198
Teachers
publications must be analysed carefully to find out the meaning or irony
intended. The purges (Entnazifizierung) after 1945 were not a success. In
Germany about 30 per cent of professors had to leave but 25 per cent
came back after the war. The story of university staff in the former DDR
is, to a large extent, a repetition of the 1933–45 pattern, and the post-
1990 Abwicklung, that is, the purge of Marxists and party activists, is
not a success story either.113 And there often remains a ‘wall of silence’
if one wishes to uncover the details. This seems to hold true of the coun-
tries occupied by Germany as well as the fascist or communist university
systems.
Apparently, not many professors were active in the upheavals that led
to the dissolution of the Eastern bloc. The 1968 events had a greater
share of professorial participation. There are a number of well-known
and important university teachers, mainly in the social sciences, who
provided a clearly left-wing theory upon which the students and in many
cases junior staff, too, could base their ‘march through the institutions’.
And many of them have indeed arrived. It was mainly the second-rate
junior staff who tried to profit from the post-1968 structures. A number of
professors put forward considerable – and to a certain extent successful –
resistance to the student movement.114
Post-war developments have made it impossible for university teachers
to pretend that they can remain neutral scientists. University teachers
need to be more aware of their close relationship to politics and their
potential for playing a political role. It will also be necessary to find
ways of defining the limits of lawful research within universities. It is
a fact that dictatorships have never tried to tamper with the doctorate,
because such regimes need good scientists too. So probably the guiding
principle must be found in the most basic right of any university: that the
research and teaching taking place in a university context should be in
fields that allow students to work towards a doctorate on research that
can be published.115
Associations
University teachers tend towards individualism, and yet they must act and
behave like a group; much of their group behaviour is regulated informally
and is learnt over many years in junior posts, and the apprenticeship lasts
113 R. Jessen, Akademische Elite und kommunistische Diktatur: Die ostdeutsche Hoch-
schullehrerschaft in der Ulbricht-Ära (Göttingen, 1999).
114 H. Daalder and E. Shils (eds.), Universities, Politicians and Bureaucrats: Europe and the
United States (Cambridge, 1982). W. Rüegg, ‘20 Jahre Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft.
Vom Defensivbundnis zum think-tank’, Freiheit der Wissenschaft, 4 (1990), 8–14.
115 Finkenstaedt, ‘Political Rôle’ (note 106), 97f.
199
Thomas Finkenstaedt
well into the time a professorship has been gained. Certain traits of the
group behaviour of professors are reminiscent of medieval guilds – and
guilds they were, after all, in their early days. It is important to note that
a university teacher always belongs to more than one group, each with a
specific pecking order. There is the international scientific community of
the discipline, and there is the faculty and the university of which he or
she is a member. The scientific community is an excellent metaphor; it is
not so easy to find this community in reality, for it can be as elusive as the
‘invisible college’ of the leading scholars and academics of a particular
subject throughout the world. Most affiliations and links of university
teachers are informal networks. Faculties, faculty clubs, academic cere-
monies and dinners are places where an academic community becomes
visible. Yet certain changes over the past decades can be observed. On the
whole there is probably less social contact within the group of university
teachers than before the war. This may be due to changes in living condi-
tions and the destruction of ceremony as an essential part of academic life
in most Western countries after 1968; new faculty structures with joint
management and Mitbestimmung (co-determination) have changed the
atmosphere in more than one country. The old elite existence and feeling
of professors has disappeared and with it many of the former close-knit
circles of colleagues. In a way, university teachers have become more nor-
mal. Among professors there is still a feeling that they belong together,
across disciplines and national borders. Apart from this feeling there are
also visible affiliations, especially the professional associations of partic-
ular disciplines and the general associations of all university teachers in
a country. Professional associations have become important social forces
in many fields since the war, and university staff play an important role
in many of them or have a specific academic association of their own.
Meetings, proceedings and publications are all important in the pursuit of
reputation, and this pursuit has become more difficult with internation-
alization. An ‘invited lecture’ at the annual meeting or chairing a session
of an important association can be as valuable for a career as any prize
or book or article.
This explains why the general associations of university teachers are fre-
quently considered to be less interesting, even though they may be equally
important for the overall system. The British Association of University
Teachers (AUT) joined the Trades Union Congress and had an extraordi-
narily high percentage of membership (more than 50 per cent; the poly-
technics had a union of their own called NATFHE (National Association
of Teachers in Further and Higher Education)). France and Sweden both
have strong trade union traditions, and the choice between the differ-
ent unions depends largely on individual political affiliation. In Sweden
university teachers have a union of their own within a comprehensive
200
Teachers
union for white-collar workers with academic training. Some teaching
staff prefer to join the union of the non-teaching staff, and it was this
union which propagated an egalitarian university system in Sweden in
the sixties. The three French syndicats are trade-union associations with
political affiliations too, and they had considerable influence on the chang-
ing staff structures after 1968. In Germany the real trade unions (GEW,
Beamtenbund) have very few university teachers as members. Profes-
sors and Habilitierte are organized in the Deutscher Hochschulverband
with a high percentage of membership (more than 50 per cent). The role
played by these associations in the different countries varies according
to the legal context in which they operate. In Britain the AUT/NATFE is
the partner in the annual bargaining process about salaries and can even
countenance strike action; in Germany the status of Beamter of university
teachers leads to more informal influence, depending to a considerable
extent on the political climate. It cannot be denied that, on the whole, staff
associations have tended to react and not to act, and they have not devel-
oped new models for the future. The former communist countries did
not have any voluntary staff organizations or independent, trade-specific
trade unions competing for membership. The party and the general trade
union did influence university politics but, as a rule, they did not interfere
with decisions about degrees, and their influence on appointments was
mostly a kind of nihil obstat.
Little is known about the private lives of university teachers today.
Perhaps the changes in student life – a retreat from the university –
have their parallel in the lives of university teachers, who prefer to meet
friends rather than colleagues. Developments may have been helped by
the appearance of a new type of academic spouse with a career of her
own.
conclusion
It is not possible to sum up the development of university teaching staff
over half a century in a sentence or two. The countries of Western Europe
have witnessed reconstruction, expansion and the upheavals of the post-
1968 years, followed by economic squeezes in the 1980s. In the East the
Soviet model introduced after 1945 underwent many changes and finally
collapsed, opening the road for a university system to be reconstructed
along more or less Western lines. The overall picture after 1990 is diffuse.
The European Union promises new growth for the economy. This could
lead to a high priority for university teaching as an engine for growth –
as was the case after the Second World War.
The integration of universities into a more comprehensive system of ter-
tiary or higher education will change traditional staff structures, especially
201
Thomas Finkenstaedt
the traditional qualifications required for senior staff. A higher percentage
of students and more mature students will force the teachers to give more
thought to teaching methods, quite apart from the influence of modern
media.
The influence of global development116 and of the European Union has
led to a growing differentiation between curricula taught by diverse staff,
more fragmented than ever. The economic drive from Brussels reinforces
the trend towards entrepreneurial universities,117 in which teachers are
expected to be both innovators and good managers; such qualities tend
to enhance the social status of academics, both inside and outside the
institution. The Maastricht Treaty says nothing about university teachers
because they are not subject to EU regulation. It proposes (Art. 130 f, g) a
strengthening of the scientific foundation of industry; centres of research
and universities will be assisted in science and technology. The EU will
also be engaged in the training of scientists and encourage their mobility.
Recent programmes that include a thematic networking of departments
across national borders indicate a direction towards planning, and a grad-
ual division of staff into the more and the less useful, which is something
quite contrary to the European tradition. Not much thought seems to
have been given to such problems by governments and staff associations
as yet.
The university ‘mandarins’ have disappeared, donnish dominion has
declined.118 The social prestige of university teachers is no longer what
it was; the profession is now too large to constitute an elite. But the title
of professor is still of considerable social and economic value in many
countries, and many university teachers are experts in their fields and
take part in the public debate on scientific and general issues. The trouble
is that modern issues usually evoke more than one interpretation and
no final word; furthermore, some university teachers cannot resist the
temptations offered by the media, politicians or industry. It can indeed
be tempting to use an academic position for purposes not connected with
one’s discipline. But the old attractions are still there: the prestige of
research conducted in the university, the considerable degree of freedom
of the lifestyle, often combined with job security. We live in a period of
transition, and it is not at all clear whether a new image of the university
teacher and a new corporate spirit will develop.119 In many subjects it
116 World Bank (ed.), Higher Education: The Lessons of Experience (Washington, D.C.,
1994).
117 B. R. Clark, Creating Entrepreneurial Universities (Oxford and New York, 1998).
118 F. K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Commu-
nity 1890–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969); Halsey, Decline (note 32).
119 Deutscher Hochschulverband (ed.), Das Berufsbild des Hochschullehrers: Thesen mit
Erläuterungen (Bonn, 1991).
202
Teachers
is no longer possible to know one’s colleagues personally, and there is
a real danger that the idea of community will disappear completely. We
probably cannot do without institutions of this kind, which combine
teaching and research, which award the doctorate, which have a core of
staff who have chosen scholarship as a profession, and who collectively
guarantee academic, scientific and scholarly standards. This important
task cannot be carried out by simple majority vote, but only through the
peer judgment of highly qualified university teachers – ‘this most public
and yet least studied of professions’, the ‘key profession’ of the twentieth
century120 and perhaps of the twenty-first as well.
select bibliography
Altbach, P. G. (ed.) Perspectives on Comparative Higher Education: Essays on
Faculty, Students and Reform, Special Studies in Comparative Education,
22, Buffalo, 1989.
Becher, T. Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Inquiry and the Cultures
of Disciplines, Milton Keynes, 1990.
Bourdieu, P. Homo academicus, Paris, 1984.
Boyer, E. L., Altbach, P. G., and Whitelaw, M. G. The Academic Profession: An
International Perspective, Ewing, N.J., 1994.
Charle, C. (ed.) Le personnel de l’enseignement supérieur en France aux XIXe et
XXe siècles, Paris, 1985.
Clark, B. R. (ed.) The Academic Profession: National, Disciplinary and Institu-
tional Settings, Berkeley, 1987.
Clark, B. R. and Neave, G. (eds.) The Encyclopedia of Higher Education, Oxford,
New York, Seoul and Tokyo, 1992.
Enders, J. and Teichler, U. Der Hochschullehrerberuf im internationalen Ver-
gleich, Bonn, 1995.
Giglioli, P. P. Baroni e burocrati: Il ceto accademico italiano, Bologna, 1979.
Halsey, A. H. Decline of Donnish Dominion: The British Academic Professions
in the Twentieth Century, Oxford, 1992.
Halsey, A. H. and Trow, M. A. The British Academics, London, 1971.
Maasen, A. M. and van Vught, F. A. (eds.) Inside Academia, Utrecht, 1996.
Sindal, H. Structures of University Staff: Schemes of Academic Hierarchy and
Dictionary of Terms, Strasbourg, 1966.
Teather, D. C. B. Staff Development in Higher Education: An International
Review and Bibliography, London and New York, 1979.
Teichler, U. (ed.) Das Hochschulwesen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,
Weinheim, 1990.
Williams, G., Blackstone, T., and Metcalf, D. The Academic Labour Market,
Amsterdam, 1974.
120 Perkin, ‘Academic Profession’ (note 29), 1.
203
PART III
STUDENTS
CHAPTER 6
ADMISSION
A. H. HALSEY
introduction
In 1945 the European universities were largely if not exclusively finishing
schools for a minority of well-to-do or meritocratic young persons, mostly
men. A small number of socially selected young people took matriculation
examinations, usually widely based in science and arts, and some then
went on to the universities to complete a degree. But the system was to
be transformed. Throughout Europe since 1945 the number of students
enrolled in universities and other institutions of tertiary education rose
more or less continuously into the 1990s. Beginning with the American
GI Bill, which enabled thousands of veterans from the Second World
War to be funded by the state through tertiary education, and with the
absorption of Eastern Europe into the Soviet sphere, it became more or
less normal practice to engage in one form or another of what we might
now see as a historic exercise in retrospective equalizing of educational
opportunity. The British further education and training grant was a typi-
cal imitative scheme, and all over the Continent – the devastation of war
notwithstanding – expansion of education became the order of the day.
This trend continued, albeit at varying speeds, throughout the post-war
period that ended with the oil crises of the mid-seventies to the end of the
period covered in this volume. A summary of the enrolment figures from
1970 to 1990 appears in table 6.1.
Growth in the Western half of Europe outside the Soviet bloc can
only be described as spectacular. In the UK, for example, the number of
students in universities in 1950 was outstripped by 1990 by the number of
university teachers! Though it slowed in the 1980s, there was a doubling
of student numbers between 1970 and 1980 in Finland, Austria and the
former West Germany. Average annual growth rates were over 8 per cent
207
A. H. Halsey
Table 6.1 Enrolments in higher education in European
countries in thousandsa (percentage of female enrolments
in brackets)
European countries 1970 1980 1990
Albaniab 14.6 (50) 25.2 (50) 22.0 (52)

Austria 59.8 (29) 136.8 (42) 240.3 (45)
Belgium 124.9 (36) 196.2 (44) 276.2 (48)
Bulgaria 99.6 (51) 101.4 (56) 188.4 (51)
Czechoslovakia 131.1 (38) 197.0 (42) 118.0 (–)
Denmark 76.0 (37) 106.2 (49) 142.9 (52)
Finland 59.8 (48) 123.2 (48) 165.7 (52)
France 801.2 (–) 1076.7 (–) 1,698.9 (53)
FRGc 503.8 (27) 1,223.2 (41) 1,686.7 (41)
GDRd 303.1 (43) 400.8 (58) 438.9 (52)
Greece 85.8 (31) 121.1 (41) 195.2 (50)
Hungary 80.5 (43) 101.2 (50) 77.0 (49)
Ireland 28.5 (34) 54.7 (41) 90.2 (46)
Italy 687.2 (38) 1,117.7 (41) 1,452.2 (48)
Netherlands 231.2 (28) 360.0 (40) 434.1 (45)
Norway 50.0 (30) 79.1 (48) 142.5 (53)
Poland 197.9 (47) 589.1 (56) 544.8 (56)
Portugal 50.1 (44) 92.2 (48) 185.7 (56)
Romania 151.9 (43) 192.8 (43) 192.8 (51)
Spain 224.9 (27) 697.8 (44) 1,222.0 (51)
Sweden 141.2 (42) 171.4 (–) 192.6 (54)
Switzerland 51.4 (–) 85.1 (30) 137.4 (35)
USSR 4,580.6 (49) 5,235.2 (–) 2,638.0 (50)
UK 601.3 (33) 827.1 (37) 1,258.2 (48)
Yugoslavia 261.2 (39) 412.0 (45) 327.1 (51)
a Sources: for 1970 and 1980 UNESCO, Statistical Digest 1990, UNESCO
Yearbook 1989. D. Kallen in Clark, Encyclopedia III, 1549. The col-
umn for 1990 was established by Marilena Filip, CEPES/UNESCO,
Bucharest. Main source: UNESCO Statistical Yearbook 1994. Other
sources: Czechoslovakia – GEO 3 Data Compendium; Greece and
Yugoslavia – UNESCO Statistical Yearbook 1994; Hungary – Educa-
tion in Hungary, Budapest: National Institute for Public Education, 1997;
Romania – United Nations Statistical Division; USSR – UNESCO Statis-
tical Yearbook 1998. b Only level 6. c Data for 1991. d Data for 1988.
per annum in the 1970s and over 4 per cent per annum in the 1980s.
Women account for much of the increase, and by 1990 they made up half
of the total, or approaching that figure in most countries.
Experience differed in the East compared with the West. In the East-
ern European countries in the 1970s growth was slower, at 3 per cent
per annum, with Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia in the lead and
the Soviet Union and Bulgaria in the rear. Then, in the 1980s, devel-
opment in Eastern Europe was virtually halted. In Hungary, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia, numbers actually declined in
208
Admission
the economic and political crisis years at the end of the decade. Thus the
gap in participation between East and West Europe widened.
Behind this European-wide educational movement we can detect three
motors and at least three resistances. The motors were in the first place
social and economic: the aspirations and the financial capacity of increas-
ing numbers to find both wealth and welfare. Yet they were expressed in
Europe for the most part politically because the East and the West lived
under one of the two main versions of democracy, and both electorates
across Europe believed that the state was the main instrument for deliver-
ing prosperity and justice. True, the West assumed that private enterprise
was essential to liberty, but state-dominated educational systems were
the legacy of centuries, and in recent experience the nation state had
triumphantly defeated fascism.
Governments inspired by Keynesian liberalism knew how to deliver
full employment by macro-economic planning. The collapse of this belief
in the 1980s is, of course, part of the very different atmosphere in which
tertiary systems of education and training came to be managed. In the
1950s, however, spurred on by progressive propaganda, in the East by
Soviet-style planning and in the West by the OECD, which was designed
to resuscitate the West European economy, labour force efficiency was
the first and most obvious motor.
Second, and closely connected to the same recent experience, was confi-
dence in the capacity of universities to improve technical and technologi-
cal efficiency. The campus had produced the atomic bomb and penicillin.
Future prosperity depended on the enthronement of academia rather than
the business enterprise as the central institution of a modern economy.
Third, and perhaps most powerful, was the drive by nation states to
enlarge the access to higher education with which this chapter is prin-
cipally concerned. Historically the problem had been phrased in both
East and West Europe as one of class. Initially, as we have mentioned, it
took the form of redress of some of the inequality of the pre-war period.
Later, it took the more surprising form of widening access for women,
ethnic minorities and mature students. Only much later did it become
clear that the traditional class project, in the sense of equalizing relative
class chances, had failed in both its Marxist and liberal versions.
Such were the motors, but the resistances were formidable. Despite
the urge to reform, the autonomy of existing institutions put up spir-
ited defences. The universities themselves tended to remain attached to
the Humboldtian and Newmanesque conceptions of the university as
an institution. Bruce Truscot became a best seller,1 essentially champi-
oning the ‘Oxbridge’ idea of an enlightened elite of scholars. Not until
1 B. Truscot, Redbrick University (London, 1943).
209
A. H. Halsey
Clark Kerr sent a message across the Atlantic in 1963 from his Gifford
lectures at Harvard did a genuinely new picture emerge of the university
as the intellectual centre of the economic and cultural life of the nation.2
In Europe, moreover, the grip of the selective secondary schools on the
mind of the aspiring parent remained strong – the lycée in France, the
Gymnasium in Germany. And an ideology of ‘the pool of ability’ ration-
alized the continuing resistance to new provision for wider passage from
secondary to tertiary institutions.
Second, and not surprisingly, there existed the forces of class and status
defence. Nothing motivates parents more, be they bourgeois or party
functionaries, than the question of how to pass on their advantages to
their own children. Fortunately economic advance was opening more jobs
and careers to more educated people, so that the defence of the selective
secondary school and the college was eased. But class and status struggles
centred on the university admissions office increasingly throughout our
period.
A third and powerful resistance force emerged later in the shape of gov-
ernmental reluctance to spend on higher education. Three root causes can
be identified: the competing claims of warfare over welfare, the unwill-
ingness of electorates to vote higher taxes, and the growing popularity of
economic-liberal doctrines of minimal government. It all seemed paradox-
ical in light of the immediate post-war experience. Yet ageing populations
do tend to give first priority to spending on health and are disinclined to
allow governments to spend their money for them in the face of evidence
that bureaucracies are inefficient. One might have supposed a rational
basis to this reluctance in the recognition that spending on higher educa-
tion by government is socially regressive. In fact the determined resistance
of suburban parents to attempts by economic liberals as well as socialists
to cut back student subsidies attests the opposite. The gathering flow of
women into the economy, and the rise of the two-earner family, gener-
ated increased demand, even within education, for pre-school and nursery
provision rather than university funding.
Finally, there was the resistance stemming from the anti-market, guild,
or public service organization of schools, colleges and faculties, which
came into play when the economic-liberal doctrines became paramount in
the polities of Europe. The guild and civil service forms of the organization
of teachers and researchers were powerful, but in the end they were unable
to stem the reorganization of education along market lines.
The background of demographic changes must also be mentioned.
These, too, were Europe-wide, including the fluctuations in fertility that
2 C. Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).
210
Admission
occurred in unexplained concurrence. The whole region was gradually
transformed after the baby-boom period following the Second World
War into a region of unprecedented incipient population decline. By 1990
the typical total period fertility rate had dropped to 1.8, whereas a sta-
ble population requires 2.1. The combination of fluctuating fertility and
secular decline might have led to pessimistic if not catastrophic long-term
prospects for the universities. But in fact the demography and relative
prosperity of this advanced industrial region created a regime of ‘the
third age’, in which health and leisure and income are relatively evenly
distributed to those who have retired from active labour participation and
who form in effect a new and powerful political class with the resources
and appetite for further education. Hence the formation of the ‘university
of the third age’ in France, the support for the Open University in Britain,
or the introduction of the Seniorenuniversität in German-speaking coun-
tries and similar institutions across Europe generally.
persistent inequality
Properly understood, the class handicap is by no means a peculiar fea-
ture of Europe in the post-war period. It pertains to other countries and
other periods. A study in comparable terms of thirteen countries supplies
crucial evidence for the main themes of this chapter.3 The ‘comparable
terms’ are essentially statistical, as defined by Robert Mare4 to distin-
guish between two processes: the expansion of the educational system
and the selection and allocation of pupils and students. In order to clarify
the distinction, Mare uses the notion of transitions, which Boudon had
labelled ‘branching points’, when children can choose or be selected to
proceed to a further stage of education.5 The odds of making the transi-
tion are obviously determined by exogenous factors such as the gender,
class background, ethnicity, parental education and income, family size,
or geographical location of the potential student population. The odds
are also an outcome of the given structure of opportunity at the time.
Thus, instead of asking the simple question as to how educational attain-
ment processes have changed historically, we can ask separately about
the effects of expansion (or contraction) of opportunity and about the
3 Y. Shavit and H.-P. Blossfeld (eds.), Persistent Inequality: Changing Educational Attain-
ment in Thirteen Countries (Boulder, Col., and London, 1993).
4 R. D. Mare, ‘Change and Stability in Educational Stratification’, American Sociological
Review, 46 (1982), 72–87.
5 R. Boudon, Education, Opportunity, and Social Inequality: Changing Prospects in West-
ern Society (New York and London, 1974).
211
A. H. Halsey
effects of shifts in the exogenous factors. Mare’s method or model makes
the answers possible through logit regressions.
Empirically he shows that when education expands, as it has done
in Europe since 1945, the regressions decline across successive cohorts
unless the association between social class and educational transitions (the
logit effects) increases. According to the characteristic empirical pattern,
logit effects tend to decrease in successive transitions. In an expansive
period the growing proportions of successive cohorts reaching higher
levels of the educational system have less selectivity, and the homogeneity
of unmeasured factors becomes lower than for previous cohorts. Thus the
logit effects of social origin on higher-educational transitions tended to
increase. The end result of this interactive process was a reduction in
the variance of schooling, an increase in its mean, but little change in
the distribution of relative chances for education between social strata.
Our question is whether this generalization applies to all the countries of
Europe in the post-war period.
The countries covered by the study are the Federal Republic of Ger-
many, the Netherlands, Sweden, England and Wales, Italy, Switzerland,
Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Some non-European countries are
also included for comparison (the USA, Taiwan and Japan). The spread,
though not comprehensive, enables us to see the general European devel-
opment in a wider context and to examine the experience of the commu-
nist reforms in Eastern Europe compared with the more capitalistic social
structures of Germany or the UK, or with the social democratic regimes
of Sweden or the Netherlands.
Experience leads us to expect educational inequality. In a period of
economic and political reconstruction and growth, we would anticipate
growing wealth, better health, attempts to respond to popular aspira-
tions for a better society, and a more elevated and peaceable civilization
occasioned by the vicissitudes of war. Moreover, we are interested to
know how far the different political regimes were able to respond, specif-
ically with respect to access to university or tertiary education. Did the
relationship between parental, political and economic characteristics and
educational opportunity change after the war, following the demise of fas-
cism and national socialism and with the rise of communism and social
democracy?
Persistent inequality of educational attainment between class and ethnic
groups as well as between the sexes is an old feature of European history.
Modes of explaining the pattern have been of two basic kinds: cultural
capital theory and the thesis of economic constraint. Cultural capital the-
ory postulates that the poor generally lack the advantages of language,
motivation and skill that promote pupils in school and equip them with
the capacity to proceed successfully to the university. The alternative
212
Admission
(though not necessarily incompatible) theory of economic constraint,
advanced for example by Boudon,6 insists that in most countries
education has to be financed from family resources to include both direct
costs and foregone earnings. Thus, according to Italian evidence, poorer
families need to make higher sacrifices and to have stronger ambitions
than rich families if they are to negotiate a passage through tertiary
studies.7 In this way, cultural and financial inequalities between classes
and status groups combine to produce educational inequalities among
their children.
The idea of meritocracy is also familiar as a feature of the broad trend
towards modernity and the substitution of achieved for ascriptive roles
in response to the requirements of an ever more technological econ-
omy. Therefore, the connection between social origin and educational
qualification should diminish over time, despite the determination of most
if not all countries to expand the numbers and the duration of those in
statu pupillari. Whether theorists take the modernization or the reproduc-
tion view of education, they tend to agree that educational expansion –
whether responding to the functional requirements of a modern econ-
omy or to the competition between status groups for scarce educational
resources – will lead to greater equality at the lower levels of education.
But the two schools tend to differ as to the consequences for tertiary
education. Modernization theorists expect that the effects of class origin
will evaporate over time; reproduction theorists by contrast predict sta-
bility or even increase in the inegalitarian influences of class hierarchy.
Certainly the expansion of tertiary institutions in one way or another pro-
duces a new and enlarged hierarchy of prestige and power to place alumni
in the professional and managerial structure, so as to make possible both
a rising proportion of graduates and a stable differential advantage for
those with advantaged class origins.
models of higher education

From 1945 to 1989 there emerged two contrasted models of the organiza-
tion of higher education. In the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern
Europe, post-compulsory schooling was dominated by the state, seen as
an antechamber to the modern economy and as the finishing school of
the new socialist man or woman. Consequently, the array of appropriate
studies was narrow and vocational, and the further ranges of ‘useless’
6 Boudon, Education (note 5).

7 D. Gambetta, Were they Pushed or Did they Jump? Individual Decision Mechanisms in
Education (Cambridge, 1987).
213
A. H. Halsey
subjects, like classics, were neglected.8 In the West the movement was
also towards science and technology, but less markedly so, and the tradi-
tional curricula retained their place. In the West also the private college or
university was dwarfed in importance by the rapidly growing state insti-
tutions, but it was tolerated. Only outside Europe in the USA and Japan
was there a serious development of private universities, and these were
mostly of religious origin, especially of new American Protestant sects. In
Western European practice, though tending towards the American model
(which itself was largely imported from the German universities after the
period of their great success in the nineteenth century), there remained a
state-dominated system of colleges and universities with government as
the obvious prime source of funding for post-war expansion.
Expansion cannot be attributed solely to a political drive to satisfy
popular desire for the egalitarian widening of opportunities. At least
comparable weight must be given to governmental resolve to modern-
ize a country through research and through the education and training
of a modern labour force. In the Soviet Union the definition of post-
compulsory education as a vast apparatus of production of the labour
force required for a modern industrialized economy and a centralized
plan seems to have led the political response to what otherwise might
have expressed itself as individual aspirations for upward mobility.
The slow withdrawal of religious influences, which had so clearly
shaped the evolution of the medieval European university, was also a
factor in the post-war era. The triumph of a secular version of univer-
sity life is evident, least perhaps in Spain, but quite clearly in France; it
was particularly striking in the special case of Oxford and Cambridge in
England, where foreign observers were often puzzled by the coexistence
of monastic colleges and anachronistic admission to close tutorial rela-
tions alongside modern laboratory departments, where Nobel Prizes and
famous scientific exploits were frequently to be observed. In the USA the
separation of church and state had facilitated the expansion of private
colleges, in France the Napoleonic revolution had given pride of place to
the grandes écoles, while in England the integration of the Church of Eng-
land into the state apparatus had led to the development of the socially
but not academically inferior ‘red brick’ universities with, among other
things, their separate admission procedures. So the picture is more of a
spectrum than of a binary division. In the Soviet Union and the Eastern
bloc the separation of church from state was in effect constituted after
the Second World War by the abolition of the former. The ancient church
foundations of Hungarian universities are a typical example.
8 N. De Witt, ‘Basic Comparative Data on Soviet and American Education’, Comparative

Education Review, 2 (June, 1958).
214
Admission
In one sense the intrusion of the state in Eastern Europe can legitimately
be seen as a recrudescence of the religiously based controls over matric-
ulation and membership that were previously practised in the Christian
medieval and Early Modern universities of the West. It is worth recalling
that penalties on opinion and entry were still in force in England until the
Test Acts repealed them in 1870. In Hungary, following the 1956 upris-
ing, some hundreds of teachers and many more students were expelled
from the universities, and in 1957 organizations like KISZ (Commu-
nist Youth Association) were set up and eventually exercised monopolis-
tic control over student life; ideological subjects transmitting Marxism-
Leninism became compulsory in such a way as to influence belief, just as
Christian doctrine had done in medieval Europe.
Only much later, in the 1980s, did the rise of market liberal doctrines
and the drive towards privatization and ‘government at arm’s length’
begin to make serious inroads into systems of a public character (whether
dominated by an established state or an established church). This culmi-
nated in the collapse of the communist command economies of Eastern
Europe at the end of that decade. Only in the 1990s did new bargains
and balances between private and state organizations begin to re-emerge.
Many of the consequences of the communist revolutions and the
counter-revolution of 1989 are traced in other chapters.9 In the context
of matriculation deliberate intrusion by the Communist Party through the
state attempted to change the social composition of the student intake and
thus the levels of social fluidity in society at large. Thus history affords (at
a price) an opportunity to compare the efficacy of different social changes
to bring about transformation through education. The attempted socialist
transformation in Eastern Europe accordingly becomes one of the main
features of this volume.
Did the socialist transformation work? In fact the use of social classi-
fication for admissions was abandoned in 1963 and success in examina-
tions substituted. We cannot know how far it was successful in achieving
its aims. The period was short, there was a good deal of cheating, and the
party apparatchiks were bound to look for ways of awarding opportunity
to their own children; and they found them through ‘side doors’, includ-
ing the right to intervene in the appeal procedures through the ministry.
All in all the system of information and competition for prestige and the
pursuit of modernity put great pressure on national university systems.
News from the West was of paramount significance to both researchers
and to students seeking new revolutions. The importance of this aspect
9 See, for example, chapter 2 (‘Patterns’), chapter 3 (‘Relations with Authority’) and
chapter 8 (‘Student Movements and Political Activism’).
215
A. H. Halsey
of university life is that a student revolution was inconceivable in East
Germany for more than three decades after it began in Hungary in 1956.
Meanwhile the period after the Second World War saw a growth in
enrolment, a diversification of curricula, a crisis in relation to the labour
market destination of alumni (from both the education and the training
systems and at both the secondary school and the tertiary college level)
in the mid-1970s. Then, finally, there was a phase of reconstruction in
the 1980s in which access and selection were increasingly influenced by
the manifold difficulties of the political economies of Western Europe, as
well as the political upheavals of Eastern Europe, including sharp rises
in public expenditure and unemployment and the rise or resurgence of
economic-liberal doctrines of state management. Put crudely, the 1980s
were the decade of the market, and the expansion of higher education
had to proceed under conditions of fiscal constraint; this led to much
redefinition of the structure and purposes of the university.
Conspicuous among these developments was a pronounced weakening
of the traditionally close link between the academic secondary school
and the university. The upper secondary school in all countries became
in effect – and instead – a freestanding institution rather than a con-
veyance of selected minorities from common elementary schooling to
elite advanced education. Of course, in the forties, fifties and sixties,
selective secondary schools continued to select, though Sweden became
internationally famous in Europe as an experimental pioneer in the devel-
opment of the comprehensive or common school. The crucial ‘branching
point’ was the upper secondary course to prepare for the baccalauréat
or the Abitur or their equivalents in Italy or elsewhere. In Britain it was
the ‘sixth form’ of the grammar or high school where pupils prepared
for university entrance. This upper-secondary stage remained important,
but its curricula afterwards became more varied in relation to slowly
emerging arrangements in most European countries for vocational train-
ing as well as for academic education. By 1990 most secondary pupils left
school at the age of eighteen, with many postponing entry to higher edu-
cation, others choosing part-time or full-time attendance at some other
form of tertiary education establishment, and still others going straight
into employment. However, the patterns between countries varied, either
from tradition or from adaptation to new demands or new terms of
financial support.
Entry to higher education in Europe and in most developed countries
was generally straight from school, sometimes from a particular type of
school at which the student had concentrated on academic subjects. Italy
had a very specialized structure, with certain types of school leading to
specific higher-education categories. In the United Kingdom, as in Japan
and the USA, the examination required for higher-education entry could
216
Admission
Table 6.2 Preparation for entry to higher education:
characteristics of examination requirements
Starting Study Usual

age years Qualification age Subjects
France 15 3 baccalauréat 18 9
Germany 15 4 Abitur 19 5
Italy 14 5 maturità 19
Japan 15 3 Upper Sec-Graduate 18 8–10
Netherlands 16 2 Leaving certificate 18 6/7
UKa 16 2 GCE A-Levelb 18 5
USA 15 3 High school diploma 18 6
a In Scotland, one year of study, in five or more subjects, leading to the

Scottish Higher certificate. b The ‘A-level’ or advanced qualification was
preceded by two years of study, usually in at least six subjects (some
compulsory), and generally included mathematics, the native language
and one foreign modern language. England, Wales and Northern Ireland
were unusual in limiting the number of subjects more narrowly and thus
specializing earlier. At least five passes at GCE (General Certificate of
Education, usually taken at age sixteen) were required for degree-level
courses, two of which at advanced level (usually taken at age eighteen),
although most candidates for entry attempted three advanced or A-level
subjects and already had at least six ‘ordinary’ or O-level passes.
be taken at any type of establishment that provided for post-compulsory

schooling, including the rapidly growing ‘sixth-form colleges’. In other
countries (and in Northern Ireland and some other parts of the UK),
children could be selected for entry to different types of secondary educa-
tion, although there was provision for transfer at later stages; the higher-
education entry examination was then usually taken in the more academic
schools.
matriculation
Each country had a specific national education qualification, which
formed the main basic requirement for entry to higher education (see
table 6.2).
There has always been a passionate controversy over the special posi-
tion of the advanced or A-level examination in England, which guards
entry to the university as does the Abitur and the baccalauréat in Ger-
many, France and elsewhere. Behind it lie the status and class battles for
possession of educational property that were intensified by the reform
and expansion movements of the period under consideration. Special
arrangements meanwhile exist for the growing body of mature students
and those lacking ‘traditional’ qualifications.
217
A. H. Halsey
Matriculation into higher education depends mainly on gaining the
appropriate entry qualification, although limits on places may mean that
a further selection process takes place either for certain types of course
or for certain institutions experiencing strong demand from students.
In the United Kingdom, entry to all institutions is competitive. In East
and West Europe, more generally, the state has increasingly controlled
entry to higher education since Napoleonic times, either through defining
examination content and standards, or through varied means of student
financial support, or through special schemes of encouragement for par-
ticular social categories of students by positive discrimination or, more
usually, by setting up barriers to entry. The conquest of Eastern Europe
by the Red Army in 1945 brought with it a determined effort to change
the terms of admission to higher education in Poland, Hungary, Albania,
Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and East Germany. Old
bourgeois conceptions and domination were to be overthrown, and a new
era of opportunity for workers and peasants was to dawn. The failure
of the original movement within the Soviet Union did not become com-
mon knowledge until after Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin at the twentieth
congress of the communist party in 1956.
The Hungarian experience was typical. Admission restrictions had to
yield before a huge social demand for admission to a relatively small
tertiary sector. Quotas were abandoned temporarily and the gates were
opened to all, including women. But the number of places was too small
to cope with the demand, and quotas had to be reintroduced and entrance
examinations imposed. There was naturally pressure to change the class
composition of the student body, given that so many sons and daughters
of workers and peasants had previously been denied opportunity to use
their talents, either for reasons of finance or qualification from secondary
schools.
In part the new movement was a continuation of pre-war liberal devel-
opments towards popular democracy. As early as 1945 in the communist
countries, two-year evening courses for workers were introduced in the
universities. After 1947 evening courses were offered alongside the nor-
mal day courses. After 1949 candidates for entry were classified with the
intention of giving priority to those of peasant or worker origin. And
since the number of such children in the secondary schools was insuf-
ficient, special matriculation courses were organized. Debate continues
about the effectiveness as well as the justice of this method. But there can
be little doubt that large numbers of talented and diligent youth were able
to take advantage of the chances thus offered by social revolution.
In the West some countries like Belgium and France used one uni-
form national examination. Sweden attempted the ranking of students
by marks weighted according to the courses taken and work experience
218
Admission
(which tacitly modifies age as a selective barrier). The American system of
standardized aptitude tests is not used in Europe. Positive discrimination
in favour of candidates with working-class backgrounds was practised
in Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as in Hungary, though exami-
nation performance was also part of the entrance procedure. Entrance
examinations were widely used with higher requirements in medicine,
science and law. This led to restrictions in highly regarded professional
disciplines such as medicine, pharmacy and architecture; in some coun-
tries, like Germany, the rejected students went to countries with an open
entry system, such as Switzerland and Austria, thereby overloading the
teaching capacity in these expensive study areas. The Norwegian gov-
ernment even went so far as to decide that it was cheaper to subsidize
medical studies abroad for its nationals than to set up a new faculty of
medicine in Norway. Rejected would-be medical students in Greece often
moved to Eastern Europe, where such students were welcome because
they were prepared to pay relatively high fees for their studies; this
helped the receiving country to compensate for inadequate local state
support.
Restrictive admissions policies were common not only in highly pres-
tigious institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge in England and the
grandes écoles in France, but also in the East European communist states
where, at the same time, at least a quarter of the places were reserved for
working-class students. Even the lottery played a role: in the Netherlands
the problem of excessive demand was overcome by its use. A lottery oper-
ated in which an individual’s chances were weighted by marks attained
in the secondary-school-leaving examinations. Yet the automatic right of
entry to university, which is the traditional privilege of those who obtain
a baccalauréat or the Abitur, still gives admission in France and Ger-
many, though not to other forms of higher education. The consequences
are visible in the high failure or drop-out rates in the first two years of
undergraduate study. Even in England and Scotland this phenomenon has
become apparent since the expansion of the system of higher education to
include the former polytechnics in 1992. It is an inevitable consequence of
the transformation to mass higher education. In other words, it is possible
to use the first years of university study as a selective device in place of the
traditional upper secondary school. It is therefore not surprising that, as
late as 1994, there was fear of rioting in Paris and reports of long queues
for admission in Bologna. Other countries, like Belgium or Spain, never
granted the prerogatives of the Abitur. In France, however, in spite of
several university reforms, including the Loi Savary of 1984, the right of
entry of a bachelier has never been modified. Of course, selective grandes
écoles continue to cream off the best 15 per cent of the candidates. And a
numerus clausus was increasingly applied in France and Germany so that
219
A. H. Halsey
the right to be admitted became nominal. It did not guarantee a place in
any particular faculty of any particular university.
In summary it appears that the evolution of matriculation and the
admissions system in our period has been to move the point of selection
upwards from the upper secondary school and its examinations to the
admissions offices of the institutions of higher education. The traditional
system was essentially controlled by teachers in universities. Control now
is much more in the hands of politicians, courts and budgetary adminis-
trators. Diversity is to be found at both the secondary and tertiary levels;
the unique role of the baccalauréat, the Abitur and their equivalents in
other European countries as the rite de passage to university education
is no more. Instead there have developed alternative modes of entry to a
diverse set of post-compulsory educational and training institutions with
the parallel development of vocational equivalents to A-level, the bac-
calauréat and the Abitur. In France there was a technical baccalauréat
with twelve options as well as the traditional one with eight sections, and
a proposed thirty-option practical baccalauréat, which was expected to
be taken in one form or another by 80 per cent of the secondary-school
leavers by the end of the century.
In most countries the majority of students first enter full-time higher
education aged between eighteen and twenty-one. At the end of the 1980s
the rate of full-time enrolment in this age group was more than 10 per
cent in over half of the OECD countries. However, older students are
also admitted everywhere; in Germany a quota of places in numerus
clausus branches is reserved for them. In the Nordic countries, Austria,
West Germany and Switzerland full-time enrolment was higher among
persons aged twenty-two to twenty-five than among those aged eighteen
to twenty-one in 1990. Reasons for starting higher-education studies later
in life are many. In some countries there is compulsory military service,
while some students pursue lower-level further education full time or enter
employment; still others may retake entry examinations and so increase
the range of institutions that will accept them.
It appeared by the end of the period that the articulation of the for-
mal education system to the labour market in Europe was entering a
new state of flux. It was not only that the macro-economic management
associated with Keynes, Bretton Woods and the left-wing-planning gov-
ernments of the 1950s and 1960s was collapsing. Nor was it only that the
command economies of Eastern Europe were rapidly eroded at the end of
the eighties. It was also that the gender division of labour was now being
comprehensively renegotiated, and that the ‘career’ to which university
admission had been traditionally a key, with its lifelong employment in
a superior trade or profession, was disappearing. Part-time and tempo-
rary contracts were becoming normal, not only for casual, unskilled and
220
Admission
Table 6.3 New entrants to higher education: 1983
Duration of Enrolments per Percentage of

first degree Total number 100 of 18–24 student
courses of students year-olds in cohort trained
Country Year (years) (000s) population at universities
Francea 1983 4 1,144 19 82

Germany 1984 4 1,503 29 87
Italy 1984 5 182 18 99
Japan b 1984 4 2,403c 21 81
Netherlands 1983 5 384 22 42
UKd 1984 3e 1,007 15 42
USAf 1984 4 1,246 44 62
a Includes an unknown number of students enrolled at both university and non-university

institutions simultaneously. b Includes enrolments at private colleges, estimated at 1.8
million in Japan and 2.7 million in the USA. c Includes enrolments on correspondence
courses. d Includes nursing and paramedical courses at DHSS (Department of Health
and Social Security) establishments. Excludes private sector enrolments, estimated at
some 0.3 million. e Four years in Scotland. f Percentages of enrolments by level are based
on proportions qualifying in 1982.
unschooled work, but also for professional and technical appointments.

Europe, along with the rest of the advanced industrial world, was enter-
ing a profoundly different phase of the development of its economy and
society.
In future there was to be not simply admission or rejection, but widen-
ing opportunity for readmission, for recurrent education, and for serial
partnership or cohabitation in a two-earner family, sometimes living
apart, often migrating between insecure jobs. Structured youth unem-
ployment was to accompany much greater investment in university study.
Easier capital flows portended a much less stable regional division of
labour. A new world was emerging in which admission to higher educa-
tion was destined to take an enlarged but different role in the distribution
of life chances.
The standard recommended by the OECD for comparisons of entry to
higher education relates all new entrants (irrespective of age) to a derived
year group appropriate to each country. New entrants are intended to be
first-year students, excluding those already qualified in higher education,
such as graduates, and those with a level 5 qualification, aiming for a
first degree. The relevant year group recommended by the OECD is the
total population of the age group, which includes 70 per cent of new
entrants, divided by the number of years involved. New entrants to part-
time study are included. The overall student count is the measure most
commonly available from international sources; but such figures actually
221
A. H. Halsey
Table 6.4 Percentage of enrolment of women 1972 and 1984
Below degree Degree Postgraduate

1972 1984 (level 5 6 7)
Francea 47b 49c 50 51 39

Germanya 33d 42 65 38 33
Italy 38 45 56 46 32
Japan 29e 34f 85 24 13
Netherlandsa 31d 42c 48 38
UKg 42 45 48 45 34
USAg, h 43 51c 55 51 45
a Level detail based on 1982 or 1983 data. b 1973. Universities only. c 1982.
d 1974. e Includes correspondence courses. f Includes private colleges and
correspondence courses. g Includes nursing and paramedical courses at
DHSS (Department of Health and Social Security) establishment. Excludes
private colleges. g Includes private colleges. h Level of detail based on pro-
portions of qualifiers in 1982–3.
provide a misleading guide to participation in higher education because of

varying course lengths and wastage rates. They can, however, be used to
compare and contrast the structure of higher education in each country.
For example, in Italy nearly all higher education is classified as taking
place in universities and only 3 per cent is indicated as being of below
degree standard. By contrast, in the Netherlands only 42 per cent is
attributed to universities and 59 per cent described as of below degree
standard. The differences between countries are more noticeable than the
similarities.
The percentage of women in higher education increased in all coun-
tries considered over the period 1972 to 1984, most markedly in the
Netherlands (11 percentage points). In the Netherlands and Germany
the percentage of women pursuing postgraduate studies in 1982 was not
below the percentage of their overall enrolment in 1972. By 1991 half of
European women aged 25–64 years had attained some kind of tertiary
education.
It may turn out, as we have suggested, that a principal feature of the
post-war history of higher education in Europe was the elaboration of
alternatives to the university. Ambitious expansion, ‘doubling in a decade’
as the progressive slogans of the 1950s had proposed, altered the terms
of entry and the definition of what was to be learned in a university
all over Europe. The old stereotype of entry through completion of the
baccalauréat or equivalent leaving certificate from a lycée or other upper
secondary school into a full-time course of three or, in Continental coun-
tries, more years in pure science or pure arts was to be transformed into
222
Admission
a large variety of courses, typically vocational or preparatory to profes-
sional training, and offered in a wider range of institutions, residential and
non-residential. The development of mass higher education was dawn-
ing in Europe, increasing participation to significant proportions of the
young and, in effect, replacing the older idea of the university in Europe
by a much more expansive and, as some traditionalists would argue, a
diluted conception of tertiary rather than higher education.
social selection before 1970

Studies of social selection through education in the earlier years of our
period have now become available.10 On the whole they are consistent
and complementary. They confirm that, within the European region, Ger-
man higher education expanded from a low point immediately after the
Second World War and that, in the process, there was a reduction in
social selectivity for the population as a whole and for women, but no
serious change in the relative chances of children from the disadvan-
taged classes. Tertiary education remained linked characteristically to the
socially superior end of the class structure with respect to recruitment
and also to placement in an occupational career.
This was the essential shape of meritocratic development in Europe
and the role of the university within an expanding and elaborating sys-
tem. The picture is complicated, not least by variation between countries
in demography, the structure of the economy and the historical pecu-
liarities of national arrangements for access to the stages of education,
their curricular content, the type and availability of student financial aid,
and the links between educational qualifications and entry to professions
and trades. Thus, for example, where a country had a large agricultural
sector as in France or Poland, the significance of educational selection
was minimized for the sons of farmers. Where, as in the UK, education
was relatively loosely connected to qualifications in the labour market,
it has been possible for relatively democratized access to the universities
to emerge. There was remarkable contrast between France and the UK.
Adjusting for the difference in the shape of the occupational structure, it
turns out that those who acquired a higher tertiary degree had service-
class origins of 55 per cent in France and only 35 per cent in England.
So, at least in the earlier post-war years, the system of selection in France
10 Shavit and Blossfeld, Inequality (note 3); W. Muller and W. Karle, ‘Social Selection in
Educational Systems in Europe. Paper presented to the meetings of the International Soci-
ological Association, Research Committee on Social Stratification, XIIth World Congress
of Sociology, Madrid, July 9–13, 1990’, in S. J. Bail (ed.), Sociology of Education
(London, 2001), 717–49; Y. Shavit and W. Muller (eds.), From School to Work: A Com-
parative Study of Educational Qualifications and Occupational Destinations (Oxford,
1998).
223
A. H. Halsey
gave the offspring of the service classes – compared to children from
other social backgrounds – better odds of surviving up to the highest
educational level than they had in other countries. For nine European
countries, beginning at a less than 10 per cent proportion of the pupils in
primary school, the service-class children grew to a cross-national Euro-
pean average of about 45 per cent among those who attained a higher
tertiary degree.
England did not stand alone at the lower end of social selectivity but
shared its relatively egalitarian position with Scotland and Northern Ire-
land. There is also an interesting contrast between Germany and France.
By the end of compulsory schooling the proportion of service-class chil-
dren was highest in France and remained so through the successive stages
or ‘transitions’. In Germany the proportion of service-class children was
lowest until the stage of an intermediate secondary degree, but then
increased more than in most other countries until, at the end point of
the educational career, Germany was placed in an intermediate posi-
tion. Interestingly, the two command economies or communist countries
included in the study were not among the most egalitarian from the point
of view of class opportunity: Hungary in particular is near the top of the
league for distributing most certificates of higher education to the higher
social classes.
There are two important processes common to the countries that have
inherited the European university. First, educational systems are orga-
nized so as to allow ever decreasing fractions of a student cohort to
survive at each successive stage of education and, second, dropping out is
socially selective though with decreasing severity. The outcomes consist
of an interplay between these two processes. On the one hand the policies
of expansion gradually move the systems of higher education through
mass towards universal provision and a fortiori towards equality. On
the other hand selective forces continue to shape the composition of the
student body into a selective social hierarchy.
Studies of the earlier years of our period show that the European coun-
tries differed strongly in the extent to which they provided opportuni-
ties for obtaining educational qualifications to each successive cohort of
young people. The data were collected in the early 1970s and the analysis
relates to those aged thirty to sixty-four, that is, born between 1910 and
1947. They therefore had left their schools or universities mostly before
1970. Only a small proportion of them were affected in their educational
careers by the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s in the West European
nations, but educational change in East Europe had been initiated earlier,
as we have described in the case of Hungary. Thus, for earlier years, the
data present a pattern which is essentially binary. The UK and Sweden
had a similar survival pattern from which Germany, Hungary, Poland
224
Admission
and France differed. The sharpest contrast was between France and
Germany. In Germany 85 per cent of pupils survived beyond compul-
sory schooling, in France only 30 per cent. Hungary and Poland had the
highest survival rates up to the end of a full secondary education. Yet,
given the differences in survival rates between nations in early schooling,
the remarkable feature of the systems as a whole is their similarity of
outcome at the upper end. At that point only France is distinctive with
its exceptionally low fraction of the population obtaining a degree from
an institution of higher education.
Within the context sketched above, the study draws attention to par-
ticular features of class selectivity. In Germany, Hungary and Sweden
the upper service class appears to have given its children rather superior
chances of educational survival. This finding fits with the observations
of historians of the Bildungsbürgertum, a social stratum of civil servants,
professionals and teachers in higher education, which has traditionally
shared a set of common values associated with the experience of higher
education and a relatively higher determination to pass on high stan-
dards of educational ambition and achievement to their children. The
Bildungsbürgertum was probably most distinguished as a status group
in Germany, but it also existed in other countries that were influenced
by the German tradition of higher education, such as Sweden and the
Austro-Hungarian monarchy.11
English society in the early twentieth century was distinctive in not
having such a broad and educationally defined upper class. Entry to the
upper echelons of British society was not so clearly restricted to educa-
tional channels. France, like Britain and Germany, illustrates the expo-
nential increase of admissions to universities since the Second World War.
Between 1900 and 1967, student enrolments in the French faculties mul-
tiplied by fourteen (from 29,759 to 428,479). But the upward movement
had been more or less halted between 1900 and 1915 and again between
1925 and 1940. Then in our period and just before 1951 the numbers
began seriously to climb. The rate of increase accelerated after 1960,
multiplying 2.15 times in the six years from 1960/61 to 1966/67. The
proportional growth rate stayed above 10 per cent each year despite the
absolute increase in the numerical base. Though aided by the increased
numbers resulting from the post-war baby boom, French student num-
bers were predominantly a product of the rising educational aspirations
of the 1950s and 1960s, and they continuously outstripped official fore-
casts as they did elsewhere in Europe. Thus French enrolment in higher
11 W. Conze and J. Kocka (eds.), Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Vol. I:

Bildungssystem und Professionalisierung in internationalen Vergleichenen (Stuttgart,
1985).
225
A. H. Halsey
education had been 2.0 per cent in 1946 (students aged 19–24 as a per-
centage of the French population between those ages), while further back
in 1911 it had been 0.7. It rose to 3.6 in 1960 and to 6.0 in 1966. There
was a slow-down in the 1970s, but by 1983 the level was typical of the
European countries, as may be seen from table 6.3 where it is recorded as
19 (per 100 of the 18–24 population). Plans for the end of the twentieth
century assumed, however, that 75 per cent of the relevant age group
would go on to some form of higher education.
With respect to the recruitment of women, it may be recalled that
French critics of their own society, though pessimistic at the end of the
1960s about the ‘democratization’ of access from the point of view of
class inequality, saw sexual equality as a front on which France had
advanced more than most other European countries. The percentage of
women among students in the university faculties in 1955 was 36.4 and
this proportion rose steadily to become 42.6 in 1965–66.12 In 1984 the
proportion was 49 per cent – higher than in the other major European
countries.13 With respect to class inequality, we have already noted the
high degree of selectivity, and this handicap of stratification appears to
have persisted throughout the period.
social selection after 1970

Traditional access to higher education had been synonymous with univer-
sities, colleges of art and sports, theological universities and teacher train-
ing colleges. In the typical and model case of Germany the minimum dura-
tion of a university course was four years. The system was extended in the
early 1970s through the establishment of Fachhochschulen (short-cycle
higher-education institutions). These courses lasted three years, mostly in
technical and economic subjects and mainly for men. In the mid-1970s
a few Länder founded academies of higher education linking practical
training in enterprises with theoretical education in schools and colleges.
These academies (Berufsakademien) were relatively successful in placing
their graduates, mostly in the companies in which they had been trained.
Access had several routes, but the traditional one was through complet-
ing upper secondary school and gaining the Abitur, thus securing the right
to study at a university or Fachhochschule. A few special schools were
founded in the 1960s to enable young people to go on to post-secondary
studies with an intermediate certificate acquired at a vocational extension
school or Gymnasium (grammar school). From the mid-1970s increased
12 C. Grignon and J. C. Passeron, Innovation in Higher Education: French Experience

before 1968 (Paris, 1970), 84. OECD, table 14.
13 See table 6.3.
226
Admission
numbers of grammar-school leavers took alternative choices. One impor-
tant destination was apprenticeship training in the dual system; another
was a vocational path in health-care schooling. It was also notable that
some grammar-school leavers began to enter higher education after com-
pleting apprenticeship, thus having two qualifications – an occupational
training certificate and a university (or Fachhochschule) degree. In the
1980s increased numbers of school leavers with the Abitur went to Fach-
hochschulen because of the relatively favourable employment prospects.
High unemployment among university graduates also led to a substan-
tial number of first-year students transferring to Fachhochschulen for the
same reasons.
One background factor in all European countries has been demo-
graphic fluctuation. In Germany there was a baby boom in the 1950s
that by the mid-1960s had produced more than 1 million annual births.
But in the following decade the birth rate dropped dramatically to
0.6 million births in 1984. Births then temporarily became steady before
continuing their downward paths in the 1990s. In the long run fertility
has its effects. But the demographic influence has been minimal by com-
parison with the growth of individual demand. That demand is measured
by participation rates. Thus in 1960 28 per cent of eighteen-year-olds
took part in education and training; in 1985 the overall participation rate
rose to almost 80 per cent, including apprenticeship. Germany, along
with Denmark, had the highest enrolments among all the EEC countries
in 1990.
A clear view of the German experience has been provided by
Blossfeldt14 as part of an international comparison of thirteen indus-
trialized countries, using data from the German socio-economic panel
covering a sample of the whole population of West Germany and aiming
to uncover trends in the educational attainment of social-class groups
arranged by birth cohorts from 1916. A commonplace assumption in
sociology is that educational expansion has decreased the effect of social
origin and gender on educational attainment, that is, that ascription has
been displaced by ‘achievement’ in the selective process. Thus for the
German, as indeed for European universities generally, we would expect
to find that women and students with working-class social origins became
more prominent on the campus between 1945 and 1990. Blossfeld dis-
tinguishes between attainment and opportunity. The former is reflected
in rising rates of qualification in successive birth cohorts. The latter is
reflected by measures of social selectivity at each stage or branching
point in the educational system through which students pass on their
way towards an occupational career.
14 See note 3.
227
A. H. Halsey
The results confirm first the established belief that both sexes have
profited from expansion in terms of the attainment of graduate status,
and indeed that the post-war period has seen a convergence between
women’s and men’s attainment levels. However, the fluctuations in this
trend are equally worthy of note since they reflect changing historical
circumstances. Most particularly it emerges that men and women born
between 1926 and 1935 in Germany obtained degrees in smaller pro-
portions than the birth cohorts of 1919 to 1925. It seems reasonable to
suppose that the younger group had their educational aspirations low-
ered by the harsh conditions of poverty and migration of the immediate
post-war years when they were ten to twenty years old. These forces
acted particularly strongly on women. Afterwards, during the years of
‘economic miracle’ in West Germany, the long-run trend to sexual equal-
ization continued and accelerated.
It is only with the birth cohort of 1941–5, which came to the appro-
priate age in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, that the proportions of
persons taking professional qualifications and degrees began to increase.
These proportions then grew at an accelerating rate. Germany was a late-
comer to the expansion of secondary education, and also, incidentally,
expansion began before the structure of secondary and tertiary educa-
tion was reformed in the late 1950s and the 1960s. The convergence of
women’s and men’s performance in these advanced examinations emerges
as a consequence of educational reform. But the relatively slower progress
in the taking of professional qualifications, which can be seen among
women born after 1950, illustrates the higher dependence of expansion
in this type of higher education on economic as compared with political
conditions.
After the Second World War there was renewed development of the
universities in Europe based on the widespread resolve in both political
democracies and state communism to plan a world of enlarged opportu-
nities for the mass of the people. Britain, with its combination of highly
restricted but socially mixed entry compared with other European coun-
tries, as well as its unique status as an impoverished victor of the war,
deserves a special mention.
The Robbins Report of 1963 (named after the chairman of the Com-
mittee on Higher Education, Lord Robbins) heralded further expansion
in British higher education. In the following period, from 1963 to 1990,
expansion continued in such a way as to obliterate Robbins as a numer-
ical landmark. Absolute numbers of students in the higher-education
system rose every year. In 1962 the total number of full-time students
was 216,000. By 1988/89, including part-timers in universities, the Open
University, the polytechnics and other colleges offering advanced courses,
it was 964,000. Apparently, therefore, Britain had – and indeed still
228
Admission
has – a record of successful development of its investment in higher edu-
cation through fluctuating economic fortunes and through Labour and
Conservative governments. In fact the story is less simple and more inter-
esting. Less simple because the numbers have risen at varying rates. More
interesting because the definition has widened from the original concep-
tion with which Robbins began. Britain, including Scotland and Wales,
mirrored Europe, but it was also distinctive in its sumptuous provision
for undergraduates, its three-year degrees and its concept of ‘further’
as differentiated from higher education. Higher education, in successive
steps, invaded ‘further’ education. The definition moved gradually, and
continues to move, towards the American conception of higher educa-
tion as including all post-compulsory or post-secondary schooling. So
the statistics begin with full-time or sandwich-course students and end
with all full-time and part-time students in a wide range of colleges addi-
tional to the traditionally defined universities. The system after 1992
became one in which the former polytechnics and colleges (including
Scottish central institutions) contributed 55% of the student total, with
the Open University taking 9% and the old universities 36%. Under-
lying this description lies the commitment to a unified mass provision
of post-compulsory opportunities towards which educational reformers
have been slowly moving for at least a century.
Economic and funding vicissitudes apart, a demographic and an edu-
cational factor underlie the trend of university numbers in the UK and in
other West European countries. The number of eighteen-year-olds peaked
at over a million in 1965, fell to 800,000 in 1973, rose again to nearly a
million in 1981 and then fell to nearly the 1973 level in 1990. These wide,
even wild, oscillations were, however, evened out by the rising produc-
tivity of the secondary schools. The percentage of the age group with two
or more A-levels (advanced level in the General Certificate of Education)
rose from under 8% in 1962/3 to nearly double that proportion in the late
1980s (15.3% of boys and 14.1% of girls in 1984/5). Nine out of ten of
those who enrolled in full-time degree courses became eligible for a grant
towards tuition fees and maintenance following the Anderson Report of
1960, and the proportion of graduate students, though fluctuating, also
rose slightly from 16.9% in 1965/6 to 17.7% in 1989/90.
As to the composition of the enlarged student body, the question arises
as to whether quality has been maintained. Britain offers clearer and more
detailed evidence than most other European countries on this issue. For
students in higher education as a whole, there has been an increase in the
age participation ratio (defined as the proportion of home students under
twenty-one years to the eighteen-year-old population of the UK in the
year of entry). Before the Second World War it had been less than 3%.
Just before the Robbins Report in 1962/3 it was 7.2%. It rose steadily
229
A. H. Halsey
Table 6.5 Age-participation ratios (APR) for students in
British higher educationa
First-year home 18-year-old

student aged population of GB
under 21 in higher (mid-year in year APR (col.1 as
education (000s) of entry) (000s) % of col. 2)
1962/3 7.2
1972/3 14.2
1977/8 12.7
1982/3 13.5
1984/5 138.5 912.5 15.2
1985/6 137.3 902.2 15.2
1986/7 137.1 873.2 15.7
1987/8 139.0 867.7 16.0
1988/9 141.7 839.9 16.9
a Sources: DES Statistical Bulletin, No. 1990, and OPCS Population

Estimates Unit
Table 6.6 British university entrants: A-level scoresa
Scores 3–8 9–12 13–15
1971 28.0 46.7 25.3

1972 29.8 43.9 26.2
1981 24.2 43.7 30.0
1984 14.8 49.3 35.7
1988 16.6 48.5 34.9 (61,225)
Scores 6–15 16–25 26–30

1989 12.6 54.2 33.2 (70,219)
Source: UCCA Statistical Supplement, 1987, table B5, 1988–9, table 2C

a Home candidates accepted through the organization that processes
applications for full-time undergraduate courses at UK universities and
colleges, UCCA (the Universities Central Council on Admissions, UCAS
since 1993), 1971–89 (% with various scores). Note: Only candidates
with three or more A-levels are included and the best three counted with
grade A = 5, B = 4, C = 3, D = 2 and E = 1. The scoring system
was changed in 1989 to include supplementary AS qualifications. The
Robbins Report in 1963 recommended that the proportion of eighteen-
year-olds going on to full-time education in Britain, which was then
8.5%, should rise to 17% by 1980.
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Admission
Table 6.7 Expansion of British higher education, 1970/1 to 1988/9,
for various categoriesa
1970 1988/9 Addition

(000s) (000s) (000s) %
University full-time undergraduates

Male 128.3 139.7 11.4 8.9
Female 57.0 109.7 52.7 92.5
Polytechnics and college students, full-time
Male 102.0 147.9 45.9 45.0
Female 113.1 146.7 33.6 29.7
Total full-time students from abroad
Male 25.9 21.1 −4.8 −18.5
Female 8.0 14.0 6.0 75.0
Total full-time students 434.3 579.1 144.8 33.3
Part-time university students
Male 18.1 29.0 10.9 60.2
Female 5.7 21.1 15.4 270.2
Polytechnic part-time, day
Male 69.8 118.5 48.7 69.8
Female 6.7 67.0 60.3 900.0
Polytechnic part-time evening only
Male 39.8 38.1 −1.7 −4.2
Female 5.0 26.5 21.5 430.0
Open University
Male 14.3 45.0 30.7 214.7
Female 5.0 40.3 35.3 700.6
Total part-time students
Male 142.0 230.6 88.6 62.4
Female 22.4 154.9 132.5 591.5
Grand total part-time 164.4 385.5 221.1 134.5
Grand total HE, full- and part-time 598.7 964.6 365.9 61.1
a Sources: calculated from DES, Statistics of Education, iii, Further Education and vi,
Universities.
until 1972/3 but then the age-grade chances fell (to 12.7% in 1977/8) and
did not climb back to the 1973 level again until 1984, when they rose to
15.2% and further to 16.9% in 1988/89.
The general line of development is clear. In the early 1960s British
professors were looking cautiously towards modest expansion and envis-
aging a system of higher education not fundamentally different from the
highly restricted access provided by the universities before the Second
World War. Public discussion led by educational progressives and those
who took optimistic views of the educability of the population joined
with a growing conviction among industrialists and politicians that a
much more highly educated younger generation was needed to ensure
231
A. H. Halsey
the wealth of the nation. Then experience of larger numbers in the post-
Robbins decade encouraged more and more university teachers to believe
that larger proportions of each new generation were capable of receiving
what they had to offer in some form. The bulk of the expansion then
took place in the polytechnics and colleges. In the process, the boundary
between higher education and further education was tacitly shifted.
shifts in the social distribution of opportunity

At this point, it is possible to see the evolving institutional and opportunity
pattern of developments since the 1960s. The general pattern of expansion
is illustrated and disaggregated for the UK in table 6.7.
Expansion, as should be stressed, was not a simple linear progres-
sion. Universities, and higher education generally, are always in compe-
tition for shares from the public purse and therefore vulnerable not only
to shifts in national prosperity, but also to both political priorities and
arguments about the social return to educational investment. Against a
general international background of pro-educational policies there have
been ebbs and flows of public confidence as to the desirability of expand-
ing post-compulsory schooling. If we recall Adam Smith’s remark that
the word ‘scholar’ had been synonymous with ‘beggar’ in the medieval
origins of the European university, we may thereby highlight the fact
that, in the debate leading to the expansions after the Second World
War, the perceived relationship between scholarship and society was vir-
tually reversed. Scholarship had been a decorative dependency; now it
became received opinion that society needed scholars and scientists to be
productively and efficiently modern. So it was out of conviction of its
usefulness that higher education was justified in the 1950s and 1960s.
The arguments, true or false, persuaded politicians and constituents that
the policy must be expansion. Progressive opinion held that the rise of the
graduate was to be of parallel historical importance to the rise of the gen-
try in the sixteenth century. Educational evolution was destined to pass
by stages from elite through mass to universal higher education. Down
the ages exemption from exacting, lifelong labour had been the privilege
of minorities, exploiting the gullibility, weakness or subservience of the
majority. But now, the higher literacy and numeracy of advanced society
was to be extended to all. The rich and privileged, of course, had always
had more or less rigorous and lengthy education and training for their
stations. These traditions, whether priestly or military, represented edu-
cation as an investment. Only for the aristocracy and bourgeoisie was
higher education in any serious sense a consumption good. But now,
backed by orthodox economic authority, it was increasingly possible to
think of education as investment in human social capital necessary for a
232
Admission
modern society, and appropriately undertaken by the state, with a wide
social distribution of education as consumption an appropriate and desir-
able consequence. Investment education was to be distributed by merit,
consumption education by democratic right.
Not until Fred Hirsch’s seminal Social Limits to Growth15 did educa-
tion, expanded and democratized, come to be seen as a positional good,
preserving scarcity and frustrating democracy. Expansion, it became
clear, does not automatically admit everyone to the educational franchise.
So long as jobs are allocated competitively according to certificates issued
by educational authorities, scarcity must persist. Education, accordingly,
remained a competitive struggle for positions in the queue for the more
desirable jobs. Social determinants of educability retained their impor-
tance along with a politics of education, which was increasingly focused
on the higher stages of schools and colleges.
Expansion, despite the student troubles in Paris, Nanterre, Berlin and
London in 1968, and American doubts about the graduate market, which
might have given pause, were also sources of news. There were virtually
inexhaustible questions about higher education, so recently an obscure
rite de passage in the late adolescence of tiny and irrelevant, if privi-
leged, minorities. What, where, how and to whom a vastly elaborated
higher education was to be given were now larger and absorbing new
questions. They emerged from a European society that was developing
serious unease about the serviceability of its established institutions – eco-
nomic, political and educational – for a future without the old external
assurances of empire and economic superiority, or the internal solidar-
ity of European civilization. The 1980s offered a thousand lessons in
disillusion, and the first of these was expansion itself.
During the 1970s there were successive reductions in anticipated stu-
dent numbers. In the preceding decade the age-participation rate had
doubled from 7 per cent to 14 per cent; but in the seventies it fell back
again. Moreover, this waning attractiveness of education beyond school
after the waxing hope and resolve of the later sixties portended ill for the
eighties and nineties, given the reduced birth rates. Here was the major
disillusion of the seventies: the demolition of the fond belief that universi-
ties and colleges had an assured and, for practical purposes, an unending
growth. Clearly, for the 1980s, either retrenchment or a sombrely revised
programme of educational expansion with very different assumptions
about the funding and working conditions of intellectual labour had to
come.
That had been the post-war history of the academy. Growth faltered in
the mid-seventies, but European national incomes rose again, at least for
15 F. Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, Mass., 1976).
233
A. H. Halsey
the majority, in the 1980s. Educational expansion continued, partly by
enlarging the definition of higher education, locating it in colleges that had
been previously allocated and administered under the heading of voca-
tional or, in Britain, ‘further’ education, and in the Open University as
well as in what had come to be labelled ‘conventional’ universities. Part-
time attendance and short courses multiplied, for example in the French
IUTs and other centres of short-cycle education and training beyond the
secondary school, thus adding to what was previously stereotyped as
a full-time, three-year, residential system for young men. Why did this
expansion, albeit in the form of increased but also devalued opportunity
for students and their teachers, continue and even become the first pri-
ority of both conservative and socialist parties? Why, admittedly after
dropping back to 12.5 per cent in 1979, did the British participation rate
for eighteen- to nineteen-year-olds rise to 16 per cent by 1989, with tar-
gets of one-third or more set for the end of the century? Taking a long
view it may be remarked that idleness has two closely related, but not
synonymous, alternatives: leisure and unemployment. The point of eco-
nomic growth is to achieve leisure, to avoid unemployment, and to profit
from a special post-industrial form of idleness, that which was praised
by Bertrand Russell: the release of scientists and scholars from mindless
toil so that they might invent more powerful modes of human command
over nature – material, aesthetic and moral. Higher education, on this
view, is a justified form of idleness without stigma. It is the use of idleness
to beget idleness, but the former is constructive research creativity, while
the latter is the leisure of a consequently more civilized society; neither
involves unemployment, except as failure.
Yet the 1970s in Europe saw a dramatic shift in our appreciation of
idleness. On one view the nations, whether victors or vanquished in the
second war, may be said to have reaped the reward of past labour and
past research, which is economic growth taken out in increased leisure.
On another view Europe entered a more conspicuously dangerous phase
of the so-called British disease, which is idleness in the form of over-
manning, the perpetual tea break, sleeping bags on the night shift and
so on. The parallel in the academy is clear. Both scientific productivity
and literary inventiveness necessitate leisure (the 1:8 ratio, the sabbatical,
the long vacation, ‘dons don’t keep hours’), and the whole point of it all
was to increase human domination of the universe so as to provide more
leisure for more civilized use. Again unemployment meant failure.
Then from the mid-seventies on, first in America and later in Europe,
came strident challenges to the justification of higher education. It was
bound to happen. Europe was adding more students in the quinquennium
of the early 1970s than the total attending universities before the war,
and 90 per cent of the cost was being provided directly by the state.
234
Admission
Academics had persuaded politicians, employers and philanthropists that
their wares were a paying investment for the nation as well as for indi-
viduals. Education was reckoned to yield a higher rate of return than
factories or machines. It was, moreover, claimed to be the source of
still higher rates of return in the future, because higher learning pro-
duced technological advance. Educational expansion was widely seen as
essential to competition in a global marketplace for increasingly skilled
labour in technologically advancing economies. These arguments justi-
fied the grandes écoles as well as Imperial College. Parallel arguments
had claimed that professors could guide politicians to good government.
Keynesian macro-economic demand management could be supplied to
governments and the international agencies of the European Communi-
ties and the OECD, and administrative intelligence could be recruited
from the École Nationale d’Administration. These claims now received
increasingly sceptical scrutiny as the bill for buildings, salaries and student
grants mounted, and finally came under direct attack especially on the
weakest flank, that of the recently expanded social sciences. Arguments
from utility had almost entirely displaced arguments from idleness. But
monetarist, market-oriented governments, determined to reduce public
expenditure, were temporarily unreceptive to both kinds of arguments
so that, for the first time, at least in living memory, the real resources of
higher education, as traditionally defined, began to fall. What was per-
haps especially remarkable about the 1980s was their illustration that ‘the
revolution of rising expectations’ was not the irresistible force that it had
commonly been supposed to be in the 1960s. Not only could utility argu-
ments be questioned, and social demand principles shown to be far from
inviolable, but the attractiveness of higher education itself (as manifested
in the demand for places from qualified secondary-school-leavers) could
decline. Somehow European society, by 1981, could find itself tolerating
mass involuntary idleness on the scale of the 1930s, despite the continua-
tion of social inequalities of access to universities and colleges which the
post-war and post-1968 reforms had been invented to eliminate. Unhap-
pily, then, the 1970s saw little progress towards the democratization of
leisure, which a modern system of higher or continuing education should
represent. Instead, the end of the decade saw governments, whether of
the left or of the right, groping for solutions to external checks on eco-
nomic growth, while the minority of the educated began to be more
sophisticated about the nature of education as a positional rather than
an investment or a consumption good, and the majority remained in
blighted ignorance that education had anything seriously constructive
to offer to either private or public life. Nevertheless, the story remains
unfinished. Both economic fortunes and political pressure moved in the
later 1980s. On the economic front a much disputed restructuring of
235
A. H. Halsey
the economy with an also disputed movement towards expansion of the
European Union had profound educational consequences. The achieve-
ment of competitive advantage impelled renewed educational expansion.
Invidious international comparison excited almost hysterical reorganiza-
tion of training arrangements and reinforced pressure towards vocational
education at all levels of schooling. From different standpoints and with
different assumptions, parties of the left, right and centre began to share
the view that a mass system of higher education was inevitable for the
twenty-first century. In the new educational era, mass higher education
would accommodate one school leaver in two. It must be immediately
added that plans for funding the new expansion remained vague. The
drive towards increasing reliance on tuition fees became a heated debate.
Governments also encouraged universities and colleges to seek funds from
the private sector, particularly from industry and commerce, benefac-
tors and alumni. A fair share of public expenditure is guaranteed to
higher education, but the final emphasis is on further efficiency, which
the embattled academics interpret as a levelling down of standards and
still further reduction of staff/student ratios. The struggle will doubt-
less continue well into the twenty-first century. But by the end of the
twentieth century one thing was sure: the binary line, to use the English
terminology, had lost its official status and a post-binary system had
begun.
select bibliography
Annan, N. Our Age, London, 1990.
Ashby, E. Education, Economy and Society, Chicago, 1961.
Boudon, R. Education, Opportunity and Social Inequality: Changing Prospects
in Western Society, New York and London, 1974.
Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.-C. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture,
London and Beverly Hills, Cal., 1977.
Carswell, J. Government and the Universities in Britain, Cambridge, 1985.
Collins, R. The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and
Stratification, New York, 1979.
Dore, R. P. The Diploma Disease, London, 1976.
Fulton, O. (ed.) Access to Higher Education, Guildford, 1981.
Gambetta, D. Were they Pushed or Did they Jump? Individual Decision Mecha-
nisms in Education, Cambridge, 1987.
Halsey, A. H., Heath, A. F., and Ridge, I. M. Origins and Destinations: Family,
Class, and Education in Modern Britain, Oxford, 1980.
Halsey, A. H. et al. ‘The Political Arithmetic of Public Schools’, in P. Walford
(ed.), British Public Schools, London, 1984.
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Higher Education: A New Framework, Cm. 1541 (White Paper presented to
Parliament), London, 1991.
Hirsch, F. Social Limits to Growth, Cambridge, Mass., 1976.
Husen, T., Tuijnman, A., and Halls, W. D. Schooling in Modern European Soci-
ety: A Report of the Academia Europaea, Oxford, 1992.
Kerr, C. The Uses of the University, Cambridge, Mass., 1963.
Kogan, M., and Kogan, D. The Attack on Higher Education, London, 1983.
Moberly, W. The Crisis in the University, London, 1949.
Moser, C., ‘Our Need for an Informed Society’, Presidential Address to British
Association for the Advancement of Science, London, 1990.
OECD. Ability and Educational Opportunity, ed. A.H. Halsey, Paris, 1961.
OECD. Education in OECD Countries 1986–87, Paris, 1989.
OECD. From Higher Education to Employment, Vol I: Australia, Austria,
Belgium, Germany, Paris, 1992
OECD. From Higher Education to Employment, Vol II: Canada, Denmark,
Spain, USA, Paris, 1992
OECD. From Higher Education to Employment, Vol. III: Finland, France, Italy,
Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Paris, 1992.
Ringer, F. K. Education and Society in Modern Europe, Bloomington, Ind., 1979.
Robbins Report. Higher Education: Report of the Committee Appointed by the
Prime Minister under the Chairmanship of Lord Robbins. 1961–63, Cmnd.
2154, London, 1963.
Shavit, Y., and Blossfeld, H.-P. (eds.) Persistent Inequality: Changing Educational
Attainment in Thirteen Countries, Boulder, Col. and London, 1993.
Shavit, Y., and Muller, W. (eds.) From School to Work: A Comparative Study of
Educational Qualifications and Occupational Destinations, Oxford, 1998.
237
CHAPTER 7
CURRICULUM, STUDENTS,
EDUCATION
SHELDON ROTHBLATT
the whirligig of change

At first glance no aspect of higher education appears to be more settled,
traditional and slower to change than the curriculum. No impression
could be more misleading. As we move across the map of Europe in the
last five decades, the subjects taught and studied, and the forms in which
they were taught and studied, changed continually. A very different type
of higher education had also appeared, the distance university, beginning
first in Britain and spreading out from there, providing the example of
how broadcasting technologies could reach wider publics. Consequently
the most salient development in the curriculum of the European university
in the second half of the twentieth century may be abruptly stated: all has
been and remains in flux. Venerable agreements about suitable instruc-
tion, training and apprenticeship were reconsidered and frequently and
repeatedly revised. Shared assumptions about what should be taught or
learned, the intensity and duration of degree and diploma programmes,
examination requirements, the depth of specialization, the correspon-
dence between curricula and labour markets, or the source of curricular
decision-making authority, all of these were constantly under review.
Options, choices and varieties of educational experiences once regarded
as inappropriate for Europe because they were American often became
the darlings of public policy. A greater willingness to experiment was
applauded by some, but ridiculed by others as faddism, consumerism or
capitulation to the whims and priorities of ministries and civil servants
concerned more about numbers and jobs than about education itself.
As the century closed, two contradictory trends were apparent. The first
was towards diversification of mission, instruction, course structure and
content, student preparation and career requirements for university-level
238
Curriculum, students, education
teachers. Innovations were so numerous that heirloom national charac-
teristics were harder to identify. Each innovation ramified to produce
another, and the variations within countries were sometimes as great
as between them. This was only partially true of France, which despite
participation in joint European research and educational schemes, still
retained many of its special dirigiste features. But even there academics
discussed ways of distinguishing a university from another by devising
unique learning opportunities (Spain as well) and to separate ideological
from non-ideological disciplines.
A second and opposite trend to diversification was the search for
international equivalences in programme, degrees, teaching and quality
inspired primarily by innumerable European-wide cooperative efforts,
student and faculty mobility and global competition for markets and
talent. Borrowings and cross-fertilization of ideas and structures were
stimulated by common research assumptions, especially in areas of appli-
cation centring on high technology, communications, public health, social
welfare, ecology and executive management.
Not all patterns established before 1946 were discarded. The lecture
system, although often transformed in spirit, remained the backbone of
teaching. Individual European states retained overall control of the struc-
ture of teaching, curricula and funding. Chair-holding professors still held
the dominant positions in the academic hierarchy. Traditional disciplines
remained the foundation of all university curricula. Despite undeniably
improved levels of inter-European cooperation, the underlying structures
of national systems still remained intact, however attenuated.1 But these
carry-overs now had to coexist with ongoing reforms and alterations.
The combined result of the two trends was a bewildering array of
specialized as well as general programmes of university study, absorbing
students with preparation ranging from excellent to indifferent and from
families long familiar with higher education to those with no sense of what
to expect. Elite universities, accustomed to admitting top undergraduates,
continued to do so even while curricular and system adjustments were
undertaken. Newer institutions, however, or those unable to be selective,
struggled against considerable obstacles to provide a good educational
experience for under-prepared students.
Over half of all French universities offered courses of study based on
a limited range of specialties in the 1990s.2 Yet another and different
1 U. Teichler, ‘Structures of Higher Education Systems in Europe’, in C. Oellert, Higher

Education in Europe (London and Philadelphia, 1993), 30–1.
2 G. Neave and R. Edelstein, ‘The Research Training System in France: A Microstudy of
Three Academic Disciplines’, in B. R. Clark (ed.), The Research Foundations of Graduate
Education: Germany, Britain, France, United States, Japan (Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London, 1993), 218 and passim.
239
Sheldon Rothblatt
pattern was for single institutions to increase course offerings by becom-
ing multiversities containing numerous styles of academic, research and
professional training programmes in the hope of fashioning multiple
revenue streams. The nineteenth-century ‘idea’ of a university as a
holistic, organic institution based on an inherent ‘essence’, customar-
ily expressed in the form of canonical studies (e.g., classics or phi-
losophy), virtually disappeared, to be invoked only when the complex
reality of the present appeared overwhelming. Institutions evolving into
the multiversity model soon found that the organization of studies,
whether by faculties, institutes, departments or clusters, had dissolved
into a universe so decentralized that scholars and scientists named col-
leagues in other institutions or even countries as their closest associates
and friends. ‘Invisible colleges’ flourished, aided by electronic commu-
nication and jet aircraft, and the frequent absence of academics from
their home institutions raised questions about undergraduate teaching
commitments.
Metamorphoses in curriculum and teaching occurring after 1946 or
1950 or 1970 can be symbolically described as architecturally baroque.
In the great palaces and churches of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, the grammatical components – orders, pilasters, arches, attics,
fenestration – were recognizably classical, but the syntax, the arrange-
ment of the parts, was novel and unprecedented. The whole, superfi-
cially familiar, was in reality filled with inspiration of a different source
and magnitude. And like the baroque, higher education policy and prac-
tice in Europe seemed incoherent, each aspect of it struggling for clarity
against the other. The governments of Europe had weakened but hardly
abandoned time-honoured control over many features of the higher-
education system. Rigid regulation was replaced by a policy of steer-
ing and frameworks allowing for some research and curricular initiative.
Experiments with market discipline – ‘privatization’ as it was called –
were tried as an alternative to central regulation and cost control.
Many universities and their constituent parts were able to experiment
with greater latitude in some specific areas of course design, teach-
ing, appointments, remuneration or the kind, duration and content of
examinations. Students themselves were presented with a wider range of
curricular options. Some countries, or some universities, went much fur-
ther along these lines than others. From the standpoint of governments,
markets were a possible means of improving efficiency and account-
ability. From the perspective of the universities, they were a means of
keeping governments at a distance. But ‘privatization’ was not synony-
mous with private. It meant loosening government control not aban-
doning it. Although more private colleges or specialized schools were in
fact established in the last decades of the twentieth century, including
240
one undergraduate university in England, the University of Buckingham,
government remained the primary source of all higher-education
funding.
Throughout the history of the European university the curriculum had
been a warring ground for rival conceptions of education, and not merely
because of the different requirements of students or occupations. Schol-
ars and scientists often disagreed amongst themselves on the rank order
of disciplines and approaches to study. ‘Basic’ knowledge, for example,
or ‘pure’ research was deemed to be of superior intellectual and cogni-
tive worth to ‘applied’ or technical knowledge. Quarrels occurred over
the meaning of specialization and the depth of study to which students
were to be exposed. The debates were real but also puzzling. In many
fields of engineering or biological and chemical science, the distinction
between basic and applied research was fuzzy. Academics defining them-
selves as ‘theorists’ were to be found in schools and faculties devoted
to vocational or professional education, the reverse being equally true.
Consequently, the ‘books’ in the age-old battles of books did not eas-
ily separate into clear-cut categories. Even in Jonathan Swift’s celebrated
archetypal allegory of 1704 on the quarrel between ancient and mod-
ern texts, the ancients were sometimes moderns and the moderns possi-
bly ancients. The distinction often lay in the spirit in which an author
wrote rather than the time period in which he (and occasionally she)
lived.
Yet in 1946 or 1950 the definition of a university still seemed to depend
upon whether it was expected to emphasize the theoretical aspects of
knowledge, while a technical institution implied practical or vocational
objectives. Technical education, however, was itself diverse and ranged
from the acquisition of specific skills and proficiencies aimed at market
entry to advanced levels where high technology could scarcely be sepa-
rated from the supposed purer forms of science itself. Consequently, it
became increasingly awkward to determine just how the standards of
teaching, or the content of a curriculum, differed from one sector of
higher education to another. Possibly this is one of several major rea-
sons why all European education ministries or professional associations
or individual institutions became so obsessed with questions concern-
ing the evaluation of curricula, the measurement of teaching outputs,
the effectiveness of courses, innovations in programme and pedagogy or
the quality of research. Admittedly, the obsession was greater in coun-
tries like the UK and the Netherlands than elsewhere, especially the first,
but Eastern and Central European institutions, shaking off the effects
of Communist Party domination, also began to consider similar con-
cerns while seeking to improve their educational inheritance. Missions,
disciplines and subjects overlapped. Engineering was taught in technical
241
Sheldon Rothblatt
institutes and other highly specialized schools, but also in universities,
and, to make the situation yet more puzzling, countries like Austria and
Germany had Technische Hochschulen, a category that could include
economics and business administration. Unless constrained by govern-
ment policy, as in the case of the binary systems of the UK, where
polytechnics were officially separated from universities until the early
1990s, or the Netherlands where the Hoger beroeps onderwijs sector,
despite being elevated from secondary-school status in the 1980s, was
still poly-technical, institutions without the historical prestige of univer-
sities tried to gain it. Some tended to drift upwards to a point where
they demanded from government the same unit of resource as universi-
ties, as well as the same historical right to grant the highest degrees or
conduct research. Their curricula tended to take on some of the charac-
teristics of the older university sector, emulating established courses of
instruction.
Actually, battles of the books notwithstanding, the broadening of the
definition of a university education was long in the making. It was at
least as old as the nineteenth century, and in some respects harkened
back to the Enlightenment. Quantitatively, however, the diversification
of the university curriculum was relatively recent, and the pace and rate
of the transformation were so swift that historians may be excused for
thinking that a qualitative change had also taken place.
Some institutional roles and missions remained fundamentally unaf-
fected by other changes. In France, specialized engineering and other voca-
tional institutions, schools called grandes écoles or écoles supérieures,
several private and others public, continued to enjoy even higher pres-
tige than universities. Their demanding competitive entrance require-
ments remained intact. Historically focused on professional training
for teaching, public service, business and teaching careers, the grandes
écoles acquired a doctoral preparatory teaching function in the 1980s.3
In Lyngby (near Copenhagen), Stockholm, Lausanne, Zurich, Berlin,
Munich, Vienna and London very high-level engineering establishments
long existed, most since the nineteenth century, that were ranked amongst
their countries’ most elite educational institutions. Within them, the
teaching of relevant history and social science courses also took place
(e.g., the teaching of the history of science and technology at the Royal
Institute of Technology in Sweden).
3 Postgraduate Research Training Today: Emerging Structures for a Changing Europe,

Report of the Temporary International Consultative Committee on New Organizational
Forms of Graduate Research Training (Ministry of Education and Science, the Nether-
lands, 1991), 14. Also for France the entry by C. Durand-Prinborgne in Clark and Neave,
Encyclopedia I, 217–24.
242
responsibility for curriculum and teaching

University-level studies in Europe were customarily arranged into large
groupings called ‘faculties’, a structure dating back to the origins of
universities. At Oxford or Cambridge, other structures had come into
being, such as ‘boards of studies’ or ‘schools’. Faculties were further sub-
divided into disciplinary or subject ‘departments’, usually called ‘insti-
tutes’ on the Continent. In Sweden, a department could be further sub-
divided into an avdelning. From at least the eighteenth century onwards,
the faculty of philosophy in the German system, a descendant of the
medieval ‘minor’ or ‘arts’ faculty, was regarded as the carrier of the high-
est ideals of learning, untainted by the compromises required of merely
practical subjects. (But law and medicine, with as respectable a lineage
as the faculty of philosophy, escaped the pejorative meaning of ‘utility’.)
Philosophy contained the disciplines comprising liberal education, called
by different names in different European traditions (Bildung in Germany,
bildning in Sweden). No single definition prevailed. A common theme
running through all national traditions, however, was that a university
education, or some significant element of it, should ideally permit sig-
nificant self-development and should permanently affect the moral and
intellectual character of those who were fortunate to have one. Main-
taining that commitment, however, proved to be daunting. The internal
unity required to feature liberal education was no longer available, and
the demands for applied knowledge outraced the desires to be liberally
educated. The issue continued to divide academic feeling throughout the
period.
The organization of knowledge and teaching embodied in the faculty
structure, limited to three and sometimes four faculties in the medieval
university, and in some cases to virtually one, had widened as the centuries
succeeded one another. By the 1990s there no longer existed an absolutely
single type of university curricular faculty structure. In 1994 in the Charles
University of Prague, to take what appears to be a characteristic example
of the changes, there were faculties of medicine (more than one in fact),
pharmacy, natural sciences, mathematics and physics, pedagogy, social
sciences, physical education and sport, arts and philosophy; but given the
special religious history of Czechoslovakia, separate faculties also existed
for Roman Catholic, Protestant and Hussite theology, a partitioning true
of other universities in regions with a plural religious history, such as
the University of Strasbourg with faculties for Protestant and Roman
Catholic religious studies.
Particularly in the Stalinist era of communist Eastern Europe, the tra-
ditional faculties were replaced by more specialized institutions oriented
toward the socialist doctrine of a planned economy. A University of
243
Sheldon Rothblatt
Economics was established in Hungary in 1948, followed by a University
of Heavy Industries the next year and a University of Chemical Industry in
1951. Then came the Budapest University of Sciences. Curiously enough,
such specialized universities were compatible with Hungarian reforms of
an earlier, non-communist period, as represented by the Hungarian Agri-
cultural University founded in 1945 before the communist takeover.4 A
University of Economics existed in Prague.5 But highly specialized univer-
sities also existed in Western Europe. A University of Mining was situated
in Leoben in Austria, and a new University of Educational Sciences was
started in Klagenfurt in 1970.
However organized or subdivided, faculties embraced a broad array
of specialties, disciplines and instruction ranging from professional edu-
cation in subjects like medicine to elementary and advanced instruction
in the basic sciences or fields of knowledge. Seldom had two universi-
ties, even within the same country, exactly the same kind or number of
faculties, nor could their departmental course offerings be guessed from
name alone. The faculty of natural science at Charles University provided
instruction in biology, chemistry, environmental protection, geography,
demography and geology. A second faculty of medicine contained spe-
cialties in paediatrics, oncology, dentistry and infectious diseases. Before
1964 the social sciences in Sweden were normally included with human-
ities in a faculty of philosophy. Most philosophical faculties in European
universities had been split into the faculty of arts, humanities, letters and
the faculty of exact and natural sciences. But the medieval unity of the
liberal arts faculty followed by the German philosophical faculty still pre-
vailed at Cologne, Kiel and Marburg until the 1960s, in Vienna and Graz
until 1975.6 Law was often paired with political science. Sociology was
joined in a department with social work at Oxford, whereas many insti-
tutions would have separated an academic discipline from a vocationally
oriented body of preparation. In the nineteenth century such pairings
were common as some disciplines were too recent to have achieved full
autonomy. Anthropology was joined to history at Cambridge University,
psychology had not yet achieved independence from moral or ‘mental’
philosophy. In Poland before 1962, the faculty of education (pedagogy)
was generally separate from humanities (or arts), but the two merged in
4 Communication from László Szögi, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and entry on
‘Hungary’ by I. Vegvari in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 291–300. Cf. Appendix:
‘Universities founded in Europe between 1945 and 1995’.
5 Higher Education in the Czech Republic (Prague, 1995); J. Kotâsek, ‘Visions of Edu-
cational Development in the Post-Socialist Era’, International Review of Education, 39
(1993), 473–87.
6 Concerning the secession of the natural sciences from the philosophical faculty see
vol. III, 454f.
244
1962. Linz, a post-war Austrian university, did not have a humanities fac-
ulty. Klagenfurt and Salzburg did not have medicine. In some countries
mathematics was included in the basic sciences, sometimes in engineering,
or in both. Chemistry could be found alone in its own faculty or partnered
with chemical engineering. Architecture wandered in search of a home
from philosophy to engineering. A faculty of agriculture might include
veterinary science, but the latter could also be included within medicine.
The curricular significance of such unions and collaborations is a subject
in itself; but it is not difficult to imagine how the subordination of one
discipline to another affected the development of an independent set of
methods and ideas, or how a theoretical subject impacted upon a utilitar-
ian one. For supporters of one historical idea of the university as a source
of knowledge rather than as a training ground for occupations, an empha-
sis on theory and conceptualization equalled the difference between a
university and a technical institute. On the Continent, responsibility for
instruction continued to rest on a hierarchical arrangement of teaching
ranks, with ‘ordinary professors’ or chair-holders, Ordinarien, in the well-
known German title, at the top of a pyramid of status and authority and
collected into faculties.7 Beneath them in rank, but not always in actual
classroom duties, came assistants, usually working for higher degrees and
lecturers, lecteurs, lettori, Lektoren. In some British universities, praelec-
tors were employed for the teaching of foreign languages. There were
also ‘readers’, a rank just below that of chair-holder. Docents existed in
some systems as assistant teachers but in some countries independent.
Their duties were sometimes confined only to research, but the responsi-
bilities attached to the category of docent changed so much in the period
under discussion that an adequate summary is awkward. There were also
extraordinary professors whose status varied throughout Europe. They
were sometimes akin to what in America was called an ‘adjunct profes-
sor’, someone in private professional practice who taught occasionally
and sporadically, often in specialties otherwise unavailable in the univer-
sities. Professoren auf Zeit in Austria were used in the medical faculties,
but sometimes the professors extraordinary enjoyed security of employ-
ment and taught the same courses as the ordinary chair-holders. The
expansion of higher-education opportunities and the vast increase in the
numbers of undergraduates and postgraduates attending European uni-
versities in the period after the Second World War, as well as an enormous
increase in specialities and the availability of courses, inevitably affected
the inherited system of teaching and appointments.
‘Democracy’ would be too strong a word to indicate the direction of
change, but it has some relevance. The decline in the influence of older
245
Sheldon Rothblatt
elites, the broadening of voter participation and the strength of pub-
lic opinion and consumer pressure opened the academic profession to
American-type influences. A certain levelling of the ranks occurred, with
junior members of the faculties given more authority in devising and
teaching their own courses. The American system of upward, scheduled
mobility through the ranks was looked upon with more favour in various
countries, and the American practice of rotating the heads of disciplinary
departments was adopted in particular universities so that ranks other
than the ordinary professors enjoyed significant administrative respon-
sibilities. In general, the professorial role remained what it had usually
been. Lecturing to undergraduates was part of it, but professors were
expected to devote more of their time to research and postgraduate train-
ing. As the gaining of a professorship was the reward for distinction in
science and scholarship and as professors were expected to continue in
this vein, their undergraduate teaching assignments were reduced. But,
as in the United States, the difference in mission and authority between
senior and more junior academics was diminishing, and the responsibili-
ties began to overlap. In Norway the advent of a career promotion system
led to a distinct blurring of teaching loads between the ranks.
The Norwegian universities altered their version of the German system
as early as the 1960s. In general, the trend was supported by trade union
agreements. The Swedish case is particularly useful in illuminating the
responses to a demand for teaching. Until the end of the 1950s the chair-
holder system was largely intact. Professors had assistants and docents.
In a few cases instructors called ‘preceptors’ taught in humanities and
social science courses while ‘prosectors’ helped in medicine and science
laboratories. A boom in enrolments in the 1960s led to the introduction
of a new ‘senior lecturer’ category to teach undergraduates. The speed of
the hiring meant that possession of a doctorate, the usual qualification,
could not at first be insisted upon. By the 1970s senior lecturers had
gained the right to teach at all levels. Yet despite the necessity for wider
consultation on teaching and curricula, the senior professoriate retained
some of its traditional authority, usually by constituting a voting majority
even in the strongly social democratic Nordic countries.
The relevance of changes in the structure of authority within the aca-
demic ranks to the history of curricula should be apparent. While hardly
the only reason for the development of a highly diversified system of
course offerings, a softening of the hierarchical differences between the
academic strata and the wider distribution of authority that resulted
facilitated the advance of highly diversified curricula, allowing supply to
accommodate student and labour market demands, a factor of growing
significance. In Soviet-dominated educational systems, however, student
curricular choice was severely restricted. All higher-education candidates
246
had to follow a closely prescribed set of courses once they had gained
entry to a specific programme. All students had to undergo compulsory
teaching in the theories of dialectical materialism and were subjected to
doctrinaire teaching. In the satellite states the teaching of the Russian
language was compulsory. But countries like Poland expressed a taste
for national independence from Moscow, leading to a somewhat more
open curriculum, which even allowed for the dropping of the mandatory
teaching of Marxist doctrine.8
Stronger disciplinary departments characterized some of the reforming
trends of the last decades of the twentieth century. Usually subordinate
to the faculties, whose governance in the old system was dominated by
professors and deans, the department format featured enhanced control
over curricula by its members, as well as permitting more of an emphasis
on disciplinary specialism and sub-specialism. While hardly universal, the
strong department was sometimes an aim of government policy, as in the
reforms of 1991 in Spain. But other structural reforms in Europe led in an
opposite direction, away from specialized work to broader educational
intentions. New groupings of disciplines and methods were adopted in
order to bypass both faculties and departments – although perhaps more
in the spirit of the first than of the second – and to further linkages
between emerging areas of research inquiry. The School of British and
American Studies or the School of European Studies at Sussex University,
established as a new university in 1960, were undertaken as an alterna-
tive to conventional departments. In the 1990s, sometime polytechnics
upgraded to university standing, such as Leeds Metropolitan University,
created multidisciplinary groupings called ‘cultural studies’, mixing the
social sciences and humanities, often within newer paradigms that had
8 For here and the national information that follows: on Austria from Hans Pechar, Min-
istry of Higher Education and Research, Vienna, and Karl-Heinz Gruber, University of
Vienna. Also Higher Education in Austria (Bucharest, 1987). On Germany, information
from Walter Rüegg, Switzerland; see also C. Gellert, ‘The German Model of Research
and Advanced Education’, in Clark, Research Foundations (note 2), 5–44, and M. Heine-
mann, ‘The German Universities after the Second World War’, in A. Romano and J.
Verger (eds.), I poteri politici e il mondo universitario (XIII–XX secolo): Atti del Con-
vegno Internazionale (Madrid, 28–30 agosto 1990) (Soveria Mannelli, 1994), 257–75.
Cf. Appendix: ‘Universities founded in Europe between 1945 and 1995’. For information
on Eastern Europe generally, see J. Sadlak, ‘Legacy and Change – Higher Education and
Restoration of Academic Work in Romania’, Technology in Society, 15 (1993), 75–100,
and J. Sadlak, ‘In Search of the “Post-Communist University” – the Background and
Scenario of the Transformation of Higher Education in Central and Eastern Europe’,
in K. Hüfner (ed.), Higher Education Reform Processes in Central and Eastern Europe
(Frankfurt/Main, 1994), 43–62, and J. Sadlak, ‘The Emergence of a Diversified System:
The State/Private Predicament in Transforming Higher Education in Romania’, Euro-
pean Journal of Education, 29 (1994), 13–23. Also J. Szczepanski, Higher Education in
Eastern Europe, Occasional paper – International Council for Educational Development,
12 (S.l., 1974). Information on Russia communicated by A. A. Russalinova and I. V.
Komarov.
247
Sheldon Rothblatt
emerged as a consequence of linguistic, anthropological and philosophi-
cal theories developed in France and widely adopted in America. In the
spirit of the German faculty of philosophy of a prior century, Dutch uni-
versities of the 1990s contemplated the possibility of closely integrating
the different studies offered in a given faculty.
Multidisciplinary studies and the cross-fertilization of ‘autonomous’
disciplines were part of an international movement in higher education
that accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s. But curricular innovations were
also driven by the American principle of institutional competition, long
shunned in Europe as demeaning and market directed. In order to attract
students, funding and public attention, universities, particularly recent
foundations, could offer newer types of subjects and methods of possible
consumer interest. However, the capacity to compete largely depended
upon whether an institution had full control over its course offerings,
which was not equally true in all countries. In France and Germany
institutional innovation was controlled from the outside to a greater
degree than existed elsewhere in Western Europe. In France the uni-
versity faculties, subject to the remarkable rationalizing tendencies of
the French state, even lost their role in curricular development which
was entirely controlled by the Ministry of Education. The university law
of 1968 established the universities as networks of disciplinary depart-
ments called unités d’enseignement et de recherche and, later, unités de
formation et de recherche (UFR). In Germany the Fakultätentage (meet-
ings of all German faculties in the same disciplinary fields) were given
the assignment of preparing and revising examination guidelines
(Rahmenprüfungsordnungen) to be approved by the Conference of the
Education Ministers of the Länder and the Conference of University Rec-
tors. They were also consulted on experimental study programmes.
For undergraduates,9 every higher-education system employed a num-
ber of different teaching formats. Lecturing by professorial chair-holders
or by lecturers holding a less exalted rank was customary, yet smaller
discussion classes led by junior teachers or assistants were also avail-
able, if less pronounced.10 The most intensive teaching took place, as it
had for centuries, in British tutorial systems, especially in the collegiate
structures of Oxford and Cambridge. Customarily face-to-face teach-
ing, tutorials in the sciences also included more than one student at a
time. The reforms of 1983 in Spain had many consequences, but one
of them was the greater use of postgraduate students to supervise prac-
tical work in subjects like biology,11 possibly because of the shortages
9 The word is an English neologism of the sixteenth century and was connected to the
stronger teaching role assigned Oxbridge colleges in the age of the Reformation.
10 Cf. chapter 5 (‘Teachers’).
11 Entry on ‘Spain’ by J. L. Garcia-Garrido in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 676–9.
248
in teaching staff created by the rapid expansion in enrolments. The French
universities also made better use of younger staff than had been the prac-
tice, as did the Netherlands. Formats that stressed student teamwork in
the model of an American import called ‘problem-based learning’ were
first introduced in the 1970s in the medical faculty of the University of
Limburg in Maastricht and subsequently extended to law. In the law fac-
ulty, small groups of students led either by peers selected from among
third- and fourth-year students, or staff tutors, met twice weekly for two
hours. A preliminary review of two control groups suggested that senior
student leaders were as successful as senior staff in imparting informa-
tion and encouraging self-review. Roskilde University just outside Copen-
hagen was well into problem-based learning in the 1990s. Undergradu-
ates, organized into small topic study groups, met alone or with advisers
(vejledere). Ample time was scheduled for intense discussion, critiques,
writing and examinations.12 How widely influential the problem-based-
learning model would become was a matter for speculation; but it had
obvious relevance to other university systems for two reasons. The first
was as a means for challenging ingrained habits of passive learning by
encouraging student teamwork and self and peer assessment, and the
second as a possible path to cost-effective instruction. Even earlier in
the 1970s, Swedish educational researchers had begun to consider an
‘anthropological’ approach to evaluation as a method for stimulating
students to undertake self-assessment. This was contrasted to the ‘agri-
cultural botany’ model. The prior knowledge of students, student leaders
and staff was obviously relevant.
Cambridge University adopted radical departures from its traditional
modes of transmitting knowledge. Certain skills once taken for granted
had declined, while others, unknown fifty years ago and scarcely known
before the 1970s, seemed to be commonplace. Entering students were
computer literate and aware of how to use electronic media to obtain
research information, but language competence – not just speaking but
basic grammatical proficiency, English, foreign or classical – had greatly
diminished. Both changes reflected curricular revision in secondary feeder
schools. The teaching of history, once a pre-eminent school subject,
appeared to have been neglected, even the teaching of English history.
In geography the situation was serious enough to have produced a deci-
sion to drop the history component some twenty years before. The dons
decided to build upon the new student competences in order to restore
the lost proficiencies. Computer literacy meant that valuable use could
12 J. C. Moust and H. G. Schmidt, ‘Effects of Staff and Student Tutors on Student Achieve-
ment’, Higher Education, 28 (1994), 471–82. Information on Roskilde supplied by Brian
McGuire.
249
Sheldon Rothblatt
be made of European television satellite links in laboratory-based lan-
guage learning, but instructors also started employing more intensive
language methods, ‘total immersion’ and interactive techniques, to restore
the foreign-language skills missing from student preparation. More and
more teaching was undertaken in teams, especially in courses regarded as
‘core’ or ‘foundation’. This format permitted heavier emphasis on inter-
disciplinary learning and attention to ‘themes’ rather than chronological
periods in such subjects as history. Interactive teaching technologies also
meant that undergraduates could be exposed to the methods of research,
and this tendency alone allowed for thesis options to be joined to terminal
examinations for purposes of determining the level of degree quality. It
also meant that students were given more freedom in choosing exami-
nation topics. In the context of the history of Cambridge written exami-
nations, which date back to the 1750s, the new freedoms were a radical
departure. In some areas of the curriculum even the lecture format was
modified, becoming less of a set piece with rhetorical flourishes than an
informal presentation where the lecturer attempted to ‘involve’ students
by permitting interruptions and discussions.13 These introductions sug-
gested that the undisputed reign of the unseen examination paper had
declined in overall importance.
No innovation is without its critics. Some Cambridge dons complained
that the emphasis on the techniques of learning and on carefully devised
structures for teaching did not encourage self-reliance but quite the oppo-
site. The changes meant that undergraduates were being ‘force fed’.14
Some suspected that, whatever the good intentions behind the reforms,
they and other changes in the United Kingdom were actually a response
to government assessment and efficiency strategies, as for example, in the
use of visiting teams from the Quality Assessment Unit of the Higher Edu-
cation Funding Council. The accusation doubtless contained some truth;
but it is inconceivable that any university in Europe in the second half
of the twentieth century could have remained unaffected by the multiple
outside pressures acting upon higher education. The only uncertainty was
the exact character of the response.
Teaching was probably more ex cathedra in Italy, Iberia and France (or
Wallonia in Belgium) than in Germany or the UK. In Italy student passiv-
ity was common because of the strict examination and study requirements
in a given field of study. However, after 1970, students were encouraged
to be more outspoken, and what followed, in the words of one observer,
was an ‘excessive liberalism’, particularly in humanistic subjects or fields
regarded as less ‘demanding’. In general, very broad distinctions between
13 J. Gregson, ‘Ars Docendi, Artium Liberalium’, Cam (Cambridge University Alumni
Magazine) (Michaelmas 1993), 8.
14 Gregson, ‘Ars Docendi’ (note 13), 7.
250
Mediterranean and northern European styles of teaching began to dis-
solve in the periods of active reforms from the 1960s onwards. Passive
learning was held to be out of step with the need for greater individual
resourcefulness and initiative in an age of democracy and information
technology. It was remembered that once-upon-a-time in the ideal Hum-
boldtian system, Lehrfreiheit may have been the special prerogative of
the professor, allowing him to follow the argument according to his best
judgment and knowledge of the sources and to teach accordingly, but
Lernfreiheit, the freedom to acquire knowledge and express it, was the
special prerogative of the student. Only if the student was self-directed
could he eventually become properly educated (gebildet).
One conspicuous development that resists measurement was a certain
informality in teaching that has already been alluded to. The tutorial
system in the United Kingdom had always lent itself to casual communi-
cation, and in certain historical periods the tutors, being very young, were
virtually in the same peer group as their charges. But although tutorial
instruction was the backbone of elite education in the United Kingdom,
its survival in an era of mass access education was questionable. Not all
UK universities possessed adequate resources to support tutorial instruc-
tion, which depended upon high staffing ratios, usually 1:8 or 1:10, the
benchmark ratios for elite instruction. The provision for tutorial instruc-
tion and the mix of professorial lecturing and small classes varied between
Oxford and Cambridge, the University of London and the civic, Scottish,
Irish and Welsh universities. Yet, even in the ancient collegiate universi-
ties, a shift was occurring to stronger university as opposed to collegiate
teaching programmes owing to a heavy emphasis on research, on the
training of postgraduate students and on the basis of eagerly sought-after
industry funding.
While UK universities struggled to retain high-cost tutorial instruction,
or partial tutorials where lecturing was the principal mode of teaching,
the unprecedented increase in student numbers in Europe created open-
ings for younger (and less expensive) staff. There was need for a fuller
use of the services of more advanced students and doctoral candidates.
In France, Austria and Germany the overflow of entering students was
so great that under-prepared teachers and assistants were employed in
large numbers, giving rise to an ‘instructor class’.15 Numbers affected
all parts of the university inheritance and required more attention to be
given to questions of teaching, since the older assumption that students
could well fend for themselves, or call upon the university experience
of friends and family, no longer seemed tenable. There were simply too
15 G. Neave, ‘Séparation de corps: The Training of Advanced Students and the Organization
of Research in France’, in Clark, Research Foundations (note 2), 159–91.
251
Sheldon Rothblatt
many students attending university whose families had never been there.
Observers called for better advising, counselling, guidance and other stu-
dent services hitherto virtually unknown in Europe, especially on the
Continent.16
Despite the increased employment of younger staff and postgraduate
students, maintaining decent teaching ratios in an era of high-cost uni-
versities was a universal difficulty. On the Continent teaching ratios fell,
rose and fell again after the 1950s, with the figures oscillating some-
where in the 1:20 or 1:27 range. Existing national statistics are usually
aggregates and are consequently an imperfect guide to teacher–student
communication. To give but one sign of the difficulty, in the Norwegian
universities of 1984 teacher–student ratios stretched from a comfortable
1:11 in the faculty of humanities to an impossible 1:67 in law,17 but even
the attractive humanities ratio is hardly a guide to the actual division
between teaching and research or to the time really spent in personal
communication with individual undergraduates.
Furthermore, as the Norwegian example illustrates, universities dis-
tribute their internal teaching resources unevenly often to allow one kind
of course to subsidize another, to free up time for graduate student edu-
cation, for example, or to use courses with large lecture attendance to
allow for the provision of smaller classes in special subjects and fields.
Still, the overall picture was not encouraging. The pressures of numbers
and the expense of maintaining staffing ratios in the vicinity of 1:10 or
1:12 meant that only a few universities would henceforth qualify for elite
standing in that respect.
Ratios tell a story, but we need to go beyond them to grasp another
aspect of teaching, one that cannot be measured by any historical calculus.
Within any teaching structure, conventional or innovative and including
the tutorial system, styles of personal communication differed and have
always varied so greatly that all that can possibly be said by way of
summary is that the art and manner of communicating knowledge are
themselves part of any curriculum. Separating the cognitive content of
a subject from the way in which it is presented is impossible since the
personality of the instructor is itself always a factor in learning. Often
enough, the impact of that personality will have an effect more lasting
than what was actually taught, since information is frequently forgotten,
but a human relationship rarely so.
Every higher-education institution subjected students to the tyranny
of oral or written examinations, often both, and required them to write
16 G. Layer, ‘Student Guidance and Support – Changing the Approach’, in M. A. Slowey
(ed.), Implementing Change from within Universities and Colleges (London, 1995), 123.
17 Entry on ‘Norway’ by S. Vangsnes and K. Jordell in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I,
524–34, and communication from Sivert Langholm.
252
essays or theses, but the use of such hallowed measurements of achieve-
ment was by no means uniform throughout Europe. Quality control in
many countries was maintained by the requirement of state-generated
terminal examinations, thus avoiding the difficulties that typified the
American course structure where the same instructor both taught and
examined in a given class, and degrees were awarded not on the basis of
a final comprehensive examination but as the result of the accumulation
of a certain number of courses or credit hours.
Yet in many countries considerable modifications occurred in the inher-
ited system of terminal examinations, with some countries adopting the
American-style modular system of courses and others reducing a heavy
reliance on terminal examinations by using other forms of assessment in
conjunction with them, such as intermediate examinations. In the Soviet
Union before and after the economic and political liberalization known
as perestroika and glasnost, university examinations were a combination
of biannual examinations (mainly oral) and a final state-set examination,
with or without a ‘senior’ or graduation thesis. However, a parallel system
of continuous assessment was also in place. In Belgium and Yugoslavia
but mainly in the Italian university system, the qualifications for the lau-
rea (the first degree) still depended primarily upon oral examinations.
Extremely brief, these were preceded by a written thesis. Professors com-
plained about the burden of examining but did little to alter the situation.
In Norway, England, Scotland and Ireland terminal examinations given
after three or four years of study remained typical but with the modi-
fications mentioned earlier. To assure objectivity, written examinations
were blindly marked by more than one examiner and were sometimes (in
Norway frequently) combined with oral examinations. Comprehensive,
written terminal examinations and the use of external examiners were the
rule in the UK until the wider adoption at some universities and former
polytechnics of modularized or self-contained courses in the 1980s and
1990s, for example, at the Queen’s University of Belfast and the New
University of Ulster founded in 1968.
diplomas and degrees

In every country the package of teaching, written exercises and exami-
nations, when successfully mastered, yielded a certificate or other ‘paper’
proof of completed academic work. In Europe, the degree, diploma or
licence had usually been ‘protected’. The authority to grant awards was
customarily assumed by the state – such was certainly the case in Russia,
other communist countries, and France or Germany. In the UK any
institution legally designated as a ‘university’ by the Privy Council (upon
which members of the governing Cabinet sat) was empowered to award
253
Sheldon Rothblatt
its own degrees. By contrast, students attending the polytechnics received
their degrees from a national body created for that purpose called the
Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA).18 Austria, which had
no non-university or polytechnic sector until the mid-1990s, created for
these new actors a similar accrediting body called the Fachhochschulrat.
Institutions without university status could not award degrees but offered
diplomas, an award that was also available for certain types of courses in
degree-granting institutions. Portugal retained a separation between uni-
versities and more technical institutions, as did Germany, Belgium and
the Netherlands. In Finland, a vocational sector (AMK) was created ex
nihilo to relieve pressure on universities.
The University of London, founded in 1836, was the historical model
for the CNAA. Two university colleges had been founded earlier, and
both demanded the right to give degrees. For religious and other reasons,
and given the conception of a university derived from history, the Privy
Council was reluctant to grant the new colleges a privilege regarded
as unique. The resulting compromise was the creation of a ‘University
of London’ that was no more than a tiny body of corporate fellows
empowered to authorize and set examinations and to award degrees.
This special system, unprecedented in any other country, became the
instrument by which the new teaching colleges of the British Empire
and Dominions were able to secure degrees for their graduates. As the
decades passed, the University of London became a wholly federated
university consisting of university colleges, nearly independent specialized
schools, and hospitals. In the 1990s, however, the constituent institutions
of the University of London’s federal system began to clamour for greater
degree-giving autonomy and closer control over their own examinations,
the Imperial College of Technology (later to acquire several teaching
hospitals) being foremost amongst them.
The normal degree course in the universities of the English-speaking
world was three or four years in length, yielding a bachelor’s degree,
except in Scotland where the historical practice of conferring a mas-
ter’s degree as the first award was maintained. In France, Spain, the
Netherlands and Germany, students advanced towards formal qualifica-
tion through a trio of phases – fase in Dutch, cycles in French. The third
phase comprised instruction considered to be advanced or, in UK terms,
postgraduate. First- and second-cycle work in France was divided into
separate tracks, some of which led to vocational qualifications or prepa-
ration for school teaching. Each of the three cycles was of two years’
18 By the end of the last decade of the century, the privilege of being able to award
degrees in Britain was granted more freely as the so-called ‘binary line’ legally separating
universities and polytechnics was erased by act of Parliament. Polytechnics could now
ask for university status and degree-granting power.
254
duration (students routinely took three), and each was a hurdle to be
overcome before the next could be encountered. Completion of the sec-
ond cycle led to a diplôme d’études universitaires générales (DEUG). A
third cycle was reserved for students willing to undertake research train-
ing for a maı̂trise leading later to a possible doctorat de troisième cycle. In
the Dutch case, students were asked to complete their first two fase within
a four-year period or risked losing state financial support. In Spain the
system of cycles was close to the French after the reforms of the 1980s.
The first two cycles together covered about five years, but subsequent
reforms in 1991 made completion possible within four. A third cycle
involved advanced work. Time to degree in Portuguese universities was
from four to six years, depending upon field. The polytechnic sector con-
ferred a bacharaleto after three years, a more specialized diploma after
two more.19 In Germany a first degree equivalent could take as long as
six to seven years. The work for a Magister was seven-and-a-half years
on average in Austria.
It is nearly impossible to correlate first-degree level awards or second
cycle completions with the length of study, the quality of a student’s
performance, or the status and employment ‘value’ of the award to the
student, either within a given country or across national boundaries.
Sometimes the bachelor of arts in Britain, the laurea in Italy, the Magister
in Poland, Germany and Austria, the diplôme in France, the licenta in
Romania, the licenciatura in Spain and licenciado in Portugal, to name
but a few, were designed for entry into specific occupational markets –
for example, radiology, agronomy, accounting, physical therapy, com-
puter programming, social work. But in other cases they were needed for
admission into yet higher or advanced programmes of study. In almost
no European country were first degrees or first- and second-cycle com-
petencies a measure of general culture, a rounding out or finishing off
closely tied to traditional elite conceptions of liberal education or civic
leadership. Such concerns, it had long been argued, were the proper focus
of the secondary schools, especially those with university preparatory
functions. The growth of specialization within the Western European
university produced a situation where few countries required undergrad-
uates to undertake a broadly based programme of studies, but doubts had
crept in. As secondary education was now subject to the pressures of mass
education, more voices began to say that schools had failed to provide
the necessary skills, proficiencies and ethos of liberal education. Nor-
way, however, had kept some elements of the ideal of a liberal education
within the undergraduate curriculum. A compulsory first-year examen
philosophicum composed of logic and the history of philosophy in some
19 For Portugal, entry by E. L. Pire in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I, 585–90.
255
Sheldon Rothblatt
respects represented a throwback to a time when such academic work
was a sign of cosmopolitanism and cultivation.20
undergraduates and postgraduates

One of the more pronounced features of the Continental university had
always been (though not in the Middle Ages) the absence of a clear-cut
division between ‘undergraduate’ and ‘postgraduate’ student status as
known in English-speaking countries. Instead of occupying separate cur-
ricular spheres, undergraduates and postgraduates almost imperceptibly
blended into one another. In America and England a bachelor of arts or
its equivalent marked the boundary line between two major categories
of education, with some confusion in areas like medicine. Professional
studies, which in the United States were often if not invariably reserved
for second-degree work, or could be undertaken for a first degree in fields
like engineering and architecture, were incorporated into separate tracks
commencing with first-cycle or, in the UK, first-degree preparation.
The stereotypical English or American undergraduate was considered
to be callow and wayward and therefore in need of proper discipline.
The English collegiate tutor stood in loco parentis to the student, and
American colleges and universities devised extensive parietal rules gov-
erning all aspects of student behaviour. The student disruptions of the
1960s replaced many of those rules with a more legalistic system of judg-
ing misconduct, but even in the Oxbridge colleges there was a noticeable
loosening of the authority of the tutor. But other reasons also account for
the change from viewing undergraduates as adolescents in need of close
supervision. One was a greater concern on the part of all categories of
instructor with research, deemed more important than teaching in deter-
mining career chances. Another was a cultural change with regard to
the exercise of authority. The students who entered the academic ranks
after the 1960s were part of a generation that had demonstrated against
the perceived paternalism of the universities. Yet another reason was a
certain awkwardness in trying to enforce conduct involving dating and
drug-taking, especially the latter where the long arm of the state was
available. But the essential point is that academics – and this was true in
most countries – no longer felt comfortable as role models. Solid bour-
geois behaviour, so long the mark of a distinguished professor, was out
of style by the end of the twentieth century. Professors and academics of
all ranks shared with students a desire to lead a private life devoid of the
constraints of convention.
20 S.-E. Liedman, ‘In Search of Isis: General Education in Germany and Sweden’, in S.
Rothblatt and B. Wittrock (eds.), The European and American University since 1800:
Historical and Sociological Essays (Cambridge, 1993), 99, 105.
256
The postgraduate student, being older, was regarded in both English-
speaking nations as more mature and responsible. The curriculum and
styles of teaching had reflected this fundamental separation. British under-
graduates normally received close and attentive preparation for examina-
tions, consisting of tutorials, essay writing, informal continuous assess-
ment and personal advice, while postgraduates were often ignored or
shunted off to archives and libraries, especially in the social sciences and
humanities. In any case, until the last forty years or so of the twentieth
century, they tended to be relatively few in number and concentrated in
certain leading universities.
On the Continent, all students no matter how old were expected
to be self-reliant. The Humboldtian tradition of Lernfreiheit already
alluded to may have been a factor. Universities were not schools, and
professors should not be required to discipline students, who were
expected to take a strong hand in their own education. (The distinc-
tion between ‘school’ and ‘university’ was not so clear-cut in America,
Scotland or England until the later decades of the nineteenth century
and possibly even later in America.) And the physical circumstances
of the older Continental universities were conducive to greater inde-
pendence. The ‘campus’ style being imported from the United States,
often housing undergraduates on the grounds of the university itself,
could not be emulated unless sufficient land was available. The tradi-
tional European universities were located in urban centres, their build-
ings scattered throughout the city. Some housing was sometimes avail-
able through ‘community’ affiliation, for instance in Uppsala in Sweden
where the tradition of the medieval ‘nations’ persisted. Students from
dispersed regions could affiliate and find accommodations through the
nations. Certainly there were student accommodations, university and
private, in the vicinity of university buildings. But the usual rule in
Europe was that students were expected to find their own housing or
live at home. In loco parentis was hardly a viable conception in such
environments.
Lecture attendance was largely optional, since examinations and lec-
tures were not necessarily in correspondence (a problem that had arisen
in Oxford and Cambridge centuries before when colleges effectively took
over teaching from the professors). Students in Spain and Germany actu-
ally selected the date at which they preferred to be examined. The German
situation was particularly lax (the Austrian probably more so before the
reforms of the later 1990s), and students in effect received permission to
dawdle for up to seven years. While so-stretched times to degree or award
completion became a source of concern, partly because of the numbers
that had to be accommodated and the additional expense incurred as
the years of education lengthened, they had the merit of leading to high
257
Sheldon Rothblatt
course-completion rates, students appearing for examinations when they
believed themselves to be ready.
The received albeit changing Continental system of loosely coupled
examination/diploma/degree sequences, minimal supervision and the rela-
tive absence of required written coursework was rooted in elite presuppo-
sitions about student achievement. Since relatively few members of a rele-
vant age cohort had attended university, it was assumed, not incorrectly,
that they possessed the necessary academic qualifications and habits of
study. Hence professors were not overly concerned about student welfare
or dropouts, although Italian professors were eager to keep numbers up
because student fees, once nominal, were a critical source of revenue when
government revenues declined. Since funding was not enrolment driven in
Germany, France, Italy or Austria (except in the Fachhochschulen sector
begun in 1994), the neglect of students did not incur financial penalties.
In contrast, other countries tried to keep greater control over the size of
the student populations. Head counts were used in Holland, the number
of candidates for degrees in Denmark and the allocation of ‘places’ in the
UK. The result in Italy, Germany, Austria and France was the unfortunate
overcrowding so pronounced in the 1980s and 1990s. Ralf Dahrendorf,
the distinguished sociologist and sometime German professor who took
British citizenship and was made a peer of the realm, also becoming
director of the London School of Economics and head of an Oxford col-
lege, angrily criticized German policies that ‘produced ten times as many
students as there were three decades ago, crammed into the same old
institutional framework’. Lord Dahrendorf went on to say sardonically
that the majority of students felt isolated and lonely, while their teachers
spent their time filling in forms or sitting on committees.
In Germany relative indifference towards students was actually justi-
fied on the basis of the traditional right of students to change universities
at will, since the degree was in effect granted by the state rather than
the institution. In France concern for democratic access, a policy decision
dating back to the 1960s, overrode considerations of effective university
teaching. Attempts by government to restrict entry in order to reduce size,
as well as to improve employment possibilities, were bitterly opposed by
students and could not be implemented. The demand for certain types
of programmes, especially those connected to teaching like psychology,
continued to produce hair-raising accounts of students ‘trying to follow
lectures sitting on the corridor floor outside – a sight not seen since
money began to pour into university expansion’.21 Similar conditions
were prevented in protected fields like medicine where a numerus clausus
prevailed throughout. Despite demand for entry, dropout rates in France
21 Times Higher Education Supplement, 3 December 1993, News 10.
258
in the 1980s were dismaying. About 40 per cent of science entrants,
45 per cent in law and economics, left in the first year of the first
cycle.22 Only one-third of Italian matriculated students earned the laurea
in 1995.23
The highest research degrees were required for entrance into the aca-
demic profession. In most countries in the second half of the twentieth
century this had come to mean a doctor’s degree, but in Austria, Germany
and German-speaking Switzerland – not to speak of Spain – and at one
time in Italy and Scandinavia, the highest award was the Habilitation, in
effect a second doctoral thesis which was also in France a prerequisite
for being appointed to full professorship. Numerous reforms in France
actually created a number of different kinds of doctorates, and there was
provision for written work that could be substituted for the research the-
sis normally associated with doctoral-level undertakings. Changes were
introduced into England that allowed for the award of a doctorate at a
later point in an academic career on the basis of an established record
of publications. Ordinarily, a highly structured programme of doctoral
studies was atypical, and time to completion was unspecified. Even the
vaunted German seminar system which spread throughout the Continent
was not the equivalent of the tightly organized American graduate school
degree programmes. Candidates seeking Habilitation, especially outside
the sciences, worked on their own, often while employed full time else-
where in teaching or non-academic occupations. But in the late 1980s
‘graduate colleges’ began to appear, perhaps inspired by, yet very differ-
ent from, American structures in organization and funding. They shared
few organizational features with one another and remain at present in an
experimental or rudimentary stage. Some Graduiertenkollegs in Germany
were interdisciplinary research groups occasionally associated with
the independent network of Max Planck Institutes for research. Dutch
onderzoekscholen and Belgian graduate schools were able to cross uni-
versity or even national boundaries to also form linkages and cooperative
efforts. In France the graduate schools consisted of several advanced
tracks leading to one or more kinds of diplomas, of which one, the
Diploma of Advanced Studies (DEA), was required for subsequent work
22 ‘France’ in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I. See also C. Musselin, ‘Steering Higher
Education in France: 1981–1991’, Higher Education in Europe, 17 (1992), 70–1.
23 Information on Italy is derived from B. R. Clark, Academic Power in Italy: Bureaucracy
and Oligarchy in a National University System (Chicago and London, 1977), 124ff.,
139; F. R. Monaco, ‘Universities in Italy: Problems and Perspectives’, in F. Pancaldi
(ed.), Universities and the Sciences: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Bologna,
1993), 20–8; O. Amaldi, ‘The Italian Tradition’, in Pancaldi, Universities, 40–8; R.
Moscati, ‘Italy’, in G. Neave and F. van Vught, Prometheus Bound: The Changing
Relationship between Government and Higher Education in Western Europe (Oxford,
1991), 91–108.
259
Sheldon Rothblatt
on a doctorate. The body responsible for conducting research training
was a groupe de formation doctorale which, as in the case of national
PhD programmes elsewhere, could be formed from the members of other
kinds of institutions, such as national laboratories. Another significant
alteration during the reforms of 1984 occurred when a breach was made
in the highly centralized government control over university teaching and
curricula. State degree-granting bodies yielded the privilege of awarding
doctorates to individual universities in France. Yet another alteration in
graduate degree programmes began in the early 1990s when écoles doc-
torales were established. Although based in particular universities, such
‘schools’ could also move across institutional boundaries. Further discus-
sions have since taken place concerning the relationship of the DEAs to
the doctoral schools.
Graduate colleges provided chances for Habilitation candidates to reg-
ularly discuss research projects with peers and senior colleagues and also
to participate in special programmes. By the 1990s, except in Germany,
Austria and France, the Anglo-American system of a single PhD was com-
peting with Habilitation as the entry qualification for university teaching.
Postgraduate education in the UK also underwent changes.24 The PhD
as a research-based degree had been introduced at the beginning of
the twentieth century in order to attract overseas students who usually
attended German universities. A student entered for the degree submitted
a dissertation in due course, normally after three years but often tak-
ing longer, and was required to ‘defend’ the work before a committee
of examiners. In some countries, a more public defence existed before a
large audience – the practice has not vanished in Sweden or at the Univer-
sities of Geneva and Lausanne. There was no administratively separate
‘graduate school’ for academic and research training as in the United
States. Other advanced degrees at the master’s level or its equivalent may
have occasionally involved specified coursework, but the majority of such
work was based on a written thesis and oral examination. However, the
‘taught’ postgraduate course, the backbone of graduate training for the
first two or three years of the American system, came to be viewed as a
needed and desirable alternative, especially as the numbers of postgrad-
uates rose and questions were asked about the actual strength of their
first degrees. By the end of the century the taught degree course was far
more available than ever before, but hardly the rule since in most areas
of study a critical mass of students did not exist.
24 For Britain, see M. Henkel and M. Kogan, ‘Research Training and Graduate Education:
The British Macro Structure’, in Clark, Research Foundations (note 2), 71–114; T.
Becher, ‘Graduate Education in Britain: The View from the Ground’, in Clark, Research
Foundations, 115–53; L. Goedegebuure and F. van Vught (eds.), Comparative Policy
Studies in Higher Education (Twente, 1994).
260
As in other countries, other kinds of degrees or awards, undergraduate,
postgraduate or somewhere in-between, were the responsibility of free-
standing music conservatories, schools of dramatic arts, architecture and
the practice of law (canon, civil and Jewish law degrees were given in
universities).
Postgraduate education in Nordic countries was reformed in the 1960s
and then again in the 1980s. There too a restructuring of the traditional
degree programmes took place to make the various stages of educational
qualification distinct. More formal PhD training in the social sciences
and humanities was provided for in Denmark to correspond with exist-
ing practices in engineering and the natural sciences, and a greater stress
was placed on interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research environ-
ments. In Finland, efforts were made to replace casual arrangements for
the supervision of research students with more accountability, and in
Norway, where formal graduate programmes had been weak, innova-
tions similar to those in Denmark and Finland were adopted, particularly
with an eye towards improving completion rates and time to degree.
Until the new programmes took hold, the older system of informal,
more loosely supervised doctoral training programmes continued to exist
alongside newer arrangements. In the largest of the Nordic countries,
Sweden, waves of all types of structural, organizational, managerial and
curricular reforms occurred from the 1960s onwards. The last doctoral
thesis defence under the old system was held in the 1970s. New master’s
degrees were introduced, as were regulations aimed at defining a normal
period of progress towards the doctor’s degree.
The decisive part that reform of the structure of elementary and espe-
cially secondary education played in influencing curricular and course
development throughout the higher-education system cannot be over-
stressed. It was upon the system of meritocratic upper secondary edu-
cation that the fundamental educational assumptions of the European
university were built. It was that system, reinforced by high-standard
school-leaving examinations, that allowed for the establishment of spe-
cialized curricula in the early stages of a university education, followed
by advanced instruction resting largely on casual supervision. Conse-
quently, when governments began to encourage a greater flow of students
upwards through elementary and secondary schools, it was only a matter
of a few years before the entire system of early merit selection would be
questioned. Less specialization in school-leaving examinations and less
emphasis on tracking, as well as a greater supply of further education
or tertiary institutions, meant that universities could no longer expect to
receive students with the requisite level of skills and discipline. Undercut
from below, many older academics were finding themselves unable to
impose the achievement standards familiar from the past. But this is a
261
Sheldon Rothblatt
story that can only be continued when historians have detailed informa-
tion from the field, that is to say, from the history of classroom teaching.
From the 1980s onwards, even earlier in France, the advent of mass
education and the Himalayan numbers of students now qualified for
university entrance shattered existing assumptions about student prepa-
ration for higher-education study. Despite the availability of American
data on the impact of sheer numbers on teaching and a university cur-
riculum, higher-education authorities in all European countries barely
anticipated the budgetary, spatial or academic consequences of mass edu-
cation. The growth rates in the university sector alone in the twenty years
after 1959 have been calculated as over 400% for France, Germany and
Italy, around 300% for Belgium, about 350% for Sweden, 364% for
Holland, and 384% for the United Kingdom.25 The result throughout
the 1980s and 1990s was a belated search for a means of combining
access with mechanisms for assuring undergraduate and postgraduate
quality, as well as creating choices for elite and non-elite students. Nearly
frantic reform activity followed: modules and credit-unit systems were
established, semesters and multiple diploma tracks were introduced, con-
tinuous assessment and problem-based learning entered teaching, ter-
minal degree programmes (as in Denmark) were adopted to demarcate
undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, ‘taught’ courses appeared at
research levels. Anglo-American degree structures spread to the Conti-
nent. One observer speculated that the BA, the MA and the PhD, as well
as credit-unit systems, made greater inroads in Eastern than in Western
Europe,26 possibly because of the jump start allowed by the rejection of
Marxism (at least until the launch of the so-called Bologna process in
1999).
research and curricula

For centuries universities were essentially teaching and training institu-
tions. While it would be erroneous to imagine that no room was made
for research in the mission of the traditional university, the pursuit of
original knowledge and the ethos of discovery were by-products of the
leisure and reflection of the academic community rather than foremost
activities upon which rested all prospects for advancement, promotion
and recognition. So strong was the traditional mission of universities
that in the Early Modern period royal academies were founded to sup-
port the intellectual activities that were secondary to universities. But
25 G. Neave, ‘A House Divided against Itself. The Changing Patterns of Authority and Par-
ticipation in Western European Universities’ (draft paper, Berkeley, Cal., 16 November
1984), table 1 following page 10.
26 Sadlak, ‘Search’ (note 8).
262
the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810 changed the primary
orientation of certain universities, which henceforth would adopt formal
research missions, provide the equipment needed for advanced scientific
work, strengthen libraries and collections of documents and, in every old
and emerging domain of knowledge, guarantee the resources and sup-
port required for the advance of pure, basic and applied research. Even in
Germany this new orientation was not fully realized until about 1850,
but afterwards it was increasingly adopted by all universities eager to
emulate the German intellectual model.
Research affects curricula in a number of different ways. First, it
encourages independent thought. Second, it promotes a sense of discov-
ery, especially in the sciences, and therefore, the rhetoric of pure or basic
knowledge notwithstanding, research opens a link to technological and
scientific application. Third, it strengthens the specialization of knowl-
edge and in this way (fourth) influences the creation of new organizations
for knowledge generation and dissemination, such as departments or
laboratories, research centres or special library collections. At the same
time, specialization spurs a contrary movement to unite disparate fields of
learning. Fifth, research changes the curriculum and consequently leads to
the adoption of course structures that permit more independent work or
debate according to the rules of Lernfreiheit as already mentioned, more
student research papers, discussion classes and open-ended examinations
where students are allowed to explore ideas.
Research had all of these influences in the university of the late twentieth
century. The constant generation of new ideas, new methods of pursuing
those ideas, new paradigms, new ways of approaching the human con-
dition and new viewpoints with respect to the world of natural science
constantly pushed at the undergraduate, not to mention the postgradu-
ate, experience and constantly therefore also challenged the way in which
universities were funded and the ways in which resources were allocated
amongst the competing faculties, departments, institutes and laborato-
ries. The rate and pace at which curricula diversified and new organiza-
tions for acquiring and disseminating knowledge developed varied greatly
among European universities, depending upon tradition, the strength of
conservative feeling, student demand, the availability of resources and
the policies of governments. As the earlier pages of this chapter indicate,
the second half of the twentieth century was characterized by an unprece-
dented ferment, by contradictory policies, by continual revisions of those
policies, by internal and external challenges to conventional authority,
by the changeover in Eastern Europe from a totalitarian environment to
one with more capacity for free expression and innovation. The rapid
transformations in the knowledge base, accompanied by organizational
changes, were not all positive. Confusion and instability also resulted, as is
263
Sheldon Rothblatt
typical of any period of far-ranging and interlocked radical changes. The
pressure to be original and to make discoveries contributed to intellec-
tual fads, to the concoction of plausible but facile theories with a certain
appeal in a world where education itself was often talked about as a pur-
chasable commodity. Many of the theories were political and ideological
or carried political or ideological implications or were replacements for
discredited Marxist doctrines. In some quarters it was announced that
objectivity was chimerical, that ‘value-free’ knowledge did not and could
not exist given human self-interest. The age-old distinction between sub-
ject and external object was pronounced false. In truth there was no dis-
tinction. For the ‘postmoderns’, all was subjectivity. Such beliefs invaded
the sciences, but the stronger empirical basis of scientific research made
them less effective influences in teaching. But in the humanities and in
certain areas of the social sciences the questioning of all received versions
of certainty sometimes shaded off into relativism and nihilism. The cur-
riculum reflected the new sensibilities, which included hypotheses about
the place of women in society (feminist theory), the treatment of minor-
ity and other ‘marginal’ populations, the imperial histories of European
nations and the role of past elites. Secular thought was so pronounced
that theologians and scholars of religion complained that a new intoler-
ance had entered universities, a new orthodoxy that claimed allegiance to
tolerance but had little patience with or respect for the study of religion
and religious morality, staples of a university curriculum in ages past.
Discontents were continuous.
Such dogmatic ‘correctness’ was the negative side, but there can be
no doubt that a new inventiveness and creativity were also abroad that
promised to produce profound medical and biological discoveries and
a new understanding of the fundamental processes of life. The bound-
aries between all fields of learning had dissipated. The social sciences
crossed over into the humanities; physics, astrophysics, chemistry, engi-
neering and the biological sciences drew liberally from each other’s store
of knowledge and borrowed one another’s methods. Professional fields
could no longer be glibly distinguished from the liberal arts and sciences.
The corpus of received learning was vitally and in a sense permanently
altered. Students were exposed to more and different modes of learning
and to more varied courses and subject material, more unusual forms of
instruction. They were allowed more ways of demonstrating their abilities
than were available in the majority of universities existing before about
1950. They had more opportunities to be active participants in their own
education than had once been the case.
The permeation of undergraduate teaching and learning by new sources
and methods of understanding was real but hard to quantify, nor can
the degree of such penetration into the undergraduate curriculum be
264
explicitly grasped. A distinction needs to be made between the reshaping
of a given course or plan of study by ideas derived from research and the
extent to which undergraduates themselves were allowed to participate
in actual investigative tasks, especially in connection with professors and
senior academics. The value of having undergraduates join a research
team, at least to see how it works, was discussed, but the degree to
which this happened is impossible to judge, and how many students
were able to participate freely is also questionable. Critics could argue
that undergraduates in the European university were not in fact closely
involved in the research experience or given a chance to absorb the spirit
of inquiry because so much of their education depended upon the outcome
of national examinations often disconnected from teaching.
In France the most favoured sector of higher education, the grandes
écoles, consisted essentially of specialized training institutions where the
argument concerning the union of teaching and research had never been
overly relevant. The primary research mission in France had long been
assigned to a national body called Centre national de la recherche scien-
tifique (CNRS) which funded full-time researchers, but other bodies also
existed.27 In Germany the research mission belonged, to about the same
extent, to the vast university sector through the Deutsche Forschungsge-
meinschaft and to some sixty Max Planck Institutes. Yet despite a division
of labour in many fields claimed by governments to be more efficient (and
probably less subject to disruption by student activists), especially under
the rapidly changing conditions of international competition, there were
substantial crossover effects – how extensive is hard to fathom. Professors
in both countries had access to research programmes and teams, and in
France universities and CNRS units sometimes shared facilities.
Nevertheless, the formal separation of research from teaching was held
by critics to undermine the great chair-holder system inherited from the
classic German university paradigm in which postgraduate instruction
or supervision was subsumed under a distinguished professor eminent in
research. With the formal separation of the two principal professorial
functions, detailed regulations and funding arrangements were outside
the chair-holders’ direct control. The faculties, institutes, departments and
laboratories that were the hoard of professors holding the exalted status
of higher-ranked civil servants were now subject to external assessment
and evaluation. It has been suggested that weak provision for research
at provincial universities in France has made the lure of Paris irresistible,
to the detriment of local teaching. Amiens was specifically mentioned.28
27 E.g., INRA for agricultural research, CEA for atomic energy, INSERM for medicine,
IFREMER for marine exploration, INRP for education, and for educational science,
the Curie and Pasteur institutes.
28 Times Higher Education Supplement, 19 August 1994, News 8.
265
Sheldon Rothblatt
Yet ironies are rarely absent from historical developments. In France the
tying of student grants, fellowships and instructorships to specific labora-
tories, programmes or universities once again provided opportunities for
a few chair-holders in selected fields to retain some of the patronage long
associated with professorial privilege.29
the student role in the curriculum

Passing reference has been made to the consumer or demand side of
higher education which includes student markets. It was suggested that
the expansion of access brought with it a greater sense of how the supply
of courses might interact with a demand for particular subjects or lead
to novel teaching formats, shorter-term courses or credit-unit modules
with continuous assessment. It may also be supposed that in a number
of countries ‘privatization’, and government adoption of steering poli-
cies, stimulated increased student participation in the educational pro-
cess, yet the narrative is not quite so reductionist. By the mid-1990s
students had not become consumer arbiters of the availability and pric-
ing of education, possibly because the likelihood of a possible active
role was overestimated to begin with and also because governments con-
tinued to exercise constraint over markets, finding student demand to
be out of step with national goals. Students tended to choose subjects
in congested and underfunded fields, whereas government wanted more
attention paid to applied science and engineering as these were held to be
of more benefit to the economy. These were also subjects that attracted
investment from the high-technology sector, non-profit philanthropies or
alumni.
National crises provided openings for student influence, although
these were often short term in effect. The dissident movements in Hun-
gary and Czechoslovakia helped liberalize studies within their countries’
communist-controlled universities, pointing to the future when Marx-
ism would be overthrown. The 1960s’ student rebellions in France and
Germany, following those in the United States, created short-term
changes, possibly even in course content, but these did not lead to fun-
damental alterations in the overall curriculum. Indeed, given the his-
tory of student participation in right- and left-wing political movements
in France, Germany, Italy or tsarist Russia, students collectively have
attracted attention more for their negative than positive results. In France,
student pressure was often expressed through protest and demonstration,
especially where restrictions on entry or field of study were proposed, or
because of the heavy overcrowding on wildly underfunded campuses like
29 G. Neave in Clark, Research Foundations (note 2), 201.
266
Saint-Étienne, Jussieu or Nanterre. The last had a planned capacity for
14,000 but burst at the seams in 1994 with two-and-a-half times that
number. In the UK, the National Union of Students attempted to main-
tain an important voice in all university matters affecting student interest,
especially regarding access and financing, but it is doubtful whether this
association in any way or at any time dramatically affected the basic
structure of teaching and education.
In some Western countries, however, such as Norway, students
acquired active experience in the running of innumerable campus-based
enterprises having to do with the larger questions of student welfare
and recreation. Dormitories, bookstores, sports, health services, kinder-
gartens, travel agencies, financed through a combination of government
grants, participation fees and membership dues and the sales of prod-
ucts, were important ways in which valuable life experiences were gained
outside the lecture hall itself. Student leaders were often given a one-
year leave of absence to act as full-time student activists and business
leaders.
Overall, of the major determinants of curricula – the state, the academic
profession, the examination system, the employment market – students
historically have had a lesser role in the shaping of curricula. Because of
youth and inexperience, especially in the category of ‘undergraduate’, and
the relatively short duration of their stay in higher education, the direct
contribution of undergraduates (or postgraduates) to the making of an
educational curriculum is limited or restricted. Possibly student efforts
were most effective in the German reforms of the 1960s. Yet their indi-
rect role should not be overlooked. A student’s preparation for academic
work is a key factor in determining the level and content of a course of
studies. The European university system had benefited historically from
the high quality of secondary education, especially the post-compulsory
sector of the last two years, and rigorous school-leaving examinations
such as A-levels in England, the Highers in Scotland, the baccalauréat in
France, the Abitur in Germany and the others that have been mentioned.
Where quality secondary education was unavailable, higher education
was forced to adopt remedial measures, a conspicuous feature of the first
or even second year of non-elite (in some cases elite) American universi-
ties. But Soviet-bloc countries were also forced into such measures and
established ‘propaedeutic’ faculties to remedy deficiencies, and within
the European university system of the 1990s complaints about student
preparedness were frequent.
Subtle or ‘quiet’ revolutions in culture also have a classroom effect
because attitudes to learning and habits of discipline influence the way
in which material is presented and whether students are self-reliant or
require immediate attention. It is inconceivable that the extraordinary
267
Sheldon Rothblatt
changes in the last forty years in personal styles of behaviour, or the
improvements in Western Europe in standards of material consumption,
did not have an impact on the way students and their teachers intercon-
nected. Superficially, the observer of the 1990s noticed a greater informal-
ity in the way classes were conducted in the UK, the Nordic countries and
the Netherlands, and this is underscored by the absence of a professorial
dress code, the traditional badge of authority and status, connecting aca-
demic culture to the wider status world of finance, business and the civil
service. The academic wanderer encountered every conceivable mode of
dressing, as if costume no longer reflected good taste (or social class) but
just the personal preferences of the wearer, perhaps also the desire to
be ‘comfortable’. It is as if the extraordinary changes in the knowledge
base, the effervescence accompanying discovery and the methods devel-
oped for knowing, required more casual modes of communication, easier
exchanges between teacher and taught, a freer environment for the trans-
fer of information and ideas involving all ranks of learners, professors,
lecturers, post-docs and students. What was perhaps being conveyed was
an attitude of spontaneity better suited to transmitting the excitement of
inquiry. Furthermore, because so many of the younger instructors were
closer in age to the undergraduates and were influenced by the same mass
media and the greater permissiveness in upbringing that occurred in the
decades after 1950, they were likely to be less aloof and more accessible,
more a peer than a superior.
Yet the greater informality of teaching, the tendency for students to
omit titles when addressing their seniors or even to refer to them by their
given names (still more typical of postgraduates than undergraduates) did
not necessarily produce certainty and assurance about career prospects.
For all the talk of the importance of student choice in the curriculum,
many found that the choices were far too many and confusing. It was
not surprising that, in the midst of historical affluence and an undeni-
able improvement in life chances, so many students should still have
struggled to find themselves and to prepare for a dynamic marketplace
of opportunities and for an employment world in which more than one
career change was likely. The freedom to choose from a cornucopia of
subjects, each of them open to the possibilities of frequent revision, may
have fostered self-reliance, but it hardly provided a clear vision of future
possibilities.
The casual academic environments of the late twentieth-century uni-
versities did not possess the clarity of the old university culture. The
university world before 1940 or thereabouts was less relaxed, although
the degree of formality depended upon the national culture and shared
elitist attitudes. The model for informality was perhaps the British tutorial
system; but there was a mingling of sorts between professors and students
268
in Germany, and in countries emulating the German model. These were
caught within the boundaries of a particular set of class-derived relation-
ships, and usually the older doctoral candidates received the most atten-
tion. The connections were made possible by small numbers, a notion of
Kultur, a Gymnasium experience and assumptions about respectability.
Informal occasions between the professor with his assistants and with
students, advanced or fresh from school, often took place in the chair-
holder’s home. Ideas were exchanged, or heard, in a setting especially
conducive to their reception. The old Ordinarius was nevertheless still
off-putting, whether in seminar or sitting room, a measure of both his
social status as a civil servant and his potential patronage. The sociologist
Hans Speier, who made a career for himself in the United States, described
Karl Jaspers, his famous teacher at Heidelberg, as ‘very reserved. Only
once did he seem interested in me personally.’ Karl Mannheim, on the
other hand, was pronounced by Speier to be ‘a good pedagogue’ and ‘free
of any professorial haughtiness’.30
As relaxed as the new learning environments may have been, there
were also anxieties in the classroom arising from the vigorous competi-
tion offered by new generations of women pouring into the universities
and into hitherto exclusively male professions. For the first time since
the foundation of universities at the end of the twelfth century, women
comprised at least half or more of the undergraduate population and
were highly represented in law and medicine. A much more worrisome
aspect, however, was the importation into universities of renewed ethnic
conflict in Europe. Hardly any country was unaffected by the movement
of populations, which included many that were not European to begin
with, or, like the Turks who did in fact possess a corner of Europe,
were not widely considered to be European given the circumstances of
their arrival at the central and western nations. Catalans and Basques
demanded greater independence from Spain. The disintegration of the
Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the formation of autonomous republics,
the separation of Czechs and Slovaks, even the de facto linguistic par-
tition of Belgium, once again allowed nationalist or separatist issues to
invade education. The story is an old one. Even in relatively calm Fin-
land in the 1920s separate universities had been created for Finns and
Swedish Finns. But whether old or new, demands that university stud-
ies contribute to the formation of ethnic and special identities intruded
into the education process, turned objective into subjective learning and
created tensions, felt if not always expressed, within the classroom and
lecture hall.
30 H. Speier, The Truth in Hell and Other Essays on Politics and Culture, 1935–1987
(New York and Oxford, 1989), 7, 38.
269
Sheldon Rothblatt
student mobility
Until the rise of the national university in Europe, with its mission of
providing legal and administrative talent for the state, universities were
open to students from all countries, who, aided by a common ancient lan-
guage, migrated freely in search of subjects, teachers and environments
conducive to their interests. State examinations in Germany enabled stu-
dents to become gypsy scholars, wandering from university to university
in search of the leading professors. The Ordinarien rather than any single
university was the core of the Humboldtian university. Other systems, the
British for example, did not encourage student mobility. A certain limited
amount of it took place in the nineteenth century when undergraduates
migrated from the newer civic universities, from the London colleges or
from Scottish universities to Oxford and Cambridge, but this was largely
because the newer institutions, and the Scottish ones, served younger stu-
dents and had not yet quite achieved the quality levels of the two senior
universities. The Scottish universities accepted student transfer, but for
degree-seeking students of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the
practice does not appear to have been very pronounced, nor was the
transfer option heavily used in the twentieth century. Student transfer
flourished in America from the later decades of the nineteenth century
onwards, principally because the introduction of teaching modules – to
include student elective modules – broke the typical university pattern of
uninterrupted studies leading to a degree. Modules, being self-contained,
could be saved and accumulated, and conveyed to welcoming colleges
and universities. When at some undetermined point in the early twenti-
eth century modules were give unit-credit value, the transition to a new
system of student flexibility was complete.
From a European perspective, modules were usually disliked because
they encouraged the proliferation of unrelated courses, inhibited special-
ization, at least early specialization, and did not guarantee quality, since
each module was autonomous. Furthermore, modules weakened the gen-
eral quality of an institution’s degree-granting capacity because the trans-
fer student may have taken as much as half of his or her coursework
in another institution. National standards of student achievement could
not be guaranteed because no common curriculum or marking system
existed. And modules, as already suggested, compromised the author-
ity of chair-holders by distributing classroom teaching responsibilities
more equitably. A survey taken of British academics in 1996 indicated
both widespread resistance and resentment. Not only did the process
of conversion to modularity create formidable reorganization problems,
difficulties of timetabling and assessment, taking up valuable time and
energy, it was also regarded by the academic community as imposed
270
by university administrators and managers.31 As the American system
had evolved over many decades, no sudden wrenching ever had to take
place.
Nevertheless, the revival of the medieval idea of a European university
accessible to all students was almost a logical deduction from the forma-
tion of a legal and political European community. This led to a search
for means to promote high student mobility to serve in the creation of a
European as complementary to a national identity. Modules and modular
programmes of study, to include credit-units, were therefore increasingly
adopted, although often modified from their American source to preserve
some of the features of the traditional European university model. The
result was the formation of a series of programmes enabling students
to travel widely in search of courses and teaching not available in their
home countries or regions. In 1987 the European Action Scheme for
the Mobility of University Students (Erasmus) was established.32 Under
this umbrella were subsumed Inter-University Cooperation Programmes
(ICPs) to promote staff mobility and uniform systems of credit transfer,
study loads, examinations, evaluation and marking. The best known was
the European Course Credit Transfer System (ECTS) established in 1989.
Other programmes soon came into being to service secondary school stu-
dents, postgraduates, teachers or business executives, such as Tempus
(specifically to assist Eastern and Central European countries),33 Lingua
(for language-study business personnel and for students and teachers in
secondary education) and Comett (for students in higher education, as
well as business employees). Plans to connect some of these programmes
into a new umbrella organization denominated Socrates unfolded in the
course of 1994, but its implementation was slowed in 1995 because of
hesitation and disagreements.
Some 11,000 persons participated in Erasmus in its first year. The heav-
iest users were students seeking business courses abroad, approximately
33% of those surveyed in 1988/89, followed by students desiring for-
eign language experience (18%), with law (11%) and engineering (10%)
rounding out the top choices. Belgian and German university students
were ‘over-represented’ in the scheme, while Portuguese, Greek, Irish,
Italian, Dutch and Danish students were ‘under-represented’. Given the
31 Times Higher Education Supplement, 25 October 1996, News, 4.

32 Information on Erasmus and student mobility from ERASMUS Monographs 13, 15,
16, 17, published by Wissenschaftliches Zentrum für Berufs und Hochschulforschung
der Gesamthochschule Kassel, 1991, 1992, 1993; European Community Course Credit
Transfer System (Commission of the European Communities (draft, 28 October 1993).
Detailed information also available from U. Teichler and F. Maiworm, The ERASMUS
Experience: Major Findings of the Erasmus Evaluation Research Project (Kassel, 1997).
33 For other details, see chapter 3 (‘Relations with authority’).
271
Sheldon Rothblatt
varied heritages and circumstances of the nations and sub-nations par-
ticipating in the European Union (as it came to be called), such differ-
entials were hardly unexpected.34 Efforts to establish a common system
of higher education were thwarted by a bewildering array of practices
that did not lend themselves to internationalization. Spain in particular
was singled out for having a parochial system of studies not conducive
to student mobility. In general, students from the Mediterranean coun-
tries studying in northern Europe noted the differences in quality and
standards, and those from the north residing in the south remarked upon
the less demanding courses of studies in those regions. Not surprisingly,
students reported that they had the most difficulty taking examinations
in a foreign language, and students from countries without a major inter-
national language spent the shortest periods abroad, three months or
less. Other difficulties, or rather differences – indicating where Euro-
pean university instruction varied the most radically – were teacher rela-
tions outside of the class format, patterns of student lecture attendance,
readings in foreign language publications and the availability of course
electives.
Erasmus students surveyed in 1990/91 were on average more than
twenty-three years of age and had completed 2.8 years of study before par-
ticipating, although most had travelled before entering the programme.
The average time spent in study in another country was seven months.
From the standpoint of social origins, 39% came from families where one
or more parents had experience of higher education, and 41% reported
parental incomes of above average, only 13% as below average. Well
over half of those surveyed were women.35
conclusion
At the time of the early stages of Erasmus, A. H. Halsey summarized:
The history of curriculum can be summarized as passing through four

principal phases of dominance, first by priests, second by aristocrats and
third by professionals. The fourth phase can be described as democratic,
meaning ‘the rise of student/consumer sovereignty’. But thanks to the tricks
34 After all, even a small nation like Switzerland, with four national languages, possessed
cantonal universities radically different from one another in course structures, time to
degree, staffing and other components of a university system. Nor were the terminal
awards equivalent.
35 ERASMUS Monograph 17 (note 32), 125–6. (Ten years later, Erasmus was to become
the flagship programme of the European Union – soon to have facilitated more than a
million exchanges – a programme that was to be emulated in many other parts of the
world.)
272
played upon the present by the goddess Clio, vestiges of the dominance of
the first three remained.36
Indeed, the foregoing pages have shown how intermixed were the origins
of a curriculum and the styles that shaped its transmission. How a subject
is taught, the setting in which it is taught and how it is grasped by the
student is a subtle process that resists quantitative analysis. The inher-
ited distribution of courses, vocational goals, the research programme,
government planning efforts and manpower targets, demography, the
operations of the supply and demand for education, the expansion of
knowledge, the development of computerized learning, organized stu-
dent activity and the influence of business and the professions all played
a part, if not an equal part, in shaping the curriculum and teaching. Since
all causes are intertwined, the precise contributions of each are difficult
to disentangle. Nevertheless, perhaps it is reasonable to conclude that
if government was the most potent force acting upon the structure of
the European university curriculum in the last fifty years, the content
of teaching was most affected by knowledge growth, especially through
specialization and the cross-fertilization of disciplines. The notable excep-
tion, which cannot be ignored, was the influence of political ideology on
the humanities and social sciences in communist countries. In Western
Europe ideological presuppositions penetrated the teaching of history,
sociology and literature, as well as economics and politics, but individ-
ual teachers not governments were responsible. While it is by no means
the case that academic specialisms have automatically found a place in
teaching and examining at undergraduate levels, it is broadly correct to
say that the professional interests of academics have continually, if unsys-
tematically, pushed the content of the curriculum in new directions. The
apparent demands of labour markets have been influential but not as
directly significant, except at the lowest entry points into the economy,
since research universities continued to exercise considerable influence
over the curricula required for professional qualifications.
In general, bold statements about the aims of a particular kind of edu-
cational curriculum provide only limited guidance to the type of teaching
taking place in a seminar room, lecture hall, discussion class or laboratory.
‘It is certainly the case’, writes one historian, ‘that a formal knowledge of
what faculties teach or examine, and of the appointments that they make,
will provide no adequate indication of the ethos in which the teaching of
these subjects has been enveloped’.37 A chapter-length map of the Euro-
pean higher-education curriculum can hardly be expected to identify the
36 A. H. Halsey, ‘Who Owns the Curriculum of Higher Education?’, Journal of Educational
Policy, 2 (1987), 341.
37 M. Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (Cambridge, 1980), 390.
273
Sheldon Rothblatt
‘ethos’ of each discipline or vividly capture the different kinds of teaching
relationships characterizing so many different countries. At best, it is an
imperfect map, a survey of known territories and unexplored regions, an
approximate introduction but also a warning about the dangers residing
in glib summaries about the curriculum. At the end of a century, and a
millennium, the European university found itself in unprecedented cir-
cumstances. It was no longer even a ‘university’, only a link in a chain of
differentiated institutions paradoxically both interdependent and incom-
patible. But perhaps it was just a leftover word, degraded as linguists
say, on the point of losing all former meaning and only a synonym for
‘higher education’. The complexity of the higher-education curriculum in
the 1990s was no less than the complexity of the modern nation itself. The
result was, depending upon one’s point of view, a tower of Babel destined
to collapse upon itself or an intellectual world of extraordinary ferment
and creativity, containing learning possibilities hitherto undreamt of in
the history of the European university.
select bibliography
Becher, T. Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Inquiry and the Cultures
of Disciplines, Milton Keynes, 1989.
Clark, B. R. Academic Power in Italy: Bureaucracy and Oligarchy in a National
University System, Chicago and London, 1997.
Clark, B. R. (ed.) Research Foundations of Graduate Education: Germany,
Britain, France, United States, Japan, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London,
1993.
Clark, B. R., and Neave, G. (eds.) The Encyclopedia of Higher Education, 4 vols.,
Oxford, 1992.
Gibbons, M. et al. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science
and Research in Contemporary Societies, London, 1995.
Kotâsek, J. ‘Visions of Educational Development in the Post-Socialist Era’, Inter-
national Review of Education, 39 (1993), 473–87.
Musselin, C. ‘Steering Higher Education in France: 1981–1991’, Higher Educa-
tion in Europe, 17 (1992), 70–1.
Neave, G., and Van Vught, F. (eds.) Prometheus Bound: The Changing Rela-
tionship between Government and Higher Education in Western Europe,
Oxford, 1991.
OECD, Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators, Paris, 1997.
Papadopoulos, G. S. Education 1960–1990 : The OECD Perspective, Paris, 1994.
Rothblatt, S., and Wittrock, B. (eds.) The European and American University
since 1800: Historical and Sociological Essays, Cambridge, 1993.
Sadlak, J. ‘In Search of the ‘Post-Communist University – the Background and
Scenario of the Transformation of Higher Education in Central and Eastern
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Europe’, in K. Hüfner (ed.), Higher Education Reform Processes in Central
and Eastern Europe, Frankfurt/Main, 1994, 43–62.
Szczepanski, J. Higher Education in Eastern Europe, Occasional paper –
International Council for Educational Development, 12, S.l., 1974.
Teichler, U. Changing Patterns of the Higher Education System, London, 1988.
Tikhonov, N. ‘La quête du savoir: Étudiantes de l’empire russe dans les universités
suisses, 1862–1920’, PhD dissertation, Geneva, 2004.
275
CHAPTER 8
STUDENT MOVEMENTS AND

POLITICAL ACTIVISM
LOUIS VOS
introduction
Since the nineteenth century, students have taken it upon themselves to
play a particular role in society as a group. In the Swedish tradition, they
saw themselves as ‘Guardians of the Light’, whose job was to watch over
the edification and enlightenment of the community. A student movement
translated into the collectively organized activities of students under their
own leadership; their goal was to influence and transform society, driven
by their own calling as students. It was a social or political movement
focused on the wider society. While it had a general political orientation as
a movement, it had no rigid programme. Nor did it align itself completely
to any one organization, although an organization might well form the
backbone of the movement.1
The development of student movements was only possible because
(and as long as) the role of student was characterized by a specific social
position.2 That position implied a role atypical for modern society, one
that was conducive to group formation and kept the social price of protest
low and the tendency to engage in ‘expressive’ politics high. The same
1 Daily student life and timeless mores therefore fall outside this definition. D. Rucht,
Modernisierung und neue soziale Bewegungen: Deutschland, Frankreich und USA im
Vergleich (Frankfurt, 1994), 77; D. Rucht, ‘Die Ereignisse von 1968 als soziale Bewegung:
Methodologische Überlegungen und einige empirische Befunde’, in I. Gilcher-Holtey (ed.),
1968: Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen, 1998),
116–30.
2 L. Vos, M. Derez, I. Depraetere and W. van der Steen, Studentenprotest in de jaren
zestig: De stoute jaren (Tielt, 1988); K. R. Allerbeck, Soziologie Radikaler Studenten-
bewegungen: Ein vergleichende Untersuchung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und
den Vereinigten Staaten (Munich, 1973); F. A. Pinner, ‘Western European Student Move-
ments: Through Changing Times’, in S. M. Lipset and P. G. Altbach (eds.), Students in
Revolt (Boston, 1969), 60–95.
276
Student movements and political activism
position also led to the development of a special intellectual habitus that
allowed students – even expected them – to analyse society critically.
Lastly, it was coloured by an individual calling, in which a self-image
based on a living tradition became interwoven with the normative expec-
tations of society. Such a calling could only exist as long as successive
generations were willing to interpret it in terms of their life experiences
and epoch. The ideological wave-like movement of student actions was
thus rooted in broader historical developments, as well as in the handover
from one generation to the next and in conflicts between the generations.3
Owing to the rapid succession of age cohorts, student movements were
usually ‘sporadic’ phenomena: maintaining continuity across the genera-
tions was an exception rather than the rule.4
The student movement existed only through the committed efforts of
activists. Initially they relied on informal personal contacts, but subse-
quently – based on common experiences – they developed a sense of
involvement, solidarity and a certain structure. The pursuit of social
influence often went hand in hand with self-awareness. Although both
elements – awareness and action – were usually present, the particular
emphasis could differ according to the circumstances.
As far as existing political movements or parties in the wider society
were concerned, the student movement stood in a relationship of tension.5
It often regarded itself as the mobile vanguard of a broader emancipation
movement at a national, religious or social level, for which it was also
a source of new militants. In this ‘classical form’ – as part of an estab-
lished ‘movement’ – the student movement often had a longer lifespan.
The normative expectation held by the broader movement, as opposed
to the student movement, made it easier for the tradition of an individual
calling to be passed down from one generation to the next. This also
meant that the ideological–historical roots of the movement, especially
the diverse student traditions of a particular national community, greatly
influenced developments within the student movement. A brief supra-
national outline of European student movements is therefore somewhat
artificial. However, while individual national traditions and historical
developments were more important than those pertaining to the whole
3 A. Esler (ed.), The Conflict of Generations in Modern History (Lexington, Mass., 1974).
4 P. G. Altbach, ‘Perspectives on Student Political Activism’, in P. G. Altbach (ed.), Stu-
dent Political Activism: An International Reference Handbook (New York, 1989), 1–17;
L. Rosenmayr, ‘Jugend’, in R. König (ed.), Handbuch der empirischen Sozialforschung
(Stuttgart, 1976); K. R. Allerbeck and L. Rosenmayr, Einführung in die Jugendsoziologie
(Heidelberg, 1976).
5 H. Fogt, Politische Generationen: Empirische Bedeutung und theoretisches Modell
(Opladen, 1982), 95–102; M. Kimmel, Die Studentenbewegungen der 60er Jahre:
Frankreich, BRD und USA im Vergleich (Vienna, 1998), 13–132.
277
Louis Vos
of Europe, student movements throughout Europe also influenced one
another strongly, especially in the 1960s.
international student organizations

The first post-war student generations were enthusiastic advocates of
international co-operation.6 In 1941, the Soviet Union launched a pro-
gramme designed to mobilize support on a platform focused on ‘anti-
fascism’ and ‘world peace’. As part of the Soviet initiative, fellow travellers
and militants were urged to join ‘representative’ and ‘non-partisan’ orga-
nizations. In 1941, when student leaders of the British National Union
of Students (NUS) actively made contact with students in other coun-
tries, the British initiators of the plan included a number of ‘submarine’
or ‘mole communists’.7 In January 1945, representatives from thirteen
countries met in London to make preparations for the founding of an
International Union of Students (IUS).
Before the meeting in London, the committee received an invitation to
hold the first post-war international student congress in Prague. The ini-
tiative to hold the congress in Prague, in memory of the students who had
been executed by German troops on 17 November 1939 during a student
demonstration at the University of Prague, came from communist stu-
dent leaders in the Czechoslovakian student organization. Accordingly,
the London committee planned its own congress immediately prior to the
international conference, in November 1945; thus 150 delegates from
thirty-eight countries travelled from London to Prague, where, finally,
more than 600 participants from fifty-one countries convened in a cor-
dial atmosphere of friendship and international solidarity. During the
Prague congress a preparatory committee was elected for the purpose of
mapping out the organizational structures for the new umbrella organi-
zation. The latter, ultimately, became a strongly centralized organization
with its headquarters in Prague, where in August 1946 the founding
congress proper took place. The communists acquired the majority in the
Executive Committee, although it was decided that the general political
line would be determined at a congress every three years.
The most important question was whether the organization, besides
providing apolitical services and member representation, should also
6 R. Cornell, Youth and Communism: An Historical Analysis of International Communist

Youth Movements (Buffalo, 1965); G. van Maanen, The International Student Movement:
History and Backgound (The Hague, 1966); P. G. Altbach and N. T. Uphoff, The Student
Internationals (Metuchen, N.J., 1973); J. Kotek, Students and the Cold War (Basingstoke,
1996); J. Kotek, La jeune garde: Entre KGB et CIA. La jeunesse mondiale, enjeu des
relations internationales. 1917–1989 (Paris, 1998).
7 Names based upon new archival evidence in Kotek, Students (note 6), 10–43.
278
wage a political fight for ‘peace’ and ‘democracy’ and against ‘fascism’.
The communist delegates thought it should. A minority of West Euro-
pean umbrella organizations (including Belgium, the Netherlands and
the Scandinavian countries) advocated an apolitical orientation focused
solely on the interests of the ‘student as such’, but the British, American
and French students wanted to make political stands admissible, on con-
dition that political involvement by the national student organizations
was voluntary rather than mandatory. The latter motion was carried. In
the meantime, contact between members was assured by World Student
News, a monthly journal published by the IUS in Prague, which even-
tually appeared in various languages.8 In the 1940s the IUS represented
most of the national student bodies, in the East as well as the West, with
a majority from Europe and only a few from the developing countries.
However, the initial period of cooperation was doomed to fail. Post-
war relations between the United States and the Soviet Union rapidly
deteriorated. In the summer of 1947, when the Soviet Union abandoned
its policy of a common front with all anti-fascist powers and opted for
massive cold-war propaganda, the tension within the IUS increased. An
active non-communist minority tried to oppose the increasing commu-
nist dominance of the movement, albeit without abandoning the unity
of the organization. In the summer of 1947, the newly established stu-
dent union of the United States (the National Student Association) opted
for that course of action. It planned a visit to Prague in the summer
of 1948 to discuss the requirements for admission to the IUS. But the
plan was thwarted by the Prague Coup, when the communists seized
control of Czechoslovakia in February 1948. They immediately began
to purge right-wing ‘deviationists’ from the Czech student associations.
When the IUS secretariat refused to object to this, the national student
unions of Denmark and Sweden resigned in protest from the organiza-
tion, the American and Swiss student unions decided not to join, and
the British NUS – which remained a member until 1952 – went into
opposition together with other Western delegations, thus exploiting the
communist desire to preserve the unity of the IUS, which was a foremost
consideration in their agenda.
Disillusionment over the communist manipulations in the IUS resulted
in the British and Swedish student unions calling for a meeting of national
student unions in Stockholm in December 1950. This conference, which
was attended by representatives of twenty-two national student unions,
took the decision to found an alternative to the IUS: the International
8 In 1966 the journal appeared in Arabic, English, French, German and Spanish. World
Student News. Magazine of the International Union of Students, 20:7–8–9 (1966). Special
Issue: ‘Twenty Years of the International Union of Students’.
279
Louis Vos
Student Conference (ISC). In 1952 it was constituted into a permanent
organization, and set up a COordinating SECretariat (COSEC) in Leiden
in the Netherlands. In the same year, the Danish, Swedish, Swiss and
American student unions, as well as the British, Norwegian, Belgian,
French, Canadian, Australian, Brazilian and Scottish organizations, all
broke from the IUS to support the ISC.
Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s, there were two opposing international
student bodies, both of them pawns on the chessboard of the cold war. On
the one hand there was the IUS, built with the support of the Soviet Union
into a fully communist organization that followed a distinct left-wing
political line; on the other hand there was the ISC, which was supported
by the United Kingdom and the United States, whose members consisted
of the national student unions that found the IUS too communist-oriented
and who wanted to be politically neutral. The fourth World Congress of
the IUS in Prague, in September 1956, developed into an open conflict
between the student representatives from the communist countries and
their Western counterparts. The repression of the Hungarian Revolution
in November caused many national student unions and the ISC to side
with the Hungarians, whereas the IUS leadership and the leaders of all
the communist student organizations – except the Polish – supported the
Soviet Union.
In the second half of the 1950s the ISC grew rapidly, culminating in
a membership of eighty national student unions in 1962. From 1956 to
1968 it published a monthly journal compiled by the COSEC (The Stu-
dent), which appeared in four languages. It sponsored projects and con-
ferences, including the International Student Press Seminars, and orga-
nized international student trips. At the same time, however, the open
infighting between the ‘student responsibility’ proponents and supporters
of the ‘student-as-such’ principle began to intensify again. The former
wanted the student movement to feel co-responsible for broader social
issues, while the latter wanted to restrict the student movement to issues
affecting the students themselves.9 The legalistic notion shared by the
West European and American student unions that the student could have
a political standpoint as an individual, but that representative student
unions should refrain from political involvement, came under increasing
pressure from student unions in developing countries, which questioned
the relevancy of isolated debates on ‘education’ outside the social and
political context and were in favour of classical student movements. The
decolonization movement that started around 1960 strengthened their
position. To stop the ‘young countries’ from moving over to the IUS,
9 Van Maanen, International (note 6), 117–43.
280
the ISC was therefore compelled to allow ‘politics’ to be included in the
debate. The evolution of the ISC thus reached full circle: at the eleventh
ISC conference in 1964, which was held in New Zealand, the ISC voted
in favour of a charter that transformed it into a distinct political counter-
force to the IUS.
Apart from this aggregation of national student unions, there also
existed ‘international’ student associations with a pronounced ideological
flavour.10 The oldest of these were the religious organizations. The Protes-
tant World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), which had existed since
the nineteenth century, was sponsored after the war by the World Council
of Churches. Since the beginning of the twentieth century there had been
a student union for the Young Men’s Christian Associations (YMCA), of
which the Intercollegiate Volunteer Movement was a sister organization.
The oldest international Catholic association was founded in 1921 as
a confederation of Catholic student associations under the name of Pax
Romana–International Movement of Catholic Students (IMCS). The year
1946 saw the advent of a second student union, which grouped together
the student associations with a specific focus on Catholic action: the Inter-
national Young Catholic Students (IYCS).11 The period between the First
and Second World Wars also saw the establishment of the World Union
of Jewish Students. The work of these organizations with a religious
background was particularly focused on the socio-religious situation of
the student world and not so much on politics, although interest in the
latter grew from the 1960s onwards, influenced among other things by
Latin American liberation theology. There was an International Union of
Christian Democrats (IUCD), created in 1962, and a World Federation
of Liberal and Radical Youth (WFLRY), which was likewise founded in
the 1960s. As for the social-democratic International Union of Socialist
Youth (IUSY), when in 1968 it was discovered that it had received funds
from the CIA, a crisis and a temporary suspension of the IUSY’s activities
ensued.
Dissatisfaction with the apolitical functioning of the national student
unions culminated in a series of meetings of the European representatives
of the student union movement: in July 1966 in Geneva, in December of
the same year in Ghent, and in February–March 1967 in Brussels. These
students were from Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Ire-
land, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.
They accused the leadership of the national student unions of restricting
10 Altbach and Uphoff, Student Internationals (note 6), 98–113.

11 B. Pelegri, IMCS-IYCS: Their Option, their Pedagogy (Kowloon, 1979).
281
Louis Vos
their activities to the organization of student trips, student exchange pro-
grammes or purely technical cultural cooperation, without any involve-
ment of the students themselves. Incidentally, the content of the concept
of ‘student syndicalism’ changed. Less and less emphasis was placed on
the defence of tangible student interests and increasing stress was put
on the politicized pursuit of a democratic society as the most important
‘student responsibility’.
The new syndicalists rejected the ‘stupid’ theory of ‘student-as-such’
and the ‘hypocritical immobilism’ brought about by ‘indifference to pol-
itics’. Their aim was to initiate a militant European student movement,
and their plans included the organization of annual conferences, the pub-
lication of a syndicalist newsletter, and bilateral and regional seminars
and study weekends. In August 1967 a meeting in Berlin provided an
opportunity for the student union leaders to forge new contacts with
international colleagues, which revealed two fundamental strategy lines
at cross-purposes with each other. One approach aimed at mobilizing
support centred around academic issues, while the other advocated inter-
est in major world issues such as Vietnam, developing countries or the
threat to democracy.
In 1967 it also became known that more than three-quarters of the
resources of the – officially apolitical and financially independent – ISC
were being covertly provided by the American Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA). This revelation provoked the end of the ISC, which had lost its
credibility; indeed, it ceased to function when the financing stopped. The
IUS continued to operate as the sole surviving umbrella organization, but
it failed to exert any influence on the New Left tendencies. As a front
organization of the Soviet Union, it was distrusted by the ‘new student
movement’. However, it carried on with its normal agenda and organized
congresses and other events for students from around the world. It was
threatened from the inside on just one occasion. In the autumn of 1981
in Poland, at the time of Solidarność, an independent national student
union ousted the communist student organization, condemned the IUS
as a non-representative manipulative tool of Moscow, and called for an
international student congress in Warsaw in December 1981 to create a
new, independent international student organization.12 The plan, how-
ever, was thwarted by General Jaruzelski’s coup d’état on 13 December
of that year. The IUS continued to function until 1989, when its ultimate
demise coincided with the collapse of the communist regimes.
The significance of the IUS and the ISC did not lie so much in the
establishment of student movements in certain countries, but in the
12 L. Révész, Jugendbewegungen im Ostblock (Vienna, 1985), 107.
282
opportunity that it afforded student leaders from all over the world
to meet one another and thus to function as a ‘training and meeting
ground’.13 Secondly, the IUS and the ISC also had significance as ‘micro-
cosms’ of the cold war, for they were attempts of the two superpowers to
lure students – ‘the ‘leaders of tomorrow’ – into their camp. The fact that
the Soviet Union started to employ infiltration and front organizations
during the war, and that later American behaviour was merely a response
and therefore a defensive action, is correct but this does not redeem
the ISC flop. Anyway, both organisations contributed to the ‘myth’ of the
‘international student movement’, which strengthened the self-confidence
of the national student movements in the 1960s without there ever having
been a real New Left student international.
diverging missions (1945–1956)

The post-war period brought diverging missions for the student move-
ments in both democratic and non-democratic countries. In the Soviet
Union and the Eastern bloc, but also in the right-wing dictatorships of
Spain and Portugal, the party and the state streamlined everything. The
tradition of the ‘classical student movement’ was continued by students
in opposition. They expressed their ‘student responsibility’ towards the
broader society by standing up for civil liberties or national independence.
They faced merciless repression, could not count on fair treatment in the
mass media, and took greater risks than activists in democratic countries.
In those countries, however, if some students wanted to follow the ‘clas-
sical model’ of the student movement, others wanted to limit the task of
the student movement to the interests of the ‘student as such’.
In the SOVIET UNION the students were de facto depoliticized in
1945, despite the formal semblance of concurring with the official party
line.14 In 1956, however, expressions of support for the Hungarian revo-
lution and protests against the Soviet intervention were voiced in Tbilisi
(Georgia), Vilnius (Lithuania), Leningrad, Kiev, Kharkov, Sverdlovsk and
even in Moscow by means of posters, handwritten pamphlets and under-
ground newspapers. Such activism was quickly suppressed.15 In the Soviet
zone of Germany, the reopening and purging of the universities was pre-
pared jointly by the Russian occupation authorities and local communist
13 Altbach and Uphoff, Student Internationals (note 6), 4–5.
14 S. K. Morrisey, Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and Mythologies of Radicalism
(New York, 1998), 231–4; R. D. Dobson, ‘Soviet Union’, in Altbach, Activism (note
4), 263–78; R. J. Misionas and R. Taagepera, The Baltic States: Years of Dependence
1940–1990, 2nd edn (Berkeley, 1993), 115.
15 Révész, Jugendbewegungen (note 12), 183.
283
Louis Vos
students,16 but open resistance to the communist domination continued
to exist until about 1950. In elections for the student councils in 1946–7,
the communists at the (East Berlin) Humboldt University failed to gain
a majority despite numerous arrests and expulsions.17 A similar scenario
followed the communist takeover in CZECHOSLOVAKIA in February
1948, but the minority of communist students, or ‘studentocracy’ (a term
unique to Czechoslovakia meaning student control of university Com-
munist Party organizations) were given a free hand to purge university
professors and students alike.18 Nevertheless, there were several expres-
sions of protest in 1951, 1953, 1955 – and in 1956 against the invasion
of Hungary.19
In POLAND the national reaction created a different situation.20 The
non-communist professors continued to set the tone. The number of party
members in the student world was still only 9% in 1953 – as opposed
to three to four times that number in the German Democratic Republic
and Czechoslovakia – and by 1958 the percentage had dropped even
further to 2.5%.21 After a short-lived armed uprising in Poznań in June
1956, in which students played a part,22 the so-called ‘Polish October’
in 1956 was an attempt by the Polish communists to restore confidence
by a move to greater openness. It was the beginning of de-Stalinization.
This example had a contagious effect in HUNGARY where the students,
16 M. Müller and E. Müller, ‘Stürmt die Festung Wissenschaft!’: Die Sowjetizierung der
mitteldeutschen Universitäten seit 1945 (Berlin-Dahlem, 1953); E. Richert, ‘Sozialistis-
che Universität’: Die Hochschulpolitik der SED (Berlin, 1967), 43–5; W. Klose, Freiheit
schreibt auf eure Fahnen: 800 Jahre deutsche Studenten (Oldenburg, 1967), 254–60;
W. Krönig and K.-D. Müller, Anpassung, Widerstand, Verfolgung: Hochschule und
Studenten in der SBZ und DDR (1945–1961) (Cologne, 1994), 148; W. Krönig and
K.-D. Müller, Nachkriegssemester: Studium in Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit (Stuttgart,
1990), 215–37; R. Jessen, ‘Zwischen diktatorischer Kontrolle und Kollaboration:
Die Universitäten in der SBZ/DDR’, in J. Connelly and M. Grüttner (eds.), Zwis-
chen Autonomie und Anpassung: Universitäten und Diktaturen des 20. Jahrhunderts
(Paderborn, 2003), 229–63; J. Weberling, Für Freiheit und Menschenrechte: Der Ring
christlich-demokratischen Studenten (RCDS) 1945–1986 (Düsseldorf, 1990), 21–2, 32–
46.
17 K. W. Fricke, P. Steinbach and J. Tuchel (eds.), Opposition und Widerstand: Politische
Lebensbilder (Munich, 2002), 162–86; Klose, Freiheit (note 16), 249–68; R. Köhler,
‘Neubeginn und Neubestimmung. Universitäten und Hochschulen in der antifaschistisch-
demokratischen Umwältung’, in Magister und Scholaren, Professoren und Studenten:
Geschichte deutscher Universitäten und Hochschulen im Überblick (Leipzig, 1981),
195–215; Weberling, Freiheit (note 16), 32–46.
18 J. Havranek, ‘Die tschechischen Universitäten unter der kommunistischen Diktatur’, in
Connelly and Grüttner, Autonomie (note 16), 157–71; Richert, Sozialistische (note 16),
590; Köhler, ‘Neubeginn’ (note 17), 217.
19 Révész, Jugendbewegungen (note 12), 36, 43–4.
20 Révész, Jugendbewegungen (note 12), 26–31.
21 J. Connelly, ‘Die polnischen Universitäten unter der Staatssozialismus. 1944–1968’, in
Connelly and Grüttner, Autonomie (note 16), 173–97.
22 Révész, Jugendbewegungen (note 12), 67.
284
on 22 October 1956, demanded more democracy and greater freedom. It
heralded the beginning of an armed national uprising that developed into
a national and democratic fight for freedom, first against the communist
security troops and, from 4 November, against the Russians, whereby
many students lost their lives.23 The repression of the uprising sent a
shock wave across both the Eastern bloc and the West, where a chorus of
outrage found expression in many motions of protest; political reaction
also led to splits in the communist ranks.
Until 1956, few dissident voices were heard in the student world of
the non-democratic right-wing European countries. In Franco’s SPAIN
the Falangist SEU (Sindicato español universitario) was the only student
association sanctioned by the regime. Membership was compulsory and
it was organized on strictly authoritarian lines, albeit with internal ten-
sions between the monarchists, supporters of Franco, and the Falangists,
with the latter being purged in 1954.24 In February 1956, hundreds of
Madrid students called for the democratization of the SEU: that led to
clashes with Falangist students and resulted in one fatality.25 In Salazar’s
PORTUGAL, opposition to the official fascist youth and student asso-
ciations likewise increased, sparking the first student protests in Lisbon
and Coimbra in 1956.26
In democratic WESTERN EUROPE, the post-war student leaders ini-
tially focused on improving the social position of the student and on
democratizing the university. Their aims were twofold: on the one hand,
lowering the access threshold for students from lower social groups
by means of scholarships, student accommodation, student restaurants,
study services and student health care on the one hand, and student par-
ticipation on the other. ‘Student syndicalism’ could be strictly limited to
consultation on student affairs, or it could become a vindication move-
ment embedded in the pursuit of a democratic society. In the first case,
politics and confrontation were avoided as much as possible; in the sec-
ond, they formed the core of the movement. In the post-war years the
apolitical line prevailed, even if, from the second half of the 1950s,
the broader political context predominated. In some countries, however,
the time-honoured engagement of the student movement in favour of
23 Révész, Jugendbewegungen (note 12), 119–99; G. Pétery, ‘Die kommunistische Idee

der Universität – ein von den Erfahrungen Ungarns inspirierter Essay’, in Connelly and
Grüttner, Autonomie (note 16), 129–55; D. F. Burg, Encyclopedia of Student and Youth
Movements (New York, 1998), 4, 155, 98–100.
24 L. S. Feuer, The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student
Movements (London, 1969), 295–6; M. A. Ruiz Carnicer, El Sindicato español univer-
sitario (SEU), 1939–1965: La socialización polı́tica de la juventud universitaria en el
franquismo (Madrid, 1996).
25 B. Schütze, ‘Widerstand Spaniens Universitäten’, Kursbuch, 13 (June 1968), 29–30.
26 Feuer, Conflict (note 24), 291–4.
285
Louis Vos
wider national, social or religious emancipation continued to exist and
was sometimes allied with ‘student syndicalism’.
Foremost in this development was FRANCE, where the post-war com-
munist and Catholic students met in the overarching Union nationale
des étudiants français (UNEF), the association taking advantage of the
desire of the new Fourth Republic to integrate students into the national
community.27 The Grenoble Charter, so called because the UNEF had
convened a meeting there in 1946, set the tone.28 It demanded that the stu-
dent be categorized as a young intellectual worker (jeune travailleur intel-
lectuel) devoted to the search for truth and freedom, but who should now
receive from the state, as an advance for services to be rendered to society
at some later date, ‘une prévoyance sociale particulière dans le domaine
physique, intellectuel et moral’ – and even, if possible, a student’s wage.
In 1951 that demand just failed to become law and subsequently disap-
peared from sight. The Charter remained a point of reference for both the
French student movement and its foreign counterparts until well into the
1960s.
In several other countries, such as the UNITED KINGDOM,
SWEDEN and THE NETHERLANDS, student leaders and the author-
ities were on the same wavelength. The British NUS already had a
blueprint for the new post-war university, drawn up during the war
in cooperation with academics and civil servants; it stated that higher
education should be available to everyone, that students should be given
‘full self-government’ of their own affairs, and that at the same time they
should be integrated more into society.29 This was repeated in the ‘Stu-
dent Charter’ of 1949, which also argued in favour of more tutorials and
seminars, the use of new audiovisual techniques in education, and oral
examinations.30 In 1945 the Swedish student union (Sveriges forenade
studentkårer – SFS) was promptly given a seat on the Government Com-
mission on Higher Education.31 In the immediate aftermath of the war,
the overarching Student Council of the Netherlands soon found itself in
27 C. Singer, L’université libérée, l’université épurée: 1943–1947 (Paris, 1997), 66–73; D.

Fischer, L’histoire des étudiants en France de 1945 à nos jours (Paris, 2000); J. P. Worms,
‘The French Student Movement’, in Lipset and Altbach, Students (note 2), 267–78.
28 Burg, Encyclopedia (note 23), 42; Worms, ‘French’ (note 27), 272–3; Singer, Université
(note 27), 118; Fischer, Histoire (note 27), 52–4.
29 A. Marwick, ‘Youth in Britain, 1920–1960: Detachment and Commitment’, Journal of
Contemporary History, 5 (1970), 37–51; Burg, Encyclopedia (note 23), 141–2.
30 E. Ashby and M. Anderson, The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain (Cambridge, Mass.,
1970), 86–105.
31 N. Runeby and C. Skoglund, ‘Sweden’, in Altbach, Activism (note 4), 279–95; R. Tomas-
son and E. Allardt, ‘Scandinavian Students and the Politics of Organized Radicalism’, in
Lipset and Altbach, Students (note 2), 96–126.
286
difficulties owing to the revival of the old fraternities, which caused the
traditional ‘aloof from society’ image of the student world to return.32
In GERMANY and AUSTRIA, which had been devastated by the war,
the immediate post-war years were characterized by military zones of
occupation. In West Germany the difficult material conditions strength-
ened the ‘ohne mich’ (‘without me’) mentality that followed twelve years
of ideological indoctrination, so that students were more concerned about
food than democracy, but also susceptible to scepticism.33 The develop-
ment of democratic student organizations was encouraged by the occu-
pying powers, while the traditional associations were forbidden because
they elicited reminiscences of chauvinism, but also because of the elitism
that they exuded. That appeared to be ‘behind the times’ in the new
democratic era.34 However, after the founding of the Federal Republic
of Germany the ‘schlagende Korporationen’ (duelling fraternities) and
their mores – including the Mensur – reappeared, and by the early 1960s
they had succeeded in attracting 30 per cent of the student body to their
ranks.35 In Austria, where the fraternity developed an extreme right-wing
ideology characterized by anti-Semitism and völkisch German national-
ism, their numbers were even greater.36
The depoliticization that occurred in the first half of the 1950s also
occurred in FRANCE where, in the period 1950–6, the UNEF was taken
over by a majority that was reluctant to initiate any political action for
fear of having to take a stand on the Algerian war.37 In that period
the British NUS leadership likewise became increasingly apolitical and
technocratic in its negotiations with the authorities, as a result of which
32 A. Doeve, ‘De Nederlanse studentenraad’, in Studenten van haver tot gort (Delft, 1957),
115–32; R. Hogendijk, Het studentenleven (Amsterdam, 1980), 2–109; J. Janssen and P.
Voestermans, Studenten in beweging: Politiek, universiteit en student (Nijmegen, 1984),
61–7; K. van Berkel, Academische illusies: De Groningse universiteit in een tijd van
crisis, bezetting en herstel, 1930–1950 (Amsterdam, 2005).
33 H. Schelsky, Die skeptische Generation: Eine Soziologie der deutschen Jugend (Cologne,
1957).
34 Weberling, Freiheit (note 16), 31; Klose, Freiheit (note 16), 268–331; L. Elm, ‘Das Ver-
gangene ist nicht vergangen’, in L. Elm, D. Heither and G. Schäfer (eds.), Füxe, Burschen,
Alte Herren: Studentische Korporationen vom Wartburgfest bis Heute (Cologne, 1992),
180–219; K. H. Jarausch, Deutsche Studenten, 1800–1970 (Frankfurt, 1984), 222.
35 Klose, Freiheit (note 16), 322–3; H. O. Keunecke, ‘250 Jahre Erlanger Studen-
tengeschichte. Soziale Bestimmung, politische Haltung und Lebensform in Wandel’,
in H. Kössler (ed.), 250 Jahre Friedrich-Alexander-Universität: Erlangen-Nürnberg
(Erlangen, 1993), 153–203.
36 M. Gehler, ‘“ . . . erheb’ich, wie üblich, die Rechte zum Gruß . . . ” Rechtskonservatismus,
Rechtsextremismus und Neonazismus in österreichischen Studentenverbindungen von
1945 bis 1995’, in D. Heither, M. Gehler, A. Kurth and G. Schäfer, Blut und Paukboden:
Eine Geschichte der Burschenschaften (Frankfurt, 1997), 187–222.
37 Fischer, Histoire (note 27), 185–204.
287
Louis Vos
they lost touch with the majority of the students.38 This alienation also
occurred in Sweden, where the SFS did have a major say in the expansion
plans for higher education in 1955. However, as a consequence of the
question whether the student union should condemn the apartheid regime
in South Africa or the war in Vietnam, sentiments were voiced by the rank
and file to return to the classical student movement of the ‘Guardians
of Light’. In Helsinki, the Union of Academic Freedom (VAL) argued
in favour of an idealistic Finnish nationalism without materialism and
hedonism, allied with a formal academic traditionalism.39
In BELGIUM there was no question of depoliticization. In the post-war
period the Flemish student movement in Leuven resumed its role as avant-
garde and recruitment field for the broader Flemish national movement.40
It did, however, develop new emphases. The old national demands were
flavoured by social accents and converged into a single platform with the
new student syndicalism. Among the better-off French-speaking students
in Brussels and Leuven there was no ‘back to the people’ tradition, and
the concepts of nationalism and student syndicalism failed to strike a
sympathetic chord. There the regional, apolitical beer-drinking student
societies were still setting the tone.
a ‘new student movement’ (1958–1969)

Whereas sociologists had a short while earlier labelled the post-war youth
in the democratic Europe as sceptical and apolitical, a turning point was
reached at the end of the 1950s: it led to a ‘new student movement’.41
The origins and the development of this movement were influenced by
the history of individual nations.42 Everywhere, however, the movements
were supported by students born during or after the war, whose own
‘experience stratification’ was coloured by the fact that they were the first
in history for whom the welfare state and democracy were a given. They
could permit themselves the luxury of inveighing against the hollowness
of the purely consumer society and the hypocrisy of the political system.
In retrospect, for the ‘generation of 1968’ the protest turned out to be
38 S. Ellis, ‘A Demonstration of British Good Sense? British Student Protest during the
Vietnam War’, in G. J. De Groot (ed.), Student Protest: The Sixties and After (London,
1998), 54–69; A. H. Halsey and S. Marks, ‘British Student Politics’, in Lipset and
Altbach, Students (note 2), 35–59.
39 M. Klinge, Eine nordische Universität: Die Universität Helsinki 1640–1990 (Helsinki,
1992), 715–47.
40 L. Vos, ‘Van Vlaamse Leeuw tot rode vaan . . . en verder: de naoorlogse Leuvense stu-
dentenbeweging’, Onze Alma Mater, 47:3 (1993), 241–59.
41 J. Habermas, L. von Friedeburg, C. Oehler and E. Weltz, Student und Politik (Neuwied
and Berlin, 1961).
42 Kimmel, Studentenbewegungen (note 5), 132–90.
288
the ‘generational event’. It gradually brought about an international con-
vergence of the movements in terms of themes and forms of action, thus
creating ultimately the image of a single movement.
In terms of content, the most important ‘new student movement’
developed in WEST GERMANY. New Left anti-authority views were
strengthened by the ‘ban-the-bomb movement’, which held an annual
Ostermarsch in the period 1959–67,43 and by the ‘critical theory’ of the
Frankfurt School centred around the sociologists Horkheimer, Adorno,
Habermas and Marcuse (who remained in America) they offered dialectic
criticism of value-free scientific positivism. The organizational framework
was the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (SDS), which in 1961 had
severed all ties with the German Social Democratic Party; its key centres
were in West Berlin and Frankfurt.44 The SDS action started with a con-
flict concerning the freedom of political speech at the Free University of
Berlin, but the mass mobilization of student opinion really got into its
stride with the protest against the Vietnam war, a theme that originated
in the United States and became the principal catalyst for action every-
where. There were three reasons for this.45 In the first place, it was a
morally unjustifiable war; in the second place, the fact that a popula-
tion of peasants in a developing country was able to resist a superpower
caused many to believe that repressive authority could and should be suc-
cessfully challenged; and in the third place, students consequently began
to regard repression elsewhere in the world and in their own country as
part of one and the same system, which must be opposed worldwide.
The Vietnam protest mobilized thousands of students in Germany in the
period 1965–7.
One of the meetings was addressed by Marcuse.46 He considered
protest against the Vietnam war as a moral duty in light of Germany’s
Nazi past, and he argued – referring to the student protest in the United
States – in favour of a ‘negierende Opposition gegen die Gesellschaft als
Ganzes’ via a moral, sexual and political rebellion. He emphasized that
this was only possible through a coalition of both the ‘Priviligierten’
(privileged students and intellectuals) and the ‘Unterpriviligierten’ in
the industrialized countries (the working class, ethnic minorities, social
43 K. A. Otto, Vom Ostermarsch zur Apo: Geschichte der außerparlamentarischen Oppo-

sition in der Bundesrepublik 1960–70 (Frankfurt, 1977).
44 A. D. Moses, ‘The State and the Student Movement in West Germany, 1967–77’, in De
Groot, Student Protest (note 38), 139–49.
45 Ellis, ‘Demonstration’ (note 38), 55.
46 I. Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er Bewegung: Deutschland, Westeuropa, USA (Munich, 2001),
54, 65–71; W. Kraushaar (ed.), Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von
der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcoctail. 1946–1995, Vol. I (Hamburg, 1998), 249–50,
265–7.
289
Louis Vos
fringe groups, the unemployed) and in the Third World (liberation move-
ments), thus bundling together the entire socio-critical movement under
a common denominator and making a link between political protest
and counter-culture. The student leader Rudi Dutschke added that the
greatest threat to democracy lay in the unresolved legacies of the Nazi
past, which led to individuals being unconsciously moulded in their daily
life into ‘authoritarian personalities’.47 Agitating against authority and
authoritarian structures could contribute to personal freedom. Such crit-
ical agitation would change both the individuals and – after a ‘long
march’ – the structures themselves. It would thus be possible to con-
struct both the ‘new mankind’ and the ‘new society’ at one and the same
time.
The killing of a German university student, Benno Ohnesorg, shot
by a police bullet on 2 June 1967 in Berlin during an anti-Shah
demonstration, seemed to confirm that ‘the established order’ was tak-
ing the path of fascism. Thousands of outraged students took to the
streets. In the ensuing debate on strategy, the anti-authoritarian line
prevailed over the left-wing socialist line that was in favour of seek-
ing co-operation with the labour movement. In 1967–8, the movement
launched the ‘Kritische Universität’, with the goal of precipitating ideo-
logical tenets while denouncing the so-called ‘value-free’, ‘objective’ sci-
ence thanks to the students’ self-motivation and permanent dialogue with
professors. Such ‘Critical Universities’ were set up in Berlin, Frankfurt,
Heidelberg, Kiel, Mainz, Munich, Münster and Tübingen, and in 1967
the model was ‘exported’ to Dutch, Italian and Flemish universities, but
not to the French ones.
These developments were paralleled by continuing demonstrations
against the Vietnam war, but also against consumer society and the
‘Notstandsgesetze’ that aimed to curtail parliamentary power, and
against the right-wing media mogul Axel Springer. At the anti-imperialist
Vietnam Congress in Berlin, on 17–18 February 1968, Dutschke suc-
ceeded in rallying students from all over Western Europe. He exhorted
them to join him in the Ausserparlamentarische Opposition (APO), the
breeder of a ‘world revolution’. However, when public opinion turned
against the students, on Maundy (or Holy) Thursday, 11 April – a few
days after the murder of Martin Luther King – Dutschke was shot and
seriously injured; violent student protests followed and led to more casu-
alties and the increasing isolation of the movement. Student leaders tried
without success to convince the workers to take industrial action against
47 The notion of ‘Authoritarian Personality’ was coined by Adorno in an empirical analysis

of authoritarian structures; see T. W. Adorno et al., Studies in Prejudice (New York,
1950).
290
the imminent acceptance of the Notstandsgesetze. But, on 30 May, Par-
liament passed the emergency bill.48
In FRANCE the decolonization and the actions against the Algerian
war changed student politics at the end of the 1950s. From May 1958
the politically engaged group in the UNEF, which for years had been in
the minority, regained control of the association and turned the French
student union into the main centre for the entire resistance movement
against the war in Algeria. Some of the students, those who continued to
swear by an apolitical stance, broke away from the UNEF in 1961 and
formed an apolitical student union of their own. When the conflict ended
in 1962, a whole generation had become aware of the decisive influence
that students could have on the course of history.49 Student organizations
were formed that embraced both extreme left-wing and extreme right-
wing politics. Thus, the UNEF protested against a technocratic-economic
restructuring of the university, which came into force in 1967–8. The
May Movement of 1968 joined in. It started in Nanterre with the ‘March
22nd Movement’, with Daniel Cohn-Bendit emerging as student leader,
and on 2 May it moved on to the Sorbonne, where the occupation of the
university was brought to an end by the police.
The following days were marked by a series of violent clashes with the
police, as during the ‘Night of the Barricades’ (10 and 11 May 1968).
Police excesses caused public opinion to side with the students. Solidarity
strikes by social groups of diverse origins culminated in a general strike
on 13 May, in which as many as 7.5 to 9 million people ultimately
participated. The magic word was autogestion (workers’ control or self-
management), a principle that would have to be attained not only in
the universities, but also in the schools and factories. In a never-ending
debate at open meetings, in cafés and on the streets, radical criticism was
levelled at the nature of the existing society, in the hope of sparking a
left-wing revolution.50 But it never happened. De Gaulle managed to stay
in power. In the student world a new phase of ideological struggle was
then initiated between various left-wing factions.51
In ITALY the ‘new student movement’ was born out of dissatisfaction
with the academic structures.52 However, just as in Germany, it was Viet-
nam that mobilized the students. In March 1967 the sociology students
48 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule (note 46), 289–312; Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er (note 46),
90–2, 94.
49 Fischer, Histoire (note 27), 224–59; Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er (note 46), 80–93.
50 J.-P. Le Goff, Mai 68: L’héritage impossible (Paris, 2002), 457–63.
51 Fischer, Histoire (note 27), 383–417; G. Statera, Death of a Utopia: The Development
and Decline of Student Movements in Europe (Oxford, 1975), 181; Kraushaar, Frank-
furter (note 46), 312–41.
52 R. Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London,
1990), 63–5; Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er (note 46), 42–5, 71–2.
291
Louis Vos
in Trent led the way with a student strike and occupation of the univer-
sity buildings. The protests were taken over in the following weeks at the
universities of Rome, Pisa, Milan, Florence and Perugia.53 In the autumn
and winter of 1967/8 the confrontation resumed in Trent and spread
elsewhere, as in the Catholic University of Milan; by January 1968 a
total of thirty-six universities were occupied. The criticism of academic
authoritarianism evolved in a short time into anti-authoritarianism per
se and into a ‘contestazione globale’ of society; inspired by Marcuse,
Fromm and psychoanalysis, the movement also referred to beliefs held by
Dutschke. The occupied buildings provided the opportunity to develop a
counter-culture in which solidarity and the importance of the community
transcended the individual, in which taboos were also broken in what
the right-wing press called the ‘Nights of Mao’.54 In these sexual experi-
ments a traditional gender role frequently continued to dominate but the
discrimination of female students by their male colleagues was not felt as
such. The first ‘communes’ were a natural extension of this development.
In the Italian student protests violence played a major role, as in the
clashes on 1 March 1968 between the police and students at the Villa
Giulia in Rome, symbolic starting point of the confrontation.55 Police
excesses, like in France, caused public opinion to side with the students;
this encouraged students to opt explicitly for violence. It was no accident
that their most popular battle song became La Violenza. That was the
beginning of Italy’s ‘decade of lead’ (anni di piombo).56
As in Germany and France, though slightly later, the movement like-
wise disintegrated. An anti-authoritarian stance placed the emphasis on
student power (potere studentesco) and wanted to keep the university
as a field of activism. Insofar as the political stance centred around the
newspaper Il Potere Operaio (workers’ power), it proposed action in
the factories but clung to an anti-bureaucratic and fundamentally demo-
cratic orientation. The Maoists also went to the workers, but promptly
abandoned anti-authoritarianism to develop a party structure acting as
a revolutionary vanguard for the workers’ struggle. This move gained
momentum when the French workers began action on the other side of the
Alps. In the strikes of 1968–9, students played an important role through
the ‘comitati di base’: rank-and-file committees that strengthened the
workers’ distrust towards the official ‘reformist’ trade unions and zeal-
ously advocated ‘workers’ autonomy’.57
53 Halsey and Marks, ‘British’ (note 38), 44–7. 54 Lumley, States (note 52), 87–107.
55 Statera, Death (note 51), 106–7. 56 Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68-er (note 46), 75–7.
57 Statera, Death (note 51), 221–59; I. Gilcher-Holtey, ‘Die Phantasie an die Macht’: Mai
68 in Frankreich (Frankfurt, 1995); I. Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68-er (note 46), 102–20;
G. Dreyfus-Armand, R. Frank, M.-F. Lévy and M. Zancarini-Fournel (eds.), Les années
68: Le temps de la contestation (Brussels, 2000).
292
In the UNITED KINGDOM the Anglo-French attack on Egypt and
the Suez crisis in 1956 led to student protests against imperialism, while
the Soviet invasion of Hungary accelerated the rise of the ‘New Left’, in
which Oxford students played a part. The New Left subsequently grew by
concentrating on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In November
1964, students in London demonstrated against apartheid, and a few
months later against the war in Vietnam. The politicization increased
through disappointment with the right-wing policy of the Labour Gov-
ernment, which had been in office since 1964.58 The sit-in, staged at the
London School of Economics (LSE) in March 1967, was the result of a
disciplinary conflict that stemmed from a political stand, but here too it
was mainly Vietnam that brought the students onto the streets in protest.
The largest demonstrations took place in London outside the US embassy
in October 1967 and in March and October 1968, but other actions also
took place in other parts of the country; in 1967 and 1968 demonstrations
occurred in about half of all the UK universities or colleges.59
Generally speaking, the British ‘new student movement’ was less violent
and less ideologically radical than anywhere else. However, it did succeed
in gaining joint democratic decision-making in universities, although the
leadership of the British NUS remained aloof from the student move-
ment or even explicitly opposed it. That stamped the NUS as a con-
servative association that was completely out of touch with its student
members. To discredit the NUS leadership, in 1967 radical students
revealed the CIA financing of the ISC. By November 1968 the posi-
tion of the radicals was sufficiently strong to force the NUS to leave
the ISC. Dissatisfaction with the politics of the NUS caused the local
student unions, like those of Keele and Hull, to withdraw from the
NUS and also resulted, in 1967, in the establishment of a reformist
left-wing student union (Radical Student Alliance – RSA), followed in
1968 by a revolutionary student union (Revolutionary Socialist Students
Federation – RSSF). In 1969 the RSA, supported by the radicalization of
the campuses, succeeded in taking over the leadership of the NUS.
In BELGIUM, at the beginning of the 1960s, the Flemish student move-
ment in Leuven had succeeded in reconciling student syndicalism with
Flemish nationalism. Through the turmoil of two student revolts it would
eventually transform itself into a ‘new student movement’. The policy of
monolingualism in Flanders, which had been compulsory since 1963,
prompted the Flemish nationalists to demand the ‘siphoning off’ of the
French-speaking department of Leuven University to the Walloon region
58 M. Shaw, ‘Great Britain’, in Altbach, Activism (note 4), 236–48.

59 Ellis, ‘Demonstration’ (note 38), 54–65; K. Mehnert, Twilight of the Young: The Radical
Movements of the 1960s and their Legacy (Stanford, 1976), 601.
293
Louis Vos
of Belgium. In 1966 the Belgian bishops rejected the idea and demanded
unconditional obedience.60 This rejection sparked off the ‘May Revolt’
of 1966, which rapidly spread across the country as a Flemish national
protest movement, but above all as one with a democratic, anti-clerical
and anti-authoritarian identity. In student circles the emphasis quickly
changed from Flemish nationalism to anti-authoritarianism with New
Left leanings. In 1967 that resulted in the establishment of a (initially
small) radical ‘Studentenvakbeweging’ (student trade union). Under pres-
sure from the protest campaign, the bishops decided to leave further
decisions to the political establishment, but when it was found that the
French-speaking academic authority had nonetheless decided to stay in
Leuven, a second revolt of the Flemish students broke out in January
1968. The three-week protest precipitated the fall of the Belgian Gov-
ernment and resulted in the university being split up, with the French-
speaking departments of Leuven University moving to a new university
in the Walloon region. As a result, the Leuven militants severed their ties
with the Flemish movement and became New Left supporters. In May
1968 students at the university in Brussels launched a ‘new student move-
ment’ of their own, with an ‘association libre’, which lasted precisely one
month.61 In Leuven the movement resumed in the next academic year
and expanded to the other Belgian universities of Antwerp, Ghent and
Liège. Although the initial mobilization theme was student participation,
the movement quickly broadened to embrace criticism of global society
via the themes of the Third World and Vietnam, while radical militants
tried also to establish contact with striking workers.
In THE NETHERLANDS, until the beginning of the 1960s, being a
student was primarily an experience set aside from social reality.62 Then
a new generation suddenly rediscovered the students’ capacity for rad-
ical criticism and established a ‘Studentenvakbeweging’ (student trade
union). It soon found a following in all Dutch universities, demanding
student empowerment and social facilities for students; in 1967, this led
to setting up a Kritische universiteit at various locations. Concurrently,
in Amsterdam an avant-gardist and provocative movement emerged, the
so-called ‘Provo’, in which students and former students were active. In
April 1969, government plans for technocratic reforms of the universi-
ties triggered massive student protest, first at the Catholic universities
of Tilburg and Nijmegen and subsequently in Amsterdam and Leiden,
accompanied by sit-ins and a student movement that quickly broadened
60 Vos et al., Studentenprotest (note 2), 22–9.

61 S. Govaert, Mai ’68: C’était au temps où Bruxelles contestait (Brussels, 1990).
62 P. de Rooy, ‘“Kapitalist moet je geloof ik niet zijn”: On the Reinvention of the Student
in the 1960s’ (lecture, Amsterdam, 27 May 2005); van Berkel, Academische (note 32),
37–66.
294
out to encompass social criticism.63 In the autumn of 1969 the move-
ment lost its mass following, and political factioning gradually began to
emerge. The most important structural result of the student actions was
the enactment, in December 1970, of the Wet op de universitaire bestuur-
shervorming (Universities Administrative Reform Act), which opened the
door through simplified parliamentary rules to joint democratic decision-
making at all levels – including the administrative and technical per-
sonnel – in the policy of the university. It was probably the most far-
reaching academic democracy exacted by a student movement in the
1960s.
Student protests also occurred in the Scandinavian countries, with sit-
ins at the universities of Stockholm, Copenhagen and Helsinki. The situa-
tion remained amicable, however, without recourse to police intervention
or riots.64 In SWEDEN a wide gap had developed between the leader-
ship of the SFS and the activists, who labelled the leaders as ‘traitors’. The
militants wanted joint government at university level. The protest actions
did result in an adjustment of the academic legislation. Some activists,
referring to the older ideal of the students as ‘Guardians of the Light’,
organized protest demonstrations against the Vietnam war and against
a planned tennis tournament between Sweden and the ‘white’ Rhode-
sian regime. They also sought more contact with the people by giving
up their privileges and opening their associations and student facilities to
all young people. That levelling of conditions was also expressed in the
ritual burning of white student caps in Lund and Uppsala.
In DENMARK in the 1960s the authorities were already well disposed
to the idea of involving students in the academic policy-making of the
universities, but despite this concession a mass protest demonstration
took place in Copenhagen in March 1968 for student empowerment at
the university level.65 At the beginning of June, student participation was
regulated by law at the national level.66
63 H. F. Cohen, De strijd om de academie: De Leidse universiteit op zoek naar een bestu-

ursstructuur 1967–1971 (Meppel, 1975); H. Krijne, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse
studentenbeweging 1967–1973 (Amsterdam, 1978); F. de Jong (ed.), Macht en inspraak:
De strijd om de democratisering van de Universiteit van Amsterdam (Baarn, 1981); J.
de Vries, Katholieke Hogeschool Tilburg, Vol. II: 1955–1977 (Baarn, 1981), 288–346;
Janssen and Voestermans, Studenten (note 32); H. Righart, De eindeloze jaren zes-
tig: Geschiedenis van een generatieconflict (Amsterdam, 1995), 256–61; J. C. Kennedy,
Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw: Nederland in de jaren zestig (Amsterdam, 1995), 168–72.
64 Tomasson and Allardt, ‘Scandinavian Students’ (note 31), 96–126; Runeby and
Skoglund, ‘Sweden’ (note 31).
65 S. E. Stybe, Copenhagen University: 500 Years of Science and Scholarship (Copenhagen,
1979), 212–17.
66 P. Boje and K. J. V. Jespersen, Pastures New. Odense University: The First 25 Years
(Odense, 1991), 47.
295
Louis Vos
In FINLAND, traditions and new insights developed side by side and
the traditional Finnish nationalism continued to set the tone; yet, mid-
way through the 1950s the national student association Suomen Yliop-
pilaskuntien Liitto (SYL) took the lead in advocating joint participation
and the provision of social facilities for students, requests that were sup-
ported by the campus intellectuals grouped around the student newspaper
Ylioppilaslehti, which called for student syndicalism.67 This led to some
polarization, because left-wing students wanted the university to take a
moral stand on matters of social importance, such as the Vietnam war.
The governing body of the University of Helsinki was quite willing to
organize joint participation, and a joint committee finalized a proposal in
November 1968 for the right of representation on decision-making bod-
ies at all levels. Left-wing students nonetheless took advantage of the one
hundredth anniversary of the university to publish a critical Festschrift
listing their grievances, and on the evening of the gala dinner, which was
attended by thousands of students in formal dress, they staged a sit-in as
‘pullover’ students in the offices of the student union where they raised
the red flag. The left-wing students remained a minority; they subse-
quently carved a niche for themselves as inheritors of ‘1968’ ideas in the
Association of Academic Socialists, which was Marxist-Leninist (but not
Maoist); they managed to win a quarter of the seats in the students’ parlia-
ment. In 1973 the anarcho-syndicalists broke away, but the two left-wing
associations came together and managed to maintain their position until
1981.
Even more so than in France or Germany, the student world in
AUSTRIA was oriented towards the right.68 During a protest demonstra-
tion against the extreme right-wing professor Borodajkewicz in 1965,
one of the demonstrators was beaten to death by a radical right-wing
student.69 That led to the radicalization of the socialist scholars and
student unions who had already demonstrated in Easter ban-the-bomb
marches. The small New Left student movement made its presence felt
in 1967–8 by debates and discussions, participation in the SDS Vietnam
Congress, a protest demonstration after the attack on Dutschke, a sit-in at
the university of Vienna and a teach-in on art, which became so provoca-
tive that the organizers disbanded their association. In the elections for
the student union held shortly afterwards, the left-wing candidates were
found to represent a minority of 13 per cent.
67 Klinge, Nordische (note 39), 748–99.

68 A. Pelinka, ‘Zu einem konlfiktfreudiger Bewußtsein’, in E. Welzig, Die 68-er: Karrieren
einer rebellischen Generation (Vienna, 1985), 9–24; Gehler, ‘Rechtskonservatismus’
(note 36).
69 F. Keller, Wien, Mai ’68: Eine heiße Viertelstunde (Vienna, 1983).
296
In 1968–9 the disruption of the inauguration of a new rector led to
a reaction from the corps of students who were present in full regalia;
in January 1969, during a visit by the Shah of Iran, there was a violent
confrontation not only with the police, but also with hostile groups of
right-wing students. The left-wing following in Vienna gradually dimin-
ished, despite actions for joint participation at the university, for more
freedom in student associations and despite protests against the American
propaganda film The Green Berets. In the winter of 1969–70, left-wing
students opted for the formation of basic groups per faculty.
the leninist turn and decline (1969–1974)

In democratic Western Europe the ‘new student movement’ disappeared
between 1968 and 1970.70 The decline was caused both by the repressive
policies and measures taken by the authorities and by the transition from
utopia to ideology, that is, from spontaneity to rigid party organization. In
the summer of 1968 ‘Leninists’ emerged and provoked the movement to
disintegrate into warring parties of cadres, cliques and sects. Almost none
of them attracted a wide following, most were distrusted by the students,
and they were unable to get a real ‘movement’ going again. Many militants
no longer had any faith in the student movement; they believed that the
only salvation lay in a revolutionary workers’ movement. They stopped
studying, went to work in factories and served as red missionaries for the
revolution.
In FRANCE the collapse of the movement was the fastest and the
most spectacular. The anti-authoritarian line of the ‘March 22nd Move-
ment’ had already been criticized during the May Days by existing
groups, notably by the Maoists and Trotskyites who tried to canalize
the movement.71 All were banned by the French government on 12 June
1968, but they were promptly replaced by new groups. A sectarian dog-
matic and more open organization emerged in the Trotskyite family. In
the Maoist family there was a small nucleus of ‘maos-spontanéistes’ or
‘maos-spontex’, who opposed ‘fossilized Leninism’ and were prepared to
undertake an armed struggle against capitalism, but most of the left-wing
student population found their home in several Marxist-Leninist parties.
They continued to oppose the Communist Party and interpreted every-
thing to suit their own ideological dogma. They accepted some form of
‘democratic centralism’ and revived all sorts of complaints that the ‘new
student movement’ had about: organization, bureaucracy, centralization,
70 Statera, Death (note 51), 219–33.

71 Statera, Death (note 51), 222–33; Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er (note 46), 100–2; Fischer,
Histoire (note 27), 448–56.
297
Louis Vos
blind obedience or slavish ideology. With this ‘Leninist turn’ the move-
ment appeared to have gone full circle. These developments led to the
disintegration of the UNEF in December 1968, when one group wanted
to transform the student union into a ‘political mass organization’ and
another wanted to change it into a ‘mass syndicalist organization’. In
1971 two successors emerged: the UNEF-Renouveau (or UNEF-re), sup-
ported by the communists, and the UNEF-Unité syndicale, supported
by the Trotskyites. Both student unions commenced a campaign to be
officially recognized by the authorities as the one and only union.
In GERMANY the fragmentation started in the summer of 1968 after
the abortive action against the Notstandsgesetze. This triggered the battle
between the factions, which differed in their ideologies and their inter-
nal working procedures.72 While the anti-authoritarians wanted to con-
tinue Dutschke’s activist legacy, with students and fringe groups as the
revolutionary subject, the Marxist-Leninists believed exclusively in the
revolutionary power of the working class, which they intended to mobi-
lize according to the Maoist model. By the autumn of 1969 these con-
tradictions could no longer be reconciled, and they culminated, on 21
March 1970, in the formal dissolution of the SDS. A year later several
new formations were consolidated, such as the Maoist Kommunistische
Partei Deutschlands/Aufbauorganisation (KPD/AO), the Kommunistis-
cher Bund Westdeutschlands (KWB) and the Proletarische Linke Partei-
initiative (PLPI), or the Rote Zellen. They could only be regarded as the
inheritors of the original movement. That also applied to the Rote Armee
Fraktion (RAF), centred around Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff,
who opted for bank robberies, attacks and abduction as the right road
to revolution. Their murderous actions against leading representatives of
justice and economy, culminating in the abduction of a German passen-
ger airplane, were experienced by public opinion and the authorities as a
strong security threat.73
A similar development took place in ITALY. In the course of 1969
a progressive demobilization of the students became apparent but did
not prevent the flourishing of numerous sub-groups. At the end of 1969
the ‘new student movement’ was largely dead. Here, too, its inheritors
were the Maoists and the Trotskyites. The hotbed of social protest did,
however, shift from the students to the workers, who turned the latter
half of 1969 into a long hot summer, and a long hot autumn of militant
strikes. In Italy too, a terrorist organization – the Brigate Rosse – grew
out of disillusionment with the results of the student movement. This
organization intended, as in Germany, to rise up against the established
72 Kraushaar, Frankfurter (note 46), 341–527; Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er (note 46), 105–11;
Kimmel, Studentenbewegungen (note 5), 198–9; Statera, Death (note 51), 234–47.
73 Kimmel, Studentenbewegungen (note 5), 219.
298
capitalist order and secure victory by force of arms. The fact that the
desperate groups remaining in Germany and Italy chose to take the route
of violence and terrorism led to the complete rejection of the movement
by public opinion.74 No other armed groups such as these grew out of
other European student movements.
Fragmentation, in fact, became commonplace. Maoist formations
everywhere instructed their militants to abandon their studies and go
to the factories, either to help the workers in their revolutionary struggle
or to learn from them. All these tiny groups in Belgium, Denmark, Swe-
den, Austria and the Netherlands called themselves Marxist-Leninists and
regarded the university merely as an operating base or a logistics support
facility. In addition, there were Trotskyites, tricontinentalists, anarcho-
syndicalists and New Leftists with no party affiliation. In some student
communities the latter could count on a considerable following, since
they showed affection for Marxism and regarded themselves as destined
to revise the traditions of the ‘new student movement’.
Around 1974 a new turning point was reached. The rhythm of the
annual mass actions slowed down and eventually stopped. It was partic-
ularly evident in Leuven and Nijmegen, two Catholic institutions where
for a long time a global orientation to the left had existed, which provided
opportunities for mass actions despite ideological differences between
specific factions. When, from time to time, student movements managed
to organize large mobilizations, a clear shift was noticeable in their objec-
tives. This was due to the economic crisis that started in 1974. Protest
actions in the second half of the 1970s were no longer focused on the
New Left themes of the 1960s but on the defence of the student’s posi-
tion, which was now under threat. In 1977, commenting on the protest
against increased tuition fees, Ralf Dahrendorf, director of the LSE, said,
‘In 1968, students thought they were a rising social group and should
demand a place under the sun. In 1977, students are behaving as though
they were a declining industry. They are asking for more money and
Government support.’75 It was evident that the students were reverting
to their own small world and that the student movement was increasingly
evaporating, at least in democratic Europe.
the nature of the ‘new student movement’

The ‘new student movement’ that emerged in the 1960s in Western
democracies differed fundamentally on at least three levels from its classi-
cal predecessor. In the first place, it no longer aspired to be the vanguard
74 Kimmel, Studentenbewegungen (note 5), 199–200; Statera, Death (note 51), 247–59.
75 Daily Telegraph, 15 February 1977, quoted by Mehnert, Twilight (note 59), 165.
299
Louis Vos
of an existing broader ‘institutionalized’ social or national movement;
rather it was bent on transforming society as a whole. Secondly, it explic-
itly introduced new themes that developed into an anti-authoritarian
utopia allowing for the creation of a community in which the creative
development of individuals could go hand in hand with social justice.
Thirdly, it introduced new forms of direct political action, which were to
while expose and destroy the established order replacing a representative
democracy with a participative democracy. Such global ambitions con-
stituted a high point in the history of the student movement, but at the
same time brought about its demise.
The new social themes that the movement introduced stemmed largely
from the New Left, which emerged in the early 1960s and whose cogni-
tive orientation was most clearly summarized by Gilcher-Holtey in five
points:76 a new interpretation of Marxism with the emphasis on alien-
ation going back to the early writings of Marx; a new socialist society
model, which was expected to neutralize such an alienation; emphasis
on personal development, so that ‘the new humankind’ could emerge
together with new social and political structures; a new organizational
concept with the emphasis on provocative action, as a result of which
both the activist and society would change; and instead of being pro-
moted by the working class, this renewal movement would be carried by
young intellectuals and the fringe groups in society. It therefore involved
the meshing of individual and collective emancipation, social and cul-
tural criticism, and cultural and social revolution, all of which were
connected by a common utopia focused on themes that are now called
‘post-materialistic’, i.e., improving the quality of life rather than material
welfare.
Initially, the orientation of the ‘new student movement’ could be
described as more of a ‘sentiment’ rather than anything else, a sentiment
characterized by anti-authoritarianism, anti-dogmatism, romanticism,
direct democracy, moral purity and community spirit; this, according to
Statera, gave it a millenarian character.77 In contrast to ‘ideology’, which
aspires merely to a partial adjustment of reality, the concept of ‘utopia’
requires – according to Mannheim – something completely new. By
demanding the impossible, the utopia appeared to liberate existing reality
from its self-evident acceptance and thus open the way to change. The
concept of utopia appealed to the masses, whereas the ideology belonged
76 Gilcher-Holtey, Phantasie (note 57), 44–104; I. Gilcher-Holtey, ‘May 1968 in Frank-

reich’, in Gilcher-Holtey, 1968 (note 1), 13–18; I. Gilcher-Holtey, ‘La contribution des
intellectuels de la Nouvelle Gauche à la définition du sens de Mai 68’, in Dreyfus-Armand
et al., Années 68 (note 57), 89–98; Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er (note 46), 11–17; Kimmel
Studentenbewegungen (note 5), 29–30.
77 Statera, Death (note 51), 153–218.
300
to the minority group and provided the support and self-confidence to
steer the wider movement. The balance between the two changed every-
where in the same manner. This type of evolution was the inevitable
consequence of internal logic: every social movement must either trans-
form itself into an organization or disappear. A permanently sustained
commitment cannot exist without structures.78
According to Kimmel, from a comparative international perspective,
the ‘new student movement’ consisted of seven features. Firstly, it was
driven by a millenarian vision to bring about ‘a new mankind’ in ‘a new
society’.79 Secondly, it had a changed notion of politics in which the divi-
sion between the public and private spheres no longer existed. Thirdly, it
propagated a new way of life in which the community played a central
role while individualism was to be restrained. Fourthly, it rejected the
‘politics of reason’, the cold logic of ‘cost-benefit analysis’ and cynical
Machiavellianism: it opted instead for emotional involvement, idealistic
‘engagement’ and solidarity with the community. Fifthly, it saw negation
as its central attitude to life: the refusal to play a role ‘as a cog in the
system’. In the sixth place, in its strategy and forms of action, it placed
the emphasis on ‘expressive’ politics rather than ‘instrumental’ politics.
And lastly, the movement was thoroughly permeated by ideological con-
tradictions, which, starting from a comparable criticism of society, led
to alternatives being developed in different directions – either in a more
individual libertarian sense or in a more egalitarian socialist sense.
Where the psychology of the activists was concerned, there was a rig-
orist ideological moralism and a dualist Weltanschauung. This inevitably
came complete with its own development dynamics, ranging from anti-
authoritarian criticism of certain aspects of ‘the system’, through a tactic
of revealing provocation, to rejection of all this and further radicalization,
to Marxism-Leninism. The next step for the radical groups that remained
in Italy and Germany was the path of terror, born out of frustration with
the impossibility of bringing society to heel. Most of the incentives for
social change stemmed from the initial anti-authoritarian phase, while
the impact on society diminished in line with the metamorphosis into
neo-Marxism.80
Apart from its political component the ‘new student movement’ also
had a cultural element that was bent on transforming daily life into
an ‘alternative’ experience.81 This non-conformist passion wanted to rid
itself of a bourgeois lifestyle by experimenting with communes and other
78 Allerbeck, Soziologie (note 2), 37–44.
81 J. Tanner, ‘“The Times they Are A-Changing” – Zur subkulturellen Dynamik der 68er
Bewegungen’, in Gilcher-Holtey, 1968 (note 1), 207–23.
301
Louis Vos
forms of group living in order to create a new way of life in which
desire could be liberated from conventional restraints and instant plea-
sure attained through music, sex and drugs. Naturally, this implied a
total break with traditional cultural and political values and, as a result,
the image and identity of the students changed over the course of the
campaign.82 A sudden change in dress code was typical: blue jeans for
both female and male students, jeans jackets or military style jackets, and
Palestinian headscarves. In Italy the students wore Eskimo-style jackets;
in Belgium and Germany the trend around 1970 was green parkas; the
young men had Cuban-style beards and long hair covering their ears.
This type of uniform and fashion was an expression of their political
self-image, and the students’ attire and grooming thus became an integral
part of demonstrative action against a bourgeois lifestyle and an indicator
of participation in global confrontation.83
These developments created a sense of ‘moral panic’, as Stanley Cohen
called it, among the civil and ecclesiastical authorities and the ordi-
nary man in the street.84 The student movement was seen as a threat
to the established social order, values and interests.85 With its aversion
to the systematic accumulation of knowledge, idolizing of spontaneous
self-expression and its notion that the university would become a per-
manent seminary under student leadership, many established academics
regarded this development as an anti-intellectual movement that was bent
on destroying culture, science and even the university itself. This same
conviction was held by the established political parties, trade unions and
churches. They all saw the movement as a threat and tried to weaken
or channel it. Another example of this moral panic was demonstrated
almost immediately in the form of distrust towards recently graduated
activists who were trying to find a job in education, youth work or the
civil service. From 1968 to the beginning of the 1970s the fear of left-wing
infiltration gave rise in various countries – especially Italy and Germany –
to a sort of ‘Berufsverbot’ against former student activists.
It was a curious circumstance that the New Left student movements
were exceptionally strong at (of all places) Catholic universities, as in
Leuven (Flanders), Tilburg (the Netherlands) and Milan (Italy). Contrary
to what one might assume, the shift to the left at these universities was not
the result of ‘foreign’ input, but was due to a ‘discovery’ of the need for
reform by the young Catholic generation itself. The turmoil that followed
the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) had ‘exposed’ the authoritarian
hierarchical exercise of power in a changing Catholic Church as a blurring
82 Le Goff, Mai 68 (note 50), 72–473. 83 Lumley, States (note 52), 70–4.
84 S. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers
(London, 1972), 28 quoted by Lumley, States (note 52), 73.
85 Ashby and Anderson, Rise (note 30), 123–9.
302
of fundamental contradictions. And the young Catholics had ‘discovered’
that the main contradiction in society lay between the rulers and the
suppressed, or between capital and labour.
The Catholics’ openness to engagement in the ‘Movement of ’68’ was
partly due to the fact that under the surface of this movement – far more
than in the existing socialist or communist parties and associations – there
existed an ethical (that is to say religious) element. It was a ‘religious struc-
ture of feeling’, as Lumley called it.86 Millenarian conversion had also
existed in the emerging socialist movements of the nineteenth century,
but it was later banned on grounds of atheism or for fear of unbridled
enthusiasm. This left-wing ‘religious emotion’ re-emerged in the 1960s in
the student movement. It was therefore not surprising that young peo-
ple with a religious background were open to the new movement. In
Belgium the movement and its offshoots were particularly successful
among adolescents in the Catholic youth movements, while the more
traditional socialist (and non-religious) youth were more inclined to stay
away.87 The ‘Marxism’ of young Catholics was less quickly affected by
ideological fragmentation because it was rooted neither theoretically nor
practically in an existing left-wing tradition, and such ‘Marxism’ was
therefore more of a vague inspiration or analytical model rather than a
fully elaborated ideology.
The student movement of the 1960s can be seen as the first expression
of what is now called the New Social Movements, a new type of protest
that first emerged in the 1960s in the industrialized countries of the West:
not centrally organized, distrustful of formal structures, standing up for
threatened post-materialistic values, advocating an alternative way of life
in which self-fulfilment and political participation by the general popu-
lace played a central role; its following was found mainly in the tertiary
sector, and its message was primarily disseminated via the information,
communication and mobilization channels of the modern mass media.88
fighting for freedom (1956–1989)

In the non-democratic European countries there was no need for a ‘new
student movement’ because the ‘classical’ movement had never disap-
peared. Even so, there were some similarities between the two phenom-
ena. Despite the lack of welfare, the students in these countries were
86 Lumley, States (note 52), 84.
87 E. Daniëls, ‘Links in Vlaanderen – Contradictio in terminis’, De Nieuwe Maand, 29
(1986), 99–117.
88 B. Klandermans, ‘New Social Movements and Resource Mobilization: The European
and American Approach Revisited’, in D. Rucht (ed.), Research on Social Movements:
The State of the Art in Western Europe and the USA (Frankfurt, 1991), 18–19.
303
Louis Vos
nonetheless actively engaged in non-materialistic issues and goals: free-
dom, truth and justice. That pursuit of a more authentic, democratic and
open society was not unlike the society that the ‘new student movement’
was trying to achieve in western democracies. Similarities were appar-
ent even in the forms of action, although the risks for the students in
authoritarian regimes were far greater.89
Non-democratic right-wing regimes were characterized in the second
half of the 1950s by a continuous development of democratic student
movements. In SPAIN the movement focused, on the one hand, on the
democratization of the existing SEU. Following a series of demonstra-
tions, a proposal was accepted to the effect that SEU delegates would
be elected at faculty level as from 1958. The movement also supported
striking workers in Asturias, Catalonia and the Basque provinces and
planned a general strike in 1959, but that plan failed and many students
were arrested. In the autumn of 1961 the three most important student
associations in the opposition formed the FUDE (Federación universitaria
democrática española), which successfully nominated candidates for the
faculty elections of the SEU. In December 1963 the FUDE had the major-
ity in nine of the twelve university districts. In 1964, a ‘week of university
reform’ in Madrid was banned after some professors gave several critical
lectures, which led to mass student demonstrations and sit-ins, causing
the government to close the university and expel a hundred or so stu-
dent leaders all over Spain. In February 1965 the situation escalated into
a conflict about freedom of association and freedom of speech, which
resulted almost everywhere in severance of the cooperative relationship
with the SEU.
Despite numerous arrests, an independent student union was able to
hold in March 1965 its first national congress in Barcelona, at the end
of which, in collaboration with the SDE (Sindicato democrático de estu-
diantes), it set up a broadly based student trade union representing all
non-fascist students. Out of sheer necessity the government abolished the
SEU in April 1965, while in April 1967 it was forced to reach the conclu-
sion that its attempt to launch a new governmental student organization,
Asociaciones profesionales de estudiantes (APE), had failed.90 In 1967–8,
the still illegal SDE continued activities at every university in the coun-
try, built up a network in secondary education schools and colleges and
created a complete student subculture of seminars, lectures and politi-
cal debates; it issued magazines, set up a trade in (second-hand) books
and raised funds for undergraduate scholarships. Above all, it wanted
89 Mehnert, Twilight (note 59), 191–5.
90 J. Maravall, Dictatorship and Political Dissent: Workers and Students in Franco’s Spain
(London, 1978), 98–112; Feuer, Conflict (note 24), 296–8; Schütze, ‘Widerstand’ (note
25), 18–47.
304
democratic freedom and considered that the workers’ movement, because
of its orientation towards an immediate improvement of the workers’ lot,
was lagging behind to some extent and curbing developments (‘rezagado’
and ‘frenando’).
The protest against the manipulation of the student elections in January
1968 was violently repressed, and several of the arrested student leaders
subsequently died in suspicious circumstances.91 In response to this ‘offi-
cial’ violence, left-wing commando groups were formed, which organized
terrorist actions against banks, offices and official buildings. In Catalonia
and the Basque provinces, democratic nationalist student groups were
secretly formed92 and the ETA (Euskadi ta askatasuna, Basque Father-
land and Freedom), which had been founded in 1959, was transformed
into a terror organization.93 The assassination in 1973 of Prime Minister
Carrero Blanco in a bomb explosion was seized upon by the more liberal
elements in the government as an excuse to implement reforms. In 1974,
three elected student councils built on grass roots initiatives were installed
at each university, thus achieving joint participation in the administra-
tion of the university. The death of Franco in November 1975 led to the
gradual dismantling of the dictatorial regime.
When the authorities in PORTUGAL banned the traditional celebra-
tion of the Dia do estudiante, student strikes broke out in Coimbra, Porto
and Lisbon, where they lasted for three months. The students demanded
the establishment of a free national student union and an end to the colo-
nial war in Angola and Mozambique. Repression followed by arrests and
the dismissal of professors only harmed the movement temporarily. In
January 1965, a new student strike broke out in which four-fifths of the
25,000 students participated. This was again followed by repression with
arrests, torture and purging at the universities. In contrast to Spain, in
Portugal it was not the students but young military officers who toppled
the authoritarian regime on 25 April 1974.94 Like the rest of the popula-
tion, the students supported this Portuguese revolution, and the campuses
suddenly became centres of political debate on the future of the country.
On 4 August 1967, GREECE likewise ended up in the category of
right-wing dictatorships following a coup d’état led by a group of mili-
tary colonels. Democratic professors and staff members were dismissed,
and the only student organization sanctioned by the military junta was
one that was loyal to the new regime.95 At the beginning of the 1970s,
91 Mehnert, Twilight (note 59), 152–3.

92 M. Miclescu, Die spanische Universität in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Cologne, 1985);
Maravall, Dictatorship (note 90), 112–17.
93 Burg, Encyclopedia (note 23), 68. 94 Mehnert, Twilight (note 59), 175–6.
95 National and Capodistrian University of Athens. 1837–1987. One hundred fifty years:
Catalogue of the Exhibition of Memorabilia (Athens, 1988), 18–19, 86, 173.
305
Louis Vos
students staged a protest at the University of Athens. In February and
March 1973 the students occupying the law faculty building were
removed manu militari and the student leaders were conscripted into
the army. In November 1973, students occupied the National Technical
University of Athens (NTUA) demanding ‘freedom, bread and educa-
tion’. The whole world was able to see on television how a tank smashed
through the central gate of the campus, crushing dozens of students:
thirty-four were killed.96 This ‘military’ victory brought down the dicta-
torship and heralded a return to democracy. The students then demanded,
and obtained, an agreement to purge the universities of the junta’s follow-
ers and gained joint participation in the university. Through strikes, boy-
cott actions and demonstrations they tried to retain their impact on poli-
tics, but their power gradually eroded because of political fragmentation.
In the second half of the 1950s, East European student movements
had to contend with an increasingly powerful neo-Stalinism, but one that
differed from one country to the next. In POLAND the openness that
followed the Polish October did not last long. The critical ‘weekly news-
paper for students and young intellectuals’, Po Prostu97 (‘Quite Simple’
or ‘In Plain Words’), was closed down in 1957 despite massive protest.
The 1960s saw the start of direct party intervention in the universities.98
Critical debating societies were banned, academics were accused of
Trotskyism, and lecturers who wrote an open letter to the party to
replace the ‘communist bureaucracy’ with a workers’ democracy ended
up in jail.99 The ‘political balance sheet’ that the well-known philosopher
Leszek Kołakowski drew up at the request of a group of critical students
in October 1966, ten years after the Polish October, concluded that a
de facto state of lawlessness ruled in Poland. Such a statement promptly
resulted in sanctions being imposed on Kołakowski.
In 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian October
Revolution, a play written by the nineteenth-century Polish author,
Adam Mickiewicz, was performed, in which the anti-Russian passages
were greeted with tremendous enthusiasm by the audience. The authori-
ties promptly prohibited further performances and violently dispersed a
protest rally organized at the beginning of March on the Warsaw campus.
It was the beginning of the Polish ‘March Movement’,100 which spread to
96 Mehnert, Twilight (note 59), 176.
97 G. Z. Bereday, ‘Student Unrest on Four Continents’, in Lipset and Altbach, Students
(note 2), 108–13.
98 Connelly,‘Die polnischen Universitäten’ (note 21), 188–95.
99 Révész, Jugendbewegungen (note 12), 72–6; S. M. David, Student Politics and Higher
Education in Socialist Poland (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1972), 220–31.
100 David, Student (note 99), 232–7; A. Friszke, ‘Ruch protestu w marcu 1968 (w świetle
rapport od MSW dla kierownitwa PZPR)’, Wie˛ź, 3 (1994), 92; Burg, Encyclopedia
(note 23), 196–202.
306
all the universities, gained support from writers and the Catholic Church,
and also from some workers’ groups. The ‘Prague Spring’ had an inspiring
effect, for on 11 March some 10,000 students converged on the rectorate
of Warsaw University chanting ‘Cała Polska czeka na swego Dubczeka’
(‘All of Poland is waiting for its Dubček’).101 Following the anti-Zionist
campaign which had been conducted since the six-day Arab–Israeli war
of 1967, the government portrayed the student movement as the result
of a Zionist conspiracy led by students of ‘Jewish descent’ and started
an anti-Jewish campaign.102 Throughout the action and confrontation
with the police and a mendacious media, many students became increas-
ingly outraged and lost faith forever in the regime.103 When the Prague
Spring reform movement was crushed by Warsaw Pact troops at the
end of August 1968, it brought a resurgence of the student protest, but
this was quickly suppressed. In the Western student movements there
was hardly any reference at all to their Polish counterpart. The French
and Italian student movements simply ignored it. In the German student
movement the anti-authoritarian elements kept a certain distance, while
the Marxist-Leninist line actually denounced it as petit bourgeois.104
Among the Czech students – after a degree of depoliticization at the end
of the 1950s – critical slogans were heard at the 1 May student festival,
called Majales, which had been revived in 1963. For this the organiz-
ers were expelled from university.105 In the autumn of 1967 a student
demonstration took place in Prague to raise awareness following trivial
complaints about student housing. The brutality of the militia towards
the demonstrators sparked off protest rallies at other universities.106 In
January 1968, during what became known as the Prague Spring, the new
party secretary, Alexander Dubček, announced a series of reforms for
‘socialism with a human face’. The independent student body founded at
the end of May for students in higher education in Bohemia and Moravia
(Svaz vysokoškolského studenstva Čech a Moravy, SVS) supported the
reforms.
101 Révész, Jugendbewegungen (note 12), 59, 84–7; Wydarzenia marcowe (Paris, 1969),
50–1.
102 ‘Dossier 2: Warschauer Bilanz’, Kursbuch, 13 (June 1968), 91–105; Statera, Death
(note 51), 143–52; Révész, Jugendbewegungen (note 12), 79–84.
103 J. Eisler, ‘March 1968 in Poland’, in C. Fink, P. Gassert and D. Junker (eds.), 1968:
The World Transformed (Cambridge, 1998), 237–51; J. Eisler, Marzec ’68 (Warsaw,
1995); David, Student (note 99), 238; Révész, Jugendbewegungen (note 12), 89–95.
104 Statera, Death (note 51), 143.
105 Révész, Jugendbewegungen (note 12), 44–52; Havranek, ‘Die tschechischen Univer-
sitäten’ (note 18), 166–9; J. Havranek and Z. Pousta, History of the Charles University,
Vol. 2: 1802–1990 (Prague, 2001).
106 G. Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston,
1987), 60.
307
Louis Vos
However, the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops on 21 August 1968
thwarted everyone’s plans. The repression caused seventy deaths in the
first few days, mostly young people. The Czech student movement subse-
quently tried to maintain the reforms as long as possible and oppose the
restoration.107 On 17 November 1968, the anniversary of the last student
protest against the Nazi occupier in 1939, a three-day student strike was
held and the university buildings were occupied. Nearly all of the 80,000
students took part. There were solidarity actions in Prague factories, and
a month later agreement was reached between the SVS and the met-
alworkers federation. In the months that followed, students distributed
pamphlets all over the country. On 16 January 1969, philosophy student
Jan Palach died after setting himself on fire at Wenceslas Square in protest
at the ‘foreign occupation’ of Czechoslovakia. That led to a resurgence of
resistance by students and workers. Huge crowds (estimated at 100,000
people) turned out for his funeral. In June 1969 the SVS was banned. The
first anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion, on 21 August, gave rise
to a final confrontation between students and the militia, complete with
barricades and casualties. What now followed was systematic repression.
It reached its climax in the spring of 1970.
When Polish workers in Gdańsk staged protests in December 1970,
their appeal for solidarity actions by the students went unanswered.108 It
was not until after the wave of strikes in 1976 that they became active
again in the movement for more democracy through the Workers Support
Committee. The murder of a student activist in 1977 had a catalysing
action and accelerated the establishment of independent student
committees – Studenckie komitety solidarności (SKS) – in various uni-
versities, which campaigned for more freedom in the academic environ-
ment; following the victory of the Solidarność movement over the gov-
ernment in the summer of 1980 they widened their campaign.109 After a
student strike in Łódź lasting nearly a month, in February 1981 the gov-
ernment officially recognized the independent student union NZS (Nar-
odowy zwia˛zek studentów), which in the same year rapidly developed
into the country’s largest student organization with 80,000 members at
eighty-nine universities and colleges.
Following the coup d’état by General Jaruzelski on 13 December 1981,
all free student associations were banned again, but the NZS continued to
exist as an underground organization. In 1988, when the transformation
107 Révész, Jugendbewegungen (note 12), 52–62; K. Bartosek, ‘Rencontre inattendue en

Tchécoslovaquie (octobre 1968–juin 1969)’, in Dreyfus-Armand, Années 68 (note 57),
299–311.
108 Révész, Jugendbewegungen (note 12), 97. This is at least the ‘Solidarność-myth’: the
reality was more complex.
308
to a democratic open society continued to make headway, the still illegal
NZS was able to return to prominence, and in the ‘final struggle’, which
culminated in a transformation to democracy, it even played a spearhead
role. After the regime changeover it continued to exist, but for its grass-
roots support it had to compete with new student associations in the self-
administered student organizations that were then formed (Samorza˛dy
studenckie).
In CZECHOSLOVAKIA, the government’s hope of winning the stu-
dents over to the new regime likewise turned out to be a vain one. In the
1970s, political apathy was the norm and even this was regarded by the
authorities as a success because it meant that the students steered clear
of the ‘Charta 77’ civil rights movement. It was not until 1987 that atti-
tudes changed. Unofficial student associations came into being and began
to distribute ‘samizdat’ magazines, and even the official student associa-
tions cautiously started making critical noises. The fiftieth anniversary – in
1989 – of the closure of the universities by the Nazis and the repression of
the student movement on 17 November 1939 was marked by a forbidden
demonstration past the place where Jan Palach died, and a violent con-
frontation with the police. That became the signal for strikes and sit-ins
at every university, and for a call from students urging the population to
stage mass protests. That call was answered. Following a general strike on
27 November, the regime collapsed. The student activists subsequently
handed over the leadership to Václav Havel, leader of the democratic
movement ‘Civic Forum’, who was elected president of Czechoslovakia
on 29 December 1989.
In YUGOSLAVIA the wave of student protests around the world in
1968 created a favourable atmosphere for protest. Students’ living condi-
tions were poor, and there was a high level of academic unemployment.110
Dissatisfaction with a shortage of seats for a theatrical performance in
Belgrade on 2 June 1968 prompted students to destroy the building, and
the next day they marched in protest from the students’ district to the
centre of the city. Brutal police attacks scattered the demonstrators, but
resulted in the university buildings being occupied by the students and
the preparation of a long list of grievances. The conciliatory words and
promises of the Yugoslav authorities initially had no effect, and it was
not until a week later, after the students had received a solemn decla-
ration from Tito himself, that the action was stopped. Tito commended
the activists’ idealism, political commitment and engagement, which he
presented as concern for the improved functioning of the system, and
110 R. Pervan, Tito and the Students: The University and the University Student in
Self-Managing Yugoslavia (Nedlands, 1978); N. N. Soljan, ‘Yugoslavia’, in Altbach,
Activism (note 4), 297–312; Feuer, Conflict (note 24), 302; Révész, Jugendbewegungen
(note 12), 200–2.
309
Louis Vos
personally guaranteed a solution to all grievances. In the autumn of 1968
the student activists realized that their protest had been effectively stymied
by the regime and had achieved nothing. Throughout Yugoslavia the crit-
ical student movement was definitively finished.
In contrast to this, student movements did start to play a role at
the level of the federal republics, which felt that they were being sup-
pressed by SERBIA. In 1971, the year of the ‘Croatian Spring’, a
renewal movement called for greater autonomy for Croatia and, in
it, students played the major role. In November of that year 35,000
Croatian students went on strike with the same patriotic goal, and in
December there were mass demonstrations.111 In Belgrade this strike was
branded as a ‘nationalist excess’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ and many
students were arrested. In 1974 a constitutional review in Yugoslavia gave
the federal republics greater autonomy, but the predominantly ethnic
Albanian Kosovo remained a Serbian province. After Tito’s death, in
1980, the Albanian nationalist movement gained fresh impetus among
Albanian students at the University of Priština. In 1981 they demanded
that Kosovo should become linguistically and culturally Albanian and
receive the status of a republic, which carried with it the right of secession.
During the first large student demonstrations on that issue in the spring
of 1981, eight were killed and more than a hundred injured; more than
a thousand people were arrested. Similar demonstrations were repeated
in 1982. Some student leaders were expelled from university, while oth-
ers ended up in prison or went into hiding and opted for violence and
terrorism in order to achieve their goal.
In SLOVENIA students emerged at the end of the 1980s as the van-
guard of a democratic reform movement that promptly demanded greater
autonomy for Slovenia. That message was disseminated to the public
through diverse channels, including Radio Student and numerous stu-
dent publications. The authorities in Belgrade regarded these actions
as counter-revolutionary but were unable to stop the advance of the
‘Slovenian Spring’, which culminated in the disintegration of the Yugoslav
Federation.
In the fringe regions of the SOVIET UNION, too, the national issue
became also the driving force for student movements in the 1980s.112
In LATVIA, students in the capital Riga protested against the inva-
sion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, a movement that reached its
climax with the self-immolation of Ilia Rips on 13 April 1969 near the
Independence Monument.113 He survived and was eventually deported

112 Dobson, ‘Soviet Union’ (note 14), 273–8.
113 Misionas and Taagepera, The Baltic (note 14), 245.
310
to Israel on account of his Jewish origin. Outside the theatre in Kaunas,
where in 1940 the annexation of LITHUANIA to the Soviet Union was
ratified, the nineteen-year-old student Romas Kalanta took his life by
self-immolation on 14 May 1972 in protest against the annexation.114
On the day of his funeral, thousands of demonstrating students called for
‘Liberty for Lithuania’. After fighting in the streets, hundreds of students
were arrested. Within three days there were three more cases of self-
immolation elsewhere in Lithuania. In October 1980, thousands of stu-
dents from the University of Tartu staged a demonstration, demanding the
resignation of the (half-Russian) education minister of ESTONIA, Elsa
Gretškina, whose appointment they regarded as a sign for increased Russi-
fication. The slogans ranged from ‘Russians out’ to ‘better mensa food’.115
In 1978, Kazakh students in KAZAKHSTAN staged a protest against
what they considered to be the disproportionate number of university
places going to students from other ethnic groups at the expense of
the Kazakhs. In the same year, thousands of students in GEORGIA
demanded that Georgian be declared the official language in the new
constitution of the republic. In June 1979 and in the summer of 1986,
Yakut students were involved in anti-Russian disturbances in Yakutsk.
Gorbachev’s proposed policies of ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ were an
invitation for yet more action. In October 1985, students in Tartu hung
the national flag of Estonia from the Opera House. In Lithuania, students
formed an underground organization that published the samizdat maga-
zine Juventus Academica in 1986. In Kazakhstan a protest was staged in
December 1986 against the appointment of a Russian head of the local
Communist Party, and demonstrations for independence at the univer-
sity in Alma-Ata resulted in several deaths and injuries, which led to the
dismissal of the rector; a number of professors were arrested and many
students were expelled. Nationalist protests also took place in Soviet
Central Asia and in the Caucasus.
In June 1987, thousands of Latvian students took part in a protest
demonstration against Stalin’s deportation of 15,000 Latvians to Siberia
in 1941, and two months later thousands of inhabitants of the three Baltic
republics staged a demonstration against the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact
of 1939, which gave the Soviet Union a free hand to gain control of the
Baltic States. In the first half of 1989, just before the fall of the regime,
student activism reached its climax in the Soviet Union. The number
of members of the Komsomol fell, and the new student organizations
that were formed in many cities as an alternative to the Komsomol saw
their membership grow. At the same time in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
114 Misionas and Taagepera, The Baltic (note 14), 252–3.
115 Révész, Jugendbewegungen (note 12), 27–8; Misionas and Taagepera, The Baltic (note
14), 253.
311
Louis Vos
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, students with their demonstrations,
strikes and boycotts of lectures formed the vanguard of the emerging
nationalist movements.
beyond the student movement (1974–2000)

In the West the legacy of ‘1968’ lived on until the end of the 1970s. For
the ‘veterans’ it was the principal decisive factor for their positioning in
society.116 When a ‘political balance sheet’ was first drawn up in 1978
there was still ‘feeling’ for 1968, and ‘les évènements’ were regarded as
the birthplace of many of the initiatives of the 1970s. Afterwards the
tradition began to lose its vibrancy. On the twentieth anniversary, in
1988, the ties with ‘1968’ appeared to have been severed, and the student
generation of that era looked back on it as something that was over and
done with, while former activists of ’68 launched all kinds of assumed
interpretations as the basis for their convictions twenty years later. It was
not until the wave of publications that appeared in 1998 that ’68 was
finally relegated to history, and one author was able to proclaim that ‘mai
68 n’appartient à personne’.117
For the younger student generations the old tradition started to wane
much earlier in the second half of the 1970s, when the economic crisis
struck. Among student leaders, however, it hung on for another decade
as a mobilizing myth, albeit reduced to the slogan ‘democratization of
the university’. No-one created a new living tradition that could pass on
the torch of the ‘student movement’ from one generation to the next, as
had happened with the ‘classical’ movements. The movement therefore
gradually evaporated. How that happened can be clarified by looking
closely at the evolution of one ‘new student movement’ with a long ‘clas-
sical’ tradition, the one at Leuven University, which I have studied using
primary sources. I believe it is highly representative for what has hap-
pened to the student movement in the Western democracies since the
1970s.118
In the second half of the 1970s a generation made its appearance in
Leuven, which, although it still thought of itself as having inherited the
mantle of ’68, was no longer prepared to focus student actions exclusively
on radical social reform.119 Against the background of the economic crisis
that started in 1974, it tried to turn the ‘democratization of university
education’ into a new action platform for committed students. In 1977
it basked briefly in a new élan and massive support for its action against
116 K. Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago, 2002).

117 Le Goff, Mai 68 (note 50), 465–75. 118 Fischer, Histoire (note 27), 419–522.
119 Vos, ‘Vlaamse Leeuw’ (note 40).
312
the 100 per cent increase in the university registration fee, which spread
rapidly across the country and was paralleled by similar actions in France
and the United Kingdom. It was unsuccessful, however, due in part to
the fact that the social engagement of most students was on the decline.
During the opening ceremony of the academic year in October 1980,
the students’ spokesman – himself sympathizing with the Maoist student
faction – used his speech to denounce the difference between the ‘more
than ample professors’ salaries’ and the ‘miserable income of a single
person entitled to benefits’. For a short while this echoed the spirit of
radical confrontation, and that same spirit was also voiced in the same
year by the student press, but it was evident that the broader student
group, even the portion that was actively engaged in associations, was
not on the same wavelength.
Leaving aside the small marginal groups of left- and right-wing extrem-
ists and focusing on the average association student, two generational
groups are clearly distinguishable in the student generation of the early
1980s. One considered itself to be the inheritor of the ‘new student move-
ment’ of ’68 and continued to focus on (the defence of) the ‘democrati-
zation of university education’. In contrast, the other generational unit
wanted nothing to do with the ‘inheritance of ’68’ and proposed banning
all politics from student associations. The first group continued to con-
duct protest actions against late payment of scholarship awards, against
plans to abolish scholarship awards and against price increases in student
restaurants, and argued in favour of the student union – ‘on behalf of the
Leuven student movement’ – joining the movement against the deploy-
ment of American cruise missiles. That irritated the leaders of student
societies in several faculties, who were of the opinion that politics had no
place in modern student associations; in February 1984 the ‘apolitical’
faculty societies of students in economics resigned from the existing stu-
dent union, which they regarded as politicized and left wing. In 1984–5
they went on to set up their own alternative overarching student union,
together with seven smaller official overarching unions.
The new student union easily gained official recognition and grants
from the academic authorities, which silently applauded its apolitical
stance. However, the old student union continued to be supported by
two-thirds of the faculty organizations, which had a broader vision of the
student movement. Throughout most of the following academic year, rec-
onciliation meetings were held, which briefly threatened the very existence
of the student magazine, Veto – if not the magazine then the name itself –
as an undesirable leftover from ’68. The outcome of the meetings was
the establishment of a new overarching student organization, recognized
again by all faculty societies. The explicit reference to the ‘democratiza-
tion of society’ as the mission of the student movement disappeared from
313
Louis Vos
its ideological manifesto, and in the rest of the text greater emphasis was
placed on the students’ own situation.
In the summer of 1986 the students’ situation was threatened by exter-
nal factors when the Flemish minister of education, Coens, cut the social
allowances to the universities by half, decoupled them from the cost of
living index and raised the registration fee. This all happened at the time
when students in France were staging massive demonstrations against
the plans of the French education minister Devaquet.120 That heartened
the Flemish students – because protests were also taking place in Ghent,
Brussels and Antwerp – and gave them an opportunity to target both
Coens and Devaquet on their banners. The student boycott against pay-
ment of the registration fee failed. A national demonstration in October
1987 was a taste of things to come in the protest demonstration orga-
nized by Leuven students from the end of November to mid-December.
Strike action, torch-lit processions, occupation of the rectorate, the cen-
tral library and several faculty buildings, and incidents involving the state
police, all evoked memories of ’68. However, the mobilization was lim-
ited to some 3,000 students (out of a total student population of more
than 20,000), mostly from the humanities, and it was characterized by
internal contradictions between ‘goal-motivated students’ and students
who were merely looking for ‘a confrontation with the police’, as well as
between those whose only aim was to stand up for ‘student interests’ and
still others who wanted a complete package of demands for students, the
young unemployed and national servicemen. A national demonstration
in December 1987 became both the climax and the end point. A sub-
sequent demonstration in February 1988 hardly attracted any students
from Leuven. Even though ‘the actions’ had no political effect, for those
who took part in them they became a generation-forming event. How-
ever, the hope that ’86 – an anagram of ’68 – would be the beginning
of the resurgence of the student movement, turned out to be a vain one.
Student politicization, which in itself was limited to the protection of the
students’ own position and was seen by only a few students in a broader
social perspective, quickly evaporated again.
Midway through the 1990s, for the majority of student leaders an
apolitical representation focusing on the protection of student interests
became the most important guideline for student action. The overarch-
ing student organization no longer took a stand on social issues such as
racism, youth unemployment or child abuse. However, as the editorial
team of the weekly student magazine Veto continued to defend democra-
tization as a common project for ‘the student movement’, the ‘representa-
tiveness’ and the ‘critical’ editorial line of the magazine were questioned
120 Fischer, Histoire (note 27), 470–2.
314
by leaders of the student organizations. This occurred in 1989, in 1993
and again in 1996. It was then decided at an open general meeting of
the student union that this assembly would in future appoint the chief
editor and the editorial secretary of Veto. Thus the critical stance of the
magazine was diluted.
Despite the evaporation of the ‘student movement’ into a vague form of
mysticism, for the Leuven students who did not have a purely individual-
istic attitude, solidarity with their own faculty organization continued to
exist, and group loyalty and sociability in the faculty society became the
only ‘student movement’. Non-political, constructive cooperation with
the academic authorities on the basis of formal representation became
the guideline for the elected student representatives. The remaining ten-
sions that came to the surface did not arise from a general social vision but
out of dissatisfaction with specific measures or individuals. Even when the
rector launched a plan, in 2003, to have his successor no longer elected
but appointed, this was greeted with protests by the professors but not
by the students. To all intents and purposes the student movement had
ceased to exist.
The most important cause of the demise of the student movement was
the change in the student’s social position. This also caused a shift in
the self-image of the new generations entering university. Students no
longer saw themselves as a group but rather as individuals who spent
their formative years in a certain social environment in relation to their
personal learning-cum-lifetime project. They had become customers of a
diploma mill, no longer members of a community. Because students were
no longer exceptions in their age cohort, and since studying had become
‘normal’ and the distinction between university and other forms of higher
education had blurred, the normative expectation of society disappeared.
Furthermore, the ‘total role’ of the student was also affected. The student
lived only part of the time in the university town, where his group life
was largely limited to typically ‘student-like’ forms of involvement. Still,
volunteer work in associations continued to be very popular, but in the
main it took place outside rather than inside the student environment.
Moreover, student engagement remained ‘heterogeneous, fragmented and
not very visible’; it was not characterized by ‘total dedication, strong
solidarity or great ideals’, but was principally measured against the degree
of usefulness for the individual’s curriculum vitae or development.121
Against this background the tradition gradually faded away and lost
its specific social student calling and hence the potential for the existence
121 As was revealed by a sociological survey of the social commitment of Leuven students
in 2001: L. Hustinx, T. Vanhove, I. Verhalle, K. Lauwerys and F. Lammertyn, Het
maatschappelijk engagement van de K.U. Leuven studenten: Een sociologisch onder-
zoek (Leuven, 2002).
315
Louis Vos
of a student movement. The students resigned themselves to no longer
playing a direct role in society as a group. This was facilitated by the
fact that bureaucratization of their own circle had become a self-evident
process, and hardly a voice was raised in protest in the wider society.
With the exception of a few individuals, who still considered themselves
the surviving heirs of the defunct student movement, most of the students
and student leaders no longer saw themselves as links in a chain whose
job it was to pass on the torch of a movement to successive generations.
The deep-rooted cause of this did not lie in the ‘aftermath of ’68’, or in
the academic unemployment of the 1970s with its ‘survival of the fittest’
mentality, or even in the heavier study load or the increase in scale of
the student population in the 1980s and 1990s. Neither was it caused
by a shift of the political economy to the right, or by the undermining
of the ‘big stories’ by postmodernism. All these elements certainly played
a role, but the principal reason why young generations of students no
longer came forward with a ‘back to the people spirit’ to fulfil their call-
ing as students in the service of the broader community was structural.
It lay in the fundamental change of the social position of the student,
which actually coincided with that of the academics and the university
itself. Whether student movements will ever develop again in the Western
democracies against this background is doubtful. Elsewhere they could
perhaps revive: in developing countries, dictatorships or national commu-
nities which have not (yet) gained their independence, where the social
position of the student still displays all the characteristics that it enjoyed
in Europe for nearly two centuries.
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318
CHAPTER 9
GRADUATION AND CAREERS
ULRICH TEICHLER
introduction
In seeking to foster ‘competence’, twentieth-century European universi-
ties strove to enhance their students’ knowledge and develop their per-
sonalities, attitudes and values. Universities also provided, as in the past,
training for those who would teach future generations, and, in a more
organized and deliberate way than in the past, offered a foundation of
knowledge and skills relevant for future employment.
There were variations from country to country, from institution to
institution and from discipline to discipline in the emphasis placed on
these three functions and on the balance among them. There were also
changes over time. At one extreme, universities laid the general foun-
dation for diverse forms of professional competence; at the other, they
directly trained students for a particular profession. In the latter case
questions arose about the time to be devoted to the training and the
division of responsibilities between universities and other institutions of
higher education or professional training agencies.
The more cognitively demanding educational tasks are, the less directly
can their realization be conceived of in terms of training. Among their
responsibilities universities were expected to carry out a critical and an
innovative function. Graduates would have learnt ‘rules’ and acquired
‘tools’, but they would also have had to be motivated and placed in
a position where they could question established professional practices
and cope with future changes in patterns of work. The rapid expan-
sion in the number of students and continuing demand for ‘manpower’
in specific fields after the Second World War made a university degree
more and more a prerequisite for access to top occupational positions,
those involving high levels both of systematic thinking and of cognitive
319
Ulrich Teichler
competence. At the same time, there was widespread uneasiness among
experts, politicians and the population in general that traditional ‘sys-
tems’ were breaking down.
Four general questions were raised:
1. Does the competence acquired at the university qualify graduates

to meet the demands of the employment system? What are the
consequences of discrepancies – in quantitative terms – between
demand and supply, and – in qualitative terms – between skill and
requirements?
2. How does the attainment of a university degree affect social selection
and status distribution? How does the emerging meritocracy based
on educational attainment affect the links between competence and
work tasks, and between teaching and learning at universities?
3. How do the motivations, inclinations, and career expectations and
prospects of students change as the skills required of them change?
And how do altered motivations and expectations affect the character
and quality of teaching and learning?
4. How have the changes just discussed altered student access, enrol-
ment and graduation, institutional patterns, study programmes and
teaching? How do universities react to the changing conditions of
graduate employment and work, and how do they actively try to
change these conditions?
The aim of this chapter is to provide an account of quantitative changes

in enrolment and graduation in Europe between about 1950 and about
1990, to summarize major political and research debates about the chang-
ing relationships between higher education and employment, to offer an
overview of the modes of graduation and award of degrees as well as their
links to professional practice, to analyse changes in graduate employment
and work, as far as they have been set out in statistical material and
empirical surveys, and to consider selectively the response of universities
themselves to the changing relationships between higher education and
employment. Finally, trends and policies will be discussed which could
be observed in recent years.
The terminology used in the preceding paragraph hints at one of the
major changes facing European universities after the war. While in the
1940s they remained the core institutions of society as far as linkages
between research and teaching were concerned, they tended to be viewed
from the 1960s onwards as ‘institutions of higher education’, no longer
the sole providers of advanced knowledge and professional skills. The dis-
tinction between universities and other establishments of higher education
320
Graduation and careers
became blurred, and their respective functions overlapped. Many sources
referred to in the text that follows do not distinguish clearly between
universities and other institutions in discussions of or statistics relating
to ‘higher education’, ‘third-level’ or ‘tertiary education’ and ‘lifelong
learning’.
overall development of enrolment, graduation

and attainment
After 1945, higher education experienced an unprecedented expansion,
which had far-reaching consequences for graduate employment. Since
the available data vary in terms of the sources referred to, the coun-
tries included, the types of higher-education institutions taken into con-
sideration and the statistical measure employed (whereby selection and
definitions change over time), only select examples are provided here to
illustrate the development.
Concerning admission to and enrolment at institutions of higher edu-
cation, a few aggregate data may suffice to indicate the trends:
1. According to UNESCO statistics, the ratio of students attending insti-

tutions of tertiary education in the richer countries (the top third
in the world in terms of GNP per capita) increased from 3.7% of
their age cohorts in 1950 to 8.4% in 1960, 13.6% in 1970 and
18.9% in 1975. Similarly, the mean enrolment ratio of students at
universities and similar specialized institutions as a proportion of 20–
24-year-olds in ten Western European countries was 4.5% around
1950, 6.4% around 1960, and 17.4% in 1975.1 According to OECD
statistics, the number of students in higher-education institutions in
the European market-oriented (OECD member) states grew annually
by 5% on average during the 1950s and by almost 8% during the
1960s, when the growth rates in ‘university-type higher education’
surpassed those in ‘non-university-type education’.2
2. In 1991, the entry ratio to ‘tertiary education’ – the number of stu-
dents enrolled divided by the total age cohort – had reached 38% on
average in Western European member states, 24% of them in ‘uni-
versity education’ (see table 9.1).3 By contrast, UNESCO statistics
show that the entry ratio to higher education in Eastern European
1 R. Schneider, ‘Die Bildungsentwicklung in den westeuropäischen Staaten’, Zeitschrift für

Soziologie, 11 (1982), 22.
2 Education in OECD Countries 1978–88 (Paris, 1990), 81–3, 113.
3 OECD, Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators 1993 (Paris, 1993), 126.
321
Ulrich Teichler
Table 9.1 Entry rates into tertiary education 1991 and graduation rates
1994 in selected OECD Member States (percentage of corresponding
age groups)
Entry rates 1991 Graduation rates 1994

Non-univ. Univ. Total Non-univ. Univ. Total
a. Western Europe
Austria 5 23 28 5 9 14
Belgium 22 28 50 m m m
Denmark 14 24 38 9 26 35
Finland 29 33 62 25 21 46
France 15 29 44 25 14 39
Germany 11 33 44 11 13 24
Ireland 16 17 34 14 23 37
Italy – 36 36 9 11 20
Netherlands 25 13 38 m m m
Norway m m m 47 23 70
Spain – 40 40 1 21 22
Sweden 34 13 47 12 13 25
Switzerland m m m 25 9 34
Turkey 2 12 15 2 7 9
United Kingdom 8 20 28 25 27 52
b. Central and Eastern Europe
Czech Republic∗ 1 15 16 5 14 19
Slovak Republic ∗ ∗ ∗ m m m
Hungary 9 7 16 m 14 m
c. Other countries
Japan 29 24 53 28 23 52
United States 27 38 65 22 32 54
m = missing
∗ 1991: Czechoslovakia
Sources: OECD, Education at a Glance: 1993. OECD Indicators (Paris, 1995); OECD,
Education at a Glance: 1994. OECD Indicators (Paris, 1996).
countries cooperating economically and politically with the Soviet

Union remained below 20% until the late 1980s – i.e., until their
rapid socio-economic transformation to market-oriented economies
began.4
3. The ratio of first-degree graduates of the respective age group in thir-
teen Western European OECD member states in 1994 was on average
33% (see table 9.1), among them 16% in ‘university education’.5
4 Nevertheless the developments in the Eastern European countries varied substantially, as

demonstrated in L. Cerych, S. Colton and J.-P. Jallade, Student Flows and Expenditure
in Higher Education 1965–1979 (Paris, 1981).
5 See table 9.1.
322
Table 9.2 Educational attainment of the population over
25 years old 1960–1985 (percentages)
Average years
Year No school Primary Secondary Higher of school
OECD countries
1960 6.4 61.1 25.5 7.0 6.71
1965 6.0 58.0 27.8 8.2 7.03
1970 5.2 54.0 31.3 9.5 7.42
1975 5.4 47.6 34.2 12.8 7.88
1980 4.6 39.4 40.2 15.8 8.65
1985 3.3 37.7 40.8 18.2 8.88
Centrally planned economies
1960 5.0 68.8 22.3 3.9 6.83
1965 5.3 62.1 27.6 5.0 7.29
1970 4.0 53.3 36.3 6.4 7.97
1975 3.7 47.9 40.9 7.5 8.33
1980 2.7 39.4 49.9 8.0 8.78
1985 2.3 36.1 51.8 9.8 9.17
Source: OECD Job Study (Paris, 1994).
There was a considerable and inevitable time lag in the percentage

of the adult population attaining higher education. As table 9.2 shows,
the proportion of the population over twenty-five in the OECD member
states who had attended a university for some period (most of whom com-
pleted their studies) increased from 7.0% in 1960 to 18.2% in 1985. The
respective ratios were 3.9% and 9.8% in ‘centrally planned economies’.
According to data from the early 1990s, the mean proportion of adults in
sixteen European OECD member states having completed higher educa-
tion was about 16%, some 10% of whom held a university-level degree.6
The proportion of persons having completed higher education naturally
varies according to age. In the early 1990s, 9% of the population aged 55
to 64 in sixteen European member states had completed higher education
compared with 19% of those aged 25 to 34.
The entries in the tables may not be consistent across countries with
respect to exclusion or inclusion of students and graduates in non-
university institutions. In some cases, statistics for previous years are
corrected following the upgrading of an institution, in others not. Insti-
tutions may be included or excluded in international statistics that do
not have the official status of higher-education institutions within the
countries concerned.
6 OECD, OECD Education Statistics 1985–1992 (Paris, 1995), 194.
323
Ulrich Teichler
variations in europe
The ratios of beginning students, students and graduates of the respective
age cohorts did not increase continuously from 1950 to 1990 and did not
follow any convergent trend. Overall across Europe, the ratio of beginners
continued to grow, but stagnation or even a modest decline in the ratio
occurred in individual countries for about a decade, and the differences
by country are striking.
According to UNESCO statistics, the ratio of students among 20–24-
year-olds was highest in 1950 in the Netherlands (7.4%) and Poland
(5.9%), but only 2.1% in Spain and even lower in Albania and Turkey.
According to OECD statistics, the number of first-time entrants to full-
time higher education per 100 ‘in the theoretical starting age’ was above
40% in the majority of European OECD member states around 1990,
but below 20% in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in Turkey.7
The ratio of graduates of the respective age group in 1950 was about
three times as high in Austria and the Netherlands as it was in France at
that time; twenty-five years later, the ratio of graduates was more than
20% in France, while it was less than 10% in Denmark, Switzerland and
the Netherlands. As table 9.2 shows, the OECD reported that more than
30% of the respective age cohort obtained a higher-education degree in
Norway and Belgium, but less than 10% in Italy. Some countries moved
up in the list of respective ratios and others down. Overall, there was no
general growth trend in countries starting off with low ratios in the 1950s
and 1960s.
Higher education expanded rapidly in the 1950s and early 1960s in
the planned economies and thereafter only moderately. By contrast, most
European OECD states experienced high growth during the 1960s and
partly during the 1970s, eventually reaching in the 1980s an enrolment
ratio about twice as high on average as those in planned economies.8
Moreover the ratios of beginning students and graduates varied less by
country in respect to university degrees than in respect to completion of
any kind of higher education. The proportion of students enrolling in
non-university higher education in Western Europe varied from less than
2% to 34% in 1991, while it ranged for students enrolling in university
education from 12% to 40% (see table 9.1).
The graduation ratios across different countries cannot be inferred
from entering ratios a few years earlier, since dropout rates increased
(and at different rates) in many European countries over time. In a study
published by the Council of Europe, the ‘success quota’, defined as the
7 Indicators 1993 (note 3), 126.

8 See UNESCO/CEPES, Planning in Higher Education (Bucharest, 1986).
324
ratio of graduates in 1985 to the number of entrants in 1980, varied
among the nine countries concerned from more than 90% to less than
50%.9 Various studies indicate dropout rates of 63% in Italy and 70%
in Yugoslavia during the 1980s.10
The impact of these different developments on the educational attain-
ment of the labour force may be illustrated by more recent OECD statis-
tics. In the early 1990s, the proportion of 25–64-year-olds having com-
pleted higher education was highest in Norway (25%) and Sweden (24%),
while the corresponding ratios were less than 8% in Austria, Italy, Por-
tugal and Turkey (see table 9.3).
distribution by field of study

The composition of students and graduates by field of study changed
substantially after 1945. Among the causes proposed are student choice,
political or administrative policy, academic stress or interest, employer
demand, professional gate-keeping and, of course, cost of facilities. In
all European countries we find a mix of fields or institutions open to
everybody qualified to enrol and fields or institutions with restricted
admissions.11 On the whole, planning according to perceived ‘manpower
demands’ dominated in the planned economies, while ‘social demand’,
that is, the sum of students’ choice, played a substantial role in most
Western European countries.12 Teacher training and related fields expe-
rienced the largest fluctuations. Science and engineering fields continually
gained in importance.
The international organizations most actively involved in compiling
educational statistics, UNESCO and OECD, changed their field classifi-
cations over time. No documents are available, therefore, which analyse
the change of the composition of higher education in Europe from about
1950 to about 1990 by field of study. In comparing the composition
of students by disciplinary groups in 1955 and 1985 on the basis of
UNESCO statistics,13 we note a substantial contrast between some of
the planned economies in Central and Eastern Europe and most Western
9 U. Teichler, Convergence or Growing Variety: The Changing Organisation of Studies
(Strasbourg, 1988), 85.
10 OECD, From Higher Education to Employment: Synthesis Report (Paris, 1993), 58.
11 See UNESCO, Access to Higher Education in Europe (Paris 1966); Access to Higher
Education in Europe (Bucharest, 1981); OECD, Policies for Higher Education in the
1980s (Paris, 1983); B. B. Burn, ‘Higher Education: Access’, in T. Husén and T. N.
Postlethwaite (eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Education (Oxford, 1985),
2179–85.
12 Cf. J. Marceau, ‘General Report’, in OECD (ed.), Individual Demand for Education
(Paris, 1979), 9–48.
13 UNESCO, Access (note 11), 34–5; V. Nicolae, R. H. M. Smulders and M. Korka,
Statistics of Higher Education (Bucharest, 1989), 86.
325
Table 9.3 Percentage of the population 25 to 64 years of age that has completed a certain highest level of
education 1992
Early childhood and Lower secondary Upper secondary Non-university University

primary education education education tertiary education education Total
m+w m w m+w m w m+w m w m+w m w m+w m w m+w m w
European Community
Belgium 28.3 25.4 31.2 26.4 27.6 25.2 25.0 26.2 23.8 11.4 9.2 13.6 8.8 11.6 6.1 100 100 100
Denmark – – – 41.1 36.6 45.7 39.7 44.4 34.9 5.9 5.0 6.8 13.3 14.0 12.7 100 100 100
France 26.2 24.3 28.1 21.5 19.5 23.5 36.3 39.9 32.8 5.7 5.1 6.4 10.2 11.3 9.2 100 100 100
Germany – – – 18.1 11.4 24.9 60.5 61.1 59.9 9.8 12.7 6.9 11.6 14.8 8.3 100 100 100
Ireland 31.7 33.7 29.7 26.1 27.4 24.7 25.3 21.2 29.3 8.6 7.9 9.3 8.3 9.8 6.9 100 100 100
Italy 36.9 32.5 41.3 34.6 37.0 32.3 22.1 23.1 21.0 – – – 6.4 7.3 5.4 100 100 100
Netherlands 16.7 14.4 19.1 25.3 21.8 29.0 37.1 40.0 34.1 – – – 20.9 23.8 17.8 100 100 100
Portugal (1991) 77.6 76.3 78.7 8.3 9.0 7.6 7.5 8.4 6.7 1.7 0.9 2.4 5.0 5.4 4.6 100 100 100
Spain 61.1 58.0 64.1 16.0 16.4 15.6 9.9 10.9 8.9 3.0 4.1 1.0 10.0 10.7 9.4 100 100 100
United Kingdom – – – 31.9 26.1 37.8 49.6 53.9 45.3 7.7 6.2 9.2 10.7 13.8 7.7 100 100 100
Other Europe-OECD
Austria – – – 32.0 22.3 41.7 61.0 69.7 52.4 – – – 6.9 7.9 6.0 100 100 100
Finland – – – 38.5 38.9 38.1 42.9 41.2 44.6 8.2 7.8 8.5 10.4 12.1 8.8 100 100 100
Norway 1.4 1.6 1.1 19.6 18.6 20.7 53.7 52.7 54.8 12.8 12.4 13.3 12.4 14.8 10.9 100 100 100
Sweden – – – 30.2 31.7 28.6 45.8 45.2 46.4 12.4 10.9 13.8 11.7 12.2 11.2 100 100 100
Switzerland – – – 19.2 13.0 25.4 59.8 56.8 62.9 12.9 19.2 6.6 8.0 11.0 5.1 100 100 100
Turkey 80.0 73.1 87.1 6.4 8.7 3.9 8.9 11.6 6.1 – – – 4.8 6.6 2.9 100 100 100
Source: OECD, OECD Statistics 1985–1992 (Paris 1995), 194–8.

European countries. The proportion of students enrolled in humanities
and social sciences in Romania comprised only 29% in 1955 and declined
to a mere 16% in 1985. In the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, the com-
parable figure fell from somewhat above 40% to below 30%, and engi-
neering took a much larger share than in Western European countries.
There the proportion of students in the humanities and social sciences
varied from 43% to 65% in 1955 and from 45% to 62% in 1985.
In an overview provided by the OECD regarding fields of study at insti-
tutions of higher education in nine European countries in the late 1980s,14
the humanities and social sciences (including teacher training, but exclud-
ing economic fields and law) garnered 61% of all students in Denmark,
between 30% and 40% in the majority of countries, but only 17% in
Norway, 22% in Belgium and 24% in Germany. The proportion of sci-
ence and engineering students was 40% in Germany owing to the large
number of engineering students at Fachhochschulen. Although science
and engineering were named most frequently by planners of resources
in higher education, the proportion of students in those fields varied as
much across countries as in other fields: it ranged from 17% (Spain) to
34% (Norway). Finally, the proportion of students in health sciences was
highest in Sweden (25%). In sharp contrast, only 7% of students in the
Netherlands and 5% in the Federal Republic of Germany were enrolled
in medical fields, probably because paramedical students in Germany
enrolled outside higher education. Altogether, the distribution of students
varied more according to discipline among the Western European coun-
tries than the public debates on higher education and its relationships to
employment suggested.
changing debates about the quantitative and

structural relationships between university
education and employment
Universities in the various European countries differed considerably in
their basic approach to teaching and learning vis-à-vis employment and
work, and, as discussed above, the ratios of the respective age group
beginning and eventually completing a programme at universities or other
institutions of higher education also varied substantially. Yet for the first
few years after 1945, when many European countries were absorbed in
re-establishing universities following the turmoil of the war, a substantial
change in the relationship between study and career was not on the
agenda.
14 OECD, Synthesis Report (note 10), 40.
327
Ulrich Teichler
Expansion expected to serve economic growth and social equality
Thereafter changing relationships between higher education and ‘work’
were accompanied by quite similar debates in different European
countries – at least among those pursuing similar economic and social
policies. The leaders of the planned economies in Eastern Europe decided
in the early 1950s that a targeted increase of highly trained cadres would
provide for a rapid technological improvement and substantial economic
growth. The overall number of engineers and higher technicians in the
production sector of the Soviet Union increased by more than 50% in
the 1950s and by more than 40% from 1960 to 1965.15 And technolog-
ical development in the planned economies had a substantial impact on
market-oriented industrial countries in the West, following the so-called
‘Sputnik shock’, the reaction to the successful launching of the first space
mission by the Soviet Union in 1957. Now, with the OECD playing a
significant role,16 most experts and politicians in Western Europe agreed
to the view already spread previously in the domain of economics of edu-
cation both in the US and Western Europe that education is a key driver
of economic growth.
The planned economies insisted on manpower forecasts, and individ-
ual production enterprises were asked to indicate in advance the number
of graduates they would need in a few years. These projections formed
the basis for deciding the number of students to be admitted in the cor-
responding fields of study. This system was handled in a relatively strict
manner in the Soviet Union and Romania, but in a more flexible way in
Poland.17
Western European countries followed two approaches for relating
demands for highly qualified labour to its supply from the higher-
education system. First, they too used the manpower requirements
approach to predict future demand through extrapolation of trends and
scenarios of likely changes of directions. This approach was first employed
on a large scale in an OECD Mediterranean Regional Project in the early
1960s.18 Second, they calculated returns on educational investments on
15 D. Chuprunov, R. Avakov and E. Jiltsov, Enseignement supérieur, emploi et progrès

technique en URSS (Paris, 1982), 43.
16 OECD, The Residual Factor and Economic Growth (Paris, 1964).
17 I. V. Ivanov, ‘Skilled-Manpower Planning Forecasting and Training in the USSR’, in R. V.
Youdi and K. Hinchcliffe (eds.), Forecasting Skilled Manpower Needs (Paris, 1985), 153–
72; A. Josefowicz, J. Kluczynski and T. Obrebski, ‘Manpower and Education Planning
and Policy Experience in Poland, 1960–80’, in Youdi and Hinchcliffe, Forecasting,
135–52.
18 For the approach, see G. Psacharopoulos, ‘The Manpower Requirements Approach’,
in G. Psacharopoulos (ed.), Economics of Education (Oxford, 1987), 331–5; for its
application, see Youdi and Hinchcliffe, Forecasting (note 17), and O. Fulton, A. Gordon
and G. Williams, Higher Education and Manpower Planning (Geneva, 1980). See also
328
the basis of the so-called ‘human capital approach’. Some adherents of this
latter approach concluded that higher earnings for graduates indicated a
shortage of highly skilled persons and lower earnings an oversupply.19
Concurrently, political efforts in Western European countries were
aroused to reduce inequalities of educational opportunity related to socio-
economic background, gender and region. While admission quotas were
fixed for children of manual workers and farmers in some Eastern Euro-
pean countries, notably during the 1950s and 1960s, Western Europe
abolished tuition fees, offered need-based scholarships, introduced com-
pensatory education for the disadvantaged, provided educational oppor-
tunities in hitherto disadvantaged regions and, not least, undertook infor-
mation campaigns.20
Structural moderation
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, belief in the value of higher mass
education waned. Doubts grew about whether an expansion of universi-
ties could be funded to the extent initially projected, whether such high
numbers of graduates were needed, and whether quality could be pre-
served during rapid expansion. A restructuring of the higher-education
system was now advocated to take account of the growing diversity of
students, their talents, motives and career prospects. Some experts and
politicians favoured a highly structured, diversified system of higher edu-
cation to protect ‘elite higher education’ while at the same time provid-
ing ‘mass higher education’ for a growing number of students.21 Others
pleaded for a broad range of educational goals as well as easier ways of
modifying individual educational choices. Finally, some opted for limiting
quality differences.
In the wake of these debates, various institutions were upgraded or
newly founded to form a new sector of so-called ‘non-university’ or
‘short-cycle’ higher education in Western European countries, such as
the instituts universitaires de technologie in France, polytechnics in the
United Kingdom, distrikthogskoler in Norway and Fachhochschulen in
the Federal Republic of Germany. Some of these institutions tried to
H. S. Parnes, Forecasting Educational Needs for Economic and Social Develop-

ment (Paris, 1962); G. Williams, ‘The OECD’s Mediterranean Regional Project’, in
Psacharopoulos, Economics (note 18), 335–6.
19 Cf. the critical comments by D. M. Windham, ‘Social Benefits and Subsidization of
Higher Education: A Critique’, Higher Education, 5 (1976), 237–52.
20 See U. Teichler, ‘European Practice of Ensuring Equality of Opportunity to Higher
Education’, Journal of Higher Education Studies, 3:2 (1988), 2–11.
21 M. Trow, ‘Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher Education’, in OECD
(ed.), Policies for Higher Education (Paris, 1974), 51–101.
329
Ulrich Teichler
maintain the same entry requirements as universities. Some offered short-
cycle study programmes similar to ones available in universities as well
as a ‘vocational’ or general curricular approach.22 Routes of access to
higher education opened up for secondary-school leavers who tradition-
ally would not have qualified for higher education and for adults who
had not even completed secondary education. In addition, transfer routes
were established from non-university higher education to university pro-
grammes.
Some countries tried to limit quality differences in the expanding
higher-education system. Thus, in the Federal Republic of Germany,
the Framework Law for Higher Education enacted in 1976 provided
for comprehensive universities that combined ‘theoretical’ and ‘practice-
oriented’ course programmes within the same institutions. Yet only six
comprehensive universities were founded offering students the opportu-
nity to choose between the two options during their studies. According to
Swedish higher-education legislation, all institutions of higher education
were named högskole, and short as well as regular degree programmes
were provided within the same institution.23
No convergent structure of higher education emerged in Europe. A two-
type or three-type institutional pattern spread, but did not become the
rule. The ‘comprehensive’ model remained exceptional. In some countries,
a ‘unitary’ structure was preserved (for example in Austria, Italy and
Switzerland) or re-established. Re-structuring activities came more or
less to a halt from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, and only re-emerged
around 1990, especially in countries concerned about the long duration
of studies. A number of countries established new institutions in regions
remote from universities or urban centres, for example, the University of
Tromsø, created in Norway north of the Arctic Circle in 1968.24
Pessimism and concern about ‘over-qualification’

During the 1970s, the optimism of the 1960s was replaced by pessimism
regarding the expansion of higher education, and by a dramatic criticism
of the policies prevailing in the 1960s. Views changed in four respects.
First, there was a decline of faith in a substantial growth of demand for
22 See OECD, Short-Cycle Higher Education: A Search for Identity (Paris, 1973);
UNESCO/CEPES, New Forms of Higher Education in Europe (Bucharest, 1976).
23 See H. Hermanns, U. Teichler and H. Wasser (eds.), The Compleat University
(Cambridge, Mass., 1983).
24 See J.-E. Lane, ‘Higher Education Regionalisation’, Higher Education, 13 (1984), 347–
68; J.-E. Lane, ‘Local Communities and Higher Education’, in Clark and Neave, Ency-
clopedia II, 946–56; K. N. Bie, Creating a New University: The Establishment and
Development of the University of Tromsø (Paris, 1973).
330
highly qualified human resources after the so-called ‘oil shock’ in 1973,
when unemployment began to grow substantially in market-oriented soci-
eties. Many politicians and researchers pointed out an increasing ‘mis-
match’ between demand and supply, as well as growing discrepancies
between the capabilities of graduates and job requirements, and fears were
expressed about the emergence of an akademisches Proletariat exposed
to the sort of large-scale unemployment experienced by university grad-
uates during the world economic crisis around 1930. Criticism was also
expressed concerning an emerging ‘displacement’25 whereby university
graduates took over jobs traditionally held by persons who had a sec-
ondary or vocational education, reducing the employment opportunities
of the latter and perhaps performing worse on the job.
Meanwhile, access to higher education for previously disadvantaged
social groups had indeed increased, though more modestly than had been
hoped.26 Increased educational opportunities did not seem to translate
into corresponding equality of professional opportunities except in a very
few countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden.27 On the one hand,
employers might select graduates according to their social skills or ‘cul-
tural capital’;28 on the other, pressures for the preservation of social
inequality might increase the weight of tiny differences between educa-
tional credentials, or bigger differences between types of higher-education
institutions.29
Third, the career rewards of education became a focus of inquiry.
Constant oversupply set in; the previous cycle of shortage, increased
income, oversupply and reduced income no longer worked. Action was
called for to redress ‘credentialism’ and an artificial emphasis on the
qualifications acquired in assessing competence and performance.30
Fourth, belief eroded the rationality and possible success of targeted
educational policy and planning. Macro-societal planning was viewed
25 A. Hegelheimer, ‘Verdrängen und verdrängt werden’, Der Arbeitgeber, 27 (1975),

1097–9.
26 See M. Kotwal, ‘Inequalities in the Distribution of Education between Countries, Sexes,
Generations and Individuals’, in OECD (ed.), Education, Inequality and Life Chances,
Vol. I (Paris, 1975), 31–108; G. Busch, ‘Inequality of Educational Opportunity by Social
Origin in Higher Education’, in OECD, Education (note 26), 159–81.
27 Y. Shavit and H.-P. Blossfeld (eds.), Persistent Inequality: Changing Educational Attain-
ment in Thirteen Countries (Boulder, Col. and London, 1993).
28 See P. Bourdieu and J.-C. Passeron, Die Illusion der Chancengleichheit (Stuttgart, 1971);
P. Bourdieu and J.-C. Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London
and Beverly Hills, Cal., 1977); see also R. K. Kelsall, A. Poole and A. Kuhn, Graduates:
The Sociology of an Elite (London, 1972).
29 See U. Teichler, ‘Struktur des Hochschulwesens und “Bedarf” an sozialer Ungleichheit’,
Mitteilungen aus der Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, 7 (1974), 197–209.
30 D. Davies, ‘Credentialism’, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia II, 871–7; R. P. Dore,
The Diploma Disease (London, 1976).
331
Ulrich Teichler
more cautiously. Analysis of the economics of education lost popularity.31
Ambitious reform goals gave way to awareness of the various pitfalls
in the implementation of reforms.32 In this context, the limits of the
predictive power of manpower forecasts and respective planning activities
were stressed.33 So too were ‘mismatches’.
The debates of this period about the tasks and functions of higher edu-
cation vis-à-vis employment and work were more controversial than at
any other time since the war. But when graduates began to face employ-
ment problems on a large scale, universities felt pressed to take their
employability seriously.34 Moreover, the aim of serving the academic
goals of universities and professional goals now appeared incompatible,
even contradictory, as did the policy of meeting economic demands on
the one hand, and contributing to equality of opportunity on the other.
It became more difficult to take action in any direction in times of stag-
nating or declining expenditure on higher education than at times of
expansion.35
Signs of adjustment and diverse options

Between the early 1970s and the late 1980s, however, the debate mod-
erated. This reflected changes in graduate employment as well as pro-
cesses of adaptation to the changed state of affairs. Two reasons may
be given. The growth in the number of graduates beyond those planned
for did not lead to any single major problem. Instead, there were mul-
tiple responses. Access to higher education did not expand as much as
before; some students avoided subjects where graduates faced serious
employment problems; others prolonged their studies; the job search
period increased marginally and initial employment became riskier.36 The
31 See OECD (ed.), Educational Planning: A Reappraisal (Paris, 1983); G. Williams, ‘The
Economic Approach’, in B. R. Clark (ed.), Perspectives on Higher Education (Berkeley,
1984), 79–105.
32 L. Cerych and P. Sabatier, Great Expectations and Mixed Performance: The Implemen-
tation of Higher Education Reforms in Europe (Stoke-on-Trent, 1986).
33 Cf. the summary in Youdi and Hinchcliffe, Forecasting (note 17); Arbeitsgruppen des
Instituts für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung und des Max-Planck-Instituts für Bil-
dungsforschung (eds.), Bedarfsprognostische Forschung in der Diskussion (Frankfurt,
1975); U. Teichler, D. Hartung and R. Nuthmann, Higher Education and the Needs
of Society: A Study (Windsor, 1980); Fulton, Gordon and Williams, Higher Education
(note 18).
34 See G. Williams, ‘Graduate Employment and Vocationalism in Higher Education’, Euro-
pean Journal of Education, 20 (1985), 181–92.
35 See P. Windolf, Die Expansion der Universitäten 1970–1985: Ein internationaler Ver-
gleich (Stuttgart, 1990).
36 See pp. 341–53 of this chapter, and also U. Teichler, ‘Beziehungen von Bildungs-
und Beschäftigungssystem: Erfordern die Entwicklungen der achtziger Jahre neue
Erklärungsansätze’, in A. Weymann (ed.), Bildung und Beschäftigung, Soziale Welt,
Sonderband 5 (Göttingen, 1987), 27–57.
332
relationships between higher education and employment became more
flexible, not only in the United Kingdom, where about 8% of British
university graduates in the humanities were employed in industry or agri-
culture and about 15% in private services, but in other countries as well.
In the Federal Republic of Germany, the Institute for Labour Market and
Occupational Research calculated on the basis of the 1970 census data
that one-sixth of the occupational categories typically filled by graduates
in mechanical engineering actually had been filled by graduates from other
fields of study, and one-fifth by non-graduates. Corresponding ‘realized
substitution’ was even higher for graduates from electrical engineering
and law, and while in the case of scientists vertical substitution remained
an exception, horizontal substitution was even higher.37
The second reason for moderation was that employment prospects
for graduates had become more diverse as a function of their field of
study and the type and reputation of the institution they had attended.
Graduates from some institutions had many options, while others faced
serious employment problems. Making wise choices was an individual
responsibility, but more moderate planning goals were now set in Western
European countries, and most notably in countries in which educational
planning had hitherto been ambitious, such as Sweden and Germany.
There were changes, too, in the approaches of planned economies.38
The emerging mood about the possible future role of planning may be
illustrated by the summary of an OECD conference in the early 1980s
on policies for higher education. It did not recommend a contraction
of higher-education systems, fearing that innovation in higher education,
which had been encouraged under conditions of growth in the past, might
come to a halt. It also recommended against a laissez-faire policy, that
is, just hoping for adjustments either in terms of declining social demand
for higher education or in terms of the absorption of the rising number of
graduates in lower-level jobs. Students should be guided towards ‘more
occupationally-relevant courses’, it suggested, and institutions encour-
aged to be more sensitive to employment problems by giving priority to
courses that responded to the requirements of working life.39
37 R. Butler, Employment of the Highly Qualified (London, 1978); Institut für

Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung der Bundesanstalt für Arbeit, Berufliche Flexibilität
und Arbeitsmarkt, Quintessenzen, 7 (Nuremberg, 1977), 14, 20. See also D. Mertens and
M. Kaiser (eds.), Berufliche Flexibilitätsforschung in der Diskussion, 4 vols. (Nurem-
berg, 1978); U. Teichler and B. C. Sanyal, Higher Education and the Labour Market in
the Federal Republic of Germany (Paris, 1982), 90–9.
38 See K. Hüfner, ‘Higher Education in the Federal Republic of Germany: A Planned or
a Market System? Or a Third Way?’, in R. Avakov et al. (eds.), Higher Education and
Employment in the USSR and in the Federal Republic of Germany (Paris, 1984), 185–96;
UNESCO, Planning (note 8).
39 OECD, Policies (note 11), 35.
333
Ulrich Teichler
During this period, a significant change in the relationships between
governments and higher-education institutions in many Western Euro-
pean countries took place. With the exception of the United Kingdom,
governments reduced bureaucratic control, thus raising the individual
university’s power to shape its own profile.40 Self-assessment systems
were introduced and ‘performance indicators’ were employed as crite-
ria for the allocation of funds.41 Although aspects of academic quality
in research and in teaching were paid most attention, self-assessment
increased awareness within the universities of the links between study,
teaching and the subsequent careers of graduates.42 Both in Western and
Eastern Europe, opinion held that an increase in competence beyond
what was traditionally required should not be interpreted as ‘over-
qualification’.43 Job roles could be reshaped in the direction of a changing
combination of complex and less complex tasks, and innovation could
be stimulated in neglected areas.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, eventually, discussion of the
relationship between higher education and employment became more
general. The views expressed, however, were strikingly divergent, not
least in Central and Eastern European countries, where the socio-political
system changed dramatically after 1989. First, employers pointed out
more strongly than they had done in the past that graduates’ attitudes and
social skills ranked high among the criteria that they took into considera-
tion for recruitment and promotion.44 Second, unemployment increased
in most European countries in the early 1990s − both in the labour
force in general and among higher-education graduates. Thus, the call
for targeted employment policies returned to the agenda. Third, the pro-
portion of entering students among their age group grew in a number
40 See G. Neave and F. A. van Vught (eds.), Prometheus Bound: The Changing Relationship
between Government and Higher Education in Western Europe (Oxford, 1991).
41 See H. R. Kells, Self-Regulation in Higher Education: A Multi-National Perspective on
Collaborative Systems of Quality Assurance and Control (London, 1992).
42 See the overview on widely used criteria and indicators in F. J. R. C. Dochy, M. S. R.
Segers and W. H. F. W. Wijnen (eds.), Management Information and Performance
Indicators in Higher Education: An International Issue (Maastricht, 1990).
43 See D. Mertens, ‘Unterqualifikation oder Überqualifikation’, Gewerkschaftliche Monat-
shefte, 27 (1976), 488–97; Z. Suda, ‘Universal Growth of Educational Aspirations and
the “Overqualification” Problem: Conclusions from a Comparative Data Analysis’,
European Journal of Education, 14 (1979), 113–64; D. Vaida, ‘The University Does
not Overqualify’, ibid., 165–74.
44 OECD, Synthesis Report (note 10); ‘Higher Education and the Labour Market’ (special
issue), Higher Education in Europe, 18:2 (1993); U. Teichler, ‘Higher Education and
Employment – The Issues for University Management’, Higher Education Management,
6 (1994), 217–25; ‘Higher Education and Employment’ (special issues), European Jour-
nal of Education, 30:1 and 2 (1995); J. Brennan, M. Kogan and U. Teichler (eds.),
Higher Education and Work (London, 1995); The European Round Table of Industri-
alists, Education and the European Competence (Brussels, 1989).
334
of Western European countries, with government support in France,
Sweden and the United Kingdom. The growth occurred without any
single major argument in favour of expansion. Fourth, growing atten-
tion was paid to graduate employment in other countries. For example,
about one-fifth of students who had studied in another European country
under the Erasmus programme eventually took jobs abroad.45 Finally,
further expansion of enrolment was eventually to call into question the
traditional view that economic and social welfare depended heavily on
an elite with scarce talents.
degrees and graduation

At many European universities, there were two levels of awards: a uni-
versity degree signalling basic academic and possibly professional com-
petence, for example the Magister in Austria, and a doctorate given upon
completion of substantial, in some cases ‘original’, academic work. In
some European countries, additional awards were customary. In the
United Kingdom and in the Republic of Ireland, two university degrees
fell into the category of basic, the first of them usually named ‘bache-
lor’s’ and awarded after three or four years of study, and the second a
‘master’s’ generally awarded after one additional year of study. In Scot-
land both the first and second degree were called master’s. In France
and traditionally in the Nordic countries, two levels of examinations
and degrees were customary in the humanities and sciences: in France
a ‘licence’ and, after further years of study, a maı̂trise. In Norway, a
cand.mag. was acquired after three and a half years of study, and a higher
candidatus, referring to a discipline, for example cand.psychol., after two
more years. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Nordic countries tried to phase
out the programmes and titles because the time and effort involved cor-
responded almost to those leading to a doctorate in other countries, but
the old way remained in Denmark and Norway. In some countries an
advanced (postdoctoral) academic qualification was awarded and gen-
erally viewed as the entry card to the professoriate. This held true for
the Habilitation in the German-speaking countries as well as the doctor
scientiae in some of the planned economies.46
Universities across Europe differed – and continue to differ – in the
extent of regulation of their curricula. Western European universities
that followed a Humboldtian tradition, and especially the humanities and
social sciences in such countries, tended to offer many options, whereas
45 For the Erasmus scheme and its impact, see U. Teichler and F. Maiworm, Transition to
Work: Experiences of Former ERASMUS Students (London, 1994), 57.
46 This section is based on H. Jablonska-Skinder and U. Teichler, Handbook of Higher
Education Diplomas in Europe (Munich, 1992).
335
Ulrich Teichler
some Southern European universities, for example in Italy and Spain,
tended to provide students with little freedom except in deciding the
length of their studies.
In the wake of the expansion of higher education throughout the 1960s
and 1970s, curricula tended to become more standardized. Many factors
contributed to this trend. The growing professional relevance of higher
education in many areas called for a clearer definition of the skills to be
taught and the amount of the ever-increasing knowledge to be mastered.
The proportion of students unable to profit from loosely structured teach-
ing and learning processes seemed to be on the rise. The growing funds
needed for higher education called for increased efficiency, and the num-
ber of students leaving without a degree (‘dropouts’) were more likely to
be regarded as ‘wastage’ than in the past.
The trend towards the standardization of complete degree programmes,
however, did not remain unchallenged. ‘Lifelong education’ and ‘recur-
rent education’ called for an opening up of highly structured programmes.
British and Nordic universities in particular addressed those demands
more strategically after the late 1960s and the 1970s by facilitating study
opportunities for those students starting late, possibly without typical sec-
ondary education credentials, who wished to study part time or through
distance-learning programmes.
Increased standardization had many implications for graduation and
the award of a degree. Achievements had to be monitored more carefully.
A continuous assessment of study loads and credits – somewhat similar to
the US system – was introduced from the late 1960s to the early 1980s; for
example, Swedish points (poäng) and Finnish study weeks (opintovikko)
were deemed equivalent to one week of study, irrespective of how much
time was spent in classes or on self-study. Dutch universities began to
calculate all study programmes in terms of an overall load (studiebelast-
ing). A course programme comprised a total of 6,720 study hours (studie
uren), that is, four years of study, in 40-hour weeks in 42-week terms.
Some countries distinguished stages of study, as had been traditionally
the case in France. From the 1960s partially and from the 1980s onwards,
in all fields, for example, universities in the Federal Republic of Germany
conducted major interim assessment of student progress after about two
years (Vor-Diplom or similar).
On graduation the student received a certificate testifying to the quali-
fication and also, usually, a title. The certifying document might incorpo-
rate general information about the awarding institution, the institution
providing the course programme, the title conferred, the level of institu-
tion and of degree programme, the legal basis of the course programme
and the degree, the field of study, and the typical duration of the pro-
gramme. It also provided information about the person awarded the
336
degree (name and possibly other biographical data), details of his or her
studies, competence and achievements, the areas of specialization cho-
sen, the prior examinations passed, the title of the thesis, and the grades
achieved.47
Usually, the designation of the degree and the title were identical, for
example the Magister in Austria, or the kandidat in Denmark or simi-
larly in most other Nordic countries. Elsewhere they might differ. Hold-
ers of the laurea conferred by Italian universities were called dottore or
dottoressa. Awards upon completion of study programmes might differ
according to discipline, type of competence and professional area. For
example, the Magister in the Federal Republic of Germany, mostly con-
ferred in the humanities, underlined the academic and general nature of
the course programme; the Diplom, mostly awarded in science, engineer-
ing and social sciences, indicated some basic professional competence;
and the Staatsexamen was the first professional qualification for the civil
service or other publicly supervised professions.
In many European countries, specific titles were awarded for those
graduating in engineering – for example ingenieur (ir.) in the Netherlands
and ingenjör in Sweden – or in other fields emphasizing professional
preparation – for example meester in de rechten (mr.) in the Nether-
lands or agronom in Sweden. In Switzerland, titles differed according
to their institutional, regional or national standardization or recognition:
the Dipl. Chem.-Ing. ETH is a graduate of the Eidgenössische Technische
Hochschule Zürich, while the architecte diplomé EPFL is a graduate of
the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. Barristers are awarded the
professional qualification of a Fürsprecher, Fürsprech, Anwalt, Rechtsan-
walt or similar.
As a rule institutions of higher education had the responsibility
of certifying successful completion of studies. There were, however,
exceptions:
1. In the United Kingdom, universities were granted the right to award

degrees through a royal charter. Other colleges traditionally had to
cooperate with universities to entitle their students to obtain an ‘exter-
nal degree’. When polytechnics were established in the late 1960s, the
Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) was founded for the
purpose of granting degrees and other awards in the non-university
sector and for examining curricula. Similarly, Ireland established a
National Council for Educational Awards (NCEA).
47 Cf. U. Teichler, ‘The Informational Value of Higher Education Diplomas and the Infor-
mation Needed to Understand them’, Higher Education in Europe, 11:4 (1986), 10–19;
C. Berg and U. Teichler, ‘Unveiling the Hidden Information in Credentials’, Higher
Education in Europe, 13:3 (1988), 13–24.
337
Ulrich Teichler
2. In the Federal Republic of Germany, students completing a field
of study usually leading to a government-supervised profession –
notably in medical fields, law and teacher training – did not receive a
university degree. Rather, they passed a state examination conducted
jointly by university professors and state examiners.
3. In the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and some other
countries, some professional bodies or other external institutions,
for example churches, have the right to grant degrees.
4. In the planned economies, academies had the right to confer academic
degrees, that is, the doctorate, as well as the advanced academic
degree (or similar).
5. Since the 1970s, some institutions of higher education have cooper-
ated with partner institutions in other countries to award a ‘double
degree’, that is, a degree both of the home institution and of the
partner institution abroad.
Four interrelated factors contributed to a reconsideration of the struc-

ture of graduation and degrees in Europe from the 1950s to the 1980s:
the establishment and expansion of non-university higher education, the
concern in some European countries about the length of studies, atten-
tion to the growing professional relevance of curricula, and efforts to
promote the international academic mobility of students and doctoral
candidates.
Most non-university institutions of higher education, newly emerging
or established through upgrading, provided programmes lasting between
one and four years and awarded degrees generally regarded as lower
in academic standing than those awarded by universities.48 There were
exceptions, however: British and Irish institutions might also award bach-
elor’s and master’s degrees, and the Norwegian distrikt hogskoler could
award a first university degree as well. The degree programmes of the
grandes écoles in France were generally viewed as more demanding than
those at French universities.
Concern about the long duration of studies – along with debates about
the international equivalences of degrees – led to the introduction in
the late 1980s of a bachelor’s degree in Denmark awarded after the
completion of three years of study, irrespective of whether the programme
was intended to last three years. Also, various European countries set up
short post-degree programmes with a wide range of credentials.
48 See the overviews in OECD, Short-Cycle (note 22); R. A. de Moor (ed.), Changing
Tertiary Education in Modern European Society (Strasbourg, 1978); G. Vedel (ed.),
Reform and Development of Tertiary (Post-Secondary) Education in Southern Europe
(Strasbourg, 1981); Teichler, Convergence (note 9), 110–30; C. Gellert (ed.), Higher
Education in Europe (London, 1993).
338
International or supranational organizations were involved in easing
the transfer of degree qualifications and stimulating boundary-crossing
mobility, notably through the Joint Study Programmes promoted from
1976 to 1986 and the Erasmus programme inaugurated in 1987.49 The
Council of Europe adopted conventions on the equivalence of qualifi-
cations for admission to higher education (1953), on the equivalence
of periods of university study (1958) and on the academic recognition
of university qualifications (1959),50 and in 1972 in Prague ten govern-
ments with planned economies signed a convention on the validation
and mutual equivalence of secondary and specialized secondary-school-
leaving certificates and of higher-education diplomas. In 1979 UNESCO
went on to adopt a convention on the recognition of studies, diplomas
and degrees.51 Within the framework of the European Community, the
European Council adopted directives on academic recognition for profes-
sional purposes in a limited number of fields (medicine, 1975; veterinary
medicine, 1978; architecture, 1985; pharmacy, 1978); in 1988, it adopted
a directive according to which graduates who had successfully completed
three years of study at an institution of higher education in the European
Community were, in principle, entitled to be professionally active in any
other country of the Community.52
The diplomas that emerged in Europe may be classified into nine
categories:
1. semi-terminal diplomas, such as the Diplôme d’études universitaires

générales (DEUG) in France after two years of study;
2. terminal diplomas awarded upon completion of courses shorter than
first degree courses, such as a Diplôme universitaire de technologie
(DUT) in France;
3. first university degrees based on a relatively short course programme,
such as a licence in France, a bachelor’s in England and Wales and
in Ireland, and a cand.mag. in Norway, or degrees awarded upon
completion of a relatively long course programme at non-university
institutions, for example a Diplom supplemented by a bracketed (FH)
49 See F. Dalichow, ‘Academic Recognition in the European Community’, European Jour-

nal of Education, 22 (1987), 39–58; J. Preston (ed.), EC Training, Education and
Research Programmes: An Action Guide (London, 1991).
50 Cf. Council of Europe, Report on Mutual Recognition of Degrees and Diplomas in
Post-Secondary Education (Strasbourg, 1975). Cf. chapter 3.
51 See ‘International Recognition of Studies and Degrees: Challenges and Perspectives’,
Higher Education in Europe, 13:3 (1988), 5–66. Cf. chapter 3.
52 See Commission des Communautés Européennes, La reconnaissance mutuelle des
diplômes et des qualifications professionnelles (Brussels, 1980); G. Neave, The EEC and
Education (Stoke-on-Trent, 1984); Bundesministerium für Bildung und Wissenschaft,
Akademische Berufe im EG-Binnenmarkt (Bonn, 1992). Cf. chapter 3.
339
Ulrich Teichler
awarded by German Fachhochschulen, or a baccalaureus (abbrevi-
ated bc. or B.) conferred after the late 1980s by Dutch Hogescholen,
formerly called hoger boroepsonderwijs (HBO);
4. first university degrees based on a course programme requiring at least
four years of study, for example a Magister in Austria, a kandidaatti
in Finland or a laurea in Italy;
5. advanced university degrees in countries where the first university
degree was awarded after a relatively short period, for example a
maı̂trise in France. This degree tended to be considered equivalent to
a first university degree based on a relatively long course programme;
6. supplementary or add-on diplomas certifying a short academic or
professional qualification based on studies undertaken after the
award of a first academic degree, for example a Postgraduate Cer-
tificate in Education (PGCE) in the United Kingdom, or a Diplom or
Zertifikat after a short Aufbaustudium or Weiterbildungsstudium in
Germany;
7. advanced university degrees following some years after the comple-
tion of a degree based on a relatively long degree programme, notably
the licentiate degree in some Nordic countries;
8. the academic degree of a doctor or similar;
9. an advanced academic degree, for example a Habilitation or a doctor
scientiae, dottorato di ricerca, doctorat d’État.
National and international debates about the value of credentials con-
ferred upon completion of programmes in higher education eventually
led to a widespread agreement, according to which the duration of study
was the single most important indicator of achievement. By the 1990s,
most experts distinguished four levels, namely,
1. diplomas beyond the level of a first university degree;
2. degrees equivalent to a bachelor’s;
3. degrees equivalent to a master’s;
4. doctoral awards.
Yet there was no complete standardization of the length of courses
between or within countries, and while, for example, most British stu-
dents tended to complete their studies in the required period, students in
Spain, Finland, Italy, Germany, France, Austria and possibly some other
countries prolonged their studies on average by more than 50 per cent
beyond the officially sanctioned period.53
53 See U. Teichler and W. Steube, Studiendauer und Lebensalter: Beiträge zur Diskussion
aus sieben ausgewählten Ländern, Bildung und Wissenschaft international, 1/89 (Bonn,
1989); R. Ciucci, ‘Students in 1984: A Part-Time Activity along with Other Jobs? Illus-
trations from Italy’, European Journal of Education, 19 (1984), 299–308; P. Määtä
340
Thus, the continuing debates on the need for clarification of the value of
academic credentials and the establishment of international equivalences
had not led until the early 1990s to a consistent system of diplomas and
titles in Europe, and it was left entirely to public or private employers to
judge whether or not they considered a degree as a prerequisite for certain
positions. An individual might undertake certain professional activities
independently, whether or not he or she had been awarded a degree,
and governments might explicitly look for qualities ‘beyond’ degrees,
holding public qualifying examinations for entry to subsequent training
or professional practice. Graduates wishing to transfer to teacher training
underwent such concours in France; and the German Staatsexamen led
to a period of professional internship and a second examination before
those who passed it were considered to be qualified and perhaps awarded
a title.54
In some countries, finally, professional bodies continued to exert power
in determining access to a profession.55 For example, some profes-
sions in engineering and business in the United Kingdom and Ireland
required both the successful passing of a theoretical examination and
positive assessment following an extended practical phase, supervised by
a licensed professional, as a prerequisite for professional licensing. They
might even require examinations in addition to those leading up to the
degree.
graduate employment and work

Before concern grew in the 1970s about graduate employment, regu-
lar statistics about the transition from higher education to employment
were scarce.56 After the 1970s, however, the number of regular annual
or biennial surveys of graduate employment increased substantially. Dur-
ing the later period, when the transition from education to employment
and S. Valkonen, ‘Study Careers and Productivity’, in P. Hakkarainen, H. Jalkanen and

P. Määtä (eds.), Current Visions and Analyses on Finnish Higher Education System
(Jyväskylä, 1992), 121–35; R. J. Bijleveld, ‘Programme Length and Duration of Studies
in German and Dutch University Education: A Comparative Analysis’, in Stifterverband
für die deutsche Wissenschaft (ed.), Studienzeitverkürzung (Essen, 1991), 83–107.
54 See C. Händle, ‘Lehrerausbildung (Organisation)’, in L. Huber (ed.), Enzyklopädie
Erziehungswissenschaft, Vol. X (Stuttgart, 1983), 623–32; U. Branahl, ‘Rechtswis-
senschaft (Studium)’, in ibid., 685–92.
55 See S. Goodlad (ed.), Education for the Professions: Quis custodiet . . . ? (Guildford,
1984).
56 See E. Esnault and J. Le Pas, ‘New Relations between Post-Secondary Education and
Employment’, in OECD (ed.), Towards Mass Higher Education: Issues and Dilem-
mas (Paris, 1974), 105–69; M. Tessaring and H. Werner, Beschäftigungsprobleme von
Hochschulabsolventen im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen, 1975).
341
Ulrich Teichler
became a protracted process, graduates required reliable information
about employment opportunities and undertook sustained searches
before taking a job. The increase in elaborate searches can be demon-
strated in Austria: among the 1975/76 university graduates looking for a
job in the private sector or public organizations, 16% applied to ten or
more institutions. Ten years later, the figure was 34%.57 The increasing
length of the search period can also be shown in Austria: the proportion
of university graduates who waited for employment after graduation was
50% in 1975/76, declined to 40% in 1978/79 in the wake of a mod-
est economic recovery, and eventually increased to 79% in 1985/86. The
curve of those waiting more than six months – 9%, 6% and 24% – shows
even more clearly this change over time. (The number of those stating that
they waited voluntarily surpassed that of those waiting involuntarily.58 )
In Switzerland, by contrast, the proportion of those waiting more than
three months to start employment remained more or less constant through
the 1980s at somewhat more than 20%,59 and among Swedish graduates
in 1984–5 only 4% of those with jobs a year later had waited more than
four months for employment.60
In several countries, unemployment of recent graduates increased,
although not continually. For example, the proportion of British univer-
sity graduates unemployed six months after graduation increased from
2% of the 1965/67 graduate cohort to 8% of those completing study
in 1972/73 and eventually to 16% of those graduating in 1980/81, but
thereafter declined to 9% among the 1986/87 cohort.61 Similarly, in the
Netherlands, the ratio of the number of unemployed recent university
graduates in May of a given year as compared to the number of grad-
uates of the previous year increased dramatically from 17% in 1980 to
49% in 1985; thereafter, it declined moderately to 36% in 1989.62 For
graduates in some small European countries, working abroad might be a
way of overcoming the problems of the local labour market. For example,
when the overall unemployment in Ireland increased during the 1980s, the
proportion of unemployed among graduates from institutions of higher
education increased initially from 14% in 1981 to 22% in 1983, but
57 S. Loudon, Zum Berufseinstieg von Akademikern/innen (Vienna, 1988), 21.

58 L. Lassnigg, S. Loudon and H. Spreitzer, ‘Austria: Developments in Higher Education
and the Changing Transition to the Labour Market’, in OECD (ed.), From Higher
Education to Employment, Vol. I (Paris, 1992), 113.
59 T. Ogay, ‘Suisse’, in OECD, Employment, Vol. IV (note 58), 191; see also B. Mor-
genthaler, ‘Die Beschäftigungssituation der Neuabsolventen der schweizer Hochschulen
1985’, Wissenschaftspolitik (Beiheft), 34 (1986), 55.
60 Statistika centralbyran, Högskolan 1984/85: Elevuppföljingar 1985 (Örebro, 1986), 20.
61 M. Bee and P. Dolton, ‘Patterns of Change in U.K. Graduate Unemployment, 1962–87’,
Higher Education, 28 (1990), 27.
62 I. M. T. Coppens, ‘The Netherlands’, in OECD, Employment, Vol. III (note 58), 340.
342
declined afterwards to 7% in 1989; meanwhile emigration to find work
abroad increased from 8% in 1981 to 29% in 1989.63
Fixed-term contracts became more frequent. For example, the propor-
tion of such contracts among first jobs of Austrian graduates doubled
within a decade, from 21% in 1975/76 to 42% in 1985/86.64 In the
Federal Republic of Germany, more than one-third of recently employed
university graduates in the early 1980s had fixed-term contracts, among
them half of those employed in the public sector and one-tenth of those
in the private sector. In the late 1980s, more than two-thirds of recent
university graduates had fixed-term contracts, among them more than
90% in the public sector and almost half in the private sector.65
It was frequently said that employment problems led graduates to con-
tinue study beyond graduation both as a possible shelter from unemploy-
ment and in order to increase their level of qualification. Yet this does
not turn out to be a general phenomenon in Europe. In Austria, indeed,
the proportion of 1985/86 graduates continuing study was 10% higher
(42% as compared to 32%) than among their predecessors ten years
earlier.66 In Germany, however, the proportion of students enrolled who
had already obtained a degree remained constant at a level of 12–13%
from 1973 to 1991.67
In general, surveys suggested that students became accustomed to the
growing complexity of the transition process. For example, the propor-
tion of Swiss university graduates who reported having faced employment
problems when surveyed one year after graduation declined from 47%
in 1985 to 28% in 1989.68
By then new employment opportunities for graduates had emerged as
a consequence of rapid structural change of the economy and the labour
market.
1. In France, employment in the agricultural sector declined from 30%

in 1949 to 6% in 1990, in industry it declined moderately, after a
temporary increase, from 33% to 29%, and in the services it increased
from 37% to 65%.
63 G. Hughes and P. J. O’Connell, ‘Higher Education and the Labour Market in Ireland,
1981–1991’, European Journal of Education, 30:1 (1995), 79–80.
64 Lassnigg, Loudon and Spreitzer, ‘Austria’ (note 58), 134.
65 K.-H. Minks and R. Reissert, Studium, Übergang und Berufseintritt unter veränderten
Arbeitsmarktbedingungen (Hannover, 1984); K.-H. Minks and R. Nigmann, Hochschul-
absolventen zwischen Studium und Beruf (Hannover, 1991).
66 Loudon, Berufseinstieg (note 57), 30 (the percentage does not include graduates only
formally enrolled).
67 Bundesminister für Bildung und Wissenschaft, Grund- und Strukturdaten 1993/94
(Bonn, 1993), 154–5.
68 Ogay, ‘Suisse’ (note 59), 188.
343
Ulrich Teichler
2. In the Federal Republic of Germany, employment in the first sector
decreased similarly from 22% in 1950 to 4% in 1990, the industrial
sector followed a similar curve on a higher level from 45% to 39%,
and employment in the third sector increased from 33% to 57%.
3. Industrialization took place somewhat later in Italy. The respective
figures were 44% in 1951 and 9% in 1990 for agriculture, 30% and
32% for industry, and finally 27% and 60% for the service sector.
4. In the United Kingdom, the agricultural sector had declined just after
the war and decreased further, from 5% in 1951 to 2% in 1990.
Employment in the industrial sector decreased more rapidly than in
the other countries referred to (from 47% to 29%), while the service
sector was exceptionally high initially (48%) and grew further (to
69%).69
Altogether, sectorial changes provided growing employment opportu-

nities for graduates, and the proportion as well as the absolute number
of graduates among persons active in the respective sectors increased as
well. For example, the quota of university-trained persons in industry
in the Federal Republic of Germany increased, according to census and
micro-census data, from about 1% in 1961 to 2% in 1970 and 1980. The
number of persons trained in a university or Fachhochschule increased
from 3.3% in 1976 to 5.7% in 1987. The respective proportions in bank-
ing and in the insurance sector grew only from 2.7% to 3.0% and 3.4%
and from 4.4% to 7.7% respectively. In government and social-security
occupations, the quota of university-trained persons was 5.7% in 1961,
declined slightly to 5.0% in 1970 and grew to 7.7% in 1980; the pro-
portion of graduates of universities and Fachhochschule-trained persons
increased from 9.7% in 1976 to 15.4% in 1987.70
The available data suggest that in the 1970s and 1980s graduates were
absorbed into the labour market primarily through an increase in the
proportion of graduates within the individual sectors. For example, in
Norway the proportion of graduates in the primary and secondary sectors
increased from 5% in 1975 to 11% in 1989, and in commerce and
communication from 7% to 12%. It also increased in sectors traditionally
accommodating larger proportions of college-trained persons: in finance
and business services from 23% to 41% and in public administration from
69 OECD, The OECD Jobs Study: Evidence and Explanations, Part I: Labour Market
Trends and Underlying Force of Change (Paris, 1994), 5.
70 See K. Parmentier and M. Tessaring, ‘Bildungswesen und Arbeitsmarkt für Hochquali-
fizierte: Eine Übersicht’, in Arbeitsgruppen, Bedarfsprognostische Forschung (note 33),
257; U. Teichler and B. C. Sanyal, ‘Higher Education and the Labour Market’, in Avakov
et al., Higher Education (note 38), 105; D. Hartung and B. Krais, ‘Studium und Beruf’, in
U. Teichler (ed.), Das Hochschulwesen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Weinheim,
1990), 195.
344
26% to 37%. Similarly, the proportion of university-trained persons in
Swedish industry grew from 2% in 1971 to 6% in 1991, in other private
sectors from 3% to 9%, in the health system from 5% to 11%, and in
public administration from 20% to 35%.71
Politicians and experts paid special attention to the ‘vertical’ change
in graduate employment. Some shift from high-status positions and from
the university-trained professions towards qualified middle-level positions
had occurred before 1970, and was the more pronounced in European
countries in which the growth of student numbers had started relatively
early. In France the proportion of persons in the labour force having
completed higher education and who were active as employers, profes-
sionals and managers declined moderately from 73% in 1954 to 68%
in 1968 and eventually to 62% in 1975. By contrast, the proportion of
graduates employed as middle-level executives increased from 16% to
21% and 26% during the same period. Yet there was no substantial
change in the proportion of degree-holders employed in occupations in
which graduate employment tended to be exceptional; it remained at
around 11–12%.72
Changes in positions and tasks can be measured ‘objectively’ in terms
of occupational categories. For example, of the graduates from the sec-
ond cycle of French higher-education institutions in 1975, 15% were
employed three years later in intermediate occupations and 2% in lower
positions (employés and ouvriers et divers); the shares increased to 19%
and 4% for 1984 graduates three years later.73
In other European countries fewer than 10% of persons having com-
pleted higher education were employed during the 1970s and 1980s in
categories for which a higher degree typically was not required, and up to
20% were employed in categories that might be called ‘middle-level occu-
pations’, such as technicians, sales and office workers. While some experts
thought that these positions did not require a degree, others argued that
self-rating judgments were more valid in such cases than ‘objective’ occu-
pational classification schemes. The same held true for functional classifi-
cations within companies. In a debate among experts in the early 1990s in
Germany, some claimed that about one-fifth of university graduates had
positions and work tasks clearly below any appropriate level,74 while oth-
ers pointed out that not all Sachbearbeiter could be viewed as employed
inappropriately (see table 9.4).
71 See OECD, Synthesis Report (note 10), 98.

72 V. Vincens, ‘Postgraduate Education and Employment: The French Case’, European
Journal of Education, 16 (1981), 34–5.
73 A. Charlot and F. Pottier, ‘France’, in OECD, Employment, vol. III (note 58), 118.
74 ‘Akademiker-Beschäftigung: Ein Fünftel unter Niveau’, iwd (Informationsdienst des
Instituts der deutschen Wirtschaft), 10 (1994), 30.
345
Ulrich Teichler
Table 9.4 Professional function of university-trained persons in the
Federal Republic of Germany 1989 by age and gender (percentages)
below 35–44 45 and

Total 35 years years older
(a) All
Self-employed 15.5 8.3 16.6 20.7
Leading positions 20.7 13.7 20.5 27.1
Qualified specialists 47.0 50.6 49.3 41.7
‘Sachbearbeiter’ 6.5 11.3 4.9 4.0
Workers, low-level employees 9.3 14.1 8.3 6.3
No answer 1.0 2.0 0.4 0.3
Total 100 100 100 100

(b) Men
Self-employed 18.0 8.7 19.4 23.1
No answer 1.3 3.4 0.6 0.4
Total 100 100 100 100

(c) Women
Self-employed 10.5 7.7 11.4 13.4
No answer – – – –
Total 100 100 100 100
Source: H. Plicht, K. Schober and F. Schreyer, ‘Zur Ausbildungsadäquanz der

Beschäftigung von Hochschulabsolventinnen und -absolventen’, Mitteilungen aus der
Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, 27 (1994), 197–8.
Another way of looking at the links between educational attainment

and occupations is to analyse the increasing proportion of degree-holders
within individual occupations. (If a degree was already required for pro-
fessional practice before the process of expansion of higher education,
changes of this kind cannot be expected by definition.) In Sweden, more
or less all medical doctors, dentists, nurses, psychologists, lawyers and
teachers professionally active in 1970 had been trained in higher educa-
tion. The most obvious upgrading took place from 1970 to 1985, when
the proportion of college-trained persons aged 30–39 years in the overall
labour force almost doubled (from 12% to 22%), among professionals.
The figure broke down as follows: in electrical engineering and telecom-
munications, 12%/38%; architecture, civil engineering and mechanical
346
Table 9.5 Ratio of earnings of university-trained persons
as compared to persons having completed upper
secondary education
Early Late Early Middle/late Early

1970s 1970s 1980s 1980s 1990s
(a) Men
Denmark – – 1.39 1.42 1.31
France 1.88 2.38 – 2.42 –
Norway – – 1.35 1.25 1.26
Sweden 1.44 – 1.22 1.30 1.36
United Kingdom 1.52 1.32 – 1.47 1.53
(b) Women
Denmark – – 1.33 1.27 1.21
France 1.67 2.02 – 2.13 –
Norway – – 1.19 1.26 1.26
Sweden 1.44 – 1.22 1.30 1.36
Source: Selected from OECD, The OECD Job Study: Evidence on Expla-
nations. Part II: The Adjustment Potential of the Labour Market (Paris
1994), 160–1.
engineering, 14%/37%; among social welfare workers, 47%/69%; jour-

nalists, 28%/49%; system analysts and programmers, 35%/56%; pre-
school teachers, 71%/91%; company managers, controllers, 20%/39%;
and personnel officers, 29%/47%.75
Available statistics on earnings of all university-trained persons in com-
parison to earnings of those without a degree (see table 9.5) do not suggest
any consistent trend in Europe towards a decline of income differentials.
Three overlapping phenomena were relevant: unemployment of grad-
uates changed over time in accordance with the general change of unem-
ployment; women were more likely to be unemployed than men; and
graduates in almost all Western European countries faced lower risks of
unemployment than persons not holding a degree. However, during the
1970s advantages of higher education in terms of a lower unemployment
ratio declined in Germany and the Netherlands, while they increased in
France and Italy.
It is a widely shared view that after the 1970s the number of graduates
surpassed substantially the number of positions for which a degree was
demanded. As measurements based on occupational categories did not
turn out to be valid indicators for middle-level occupations, most grad-
uate surveys addressed the issue of ‘suitable employment’ by means of
75 S. Forneng and D. Anderson, ‘Sweden’, in OECD, Employment, vol. IV (note 58), 155.
One should bear in mind that some semi-professional training provisions in Sweden had
partly remained in upper-secondary schools until the early 1990s.
347
Ulrich Teichler
graduates’ self-ratings. The questions raised varied markedly, and since
surveys were not regularly repeated in a similar way, change over time
could hardly be analysed. The variety of questions posed, however, pro-
vides interesting insights into the diversity of underlying conceptions.
Asked to state whether the training they had received in higher educa-
tion had been suited to their present work, 70% of Swedish 1984 grad-
uates employed about one year later responded that it was completely
suitable, 24% conceived it as partially suitable, and 5% replied that their
education did not fit their work assignment at all.76 Similarly, 3% of
German graduates from select fields of study stated two years after grad-
uation – in the mid-1980s – that their employment did not correspond at
all to their education, and a further 11% noted little correspondence.77
As few as 7% of recent Swiss graduates surveyed in 1985 reported that
they held positions previously held by non-graduates.78
Other surveys asked graduates to state the level of education they
considered appropriate for their successors. Accordingly, 33% of Polish
graduates surveyed in 1979 one year after graduation said that non-
degree-holders could do their jobs.79 By comparison, about half as many
(17%) of the German graduates stated two years after graduation that
the most suitable education for their jobs would have been lower than
that required for a degree from an institution of higher education. The
comparative data confirmed the widely held view that ‘underemploy-
ment’ was a relatively frequent phenomenon in planned economies. In
the German survey, 18% considered their position as ‘inappropriate’ for
a degree-holder, two-thirds of whom stated that they had chosen such a
position voluntarily, and 19% reported that they could hardly make use
of the capabilities and knowledge they had acquired in their course of uni-
versity study.80 Surveys undertaken in other countries suggested that up
to 20% of the graduates did not consider that their job required a degree.
If wider responses are considered, the proportion of graduates who
could be characterized as inappropriately employed varies dramatically.
Thus, in a study undertaken in 1982, recent graduates from select fields of
study in Italian and French universities were asked two questions: ‘Does
your current job correspond to your university training?’ and ‘Do you
know of people without degrees who do the same job as yourself?’ Those
76 Statistika centralbyran, Högskolan (note 60), 9, 28.
77 U. Teichler, ‘Zum Zusammenhang von Studium und Beruf in der Einschätzung der
Absolventen’, in U. Teichler and H. Winkler (eds.), Der Berufsstart von Hochschulab-
solventen (Bad Honnef, 1990), 154.
78 Morgenthaler, ‘Die Beschäftigungssituation’ (note 59), 75.
79 A. Buttler, ‘Probleme von Hochschulabsolventen im ersten Jahr der Berufstätigkeit’, in
J. Kluczynski, A. Neusel and U. Teichler (eds.), Forschung zu Hochschule und Beruf in
Polen und in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Kassel, 1984), 178–9.
80 Teichler, ‘Zusammenhang’ (note 77), 153.
348
not responding affirmatively to the first question but responding affir-
matively to the second question were categorized as ‘under-utilized’, and
respondents who did not know persons without degrees in the workforce,
but who considered their job as not corresponding to their own univer-
sity training, were categorized as ‘partially utilized’. The researchers came
to the conclusion that 34% of recent graduates in both countries were
‘under-utilized’, and 8% of the Italian and 22% of the French graduates
only ‘partially utilized’.81
The majority of German graduates traced a link between their status
and the substantive quality of their education. Few graduate jobs were
well remunerated that did not require competence fostered through study.
On the other hand, demanding tasks might be shouldered that did not
pay well. Some graduates opted for a junior position in a university
or a research institute, thereby balancing fixed-term employment and
the risk of having to leave it at a stage of their lives when their fellow
graduates were professionally well established. Some graduates pursued
socio-political aims and opted for tasks they considered relevant, even if
the material rewards left much to be desired.
Many graduate surveys referred only to a potential discrepancy
between a high level of competence and a moderately demanding job. By
definition, they excluded the reverse relationship. One survey, however,
measured possible under-qualification as well. In 1979 university-trained
economists in Poland were asked to state whether higher education was
necessary for taking over their jobs, and to what extent they used the
knowledge they had acquired during their course of study. The authors
concluded that the placing of the economists had provided a good match
for 35% (28% of women and 42% of men), a surplus of qualifications
for 18% (15%/22%), a lack of qualifications for 12% (16%/8%), a
partial match for 13% (16%/8%), a waste of qualifications for 12%
(14%/9%), a loss of qualifications for 7% (8%/5%), and a bad match
for 3% (3%/5%).82
A similar result came from an employers’ survey conducted in the
Federal Republic of Germany in the late 1970s: the distinction between
suitable jobs and jobs not viewed as suitable was most clearly drawn
in professional areas shaped by pronounced hierarchies of status and
tasks, while this distinction was blurred in many areas of industry and
private services. There were distinct cultures in the various disciplines
and occupations with respect to the perception of a desirable career and
desirable work tasks. Certainly a lowering of expectations was not the
81 J.-P. Jarousse and F. de Francesco, L’enseignement supérieur contre le chômage (Paris,

1984), 108, 227.
82 J. Kluczynski and B. C. Sanyal, Education and Work in Poland (Warsaw, 1985), 144.
349
Ulrich Teichler
only response: some graduates were disappointed, some placed value on
the interesting dimensions of their work, while still others concluded
that there was a need for complex knowledge in certain middle-level
occupations and were active in re-shaping their jobs.
Reactions varied in part according to graduates’ initial field of study and
its relationship to their subsequent occupation. This may be exemplified
from Finnish statistics assembled in 1985, at a time when the proportion
of university-trained persons in the labour force in Finland was almost
10%. No fewer than 66% of graduates from the humanities were
employed as schoolteachers, and the remaining 34% were spread over a
wide range of cultural professions, public services and private services.
Graduates from the social sciences were most widely dispersed, with 16%
in private management, 14% in public administration, 11% in financial,
statistical etc. research and planning, 9% in social work and 11% in junior
clerical or manual jobs; 67% of graduates from psychology were profes-
sional psychologists and 9% teachers; 35% of those trained in economic
fields were in managerial careers in the private sector, 11% were teachers
and 15% in junior clerical and manual positions; 52% of graduates from
law worked in legal professions and the judicial system, 16% in higher
careers of public administration and 13% in the higher ranks of the pri-
vate sector; 37% of science graduates were schoolteachers and about one-
third scientific professionals in the private sector. Finally, about half of the
university-trained engineers were classified as respective professionals –
‘engineers’ (42%) or ‘architects’ (75%) – while 21% of them held manage-
rial posts in enterprises and other non-public organizations.83
It was widely assumed that recent graduates would become more flex-
ible in their occupational choices, but available data did not consistently
confirm this view. There was a substantial increase of British university
arts graduates taking up positions in the commercial sector, from 4% on
average in the graduation years 1961/62 to 1973/74, to 11% on average
in the graduation years 1974/75 to 1986/87.84
By contrast, in Switzerland the proportion of graduates employed in
universities (23% both in 1981 and 1989), the legal system (9% in both)
and industry (14%/15%) remained more or less constant, and graduates
from the humanities who did not move into the school system, their earlier
principal area of employment (down from 60% to 40%), moved most
often to cultural activities (15%/24%) and to private services (4%/10%).
Graduates from engineering kept their professional key areas more or less
unchanged.85
83 See A. Haapakorpi, ‘Academic Graduates in the Finnish Labour Market’, in Ministry
of Education (ed.), Higher Education and Employment: The Changing Relationship
(Helsinki, 1990), 71–90.
84 Bee and Dolton, ‘Patterns’ (note 61), 36. 85 Ogay, ‘Suisse’ (note 59), 198–202.
350
Over the years in Europe as a whole, students’ selection of fields of
study changed to a limited extent in recognition of the widening span
of employment opportunities. Some experts interpreted this as a sign of
growing ‘vocationalism’ on the part of the students. On the contrary,
however, evidence suggests that a considerable proportion of students
retained their intrinsic interest in the areas that they had initially chosen.
Moreover, structural changes in graduate employment during the 1970s
and 1980s were not so dramatic that the majority of students were forced
to dissociate intrinsic and extrinsic motives.
Conventional wisdom about what was happening during the 1970s and
1980s may be misleading. It was not only graduates from the humani-
ties and from some of the social sciences who experienced above-average
or serious employment problems in many European countries. Grad-
uates from the natural sciences in some countries faced considerable
employment problems as well. For example, among recent graduates from
British universities, those graduating in the biological sciences, which had
greatly expanded in universities, frequently faced unemployment, while
those graduating in civil engineering and business studies were close to
average.86
The clearest link between university study and professional work
in post-war Europe was in medical education. Medical doctors were
required to have completed a designated qualification, and places in med-
ical school were controlled in most countries – partly reflecting profes-
sional pressures and partly the high costs of educational provision. Most
places were provided by medical faculties in universities, but sometimes by
separate medical universities, usually demanding six years of study. Inter-
twined practical training took place in hospitals that in some countries
were an integral part of the universities and in others separate entities.
The institutional basis of paramedical training was upgraded in a num-
ber of countries, but it remained heterogeneous. In 1990 it was provided
by universities in some countries, in others by the non-university sector,
and in still others partly or completely by vocational schools outside the
higher-education sector.
In most European countries, public service drew a clear distinction
between educational credentials and career paths. A university degree –
in Germany, France and some Southern European countries, a law
degree – tended to be the prerequisite for high-level civil service careers.
Entry to the legal professions likewise required a degree. In the United
Kingdom, Ireland and a few other countries, experienced administra-
tors without designated university study might qualify through shorter
courses and examinations, while in other countries university study had
86 Bee and Dolton, ‘Patterns’ (note 61), 27–31.
351
Ulrich Teichler
to be completed. If the number of law graduates increased beyond the
presumed demand, many of them might opt for a legal career, fewer
clients and a reduced income.87
Teacher training for academic secondary schools during the 1950s
and 1960s involved university study accompanied by parallel profes-
sional training or, following university, in a one-year teacher-training
programme. Training for elementary school teachers and possibly for
those teaching non-academic types of secondary education was tradition-
ally provided in most European countries by colleges, with shorter course
programmes than those customary in universities. Over the years, teacher-
training colleges were upgraded in a number of countries to the university
sector; some countries required a regular university degree for elementary
school teachers. By the 1990s, in all European countries a degree from
an institution of higher education was a prerequisite for a public-school
teaching position, and also pre-school teachers in many countries were
being trained in universities or other institutions of higher education.
The teaching profession was strongly affected by the job market. When,
despite the increase in the number of students in the humanities and in
teacher training during the 1960s and early 1970s, the number of teaching
positions did not grow in parallel, and when the need for replenishment
dropped as a result of the preceding expansion, a serious ‘mismatch’
surfaced. Throughout the 1980s, the proportion of students in teacher
training declined in response to the disparity between the number of
teaching positions and the supply of graduates.
Theology disappeared as a relevant category in most descriptions of
higher education and graduate employment after the Second World War.
Theology students now tended to be counted as a statistical sub-category
of the humanities, with which theology was merged in many institutions.
Courses were offered in humanities departments as well as in theological
faculties or in separate theological seminaries. As a rule, professional
control of study and of professional work continued to be high: the
various churches supervised curricula, appointments of academic staff
and initial professional training.
Students in science fields might go on to research and development
laboratories in industry, to universities and research institutes, or become
schoolteachers. Their career patterns were distinct from those of labora-
tory technicians trained in short-cycle programmes in higher education
in some countries or in higher vocational schools in others. In many
countries, a transfer of scientists to managerial posts after some years of
laboratory assignment happened frequently in private industry.
87 See C. Hommerich, ‘Die Anwaltschaft unter Expansionsdruck’, Anwalts Blatt, 5, Beilage

(1988), 1–35.
352
University-level training of engineers took place in the majority of
European countries in specialized institutions (Technische Hochschulen,
politecnica, etc.). In other countries, they were placed in multidisciplinary
universities. The number of types and ranks varied across Europe. In
many countries there was a hierarchy, with university-level engineers at
the top, engineers trained in non-university institutions, in specific course
programmes or in higher vocational schools came second, and technicians
trained in advanced vocational schools or upgraded from manual workers
came last. Promotion practices differed. Overlaps in different career paths
were less common than in the administrative and trading sectors of private
industry and services, but more common than in scientific research and
development. The administrative, trade and service activities in industry
and the public sector were least regulated by law, professional control
and established routines. This sector, however, changed most strikingly
after the Second World War. The range of managerial careers for which
graduates tended to be recruited spread. Only in a few European coun-
tries – and then only in a few fields – did professions emerge that aimed
to control qualifications and standards of professional practice. Recruit-
ment of scientists and engineers into managerial positions, a practice
most pronounced in the planned economies, occurred to various degrees
in Western Europe.
women’s employment and work

The equalization of women’s educational opportunities was one of the
most significant social changes after the Second World War. Accord-
ing to UNESCO statistics, the proportion of women among students at
institutions of higher education in 1950 was slightly less than 30% on
average across European countries, and while this ratio hardly changed
until 1960, it increased thereafter to 37% in 1970 and 43% in 1980, even-
tually reaching 48% around 1990.88 In this process, the East European
and Nordic countries led the way. A similar trend can be identified for
the proportion of women among graduates and the ratio of women grad-
uates gainfully employed. The proportion of women among all higher-
education trained and professionally active persons in European OECD
member states reached about 40% on average in the early 1990s.89
88 UNESCO, Access (note 11), 28; UNESCO/CEPES, Statistical Study on Higher Edu-
cation in Europe 1970–1975 (Bucharest, 1978), 19–20; Nicolae, Smulders and Korka,
Statistics (note 13), 53. Calculation based on UNESCO, Statistical Yearbook 1993
(Paris, 1993), 3/266–3/273.
89 My estimate based on OECD, OECD Education Statistics 1985–1992 (note 6), 194,
199.
353
Ulrich Teichler
Inequities of career opportunities surfaced notably in two respects.
First, women’s fields of study were selective. In 1987 only 9% of Austrian
graduates in engineering were women, 32% of those in economic fields
and 42% in medicine, but they constituted the majority in the humanities
and teacher training.90 While only 5% of British female university grad-
uates as compared to 14% of men were awarded a degree in physics, and
the respective proportions in engineering (4%/15%) differed similarly, the
proportion among women having completed social sciences (15%/8%)
and languages (8%/4%) was about twice as high as among men.91
Second, women faced inequities in employment, with a higher proportion
in part-time employment with lower incomes, and often discrimination.
In the Federal Republic of Germany, university-trained female employees
earned only 57%, self-employed women 62% and female civil servants
66% of the income of their male counterparts in the mid-1980s.92
expectations, recruitment and work

Whereas ample information is available about changes of graduate
employment in terms of occupation, employment status, income and
unemployment, analyses of the substance of work and its possible links to
education were undertaken only occasionally and differed methodologi-
cally. This makes it difficult to draw comparisons within a country over
time or between countries at any time.
One such survey – of students’ motives and attitudes in five Euro-
pean countries (Austria, Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands,
Poland and Yugoslavia) – took place in the late 1970s. The students
surveyed preferred to choose their field of study on the basis of interest
rather than on career prospects. Aiming at intellectual goals came first,
but a detailed analysis of the evidence showed that academic and career
motives were not contradictory for most of the students in the countries
included in the survey.93
Surveys of graduates suggested that independent and demanding work,
the opportunity to make use of their competence, the effort to realize
their ambitions, and a good working environment all came high on their
agenda. For German graduates four to five years after graduation, ‘high
income’ ranked only eighth on a list of twenty-two possible goals and
90 Lassnigg, London and Spreitzer, ‘Austria’ (note 58), 129.

91 J. Tarsh, ‘Trends in the Graduate Labour Market’, Employment Gazette, 93:7 (1985),
125.
92 M. Tessaring, ‘Germany’, in OECD, Employment, Vol. I (note 58), 24.
93 B. Dippelhofer-Stiem et al., ‘Students in Europe: Motives for Studying, Expectations of
Higher Education and the Relevance of Career Prospects’, European Journal of Educa-
tion, 19 (1984), 309–25.
354
prospects for promotion. However, status expectations had become more
important for the graduates at this stage of their life than when surveyed
in the last year of study or two years after graduation.94 A substantial
proportion of graduates changed jobs to ensure a better match of actual
and expected work.
Recruitment criteria and employers’ expectations were surveyed in the
early 1980s in a very similar manner in the United Kingdom and in the
Federal Republic of Germany.95 Both studies were based on interviews of
persons in charge of recruiting graduates and emphasized the great variety
of selection criteria across the employing organizations. Firms developed
their own styles and strategies of recruitment rather than follow the logic
of technology or the economy. Higher education and students were much
less pressed to obtain the single best set of curricula and skills for the
job market than popular debates suggested. Both studies concluded that
employers were less interested in the details of curricula and specific
knowledge than academic administrators believed. In some respects UK
employers differed from their German counterparts. First, they placed
more emphasis on the particular institution graduates came from. Second,
a higher proportion of German personnel managers involved in graduate
recruitment questioned the validity of grading in higher education. Third,
German employers regarded highly the type of knowledge, the specific
qualifications, and the cognitive skills acquired as a basis for problem
solving, whereas British employers were more likely to search for the
generally trained mind.
A comparative study undertaken in the 1970s analysed qualification
and work in selected French and German enterprises similar in size and
in their products.96 It concluded that a system (German in this case) that
placed strong emphasis on vocational qualification was more likely to
develop complex occupational roles for manual workers and for employ-
ees of similar ranks and to allocate higher responsibilities on this level.
94 H. Schomburg, ‘Berufliche Orientierungen und Berufszufriedenheit’, in U. Teichler and
M. Buttgereit (eds.), Hochschulabsolventen im Beruf: Ergebnisse der dritten Befragung
bei Absolventen der Kasseler Verlaufsstudie, Studien zu Bildung und Wissenschaft, 102
(Bad Honnef, 1992), 207–42.
95 J. Roizen and M. Jepson, Degrees for Jobs: Employer Expectations of Higher Education
(Guildford, 1985); see also M. Kogan, ‘The “Expectations of Higher Education” Project’,
in D. Jaques and J. Richardson (eds.), The Future for Higher Education (Guildford,
1985), 99–109; U. Teichler, M. Buttgereit and R. Holtkamp, Hochschulzertifikate in
der betrieblichen Einstellungspraxis (Bad Honnef, 1984); M. Buttgereit, ‘Certificates
and Recruitment’, in Avakov et al., Higher Education (note 38), 217–30.
96 M. Maurice, F. Sellier and J.-J. Silvestre, Politique d’éducation et organisation
industrielle en France et en Allemagne (Paris, 1982); B. Lutz, ‘Bildungssystem und
Beschäftigungsstruktur in Deutschland und Frankreich’, in H.-G. Mendius et al. (eds.),
Betrieb – Arbeitsmarkt – Qualifikation, Vol. I (Frankfurt, 1976), 83–151; B. Lutz, ‘Edu-
cation and Employment: Contrasting Evidence from France and the Federal Republic of
Germany’, European Journal of Education, 16 (1981), 73–86.
355
Ulrich Teichler
By contrast, a system that placed less emphasis on vocational quali-
fications was more likely to increase the number of supervisory posi-
tions and to allocate decisions on a high level in the business hierarchy.
Businesses were relatively flexible in adjusting work to the supply of
qualified entrants.
the responses of universities to changing

graduate employment and work
Major debates and activities
Universities in Europe after the Second World War constantly confronted
the problem of responding to the changing careers and work assignments
of their graduates. The specific issues changed over time, but the basic
themes remained. For example:
1. the extent to which teaching and learning should be ‘inwardly

directed’ towards academic knowledge or ‘outwardly directed’
towards the expected jobs of the graduates;
2. the extent to which curricula should be structured by discipline;
3. whether the university should focus on the provision of knowledge
or, in addition, try to shape the personality of the students;
4. whether professional preparation should be pursued in a general way,
thus trusting the transfer of knowledge, the students’ abilities to apply
this knowledge and the subsequent training process, or whether it
should be addressed directly;
5. the extent to which a critical and innovative function of the universi-
ties should be emphasized.
The debates cannot be summarized as quickly as the themes because

behind them lay different national philosophies about the educative func-
tions of universities. It was generally assumed that French universities had
a more positive view of professional preparation and the value of special-
ization than universities in many other countries,97 that German universi-
ties focused on knowledge and scholarship,98 and that British universities
kept in mind more strongly the well-rounded personality.99 Whatever
the validity of such assumptions, debate could not leave the institutional
patterns (for example, the integration of specialized institutions into the
universities and the establishment of non-university institutions of higher
97 See A. Bienaymé, ‘France’, in P. G. Altbach (ed.), Systems of Higher Education: France
(New York, 1978), 657–70.
98 See L. Huber, ‘Hochschuldidaktik als Theorie der Bildung und Ausbildung’, in Huber,
Enzyklopädie (note 54), 118–20.
99 See G. Squires, The Curriculum beyond School (London, 1987).
356
education); curricula, teaching and learning; staffing; governance (for
example, the involvement of external individuals and outside bodies in
university administration and formal and informal communication with
professions and employers); and support services (for example, career
guidance, placement, co-operation with alumni, etc.).
In all countries there were different links between study and career in
different disciplines. In the humanities and some social sciences academic
values were highly appreciated and regarded as potentially in conflict
with professional demands. In the natural sciences, academic paradigms
prevailed and were predominantly interpreted as in agreement with pro-
fessional demands.
Structural responses
A substantial proportion of previously specialized colleges in Europe with
a strong emphasis on professional preparation were integrated into multi-
disciplinary universities, often during the 1960s and 1970s in a context of
general expansion, either by merger of existing institutions or by an exten-
sion of hitherto specialized colleges. Those structural transformations led
to an increase within multidisciplinary universities of the proportion of
disciplines closely linked to the application of knowledge and accustomed
to caring for the professional preparation of their students. This may have
reinforced a professional emphasis in the universities in general, thereby
contributing to an ‘academic drift’ of professionally oriented disciplines
that were exposed to an institutional environment in which pride in their
academic emphasis prevailed. Obviously cross-fertilization took place.
In the majority of European countries higher education was institu-
tionally diversified in the process of growing student enrolment.100 Many
countries chose a dual institutional model, with universities on the one
hand emphasizing the pursuit of knowledge beyond the visible demands
of the employment system and, on the other, institutions of higher educa-
tion serving professional needs in a more direct manner. The institutional
divide was meant to allow for different educational concepts in each
sector, but the differences were less than had been intended.101 Non-
university institutions showed many signs of ‘academic drift’ by trying
100 Cf. the overviews in OECD, Short-Cycle (note 22); U. Teichler, Changing Patterns of
the Higher Education System (London, 1988); G. Neave, ‘Foundation or Roof? The
Quantitative, Structural and Institutional Dimension in the Study of Higher Educa-
tion’, European Journal of Education, 24 (1989), 211–22; J. P. Jallade, L’enseignement
supérieur en Europe: Vers une évaluation comparée des premiers cycles (Paris, 1991).
101 See G. Neave, ‘The Dynamics of Integration in Non-Integrated Systems of Higher
Education in Western Europe’, in Hermanns, Teichler and Wasser, The Compleat
University (note 23), 263–76; U. Teichler, ‘Structures of Higher Education Systems in
Europe’, in Gellert, Higher Education (note 48), 23–36.
357
Ulrich Teichler
to raise their status, pressing, for example, for low teaching loads of
academic staff, involvement in research, establishment of relatively long
course programmes, and loosening communication ties with the employ-
ment system, while universities became more inclined to attend to the
future professional tasks of their graduates in their study provisions – in
some cases implying ‘vocational drift’ or, indeed, the ‘professionalization’
of the higher-education sector in general.102
A strong emphasis on specialized knowledge and professional com-
petence reinforced the binary structure, while an emphasis on general
preparation and personality development favoured a blurring of the
institutional divide. This might explain the fact that British polytech-
nics were named ‘universities’ in 1992,103 that German Fachhochschulen
have remained relatively stable while concurrently striving for ‘academic
components’, and that French IUTs have remained clearly distinct from
universities.
Diversification through the establishment or extension of different
types of higher-education institutions with distinct education and training
philosophies, therefore, did not necessarily serve effectively as a ‘buffer’
against professional pressures on the universities. Indeed, it might even
be argued that the coexistence of various institutional types exerted
stronger pressures on the universities towards a professional orientation
than growing student numbers did in countries in which university-type
institutions remained the only official higher-education institutions. Most
universities in Europe thus did not remain an ‘elite’ sector, protected from
the pressures to prepare a growing number of students for professional
work.
A third major structural change in the pattern of European universities
was their increasing involvement in adult education. This might com-
prise a broad range of different activities, notably advanced academic
study, advanced professional training for graduates, short professional
training courses (for updating and extending knowledge), public lectures
and other open forms of dissemination of knowledge to adults, regu-
lar degree programmes for adults (possibly as part-time and distance-
learning arrangements), remedial or second-chance provisions (especially
courses leading to entry qualifications for regular course programmes),
short study provisions (for example, special-status enrolment in regular
course programmes and one-semester or one-year study programmes)
and in-service training of university staff. In addition, special admission
102 See ‘Professionalisation: Recent Trends in European Higher Education’, European Jour-
nal of Education, 27:1–2 (special issue) (1992).
103 M. Kogan, ‘The End of the Dual System?’, in Gellert, Higher Education (note 48),
47–58.
358
schemes might be introduced for adults who had not completed the nec-
essary secondary school qualifications.104
During the 1960s and 1970s, many European countries incorporated
adult and lifelong education into higher-education legislation as a core
function of universities. Universities differed strikingly, however, in the
extent of their involvement in this area.105 There were differences too
in organizational structures. At many universities, adult education was
administered in separate units and taught predominantly by academic
staff exclusively in charge of adult education.106
Curricular responses
Curricular reforms, revisions of the structure of study provisions and
the substance of what students were expected to learn, might be system
led, institution led, resource led, discipline led, academically led, edu-
cationally led, profession led or consumer led. In all cases, elements of
the future work of graduates might directly enter the development of
the curriculum.107 Last but not least, curricula might differ in terms of
their deliberate links to professional work, some being closely geared to
occupational preparation, others not intentionally related to jobs at all.108
Beginning around 1950, universities in Eastern European countries
moved towards a more instrumental approach than the European uni-
versities had traditionally pursued. The normative dimension of learn-
ing became the focus of compulsory courses in ‘Marxism-Leninism’.
Course programmes eventually became highly specialized, possibly divid-
ing, for example, physics into half a dozen separate programmes and
degrees. An ‘integration of education, research, and productive work’
was pursued, notably by requiring students to spend about two months
every year in productive tasks that might range from harvesting to
work closely linked to a future professional occupation.109 From the
104 OECD (ed.), Adults in Higher Education (Paris, 1987).

105 See R. Sayegh, The Diversification of Post-Secondary Education in Relation to Employ-
ment, International Yearbook of Education, 16 (Paris, 1990), chapter 6.
106 See OECD, Recurrent Education: A Strategy for Lifelong Learning (Paris, 1973); see
also M. Blaug and J. Mace, ‘Recurrent Education – the New Jerusalem’, Higher Edu-
cation 6 (1977), 277–99.
107 C. J. Boys et al., Higher Education and the Preparation for Work (London, 1988),
66–8.
108 See U. Teichler, ‘Higher Education: Curriculum’, in Husén and Postlethwaite, Encyclo-
pedia (note 11), 2199–200.
109 See, for example, J. Mericka, ‘Integration of Education, Research and Productive Work
of Students in Czechoslovakia’, Higher Education in Europe, 4:3 (1979), 7–10; and the
literature named by J. Kluczynski, ‘Research on Higher Education in European Socialist
Countries’, in P. G. Altbach and D. H. Kelly (eds.), Higher Education in International
Perspective: A Survey and Bibliography (London and New York, 1985), 55–86.
359
Ulrich Teichler
late 1970s onwards, however, efforts were made once more to broaden
curricula.110
One of the major claims of the student movement of the late 1960s
was that curricula and teaching in universities lacked ‘social relevance’.
According to the critique then voiced, the ‘ivory tower’ attitude of the
professoriate had led to a neglect of the economic, social and cultural
consequences of research and professional work. Universities had lost
their critical function and had propped up the prevailing socio-political
system.111 In the early 1970s, the growing concern about graduate
unemployment fuelled debates about the links between higher educa-
tion and employment. At the same time, many governments came to the
conclusion that their planning approaches had paid insufficient atten-
tion to the content of knowledge and its implications for professional
competence.112
In summarizing various curricular activities aimed at changing the
links between study and professional practice,113 two major directions
may be identified. First, changes in areas of study and in the content
of courses were undoubtedly the main thrust. For example, the Frame-
work Act for Higher Education enacted in 1976 in the Federal Republic
of Germany called for an explicit link between academic learning and
professional practice, while in Sweden all curricula were revised nation-
ally in the late 1970s to achieve a professional emphasis to serve vari-
ous professional sectors: technical occupations, administrative, economic
and social professions, health occupations, educational occupations, cul-
ture and information occupations.114 Ten years later, in 1987, an ‘aca-
demic’ degree (filosophie kandidat, abbreviated fil. kand. or F.K.) was
reintroduced, thus allowing for the combination of various individual
courses.
In other countries, the curricular shift was less pronounced but affected
many students. New cross-disciplinary course programmes emerged.
For example, the study of foreign literature was often combined with
social sciences or business studies for degree programmes in business, or
new specializations became separate study programmes, such as infor-
mation science for the health system. During the 1980s, however, the
110 Cf. Sayegh, Diversification (note 105), chapter 5.

111 See ‘Student Activism’, Higher Education, 8:6 (1979) and 9:2 (1980) (special issues).
112 See Fulton, Gordon and Williams, Higher Education (note 18), 102.
113 See Boys et al., Higher Education (note 107); N. Kluge, A. Neusel and U. Teich-
ler, Beispiele praxisorientierten Studiums (Bonn, 1981); B. Jonsson et al., Kompeten-
sutveckling pa framtidens arbetsmarknad: Huvudrapport (Stockholm, 1991); cf. also A.
Jaumotte, ‘The Purpose of University Training’, in CRE (ed.), The European University
1975–1985 (Oxford, 1975), 51–61.
114 See Jablonska-Skinder and Teichler, Handbook (note 46), 230.
360
pendulum swung back again. Professional relevance was considered to
be dependent on close substantive links between study and prospective
work tasks.115
Second, systematic efforts increased to combine studies with practical
work experience, not only in Central and Eastern European countries.116
In most countries, medical studies were enriched by extended internships
in hospitals, and teacher training by school visits and teaching internships.
There was a wide range of work arrangements, including mandatory
work experience arranged by the students themselves, practical schemes
co-supervised by a university professor, site visits, or on-campus activities
simulating practical problem solving, such as ‘learning in projects’. Such
systematic incorporation of practical experience into study programmes
tended to be more pronounced in the non-university sector than within
universities. Dutch hogescholen required all students to spend up to one
year of their four-year study programme on the job. British polytechnics
called the interchange of study and work phases ‘sandwich’ programmes.
German Fachhochschulen had different regulations according to field of
study and region. In the late 1980s, a general agreement was reached that
one year of study should be devoted to practical phases and examinations.
By contrast, German universities, though requiring practical experiences
in various fields of study, tended to often discount extended practical
phases as part of their course programmes, irrespective of whether stu-
dents arranged them before embarking on their studies or after complet-
ing them, or whether they were carried out during vacation periods or as
breaks in their academic studies.
Opinions vary about the extent to which curricula at universities dif-
fered in their professional relevance from those in non-university higher
education. In the late 1980s surveys undertaken in the United King-
dom and Germany presented contrasting evidence. British graduates from
polytechnics faced more problems in the transition to employment, but a
higher proportion of them (32% as compared to 23% of the university
graduates) reported five years after graduation that their work ‘benefits a
great deal’ from knowledge and skills gained from their degree course. By
contrast, German graduates from both types of higher education experi-
enced similar problems in the transition to employment.
115 See, for example, the documentation of the dialogue between the European Roundtable
of Industrialists and the European Rectors Conference documented in CRE-action
(1990), 92.
116 Note the elaborate schemes at German universities referred to in U. Teichler and H.
Winkler, Praxisorientierung des Studiums (Frankfurt and New York, 1979); U. Lindner
et al., Higher Education, Industry and Human Resources: The German Experience
(Milan, 1992).
361
Ulrich Teichler
Other responses
Universities may strike a better balance between their different functions
if their academic staff members are not only competent in their disci-
plinary knowledge, but also versatile in its professional use; in this con-
nection outside experience could help. A comparative survey conducted
in 1992 showed that on average German university professors had spent
about four years, British professors five years and Swedish professors
six years of their professional life outside higher education. The figures
for those teaching in non-university institutions of higher education were
about twice as high.117 The involvement of part-time teachers was another
means of strengthening professional preparation within higher-education
institutions. In the Federal Republic of Germany, for example, the num-
ber of part-time teachers per ten full-time academic staff increased from
three in the early 1970s to four around 1990.
Finally, universities might be involved in direct services to help students
understand the world of work and transfer easily to the employment
system after graduation. During the 1970s and 1980s academic student
counselling was substantially extended in many European countries in the
process of increasing enrolment.118 Yet, the extent to which universities
were actively involved in the professional placement of graduates and in
their willingness or ability to keep in touch with alumni varied strikingly
between countries.
A trend toward vocationalism?

Some experts suggested that pressures on universities to consider their
graduates’ work and career prospects increased with the expansion of
higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. Other experts considered that
the labour market set the terms. There was agreement, however, that
universities were more hard pressed to consider their graduates’ future
employment and work in the 1970s and 1980s than in the preceding
decades.
four decades of trends and policies

In a summary of structural and curricular developments made in the
early 1990s, the author came to the conclusion that – following a strong
emphasis on culture and thereafter on equity – university institutions
117 J. Enders and U. Teichler, Der Hochschullehrerberuf im internationalen Vergleich

(Bonn, 1995), 16.
118 See R. W. Dawes, ‘The Role of the Counsellor in Mass Higher Education’, Higher
Education, 2 (1973), 267–70.
362
were by then anxious to prove themselves professionally useful.119 What
remained open for future reflection was whether, in acknowledging their
professional function, they might lose their capacity to discharge complex
and indeterminate tasks as well as their ability to respond to innovation.
The growth of enrolment in higher education had been the key issue
in all analyses of graduate employment and work after 1945, and for
the most part the relative loss of Einsamkeit und Freiheit (‘exclusiveness
and freedom’) was a cause for concerned reflection, but not for political
outcry in times of growing resources, significant public respect and a
drive to stimulate economic growth and reduce inequality. The substantial
increase of university-trained persons, by the 1990s more than 30 per cent
of the age group, did not allow students to be among the ‘chosen few’.
High-level positions traditionally open to any qualification were now
being filled increasingly by graduates. A structural shift of the economy
towards the service sector provided more openings for graduates. Thus
universities in the 1950s and 1960s did not feel hard pressed by the
process of expansion.
In the late 1960s student protests upset the belief in an autonomous
academic world, and governments began to rethink their long-term fund-
ing strategies for an expanding educational system. As economic growth
slowed and significant unemployment grew, a further increase in the
quota of graduates in the labour force began to be viewed as a major
problem. The Central and Eastern European countries, following the
socio-political model of the Soviet Union, had seemed to avoid such com-
plications. In most of them higher education had expanded significantly
during the 1950s and early 1960s, but thereafter it had only grown at
a moderate rate. Study programmes became more highly specialized and
more closely geared to the presumed manpower requirements.
During the 1970s and 1980s the state of graduate employment and
work in Western European countries was less comfortable than it had
been during the preceding decades, but less miserable than the pessimism
of the mid-1970s had predicted. Most graduates were absorbed within
the employment system, taking over positions and tasks traditionally per-
ceived as graduate assignments or at least not clearly demarcated from
them. The proportion of graduates registered in positions of manual
labour, simple services or routine white-collar jobs doubled, at most.
According to available surveys, about three-fifths of graduates consid-
ered themselves to be employed in graduate positions, a further fifth
questioned this, and only one-fifth registered serious disappointments.
Gradual shifts in the fields of study, in dropout and prolongation, in the
119 See also G. Neave, ‘On Instantly Consumable Knowledge and Snake Oil’, European
Journal of Education, 27:1 (1992), 5–27.
363
Ulrich Teichler
efforts undertaken to ease and shorten the transition to employment, all
helped to alleviate potential problems.
Opinions had changed markedly about who was expected to ensure a
balance between higher education and employment. In the 1960s, many
held that wise government planning, based on forecasts of manpower
requirements and of supply trends, was crucial. By the 1980s, how-
ever, governments in various European countries had loosened super-
visory control, expecting individual universities to be more managerial
and entrepreneurial and to be held accountable to society through often
elaborate evaluation procedures. Individual universities and departments
had been required to attend more to the relationship between study and
employment as one of the criteria for effective action, and this had led
not infrequently to what is pejoratively called ‘vocationalism’.
Around 1990, macro-social scenarios, in principle, could provoke sim-
ilarly heated debates on the links between higher education and employ-
ment to those that had taken place in the troubled mid-seventies. Unem-
ployment rose even more sharply in the early 1990s, and the supply
of graduates was expected to increase. Various experts had predicted a
growth in demand for qualified labour, but the predictions were vaguer
than either the euphoric or the pessimistic scenarios put forward in the
1960s and the 1970s. Nevertheless, awareness of the complexity of the
phenomenon had undoubtedly grown. There was obviously no single
recipe for striking a balance between the academic, cultural and profes-
sional functions of higher education.
Universities had and have to play a double role. Legitimately they were
detached from society in order to facilitate the pursuit of knowledge for
its own sake. Nevertheless, as a consequence of their relative autonomy,
universities were called upon to concern themselves with the fortunes
of their graduates and the legitimate professional demands placed upon
them. It would take time to judge whether the balance they achieved was
rational and effective.
Have universities yielded to an overwhelming vocational drift? Is there
an accelerating trend towards diversification, to the extent that common
elements disappear and a division emerges between academic universities,
vocational universities and a few institutions somewhere in between?
Only time will tell.
postscript: trends and policies since the 1990s

Higher education continued to expand throughout the 1990s and the
early years of the twenty-first century. According to OECD statistics,
admission to tertiary education increased in Western Europe from 38 per
cent in 1991 to 62 per cent in 2003, that is, by more than half over
364
twelve years.120 In this process of expansion, the non-university higher-
education sector in some countries was upgraded to university status,
while in others the vocational education and training sectors that had not
previously been classified as ‘higher’ or ‘tertiary’ were upgraded as well;
in most countries, however, a growth in student enrolment occurred in
the established sectors of tertiary education itself. The OECD came to the
conclusion that the expansionist trend had regained momentum in the
mid-1980s. Subsequently, scepticism about ‘over-education’ gave way to
the dominant view in public debate that higher education had to grow in
order to cope with the increasing demands of the ‘knowledge society’. The
OECD also observed that Europe was moving towards a situation already
visible in the late 1990s in a number of countries: about three-quarters of
the age group had benefited from some form of tertiary education, either
upon completion of secondary school or at some later stage in life.121
Available graduate surveys do not indicate that this expansion has led
to serious graduate employment problems in the labour market. In the
1980s already it had become clear that the transition from higher edu-
cation to employment was a protracted and uncertain time for many
graduates. Also, a growing proportion of the graduate population was
accepting less prestigious and less demanding assignments than had tra-
ditionally been the case. Nevertheless, the percentage of graduates ending
up in positions considered ‘inappropriate’ for higher-education graduates
remained small.
According to a representative survey in eleven European countries of
higher-education graduates in 1995, 73% were employed about four
years later in managerial occupations and professions, 20% as associate
professionals or technicians and so on, while only 7% had accepted posi-
tions as clerks, sales persons, manual workers and other jobs for which a
degree is generally not considered necessary.122
A similar survey in thirteen European countries of graduates in 2000
showed almost identical results: 74% were employed about five years later
in professions generally thought to require a degree, 19% in positions that
are sometimes called ‘semi-professional’, and only 7% in occupations that
obviously did not require a degree.123
The relative stability of the relationships between study and the sub-
sequent levels of occupation does not imply that the world of work
120 See OECD, Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators 2005 (Paris, 2005).
121 OECD, Redefining Tertiary Education (Paris, 1997).
122 U. Teichler, Higher Education and Graduate Employment in Europe (Dordrecht, 2006),
90–1.
123 H. Schomburg, ‘Young Higher Education Graduates – the Winners of Globalization’, in
European Research Network on Transitions in Youth: 15th Annual Workshop (Ghent,
2007), 4–6.
365
Ulrich Teichler
has been indifferent to changes in higher education in Europe since the
1990s. Experts can point to four major change arenas, though often with-
out precise information regarding the degree of change that has actually
occurred.
First, changes in the formal structure of curricula and degrees are bound
to affect graduate employment and work. In the Bologna Declaration of
1999, the education ministers of many European countries agreed to
establish a framework of study programmes and degrees similar to the
Anglo-Saxon tradition of the bachelor’s and master’s qualifications.124 As
a result, universities on the continent were challenged to design curricula
for relatively short (predominantly three-year) study programmes that
would be – to quote the Bologna Declaration – ‘relevant to the European
labour market as an appropriate level of qualification’. This structural
change also led to the establishment of master’s programmes at higher-
education institutions that did not adhere to the ‘academic’ tradition of
study and the close link between research and teaching that typically
prevails at universities.
Second, informal structural differences in higher education are assumed
to have an increasing impact on graduate employment. ‘Ranking studies’
of universities and the growing competition between institutions aiming
to be ‘world-class universities’125 have captured the public’s attention.
In those countries traditionally characterized by steep ‘vertical’ diversity
among universities, close links between institutional reputation and grad-
uate employment opportunities are a conventional wisdom. It remains to
be seen whether the career opportunities of graduates in countries tra-
ditionally characterized by a flatter hierarchy of universities will become
equally stratified.
Third, efforts to reshape the substance of curricula visible in the early
years of the twenty-first century go far beyond the needs of the con-
vergent structure of study programmes and degrees proposed in the
Bologna Process. Many experts agree that the increasing use of the
terms ‘knowledge society’ and ‘knowledge economy’ increases instru-
mental pressures upon the universities, both in terms of research as
well as in teaching and learning. Also, the spread of evaluation and
accreditation activities in Europe in recent years calls for a growing
awareness of the professional implications of teaching and learning.
124 See the overview on subsequent trends and policies in J. Witte, Change of Degrees and
Degree of Change: Comparing Adaptations of European Higher Education Systems in
the Context of the Bologna Process (Enschede, 2006); cf. also U. Teichler, Higher Edu-
cation Systems: Conceptual Frameworks, Comparative Perspectives, Empirical Find-
ings (Rotterdam and Taipei, 2007), and the Epilogue of this volume.
125 Cf. the overview in J. Sadlak and N. C. Liu (eds.), The World-Class University and
Rankings: Aiming beyond Status (Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca, 2007).
366
Many academics have expressed concern that the universities will lose
their innovative potential for society, ironically because of pressures to
make them more innovative in an instrumental manner, thereby sacri-
ficing the innovative potential of the search for knowledge for its own
sake, the critical function of the university, and the training of students
for indeterminate tasks. In the early years of the twenty-first century,
‘employability’ became the most popular catch phrase of curricular reori-
entation. A closer look at this debate suggests that the readiness of
higher-education institutions to adapt curricula to the presumed needs
of the employment system and to undertake many accompanying mea-
sures to ‘sell’ their own institutions on the labour market might not
have much to do with the notion of upholding a meritocratic notion
of the links between higher education and employment. Furthermore,
the interpretation of what serves the ‘employability’ of graduates is
extremely divergent. For example, in the United Kingdom a strength-
ening of ‘generic skills’ is often viewed as the most appropriate means of
enhancing one’s ‘employability’, while in Germany the fostering of a mix
of ‘key skills’, ranging from ‘computer literacy’ and foreign language pro-
ficiency to ‘socio-communicative skills’ and ‘problem-solving abilities’, is
favoured.126
Fourth, ‘internationalization’ has become a key theme for higher-
education policy in recent years. In this framework, universities are striv-
ing to increase staff and student mobility, foster more cross-border coop-
eration, strengthen European links in various ways, define themselves as
increasingly shaped by a global market of knowledge and reputation,
and increase their activities in support of higher education in developing
countries – to name just some of the major topics under consideration.127
In fact, internationalization in higher education might well have far-
reaching consequences for an individual’s career. For example, European
students who have spent a period of study in another European country
are five times more likely to work abroad a few years after graduation
than students who did not opt for mobility as part of their course. They
are also more than twice as likely to take on visibly international tasks at
home than their formerly non-mobile peers.128
126 Cf. U. Teichler, ‘Higher Education and the European Labour Market’, in EUA Bologna
Handbook: Making Bologna Work (Berlin, 2007), 23–30 (part 3.2–1).
127 Cf. J. Huisman and M. van der Wende (eds.), On Cooperation and Competition,
2 vols. (Bonn, 2003 and 2005).
128 See V. Jahr and U. Teichler, ‘Graduates’ International Experience and Mobility’, in U.
Teichler (ed.), Careers of University Graduates (Dordrecht, 2007), 211–24; U. Teich-
ler and K. Janson, ‘The Professional Value of Study in Another European Country:
Employment and Work of Former ERASMUS Students’, Journal of Studies in Interna-
tional Education, 11:3–4 (2007), 486–95.
367
Ulrich Teichler
A note of caution about the seemingly dramatic changes that have
occurred, however: even after many years of a push towards internation-
alization and Europeanization, only about 5 per cent of highly qualified
persons in the European labour market are foreigners, with about half
of these coming from other European countries. Clear changes in the
relationship between the university and the world of work are underway,
but these changes might be less far-reaching and slower to implement
than the current policy debates would suggest.
select bibliography
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Bowman, M. J. et al. (eds.) Readings in the Economics of Education, Paris, 1968.
Brennan, J., Kogan, M., and Teichler, U. (eds.) Higher Education and Work,
London, 1995.
‘Higher Education and Employment’ (special issues), European Journal of Edu-
cation, 30 (1995).
Holtkamp, R., and Teichler, U. (eds.) Berufstätigkeit von Hochschulabsolven-
ten: Forschungsergebnisse und Folgerungen für das Studium, Frankfurt and
New York, 1983.
Husén, T. Social Background and Educational Career, Paris, 1972.
Lindley, R. (ed.) Higher Education and the Labour Market, Guildford, 1981.
OECD. Education, Inequality and Life Chances, 2 vols., Paris, 1975.
OECD. From Higher Education to Employment, 4 vols., Paris, 1992.
OECD. The Utilisation of Highly Qualified Personnel, Paris, 1973.
Perkin, M. The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880, London, 1989.
Psacharopoulos, G. (ed.) Economics of Education: Research and Studies, Oxford,
1987.
Roizen, J., and Jepson, M. Degrees for Jobs: Employer Expectations of Higher
Education, Guildford, 1985.
Sanyal, B. C. Higher Education and Employment: An International Comparative
Analysis, London, 1987.
Schomburg, H., and Teichler, U. Higher Education and Graduate Employment
in Europe, Dordrecht, 2006.
Teichler, U. ‘Higher Education and Work in Europe’, in J. C. Smart (ed.), Higher
Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, Vol. 4, New York, 1988.
Teichler, U., Hartung, D., and Nuthmann, R. Higher Education and the Needs
of Society, Windsor, 1980.
Williams, G. ‘The Economic Approach’, in B. R. Clark (ed.), Perspectives on
Higher Education, Berkeley, Cal., 1984, 79–105.
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Paris, 1985.
368
PART IV
LEARNING
CHAPTER 10
SOCIAL SCIENCES, HISTORY

AND LAW
NOTKER HAMMERSTEIN WITH DIRK HEIRBAUT∗
introduction
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were characterized by an
underlying historical approach in many academic disciplines.1 This was
true of almost all disciplines, but was especially the case in the arts,
that is, in the different forms of philology, philosophy, the history of
art and archaeology, jurisprudence in all its related sub-disciplines, and
economics. The same methodological approach was also followed in the
social sciences, sociology, geography, politics, ethnology (social anthro-
pology), economics, law, psychology and above all social psychology,
all of which, with the exception of law and economics, were generally
offered in European universities after the First World War. They were
rarely called social sciences, but the individual subjects had been taught
for a considerable time at individual universities, in Germany and France
in particular, although the basic problems with which they dealt had
existed for as long as humankind. And yet many tedious roundabout
routes had to be pursued before the new disciplines received university
status and could celebrate their triumphal arrival in the second half of
the twentieth century.
In the individual countries the admission of these subjects to the uni-
versities took place in very different ways. French sociology, for example,
became a university subject relatively early, although not on a large scale.
In England sociology was the preserve mainly of non-university personnel,
entrepreneurs, journalists and intellectuals and in sharp contrast to the
Continent had a strongly empirical approach right from the beginning.
∗ Notker Hammerstein is responsible for the sections on Social Sciences and History, Dirk
Heirbaut for the final section on Law.
1 Cf. vol. III, chapter 11.
371
Notker Hammerstein
Ethnology, on the other hand, began in England and Germany as a sort
of museum discipline, and in France as a form of by-product of anthro-
pological curiosity. Politics was developed in Germany from finance and
political science, in the United Kingdom, on the other hand, from history
and moral philosophy. Comparable differences could be demonstrated
for other subjects in the social sciences.
The important thing was that in the twentieth century all European
countries gradually opened themselves up, albeit slowly, to these disci-
plines, which focused on the needs of the modern world. The European
universities in general had difficulties in accepting new disciplines. Para-
doxically, in the United States the traditional teaching programme of the
colleges had expanded to incorporate German models, and as a result they
came to adopt an open and pragmatic attitude to new disciplines such
as those constituting the social sciences.2 It was also an advantage that
the American universities were based less on faculties as in continental
Europe but rather on departments. It was no coincidence that doctorates
in sociology were being awarded at an early stage, whilst in Europe sim-
ilar dissertations were submitted for a long time under different subject
headings.3
The actual victory of the social sciences did not really begin until after
1945.4 In the USA these disciplines – in particular sociology and politics –
were held to be ‘an essential component of a democratic community’.5
The Americans brought this conviction with them to Europe as the lead-
ing victorious power in the Second World War. Since the war itself –
to an even greater degree than the First World War – had been a strug-
gle for technological and scientific superiority, the importance of science
and research entered into the consciousnesses of the nation states, their
politicians and their citizens. As the most successful power in terms of
its military strength and the strategic focus of its research, the USA was
seen as the model to be copied in many countries. This was also true to
an exceptional degree for the social sciences. In the post-war years soci-
ologists like Talcott Parsons thought that it was possible with scientific
means to plan for and realize a better future. It was a euphoric hope that
was eagerly seized upon.
The horrors of the war, the criminal policies of the National Socialists,
the shattered sense of what it meant to be European, which had been
2 P. T. Manicas, A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Oxford, 1987), 214f.
3 A. J. Reiss, Jr, ‘Sociology. The Field’, in D. L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of
the Social Sciences, Vol. XV (New York, 1968), 12.
4 R. A. Scott, ‘Social Sciences. Introduction’, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia II, 2072.
5 F. H. Tenbruck, ‘Deutsche Soziologie im internationalen Kontext’, in Deutsche Sozi-
ologie seit 1945, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 21
(Opladen, 1979), 71.
372
Social sciences, history and law
undermined by these and other catastrophes, the loss of civil cohesion
and religious faith, all made the American way of life seem so much more
attractive. People began to abandon their own traditions. The march
forward into the modern world, it was thought, could be successfully
started thanks to these new disciplines, which would allow one to solve
all social and political problems. American society was a living example
and was itself grounded – as for example S. M. Lipset has shown –
on the insights of the social sciences. A rational public opinion could
be produced by means of the methods of the social sciences, and its
views would be founded on the basis of social facts instead of a clash
of opinions and values. As a result, democracy in the country would be
secured.
In the USA itself, but to a much greater degree in the countries
directly affected by the war, this social optimism found ready acceptance.
America appeared not only as the undoubted military, but also the intel-
lectual victor, as the master of progress, which had built a humane and
democratic society on the ideas of freedom and humanity. This appeared
to be transferable to others in a way which did not apply, for example,
to the European models of democratic government. America itself main-
tained, especially in its capacity as the victorious power in Germany,
that its concepts could be applied anywhere and at the same time were
safe. This, it was argued, lay in the nature of the social sciences, which,
thanks to their use of verifiable scientific results, guaranteed success.6
The younger intellectuals of the post-war years, who were shaken by the
war and disappointed by the circumstances in Europe, eagerly seized
upon these promises, and with them the scientific methods and atti-
tudes, which seemed to guarantee democracy. In this relatively ahistor-
ical, universal concept there lay the hope of being able to take over
a life which was so successful and so admired, and which thanks to
new techniques and new scientific approaches seemed to deliver con-
stancy and resilience. ‘To a certain extent this was the result of the war’
was the perhaps slightly exaggerated but still accurate formulation of
G. Williams.7
An essential factor in the triumphant progress of the social sciences
after 1945 was a general acceptance of the pre-eminence of the USA. Of
course the social sciences had to take into account the various national
traditions. But the reception of American ideas and methods brought an
initial feeling of unity to the international academic landscape and gave
6 D. Bell, Die Sozialwissenschaften seit 1945 (Frankfurt and New York, 1986), 60ff.;
Tenbruck, ‘Deutsche Soziologie’ (note 5), 88ff.
7 ‘In some cases this was the result of the war.’ G. Williams, ‘Introduction’, in Clark and
Neave, Encyclopedia II, 849.
373
Notker Hammerstein
these subjects in the course of the 1950s and 1960s the great degree
of recognition and public influence almost everywhere that they have
retained into the twenty-first century. That communal, economic and
social problems should arouse unusual interest during those years was
partly the result of the destruction and displacement caused by the war
and also the general extent of social deprivation in the countries of
Europe. In the USA itself, however, the war had led to huge social convul-
sions which demanded solutions. The very fact that, in all the countries
affected by the war, countless young men – and in some cases young
women – had had to carry out military service or something similar,
and were now, irrespective of their social status, demanding jobs and
training, forced the governments into an active policy of intervention,
which needed guidance and advice from the planning and measuring
social sciences. There was a massive influx into the universities and col-
leges, confronting these institutions with tasks for which they were not
prepared and which they tried to master using knowledge gained from
the social sciences. This too gave further impetus to the rise of these
in part controversial disciplines – often to the irritation of the univer-
sities, as they tried to take hold after 1945 to an extent which could
never have been imagined previously and to attract a large number of
students.
This development did not take place suddenly, and not always imme-
diately after the end of the war, nor at the same time in all subjects.
But by the period 1970–5 the social sciences had become the leading
disciplines in those subjects previously known as the ‘humanities’. Their
methods and findings were held to be fundamental and methodologically
exemplary for many other subjects. That this in no way protected them
from internal strife or from serious disputes between differing schools
and methods, but on the contrary provoked these, is simply the inevitable
fate of living and trend-setting disciplines. In the late 1970s most of these
subjects had to cope with what for them were quite new crisis situations.
Their dominant status did not go unchallenged, however. The develop-
ment of the modern sciences in their many forms and their tendency to
specialization could lead to abrupt changes of course in positions and
disciplines hitherto in the lead, so that what had seemed indispensable
knowledge now became obsolete.
The displacement by the social sciences of that historical view of the
world and of academic disciplines which had prevailed into the 1940s can
be attributed not only to political and historical factors, but also to ele-
ments within the subjects themselves. It is thus appropriate to look at these
disciplines first before turning to the field of history, and, because their
American models played a decisive role in the development of post-war
374
Europe, we shall in each case start with their North American pre-history
as we consider the development of universities in Europe.
sociology
The United States of America
The individual disciplines not only arose from different lines of question-
ing, they also pursued different areas of problems and different combina-
tions of problems. In general their aim was the study of man in society,
as far as this could be discerned by contemporaries. At the same time
an important role was played by questions from associated fields, that
is political, anthropological, economic, cultural and historical determi-
nants. At the centre stood Man as a social entity, as a collective being and
yet also as an individual. This was also true for sociology. ‘The uniqueness
of human beings and the basic rules of social life’ were the fundamental
questions according to Edward Shils, or, as another scholar formulated
it, ‘The being of man, insofar as it is influenced by collective behaviour or
in general by the social order’. Social relationships, the essence of society,
social systems and structures, social stratification, organizations, institu-
tions and associations, subcultures and so on all were thus held to be part
of the problems studied by sociology.8
The early recognition and rapid spread of sociology in the United States
differs markedly from the development of the subject in Europe, with the
exception perhaps of the Netherlands. In 1883 Lester Frank Ward (1841–
1913) published his textbook Dynamic Sociology. In 1905 the American
Sociological Association was founded, and in 1905 Folksways by Frank
William Summer (1840–1910) introduced the subject to a broad mass of
the public.
In 1892 Albion Small established a department of sociology at the
newly founded University of Chicago. Thanks also to the work of
William Isaac Thomas (1893–1947)9 and Florian Znaniecki (1882–1958)
it became famous as the ‘Chicago School’. It practised its pragmatically
inspired sociology with empirical field studies into urban problems, race
relations and collective modes of behaviour in order to identify the causes
of disturbances in the social order and to improve its functioning.
8 ‘Social relationships, the nature of society, social systems and structures, social stratifica-
tion, organisations, institutions and communities, subcultures etc.’: some of the formula-
tions in J. F. Short, ‘Sociology’, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia II, 2169.
9 Known through the Thomas theory developed in collaboration with Znanicki (W. Rüegg,
Soziologie: Funkkolleg zum Verständnis der modernen Gesellschaft, Vol. VI (Frankfurt,
1969–75), 249). I am particularly grateful to W. Rüegg for these passages.
375
Notker Hammerstein
In 1895 there appeared at the University of Chicago Press the Ameri-
can Journal of Sociology. The colleges and universities, especially in the
Midwest, quickly followed the example of Chicago with departments of
sociology, whose teaching and research were particularly focused on the
practical problems of social change caused by industrialization, urban-
ization and immigration.
The main concerns of sociology at the time were the development and
application of analytical instruments and the formulation of ‘good ques-
tions’ in order to capture social reality. Many sociologists like Thorsten
Veblen (1857–1929) and Robert S. Lymd (1892–1970) were preoccupied
with uncovering inequalities in the structure of society and the effects of
capitalist systems of government. Until the end of the 1920s the vast
majority of American sociologists came from religious and rural circles.
Empiricism formed the basis of their investigations. They directed their
attention particularly to the motivation and shaping of the socialization
of individuals and groups, both in communities and in society in general,
their acculturation and de-culturalization and the political consequences
of these processes.10
In the thirties the lack of coherent theories led to a successful counter-
movement at the old universities on the East Coast. Having been expelled
from Russia in 1923, Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889–1968), as professor of
sociology at Harvard University, opened up new perspectives to a circle
of pupils. He began with the elaboration of a sociological concept and
classification system, in order to analyse the phenomena of inequality,
mobility, dynamics and social change.11 At the same time he made his
pupils aware of the different traditions of sociological thinking.12 In this
way a Pareto circle came into being, whose members were interested less
in Pareto’s attempt to link sociology and economics than his attempt to
bring about a comprehensive theory of the social sciences. With reference
to Pareto and Durkheim, but also to social anthropologists like Spencer
and Malinowski, his pupil Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) made this his
life’s task using a structural and functional analysis dating back to 1937.13
He made a radical break with sociological realism and developed his own
system of concepts, with which he was able to analyse social phenomena
as dynamic elements interacting with their total social context and to
construct an all embracing theory and methodology. His goal was the
formation of a unified and scientifically substantiated social milieu, whose
effectiveness was no longer determined by the predominance of one sector
of social reality, but by an overview of the totality of social actions. In
10 L. Bransom, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton, 1961).
11 P. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols. (New York, 1937).
12 P. Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories (New York, 1928).
13 T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York, 1937).
376
the 1960s Parsons’ Structural Functionalism14 – extended by the work
of representatives of other schools – dominated almost all American and
large sections of European sociology.
At Columbia University in New York sociologists under the leadership
of Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) and Georges G. Homans (1910–89)15
applied structural functional analysis successfully in empirical case stud-
ies. Merton rejected Parsons’ claim to a theory of total social systems,
but developed on the basis of this a theory with medium applicability.
It applied structural-functional analysis to the investigation of individ-
ual sociological themes, such as social change, the social environment of
scientific and technical discoveries, the significance of reference groups
in social action and the spread of values within society.16 In this way
functionalism developed mainly as a fruitful methodology for empiri-
cal investigations and lost its claim to provide a convincing sociological
theory of everything. This is particularly evident in the innovative empir-
ical works carried out by Merton’s university colleague Paul Lazarsfeld
(1901–76) which included, for example, the electoral behaviour of the
US citizens or their use of radio.17
Throughout these years sociology became a professional discipline,
and Lazarsfeld was commissioned by UNESCO to provide a concise sur-
vey of its general situation.18 It became an important university subject
with its own academic status and ethos. As ever more social relation-
ships were redefined as social problems, the need for trained sociolo-
gists grew. Around 1960 almost all American universities had sociology
departments, out of which seventy were awarding the degree of Doctor
of Sociology. Other forms of graduation continued to be preferred, and
they opened up diverse forms of professional activity, as is apparent in
the growing number of sections and members within the American Soci-
ological Association. This body takes in every conceivable subdivision of
sociological interests. In 1963 it consisted of five sections. In 1976 there
14 T. Parsons and E. A. Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge, Mass.,

1951); T. Parsons, R. F. Bales and E. A. Shils, Working Papers on the Theory of Social
Action (New York, 1953). R. Dahrendorf, Die angewandte Aufklärung: Gesellschaft
und Aufklärung in Amerika (Munich 1961); N. Herpin, Les sociologies américaines et
le siècle (Paris, 1973).
15 G. C. Homans, The Human Group (New York, 1950).
16 R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure: Toward the Codification of Theory
and Research (Glencoe, Ill., 1949); R. K. Merton, On Theoretical Sociology: Five Essays,
Old and New (New York, 1967).
17 P. F. Lazarsfeld, An Introduction to Applied Sociology (New York, 1975); R. K. Merton,
J. S. Coleman and P. H. Ross (eds.), Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research: Papers
in Honor of Paul F. Lazarsfeld (New York, 1979); J. Lautman and B. Lecuyer (eds.),
Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–1976): La sociologie de Vienne (New York and Paris, 1998).
18 P. F. Lazarsfeld, ‘La sociologie’, in Tendances principales dans les sciences sociales et
humaines: Première partie (Paris, 1970), 69–197.
377
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were already fourteen and in 1988 twenty-six. After 1945 there were
about 1,000 members of the organization. In 1972 there were 15,000
and in 1980 around 56,000.19 In the 1980s the numbers went down tem-
porarily. Yet they still showed how well established the discipline had
become. In the first two to three decades after the war the social sciences
were held to be the discipline that was most likely to fulfil hopes of a
better, more just and peaceful society.
Yet at the end of the 1950s a radical counter-movement had emerged at
Columbia University, whose spokesperson Charles Wright Mills (1916–
62) opposed an ‘engaged sociology’ to Merton’s and Lazarfeld’s suc-
cessful establishment of a theoretically based empirical sociology. This
new form of sociology criticized the triumphant advance of statistical
correlations, which, it argued, only served the interests of the American
power elites under the guise of abstract theory and a scientifically neu-
tral empiricism. Its sole aim, they charged, was to manipulate by means
of such investigations a politically apathetic American society devoted
to consumption and pleasure. This criticism was formulated in 1970 in
most extreme terms by a graduate of Columbia, Alwin W. Gouldner
(1921–82), with a book that created a huge stir.20
The turbulent 1960s saw sociology, in common with the other social
sciences, often at the centre of interest. The Civil Rights Movement, the
Vietnam war, hippies, the revolt of academic youth in the universities
and other events favoured those sciences which claimed not only to be
able to analyse the conditions and possibilities of society and its organi-
zations and failures, but also to be able to change them for the better.
There emerged new sections, new theories and new subdisciplines and
these in part survived the rapid decline in the popularity and prestige of
the social sciences which set in during the 1970s. It became increasingly
obvious that the frequent discussions on theory and technical terminol-
ogy which were carried out with sectarian zeal in the late seventies were
sterile. They did indeed lead to ever more attempts at a theoretical and
practical orientation, but not one of them could find common acceptance.
Neofunctionalism, structuralism, the theory of rational choice, cognitive
sociology, linguistic change, post-structuralism, postmodernism, versions
of symbolic interactionism, a new ethno-methodology and such like pre-
sented so confused a picture, that politicians and indeed even scientists
began to lose faith in the function of sociology as a fundamental science.
This led in the 1980s to a cutback in funds and a loss of prestige for
19 Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia II, 2170ff.; L. J. Rhoades, A History of the American
Sociological Association 1905–1980 (Washington, 1981).
20 C. W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York, 1959); A. Q. Gouldner, The
Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York, 1970); S. Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His
Life and Work. A Historical and Critical Study (London, 1973).
378
sociology and made it vulnerable to the political activities of its repre-
sentatives. At the same time it encouraged the spread of neo-Marxist
theories, which was new in the USA. In the end, however, applied, empir-
ically based sociology proved to be the constant and most important part
of the discipline. At the same time the subject became more professional,
so that leaving qualifications and examination certificates were now more
important.
Europe
The dominant position of America certainly shaped the development of
the social sciences in Europe, as has been shown in the introduction to
this chapter, but national concepts of science and culture and theoretical
traditions were not, and are not, easily overcome and despite growing
internationalism simply do not disappear. Indeed in the ‘softer’ arts disci-
plines and the social sciences they play a larger role than in the apparently
firmly established natural sciences. It is just that in the adoption and appli-
cation of methods there was a faster reception in some cultures than in
others. This can be shown in a survey of European countries.
In FRANCE, where August Comte and Émile Durkheim (important
representatives of a science focused on society) had been at work before
the First World War, sociology played a relatively minor role at univer-
sities – with the exception of Bordeaux and Paris. It was held to be an
applied and practically useful discipline, which did not deserve a separate
status at a university. Durkheim at the age of twenty-seven gained a post
in ‘Social Science and Educational Theory’ at the University of Bordeaux,
gave lectures and published books on sociology and in 1897 founded
the authoritative journal L’année sociologique. From 1902 onwards he
taught at the Sorbonne as deputy to the professor of education and then
from 1906 as the holder of the chair in education himself. It was not until
1913 that a chair in sociology was created for him, which he then held
for four years until his death. Despite Durkheim’s continuing influence,
not least on other subjects, the official coolness towards sociology did not
diminish.
The view in France was that sociology should deliver philosophically
and theoretically based knowledge, but that it was not really called upon
to carry out empirical fieldwork.21 That sort of work was thought to be
the province of specialized non-university institutes. The quantifying basis
which is so fruitful in modern university sociology was largely absent. In
the late 1940s and early 1950s the rapidly spreading notion that it might
be possible to plan for an economic resurgence and a better society with
21 C. E. Lemert (ed.), French Sociology (New York, 1981), 12ff.
379
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the help of sociology hardly had any impact on the Sorbonne, the most
prestigious of French universities. Not untill 1958 did Raymond Aron
gain a post to teach sociology.
In 1956 the government of Mendès-France introduced university
reforms. Part of these was the encouragement of the social sciences. As a
direct consequence a Sixth Section for Social Sciences was set up in the
École pratique des hautes études, which had been created in 1868 as a
legally independent body, but one which was linked to the Sorbonne in
terms of personnel and accommodation and which was charged with
introducing advanced students to research on the model of German sem-
inars or laboratories. In 1963 the Sixième section was changed into the
École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and linked to the
foundation of the Maison des sciences de l’homme.22
The spread of sociology as a university subject beyond Paris was deci-
sively advanced by a second measure. Within the framework of the Centre
national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) sociological research insti-
tutes began to develop. They were subject to the CNRS both administra-
tively and legally, but were led by university professors who were then in
a position to carry out research in addition to their university teaching.
In this way the conditions were established at French universities for the
teaching of a sociology which could draw on its own research.
In broad terms it developed in four directions, which, with one excep-
tion, were heavily influenced by North American models. The first applied
Parsons’ structural functional method as developed by Merton in the form
of medium range theories. François Bourricaud (1922–91) made a great
contribution to the spread of functionalism in France through his trans-
lation and critical commentary of Parsons’ ideas, and he also applied
these in research projects in South America, which he undertook at the
behest of the CNRS.23 Michel Crozier (b. 1922) after periods of study at
Stanford and guest lectures at Harvard as director of the CNRS played a
successful part in reorienting ideologically based approaches to sociology
towards a sociology which carried out empirically concrete analyses of
working relationships and forms of organization.24
The second direction was concerned with the methodology and appli-
cation of mathematically based quantitative sociology. Between 1965
and 1970 its promoter Raymond Boudon (b. 1934) published with Paul
Lazarsfeld the fundamental texts of this sociology. As a professor at the
Sorbonne and director of state research institutes he was very influential in
22 See chapter 3, 95–6.

23 F. Bourricaud (ed.), Éléments pour une sociologie de l’action, introduction à T. Parsons
(Paris, 1955); F. Bourricaud, Changement à Puno: Étude de sociologie andine (Paris,
1962).
24 M. Crozier, Le monde des employés du bureau (Paris, 1965).
380
the professionalization of sociology and its extension to serve educational
and economic policy.25
Alain Touraine (b. 1925) represents the third direction, composed
mainly of Marxist-oriented sociologists in the early post-war period.
After periods of study in the USA and the student revolt of 1968, he
tried to achieve a more differentiated analysis and an influence on social
change.26
The fourth direction has its origins in ethnology, a social science which
has long been important in France.27 Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) began
his rapidly successful career with fieldwork projects on the culture of the
Berber. The publications of his results, which culminated in the Sociology
of Algeria published in 1960, led, in 1964, to a research professorship as
Directeur d’études at the EHESS. His works on culture and educational
sociology, which were largely based on an empirical analysis of daily life,
made him so well known nationally and internationally that, in 1982, the
Collège de France created a chair in sociology for him and thus accorded
the highest prestige to a subject which a quarter of a century before had
been scorned by the French establishment. Bourdieu’s achievement con-
sisted in bringing together the social-science paradigms of structuralism
and Marxism, which predominated in France in modernized forms, and
which corresponded to leading international developments. He sociolo-
gized Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism by using Max Weber’s categories
of social action and of symbolic interaction. The category of class war-
fare, which is at the root of Karl Marx’s works, both theoretically and
practically, was extended by Bourdieu by the introduction of other social
antagonisms known from conflict theory. Above all, however, he replaced
the doctrinally narrow concept of social milieu by the key sociological
concept of habitus, now attributed to him, in order to bring the multi-
plicity of social and cultural conditions and interactions, which form the
basis of all social action, to a common denominator.28
In ITALY in 1945 there were no independent chairs of sociology. The
subject was taught by some professors in connection with philosophy,
law or social policy. In 1950 sociology became a university discipline in
25 R. Boudon and P. Lazarsfeld, Le vocabulaire des sciences sociales: Concepts et indices

(Paris, 1965); R. Boudon and P. Lazarsfeld (eds.), L’analyse empirique de la causalité:
Choix de textes (Paris, 1966); R. Boudon, P. Lazarsfeld and F. Chazel, L’analyse des
processus sociaux (Paris, 1970); R. Boudon, L’analyse mathématique des faits sociaux
(Paris, 1967); R. Boudon, Quantitative sociology (New York, 1975).
26 A. Touraine, La conscience ouvrière (Paris, 1966); A. Touraine, La société invisible
1974–1976 (Paris, 1977).
27 Reiss, ‘Sociology’ (note 3), 14.
28 The German-American art historian Erwin Panofsky took the term habitus from scholas-
tic philosophy in order to describe the generalist education of Renaissance artists, but it
was first introduced to a broader public by Bourdieu.
381
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Florence and in 1952 in Rome. In 1964 an entire independent sociology
faculty was created in Trento. By 1991 there were 662 professors and
lecturers at Italian universities in the field of sociology. From the 1960s
sociologists have worked in all areas of the social sciences, in particular
in public service and in social work.29
In addition to American sociology Marxism in all its differing modes
played a leading part, so successfully that social critique became some-
thing of a mass movement. The main themes of sociological work between
1960 and 1980 were thus: work, social actions, social classes, the domi-
nance of elites, and, above all, the capitalist organization of production
and work, the adaptation mechanisms of the social body, class and the
school system, sociology as the servant of the ruling classes in economics,
society and culture. The state was analyzed in this period of radical social
change and social mobility as the guarantor of the ruling class.30 The
very chaotic modernization of Italian society on the other hand caused
a good number of sociologists to support those who had political power
and could influence change. Both forms of political engagement led in
general to a neglect of theoretical work. This only began to change at the
end of the 1980s. Theoretical works, based on fieldwork, increased. This
remained, however, in many cases rather fragmentary and there was a
lack of a convincing systematization – with the exception of Alessandro
Pizzorno (b. 1924)31 – but the subject began to free itself from being used
mainly as an adjunct to political science.
The main areas of Italian sociology around 1995 were cultural sociol-
ogy, political sociology, work and organizational sociology and socio-
political phenomena. The perspective was just as limited. The aca-
demic development of Italian sociology could not – at least up to this
point – overcome two obstacles: the lack of institutional connections
between the individual centres of research and the distorted picture of the
social sciences in an Italian academic culture dominated by history and
philosophy.32
Although ENGLAND developed its own approaches to sociological
investigation before 1914, culminating in ‘surveys’, a much-used word,
and although it possessed in Herbert Spencer a writer on sociology and
education, who left an impact on sociological thought at home and across
the Atlantic, sociology as an academic subject developed only slowly and
29 F. Barbano, La sociologia in Italia: Gli anni della rinascità (Turin, 1985); F. Barbano, La
sociologia in Italia: Ingressi teorici negli anni della formazione (’50–60) (Turin, 1986);
D. Pinto (ed.), Italian Sociology: A Reader (Cambridge, 1981).
30 F. Ferrarotti, Una sociologia: Dalla sociologia come tecnica del conformismo alla soci-
ologia critica, 5th edn (Bari, 1975).
31 A. Pizzorno, Political Sociology: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth, 1971); A. Piz-
zorno, I soggetti del pluralismo: Classi, partiti, sindacati (Milan, 1980).
32 I owe this paragraph to Giovanni Busino.
382
hesitantly in the universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge, before
the 1950s. There was, however, a long-standing commitment within them
to ‘social work’, linking the universities with local communities and
professional bodies, and usually leading up through examinations and
case work to the award not of degrees, but of certificates and diplomas.
In academic sociology, leading to degrees, the London School of Eco-
nomics played the principal role: sociology was studied there alongside
economics, history and anthropology. The provincial universities that
had emerged under the aegis of London University, particularly Leicester
and Nottingham, established the first professorships in sociology outside
London. There were often close relations within and across universities
between sociologists and historians, with the latter playing an important
part in the advance of sociology. Anthropology and psychology continued
to develop independently. So did the sociology of industry – with stronger
links with institutions in the United States, not all of them universities,
than with France or Germany. In England, educational change, especially
university expansion, was the major stimulus to ‘social studies’ as they
were usually called, divided less by academic discipline than by their per-
ceived content. In some universities, including Oxford and Cambridge,
the term ‘social sciences’ was resisted. The biggest growth in the num-
bers of lecturers and professors in sociology and their students occurred
in the 1960s, following the creation of new universities, some of them
stressing curricular innovation, including the pursuit of interdisciplinar-
ity. Lectures were a less favoured mode of learning than working together
in small groups, with students preparing individual projects. During the
1970s and 1980s, largely as a result of changes in the economic situation,
there were signs of a reaction. Students favoured curricula more likely to
secure and guarantee employment. Yet with the reorganisation of higher
education during the 1990s, social studies, now attached to the media,
flourished as never before.33
GERMANY in the first half of the twentieth century had the most
university sociologists after the United States. Admittedly they rarely had
a university chair in sociology. The subject was taught almost always
in combination with another subject which already enjoyed recognition,
usually with economics or philosophy. This did not hide the fact that a
broad and influential discussion about the essence and theory of the dis-
cipline took place. These discussions were also noticed outside Germany.
Its leading figures – Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies,
Franz Oppenheimer, Alfred Vierkandt and Karl Mannheim – enriched the
international discussion of theory over a long period. Although oriented
towards history and the arts subjects, sociology was able to use empirical
33 I owe this paragraph to Asa Briggs.
383
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methods, but preferred positions which were drawn from the German
historical, political and philosophical tradition. Although the subject did
not enjoy much prestige at universities – as in other European countries
the more traditional professors preferred to keep their distance – it was
regularly taught in some places from the First World War onwards.34
Apart from Berlin with its traditional openness to every kind of material,
this took place first significantly at the new universities in the major
cities, Frankfurt, Cologne and Hamburg. Then came Leipzig, Kiel and
Göttingen, at which universities modern economics and the mathemati-
cal sciences played a considerable part.
The National Socialists thought little of the discipline. The expulsion
of scholars of Jewish origin and political opponents in 1933 was a painful
blow to this and other subjects. Many well-known social scientists had to
flee and left behind a thinned out academic field. It did not of course – as
was assumed for a long time – mean that sociology almost died out com-
pletely. Some younger sociologists were able to carry on working at uni-
versities, especially as demographers, agrarian sociologists, statisticians
and industrial sociologists. They were mostly committed to empirical
practices and advanced the professionalization of their subject.
After 1945 the Americans specifically encouraged the revival of the
social sciences at West German universities, and this included sociology,
which they wished to see conveyed as an applied discipline. Everywhere
that the subject had been represented before 1933 it was quickly taken
up once more in new teaching and research activity.35 It was boosted by
the return of emigrants such as René König, Max Horkheimer, Theodor
W. Adorno and Helmut Plessner. Until the middle of the 1950s sociology
led a peripheral existence. At the same time there was a fierce debate as
to how the subject should be understood, and it was not at all clear how
the study of it could be presented in an attractive light. The chairs were
mainly located in the economics or humanities faculties. Until the 1950s
there were no binding examination regulations.
Up to 1952 sociology in the Federal Republic had ten professorships.
Afterwards the number of these as well as the number of students grew
rapidly, particularly in the 1960s. The high point was attained in 1970/1.
At this time there were no fewer than 131 professors of sociology active
34 D. Käsler, Die frühe deutsche Soziologie 1909 bis 1934 und ihre Entstehungsmilieus
(Opladen, 1984); K. W. Nörr, B. Schefold, and F. Tenbruck (eds.), Geisteswissenschaften
zwischen Kaiserreich und Republik: Zur Entwicklung von Nationalökonomie,
Rechtswissenschaft und Sozialwissenschaften im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1994).
35 Cf. the contributions in G. Lüschen (ed.), Deutsche Soziologie seit 1945, Kölner
Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 21 (Opladen, 1979), in
particular R. Lepsius, Die Entwicklung der Soziologie nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg
1945 bis 1967, 25–70. Statistics and further analyses ibid.
384
in various positions at West German universities. From the middle of
the 1970s the growth in numbers and also the expansion of the subject
fell back drastically. The reason for this was the economic crisis and in
consequence the reduction in funding for universities. A further factor
was the problematic role of the social sciences during the student protests
as well as the one-sided preferential treatment of these subjects in the
planning euphoria of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. At the same
time confidence in the solidity and academic validity of the discipline
declined. The place of sociology and its understanding of its own role,
however, remained uncontested throughout.
After 1945 three competing schools formed within sociology in the
Federal Republic. There was first the Cologne school under Leopold
von Wiese and René König, which was theoretical, international and
empirically analytical; secondly, the Frankfurt sociologists – later known
as the Frankfurt School – and the leading representatives of a liberal
Marxist position with Horkheimer, Adorno and later Habermas; and
thirdly, the Münster school led by Helmut Schelsky, who worked mainly
mathematically using pragmatical, empirical methods, and without any
great stress on developing theory. From this last school were recruited
most of the university lecturers in the subject. Those academics who had
remained in Germany during the Third Reich came together at first both
alongside and within these schools. They came partly from institutes
which were outside the universities and had been founded after the war
on American lines, carried out surveys and continued to exist in parallel
with the universities. The subject itself, despite enjoying great popularity
among students for a limited period, had no lasting influence on the
faculties in which it found itself. Its public prestige grew, but it never
obtained a status comparable to that existing in the USA. This also applied
to the prospects of the students, who had few real chances of a career
outside the opinion research institutes and the universities.
However, it had become the norm in the meantime for sociology to
be taught at every university. Because of its relative lack of a unified
appearance, it was all the more important to provide solid techniques
and materials in order to enhance the students’ career opportunities and
to convince sceptical colleagues from other disciplines of the scholarly
basis and solidity of the subject. The sovereign level of interpretation
which seemed to have been reached in the years of the student protests
was soon a thing of the past, and the left-wing bias no longer informed
all branches of the subject. Even the Frankfurt sociologists barely had
recourse to their earlier works and ideas. Their predominant interest
in the (possible) survival of fascist and National Socialist thought still
made the analytical power of Marxist approaches appear viable, but this
385
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did not lead them to take up the earlier extreme Weimar positions.36
These were further developed into ‘Critical Theory’, which claimed to
interpret the totality of history, but free from Leninist-Stalinist degenera-
tions. Alienation, fetishism, false consciousness/conscience were the code
words, which were to be exposed in their dependency on the reproduction
mechanisms of the late capitalist system based on profit accumulation and
consequently identified and brought to an end.37
In the GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC Marxist ideas as for-
mulated in the Soviet Union determined relations with sociology and the
other social sciences. The subjects had a subordinate position and were
obliged to transmit doctrine according to the prevailing party line. Even
with the passage of time they failed to achieve any greater significance
at the East German universities. It was only after unification that they
were introduced or reintroduced on similar lines to the situation in West
Germany.38
political science
Politics along with sociology shares a certain conceptual uncertainty. In
the German-speaking area this is extremely clear. There is talk there of
political science, the science of politics, and politics according to how the
person speaking wishes to define the subject. Despite the long existence
of disputes about the state, legitimacy, power, sovereignty, justice and
other matters, the university discipline of politics is in its present form
extremely recent. For, in contrast to the nineteenth century, when it was
taught in France and Italy as part of jurisprudence and in Germany as con-
stitutional studies, after 1945 it took on quite another character. This did
not take place in a uniform manner or without passionate disputes. The
previously normative doctrine of the constitutional state, of legitimate
rule, of institutions which were in conformity with the law, was joined by
and indeed displaced by a pragmatic, descriptive, behaviourist, psycholo-
gizing concept of the subject in many manifestations and combinations. It
split up into subdisciplines, which often formed combinations with other
36 C. Albrecht, G. C. Behrmann, M. Bock, H. Homann and F. Tenbruck, Die intellek-

tuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule
(Frankfurt and New York, 1999).
37 O. Rammstedt, ‘Formierung und Reformierung der Soziologie im Nachkriegsdeutsch-
land’, in K. Acham, K. W. Nörr and B. Schefold (eds.), Erkenntnisgewinne, Erkennt-
nisverluste: Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten in den Wirtschafts-, Rechts- und Sozial-
wissenschaften zwischen den 20er und 50er Jahren (Stuttgart, 1998), 251–89.
38 Cf. J.-S. Kowalczuk, Geist im Dienst der Macht: Hochschulpolitik in der SBZ/DDR
1945–1961 (Berlin, 2003); M. Parak, Hochschule und Wissenschaft in zwei deutschen
Diktaturen: Eliteaustausch an sächsischen Hochschulen 1933–1952 (Cologne, Weimar
and Vienna, 2004).
386
social sciences. Whether with history in a return to older theories, with
psychology (behavioural context), with sociology (social context) or with
social anthropology (cultural context), politics has the most varied facets
depending on the questions pursued.39 Reducing it to a single concept
has been possible only to a limited extent.
On the other hand the conviction won through that the modern world,
as it was after 1945, required a theoretical investigation into, and a
practical search for, the possibilities of national and international human
coexistence. It was felt that the study of politics might make possible
within the state system a modern democratic form of communal life
serving the common good. This belief was derived from the observation
that in those Western democratic states in which there was prosperity,
and above all in the USA, this particular social-science discipline was
taught at almost every university.
Immediately after 1945 political science in the USA fought vigorously
and successfully for a place in the universities, something which only
happened slowly in the European countries. The example of the new
world power, the USA, helped in this case too.40 The belief that this
academic discipline was capable of creating better and fairer conditions
in the world moved UNESCO to recommend it to all member countries
as an important university subject. It was, they said, the right vehicle
for successful social reconstruction after the catastrophes of the Second
World War.41
Thus in the 1950s in almost all European countries the development of
politics as a university subject began and culminated, like sociology, in
a first high point in the 1970s. Even if national traditions still remained
important, a greater internationalism of scholarly methods and discus-
sions had in the meantime become the norm. A European Consortium for
Political Research led by the Norwegian Stein Rokkan was set up on the
lines of the consortium at the University of Michigan to link up research
transnationally. The Ford Foundation donated considerable means to
this venture. European cooperation was to be encouraged through con-
ferences, journals and support for young scholars in order to provide a
counterweight to North America.
A survey of political scientists at the end of this decade showed that
there were 587 in the UK, 390 in the Federal Republic of Germany,
306 in France, 164 in the Netherlands, 112 in Italy, 92 in Belgium,
83 in Denmark, 81 in Switzerland, 80 in Sweden, 26 in Spain and 4
39 O. Ruin, ‘Political Science’, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia II, 2126f.; Handwört-
erbuch der Sozialwissenschaften, Vol. XIII (Göttingen, 1964), 388ff.
40 Particularly W. C. Andrews (ed.), International Handbook of Political Science (West-
port, Conn., and London, 1982).
41 Ibid., 3ff.
387
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in Portugal.42 The figures were of course disproportionately higher in
the United States, which still had a leading role in quantitative terms
and, in particular universities, could have up to thirty academic staff in
this subject. In this way the many different methods and concepts of the
discipline could find expression. It also showed, however, the high esteem
which it enjoyed among politicians.
The central issues in political science, the theoretical discussions and
also the methods changed, of course, according to the shifting political
and ideological conditions. This was the natural result of the subject’s
claim to be able to identify, analyse and change the prevailing political
circumstances and problems. A glance at some of the subject areas chosen
for study shows why the university study of politics developed in a way
specific to each particular country, and what direction it took.
Questions of power, of raison d’état, of legitimacy and of political insti-
tutions, and also of international relations all seemed to come to the fore
after the war and to last well into the 1950s. The first post-war genera-
tion of political scientists considered these general questions, which were
on the whole avoided by later more specialized researchers, as the deci-
sive fundamental questions. Men like Quincy Wright, Raymond Aron,
Jean Meynaud, Hans Morgenthau, Carl J. Friedrich, Henry Kissinger
and Bertrand de Jouvenel dealt with them using a mixture of historical
and political considerations. Later questions of legitimacy prevailed and
their significance for political stability was the main subject of interest for
S. M. Lipset, S. P. Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski. At the same time
there was ongoing discussion of the great world schemes, as developed
by Hegel, Marx, Lenin or Oswald Spengler, Vilfredo Pareto and Max
Weber. They stimulated not only the works of political scientists such as
S. M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, but also those of sociologists like Shmuel
Eisenstadt. Others opted for social Darwinist approaches, which found
confirmation in the works of Konrad Lorenz. Some (C. H. Waddington,
Carl Sagan, Rupert Riedl) spoke in favour of a science of politics based on
socio-biology in order to achieve a sort of scientifically assured dignity.43
In the 1960s these themes faded into the background. More special-
ized questions and more limited analyses – the process by which certain
decisions were reached, case studies into political behaviour, analyses of
elections – dominated discussions, together with methodological issues
about the academic effectiveness of political science itself and of the
necessity for data-based methods. By means of clear guidelines the sub-
ject was to be given a – by no means unanimous – definition of its own
understanding of itself and of its academic status. Such methodological
considerations tended partly towards approaches closely related to those
42 Ibid. 6, footnote 19. 43 Ibid., 9.
388
of the arts subjects and partly to exact scientific procedures. As was only
to be expected, they were often based on well-known theories or revived
versions of older ones. Following Wilhelm Dilthey, some concentrated
on hermeneutics – among these were Leo Strauss and Richard Cox in
the USA, Peter Laslett and Michael Oakeshott in England, and Raymond
Polin and Robert Derathé in France. Beginning in the 1950s a new left-
wing tendency became influential, which, among other influences, took
on impulses from Scandinavian social democratic and Marxist politics, a
critical doctrine which was based on class antagonism and was concerned
less with producing social wealth than with a better distribution of it. A
spontaneous open society bordering on anarchy was one of their goals,
and it was the state’s role to further this. That such ideas were contra-
dicted, and that the free market and fair competition were thought to
be enough to bring about an open and democratic society,44 is not only
self-evident to most people but also characteristic of the lack of a unified
understanding in political science.
Devotees of a psychological understanding of political science (espe-
cially followers of Freud or Adler), those with an ethnological base (taking
their inspiration from the findings of Margaret Mead and Daniel Levin-
son or those of Lévi-Strauss and Jean Piaget) and those who espoused
game theory or mathematical analysis competed among themselves to
find and implement the correct and most fruitful method. There was
also no lack of representatives of a form of political science which felt it
could offer appropriate solutions to problems using nothing other than
empirical evidence and correspondingly standardized procedures. Mod-
ern data technology – thanks to computers and quantifying methods –
could provide much more secure findings than had been possible in the
years before 1950. Alongside all of these practioners there were political
scientists who acknowledged a debt to political sociology and its empir-
ical methods, and in turn laid great stress on empirical data.45 System
theory, cognitive research, modelling and other concepts all influenced
scholars, without, however, the discipline becoming vague, arbitrary or
limitless as a result of this multiplicity of methodological and intellectual
approaches. The core substance – the achievement, the possibilities and
the conditions of human life in a community – remained intact, and there
were many levels of understanding between the schools of thought, the
academics and the universities. The idea of a unified methodology and
theory, which had been argued over for so long, was finally given up
at the beginning of the 1970s, without raising doubts about the ability of
44 Amongst them Karl Popper, F. von Hayek, Milton Friedman; see Clark and Neave,
Encyclopedia II, 2126ff.
45 Cf. R. Merton, M. Lipset, Daniel Lerner, Erwin Scheuch, Pertti Pesonen.
389
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the discipline to produce knowledge. In the meantime its position at the
universities had become secure.
Representatives of a more normative understanding of the subject
rejected the behaviourist theory long dominant in the United States.
Behaviourism in the social sciences, as here in the case of political science,
concentrated on those aspects of human life which were readily apparent
to the eye, and about which observers could rapidly reach agreement. The
motives and drives of the protagonists could admittedly not be identified
from outside, but could be deduced from their actions. This also held true,
it was argued, for the groups, institutions, communities and organizations
which formed the actual focal points of their interest. Their starting point
was always the empirical base of every analysis, that is, the individual.
‘Verification, quantification techniques, pure science’ was how David Eas-
ton described the methodological steps which led to scholarly findings.46
A combination of anthropological, psychological and sociological knowl-
edge, in other words interdisciplinarity, was, in addition, held to be more
than useful. Theory and empirical data were to be harmonized in order to
make the pronouncements of this politico-behaviourism for the most part
watertight. Both theoreticians and empiricists would benefit from this, it
was argued. It was less about finding an all-embracing synoptic theory
than orienting oneself around verifiable hypotheses. Any form of scien-
tifically secure (or at least apparently scientific) method could be used to
produce these analyses. The hope was that in this way political scientists
would come to a general theory of human life and human communities,
which was based on firm, universal knowledge. This goal was not in fact
achieved, but many remarkable insights were obtained, which enriched
the subject.
In the 1970s the influence of this approach gradually waned. It was
forced to give ground to a modified theory, that of post-behaviourism.
Now ideas such as ‘relevance, engagement, action’ among others were
part of the programme, which again did not contribute to a unified con-
cept of the discipline. Thus political science, like politics, is characterized
by a multiplicity and a pragmatic harmonization of views both in indi-
vidual countries and internationally.47
The development of political science in the individual European coun-
tries after 1945 was always determined in part by the USA. In FRANCE,
which, like other countries, could look back on a long tradition of the-
oretical views on politics, there was nevertheless no corresponding uni-
versity subject. Such questions were always addressed within the faculties
46 Quoted after Sills, Encyclopedia, Vol. XII (note 3), 296f.

47 Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia II, 2133; E. M. Kirkpatrick and W. G. Andrews, ‘United
States of America’, in Andrews, Handbook (note 40), 371ff.
390
of law or the arts. Although a private École libre des sciences politiques
had existed in Paris since 1872, which prepared candidates for higher
government service, it was not until 1945 that political science first qual-
ified as a discipline worthy of acceptance in the universities. This was
partly attributable to the American model, but to a larger extent to the
war and its effects. The starting point for the new subject at universi-
ties was history – especially contemporary history – together with legal
and comparativist views on government, parliamentarianism, power, the
state and so on, all of them familiar to lawyers. The strong links in France
to anthropology/ethnology and geography where these modern questions
were concerned also became much more obvious. From this starting point
there was also a path to mathematical analytical methods, but they never
obtained a status comparable to that in the USA.
Binding syllabuses were not introduced. The subject was taught as
each particular academic thought right. Thus before 1978 the universi-
ties did not award any formal qualification of their own. Only then was a
maı̂trise in politics introduced. After 1945 only the non-university insti-
tuts d’études politiques presented diplomas, which qualified the holder to
enter the École nationale d’administration.48
The subject itself grew considerably at the universities in the 1960s
and 1970s. Anglo-Saxon problems and methods were, however, rarely
adopted. Instead, the French tradition aimed at producing universal inter-
pretations and analyses, which are better understood anthropologically,
sociologically, historically and philosophically than in purely analytical
political science terms. This is clearly shown, for example, in the works
of Foucault and Bourdieu. Their empirical investigations were carried out
at the EHESS.
The universities of a small Nordic country like DENMARK tradition-
ally oriented themselves on the model of the North German Lutheran
universities. After 1945 – and after German occupation in the war – the
USA took the place of these, although the older links remained effec-
tive to some extent. Theoretically determined views of the subject had
to be reconciled with or weighed against empirical ones, and deductive
approaches against inductive ones. At both the universities in the country
there was at this time no independent political science. It was only in
1968 that at the newly founded University of Aarhus a professorship was
established in the subject. Characteristically, as was later also the case at
Copenhagen and Odense, the chair was occupied initially by a lawyer or
a historian. The subject led a rather modest existence.
48 See particularly P. Favre, ‘France’, in Andrews, Handbook (note 40), 154–67. The
relative youth of the subject is evident from the fact that there is neither a history nor a
sociology of French political studies. Ibid., 166, footnote 6.
391
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In the early post-war years therefore the Danish version of political
science followed the American model. In particular, the works of Arnold
Brecht and David Easton and behaviourism were taken over. On the other
hand, there were few takers for the hermeneutic approach to problems.
The disturbances of 1968, which in Denmark were relatively civilized but
ideologically decisive, led to new curricula and university regulations, and
to a neo-Marxist tendency in political science too. The Frankfurt Institute
of Social Studies – from Horkheimer to von Friedeburg – together with the
works of Habermas were the model for young political science academics
and their students. Along with the structuralism of Althusser and Balibar
as well as the Stamokap School of the Danish communists, it gained great
influence.49
In ENGLAND, political science was an important and treasured ele-
ment in the tripos at Cambridge during the 1920s and 1930s. In Oxford
a new degree, PPE, was introduced in 1920, which incorporated politics
along with philosophy and economics. PPE was established as a mod-
ern alternative to Classics (known as Greats) because it was thought
that a course in Philosophy and Ancient History was no longer rele-
vant for those entering the civil service; it was thus initially known as
Modern Greats. The independent development of politics – not usually
called political science in Britain – at other universities was slow until
the new universities were created during the 1960s, although the subject
figured as a necessary element in ‘general studies’ at Keele, opened as
a University College in 1950. The most important new elements in the
study of politics after 1945 were research on general elections, pioneered
at Oxford and later specialized at Essex, and on political parties, pio-
neered at the London School of Economics and followed up elsewhere in
studies of ‘political culture’. General textbooks on political science were
few, and successive governments did not tap members of the academic
profession for political advice as they did in the United States. Nor were
there critical ‘schools’ of political science. Politics scarcely figured at all in
courses of law. Nevertheless, an increasing proportion of those Members
of Parliament who were university graduates had studied some politics at
university.50
In the NETHERLANDS, politics as a subject of academic study did
not exist at the universities before 1945. In 1948 a first new department
of political and social sciences was founded in Amsterdam, followed in
1953 by the Free University in the same city, and the Catholic university in
Nijmegen in 1955. Leiden and Groningen followed suit in 1963 without
there being any attempt to unify the content of teaching and courses. The
49 P. Nannenstad and O. Gaasholt, ‘Denmark’, in Andrews, Handbook (note 40), 132–43.

50 I owe this paragraph to Asa Briggs.
392
first professors came mainly, as usual in Europe, from law. Only after
the middle of the 1970s did the number of graduations in the subject
increase, and it too remained at a modest level.
Teaching and research generally favoured empirical investigations, and
they were often carried out along with the development of theory. The
American influence predominated, and analyses of elections and research
into political parties were popular. Behaviourism and then the so-called
post-behaviourism were adopted. French and, to an even greater extent,
German political science were held to be traditional and uninteresting.51
Political theories lost their earlier prestige, and the links with other social
studies, especially sociology and psychology, became obligatory. With
acceptance of the subject students and teachers showed increasing interest
in daily politics. During the student protests of 1968 political science –
in line with other social studies – took up positions close to Marxism,
which in Amsterdam in particular led to disputes which were not without
violence. Theory and evaluation were to give way to decisive action. For
a short period academic study was seen as a vehicle for social change.52
In the FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY the revival of political
studies took place thanks to the occupying Western powers – above all
the USA. At conferences in Waldleiningen in 1949 and in Königstein in
1950 German scholars, together with scholars from the occupying pow-
ers, deliberated over the hoped-for contribution of the social sciences, and
especially political science, to the democratic reconstruction of Germany.
Whilst the French participants at these conferences argued from a theo-
retical, political and historical perspective, and yet at the same time had
to admit that they could point to no institutes or chairs in their own coun-
try, the Americans offered immediate help both in terms of theory and
practice. Through guest professorships and scholarships the discipline
most likely to secure democracy was to be anchored and developed at the
universities.53 As a result there quickly followed a third founding of the
subject, which had once had a great tradition in the eighteenth century as
Kameralistik and Philosophia practica and then in the nineteenth century
as Staatswissenschaft. Now it was to link up with the American discipline
which, in part at least, had absorbed and developed that tradition.54
At the universities the subject was greeted at first with anything but
universal enthusiasm. Many of the representatives of related arts subjects
51 A. Hoogerwerf, ‘The Netherlands’, in Andrews, Handbook (note 40), 227–45.

52 Ruin, ‘Political science’ (note 39), 2132.
53 A. Mohr, Politikwissenschaft als Alternative: Stationen einer wissenschaftlichen Diszi-
plin auf dem Wege zu ihrer Selbstständigkeit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945–
1965 (Bochum, 1988).
54 Manicas, History (note 2), 213f., calls this the de-Germanization of the American social
sciences.
393
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expressed reservations at a (so-called) science based purely on practice and
the application of that practice.55 The determination of the Americans and
the political respectability of many of its supporters – in time often the
first true representatives of the subject – nevertheless led to the eventual
establishment of chairs at some universities. There were indeed plans for
university institutions devoted to political science, as in the days of the
Weimar Republic, but they could only be realized later and only in a few
cases. It seemed more important to establish the subject generally, and
this was achieved first in Hessen, and then in other federal states.
It was difficult to find acceptable candidates for the academic posts.
Only a few of the professors who had emigrated to the USA and were
familiar with the subject there were prepared to return to a destroyed
Germany. Among them were Karl Lowenstein, Franz L. Neumann, and
later Ossip Flechtheim, Herman Fraenkel and Eric Voegelin. And yet it
was still a higher percentage than in sociology, that is around 25 per
cent.56 Suitable politicians such as Hermann Brill, Otto Suhr or Ludwig
Bergsträsser, politically interested candidates from the field of journal-
ism such as Eugen Kogon, Dolf Sternberger, Wolfgang Abendroth and
Theodor Eschenburg, who all contributed to building up the subject,
were definitely not university insiders. To a sceptic, therefore, the subject
appeared unacademic and lacking in seriousness. And yet by the middle
of the 1950s these outsiders had managed to secure the existence of the
subject in universities in Hessen, Berlin and Baden-Württemberg with at
least thirty university staff.57
There was no return to the older celebrated prehistory. Since this had
been unable to prevent anti-democratic thought and action, one now
wanted to develop a new independent form of political science. The door
was thus open for American interpretations of the subject. Individual
scholars, of course, followed their own ideas, often harking back to older
traditions. All of this did not contribute to a theoretically and methodi-
cally unified approach. There was much discussion, but it produced no
result that yielded a consensus.
In 1961 a document produced by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsge-
meinschaft) called for the establishment of professorships in sociology
and politics at all universities within five years.58 To a great extent this
was achieved and, as a result, politics and sociology almost became the
55 G. C. Behrmann, ‘Die Verselbständigung der Wissenschaft von der Politik; Gründung
und Begründung einer neuen Fachwissenschaft’, in Acham, Nörr and Schefold, Erken-
ntnisgewinne (note 37), 443–78, here 446.
56 C. D. Krohn, ‘Deutsche Wissenschaftsemigration seit 1933 und ihre Remigrationsbar-
rieren nach 1945’, in R. von Bruch and B. Kaderas (eds.), Wissenschaften und Wis-
senschaftspolitik (Stuttgart, 2002), 437ff., here 447.
57 Behrmann, ‘Verselbständigung’ (note 55), 455.
58 The same was true for the pedagogical high schools.
394
basis for the new educational studies in the Federal Republic.59 Exami-
nation regulations and academic degrees secured its development within
the universities. Moreover, the changing political conditions of the 1960s
had enabled the subject, which was still strongly oriented towards the
arts, to expand its use of empirical and analytical methods, so that, in
conjunction with sociology, it came to be seen as a real achievement of
the new young Federal Republic. Between 1960 and 1970 the number of
professorships doubled. All the new universities founded in the 1970s had
corresponding chairs. In 1976 there were 133 professorships in political
science in the Federal Republic.
The adoption of American methods was not just limited to theory.
Many voices were raised against behaviourism in the Federal Repub-
lic. They returned indirectly to the discussions of methodology that had
prevailed before the First World War. It was a question of defending
the normative political and moral claims of the subject (in its older ver-
sion) against a pragmatically oriented discipline concerned with solving
social problems. As it was no longer principally a question of securing
democratic conditions and a free state, which, in contrast to the second
German state, the GDR, seemed to have been successfully achieved in the
Federal Republic, the subject could turn its attention to broader tasks.
The Freiburg school under Arnold Bergsträsser and Wilhelm Hennis and
the Otto Suhr Institute at the Free University of Berlin (FU) played a
particularly important role in this.
The convulsions of 1968 would temporarily boost the importance of
the subject, but at the same time, just as with sociology, they brought furi-
ous, intolerant and violent controversies. Politics suffered just as much
from this as sociology. After a few years of apparently enjoying a leading
role in defining the present – as the mainly neo-Marxist activists in the
student movement thought – the subject entered a crisis in the late 1970s.
Because a less intransigent, new-left political science was taught and sup-
ported south of the Main, the subject managed to hang on to the status
which it had attained and continue the broad spectrum of what were now
normal research projects in a series of theoretical and practical empirical
works. However, it never again attained the status which it had enjoyed
in the 1960s and 1970s.60
Developments took a quite different path in AUSTRIA, although the
country in the older phase of its university history bore many resem-
blances to Germany. The combination of different treatment at the hands
of the victorious powers and a different role in relation to the Third

60 See also K. von Beyme, ‘Federal Republic of Germany’, in Andrews, Handbook (note
40), 169–76.
395
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Reich, which the country attained after 1945, enabled it to achieve more
independence than was possible for defeated Germany. Political science
had not existed hitherto at the universities, and thus was felt to be no
loss in 1945. Related topics were taught within the law faculties – as
elsewhere – and were prescribed centrally by the state. It was only in the
1960s that thought was given to introducing the subject on the German
model, after lectures were given on social-science themes at the newly
created (1961) Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. The courses in
this area which had been given in Salzburg had not succeeded in achiev-
ing any great significance. It was only after the institution of courses and
examinations uniformly across the whole country in 1971 that politi-
cal chairs were created in Vienna and Innsbruck. The subject remained
small.61 Its legal and historical content was reduced and via Germany
American practices and methods were taken on, but theoretical questions
continued to have a high status.
The introduction of political science in equally small SWITZERLAND
took a somewhat different course.62 The Helvetian Republic, neutral
and apparently untouched by the war, had no comparable conditions
after 1945 to surmount, let alone the catastrophes which had befallen
its European neighbours. A stable democracy with its long tradition did
not demand remedies drawn from the social sciences. Questions relat-
ing to the political and social order could be deliberated and decided
using the means of jurisprudence. Political science was unknown in the
universities as late as the 1960s. Only in Geneva was an attempt made
to gain distinction by means of such an unusual discipline, and there it
took place on the basis of existing international institutions, on a French
model, and from a feeling of being in a minority dominated by German-
speaking universities. In 1927 an Institut universitaire de hautes études
internationales was founded, which achieved a high ranking in the field
of international political studies. In the process, no homogenous doctrine
or theory emerged; this was as little the case in Switzerland as in other
countries, but at least people had become aware of the existence of polit-
ical science. And so in the 1960s in German-speaking Switzerland, that
is, in Basle and Zurich, a chair in politics was introduced, which in each
case belonged to the law faculty. In St Gallen a similar professorship was
located with the economists and in Bern two chairs were added, in the
economics and social studies sections of the law faculty.
In SWEDEN the universities could equally look back on a long
tradition of subjects, which, like history and jurisprudence, dealt with
political theories. Thus after 1945 – in contrast to the other Scandinavian
61 P. Gerlich, E. Talos and K. Ucakar, ‘Austria’, in Andrews, Handbook (note 40), 85–92.
62 M. Wennegah and D. Frei, ‘Switzerland’, in Andrews, Handbook (note 40), 327–35.
396
countries – they kept to their established teaching practice. They did not
have an independent political science discipline. It was not until the 1960s
and 1970s that they accepted American practices and theories, and like the
Danish and Norwegian universities, they then held fast to these. The
subject experienced an enormous surge of popularity. At the five non-
technical universities in the country social studies faculties were intro-
duced, but even taken together they were numerically no bigger than a
single American department.
The late 1960s also brought student unrest in Sweden, but on a smaller
scale than in Germany or France. Political science clung to behaviourism,
and Marxist positions were not particularly significant. Scandinavian
socialism was more concerned with appearing socially modern than
orthodox, that is, Marxist.
The crisis of the 1970s also had a depressing effect on a subject which
set great store by optimism about the future, but the depression did
not have a lasting effect on the directions of research. There was, at
most, a shift from assured knowledge about planning and improvement
to an analysis of political processes and institutions.63 The famous neutral
politics of Sweden, spared the upheavals of other European countries,
appeared to offer no grounds for an ongoing and critical analysis. In
many areas the country seemed a model. Academics were expected to
support the politics of the country.64
In the UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS developments
took a quite different course from the processes described so far. Despite
its assurances to the contrary, communism by its very nature allowed no
free research, and especially not in the social sciences and arts. Their job
was to carry out clearly prescribed tasks. The ministry responsible and the
Academy of Sciences defined the contents of the textbooks and teaching
materials. In addition, a thorough exegesis of Lenin’s writings in partic-
ular was obligatory. At the universities of Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad
(St Petersburg) and also in the Urals there were special institutes, which
were modelled on the Moscow Department of Higher Education and
which had the task of turning their students into well-schooled political
functionaries, into teachers at the schools and into the next generation
of scholars. About 27,000 academically trained persons were thus pro-
duced up to the early 1970s. Around 3 per cent of them had gained
their doctoral degree and thus formed the upcoming generation of schol-
ars. It was their job to make sure that the country as well as all aspects
of scholarship remained equally permeated with Marxist-Leninism and
63 O. Ruin, ‘Sweden’, in Andrews, Handbook (note 40), 299–319; Jı́lek, Historical Com-
pendium.
397
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oriented towards it.65 The same was demanded of all the satellite states
and copied most slavishly in the German Democratic Republic.
With the end of communist rule the situation changed, and there
emerged cautious approaches to Western ideas, but the social sciences
were not able to achieve a comparable status in the universities. In many
countries there was also a lack of suitable teachers. The reception of
Western social sciences varied widely according to the country and its
traditions. As was the case in the other European countries, national
preferences and customs remained important. In general American meth-
ods and theories were the model.
economics
Economics had a long tradition but developed relatively late into an
independent university subject. Until the late nineteenth century it was
taught – in Germany especially, but in France too – in the form of cam-
eralism or national economics mostly in the law faculties, but also in the
philosophy faculty within Philosophia practica and the doctrine of nat-
ural law and ethics. It was only in 1914 that a separate economics and
social studies faculty was set up at the newly founded university of Frank-
furt am Main. National economics, business studies and sociology were
taught together here, without it ever becoming clear how a theoretical
linkage of the different subjects could be achieved.
National Socialism and fascism, and even more the Second World War,
changed the existing parameters first in Europe and then in the USA too.
As economic matters could hardly be considered separately from politics,
the catastrophe of the war and the attempt to unify Europe and its even-
tual success represented a considerable challenge for economics. For the
most part regulatory guidelines were expected from the state and from
politicians. The considerably modified German Ordoliberalism of the so-
called Freiburg school, the teachings of the English economist Maynard
Keynes and those of the Dutchman Jan Tinbergen, all of them, in contrast
to the USA, saw the obligations of the public hand and had little regard
for the market itself or for an open, self-regulatory society. Using statis-
tics, econometrics and mathematics, an attempt was made to ascertain
the fundamental conditions of national economies. The older, German,
historical and arts-based formulations of the questions were largely aban-
doned. In economics, too, despite internationalism and the pre-eminence
of the USA, national traditions carried on shaping the formulations of the
problems and the lines of approach. At a time of integration Europe saw
65 V. E. Chirkin, ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Socialist Political Science’, in

Andrews, Handbook (note 40), 336–51.
398
itself as an independent yet nevertheless grateful partner of the United
States.
Clearly the diverse treaties, measures and options which were designed
to bring about a united Europe called for adequate economic and political
models, for statements and for actions. From the Marshall Plan (1947),
the OEEC (1948), the Council of Europe (1949), the European Coal and
Steel Community (1951) right up to the Treaties of Rome via the EEC
and Euratom (1957), there was a long sequence of challenges, which
were met by what was throughout an optimistic view of Europe over
the period 1958 to 1972. The consequent economic and oil crises, the
collapse of the Bretton Woods Treaty, budget crises and the expansion
of the EC put a brake on this enthusiasm and optimism, yet from 1984
into the early 1990s new hopes for a better world economy emerged.
Discussions about monetarism and common fiscal measures dominated
both academic life and politics up to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.66
The close connection between the two, which is so characteristic of the
modern world, was constantly reflected in the theories and doctrines of
economics after 1945. This will be evident from a survey of conditions in
some European countries.
In the UNITED KINGDOM questions of a new economic order and
economically sound policies had long been discussed. This did not, how-
ever, lead to a growth in the discipline of economics in the university sec-
tor or a corresponding increase in its standing. The numerically restricted,
elitist access to universities which continued after 1945, and the tradi-
tional regard for the gifted amateur in both the governmental and eco-
nomic spheres, made arguments for the introduction of a new discipline
seem anything but compelling, although the linguistically easy access to
the rapidly growing social studies in America ought to have changed this
perception. A change in attitude and in university policy was needed to
make possible the introduction of economics as a general university sub-
ject. This began in the 1960s and finally led in the 1970s to the growing
employment of economists as academically fully equal university grad-
uates in the business world and in the civil service.67 On the whole the
universities followed the American model, and continued to pay little
attention to continental initiatives in this area – with the exception of the
London School of Economics. That a Briton in the person of Maynard
Keynes had developed the leading European economic theory after 1945
did little at first for the discipline as a university subject.
66 A. W. Bob Coats, ‘Introduction’, in A. W. Bob Coats (ed.), The Development of Eco-

nomics in Western Europe since 1945 (London, 2000), 2f.
67 R. E. Backhouse, ‘Economics in mid-Atlantic: British Economics 1945–95’, in Coats,
Development (note 68), 20–41.
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In SWEDEN, a country which was largely spared the destruction of the
war, many alert observers of economic and social developments in Europe
had soon recognized that exceptional efforts would have to be made in
these fields. They put forward strategies designed to shape the whole of
the public and private spheres. Their generally left-wing approach saw
state support and planning as the means to lead the country out of the
poverty of the post-war years and to shape the future positively through
the welfare state on a worldwide basis.68 Indications of the importance
of economics were its many representatives who became members of
parliament or indeed ministers and the founding of chairs in the subject
(there were eight in 1945 and fifty-seven in 1996) and corresponding
institutes. Anglo-Saxon methods and theories increasingly displaced the
national traditions. The increase in academic posts also led to a growing
specialization.
In the NETHERLANDS, too, academic attitudes to economics also
gradually changed after 1945. As early as the 1940s the head of the
Central Planning Bureau and later professor in Rotterdam, Jan Tinber-
gen, formulated macroeconomic models for a successful economic pol-
icy designed to lay the basis for post-war reconstruction of the severely
damaged country. They were developed with one eye on world poverty
and another on a socially just economic order. These issues were to be
addressed by the use of modern econometric and quantitative methods
together with a theory of economics which owed much to Keynesianism.
Tinbergen’s model had an influence well beyond the Netherlands and was
for a time almost as influential as Keynesianism itself.69
At the Dutch universities economists were expected to study not only
the national economy, but also mathematics and econometrics. The
growth of specialization on the American model forced the adoption
of graded, less interdisciplinary courses. The number of students, lectur-
ers and associate professors grew rapidly. The student unrest at the end
of the decade and in the early 1970s had lasting effects on the subject, in
that now Marxist theories were demanded, and also – as in the case of
Ernest Mandel – adopted by the lecturers and young assistant lecturers.
This led to the establishment of Marxist professorships in Amsterdam,
Groningen and Tilburg. In Tilburg this was reversed in 1993, as students
in the 1990s showed little interest in a subject which had declined into
provincialism.
In addition to the universities, private institutes as well as a few public
ones contributed to the development and extension of the knowledge of
68 B. Sandelin, N. Sarafoglou and A. Veiderpass, ‘The Post-1945 Development of Eco-
nomics and Economists in Sweden’, in Coats, Development (note 66), 42–66.
69 H. W. Plasmeijer and E. Schoorl, ‘Post War Dutch Economics: Internationalization and
Homogenization’, in Coats, Development (note 66), 67–93.
400
economics. For this reason the Netherlands was sufficiently innovative
and liberal to absorb modern developments in other countries. This also
held true for the universities, which, after overcoming the depredations of
1968 and the following years, became more and more international and
in particular American in outlook. They increasingly focused on political
questions and devoted less attention to macroeconomic theories.
In BELGIUM economics had no particular status until 1945, and it
was only in the 1960s that it gained importance, first in Louvain and
then in Brussels, though to some extent with very different academic
approaches.The USA provided the model, rather than France or the
Netherlands, although the approaches in these countries were taken into
account. The academic emphasis was on mathematical method, game the-
ory and monetarism. There was no real attempt to develop independent
positions.
Two directions of economics teaching had coexisted in FRANCE
since the nineteenth century. Professeurs d’économie politique confronted
ingénieurs économistes. The professors of économie politique teaching at
the universities belonged to the law faculty and in consequence mainly
dealt with state targets and tasks of the economy. This corresponded to
French economic practice for centuries. At the grandes écoles, ingénieurs
économistes were educated in a way which focused on mathematics and
scientific procedures. Even during the course of their training they were
civil servants and most of them remained in public service. The economic
theories and teaching remained genuinely French at both institutions,
and were largely screened from foreign influences. They were oriented
towards the state and its service and did not approach economics from
a historical or philosophical perspective as was the case in Germany or
England.
This situation prevailed until after 1945. From this point onwards
Anglo-Saxon methods gradually gained ground, especially in the content
of engineering courses. The introduction of statistics and econometric
practices, and a stronger orientation towards the non-state economy, did
not change the subject fundamentally, but it did open it up to contempo-
rary standards. From 1970 onwards the professors of economics detached
themselves from the law faculties, which led to a closer approach to the
academic culture of the engineers and lessened the old distinction. The
number of students in these subjects grew continually – at least up to
1995 – as did the development of the subject at universities. The socialist
governments also supported this social studies discipline, and by the end
of the century the last sixteen of the approximately sixty universities had
introduced economics and business studies departments.
The founders of Dauphine University in Paris capitalized on the need
for institutional change in French higher education after 1968 by creating
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a university base for ‘decision-making and organizational sciences’. Their
initiative combined the Anglo-Saxon interest in the firm as an organiza-
tion with the tradition of French economics.
ITALY represents a special case in a different way from France.
National economics (economia politica) was taught at the universities
as in France within the law faculties. The setting up of commercial col-
leges (scuole superiori di commercio) in Venice, Bari, Turin and Genoa
at the end of the nineteenth century strengthened the independence of the
subject indirectly. As these schools were only intended to train and not
to carry out research, they hardly had any effect on the universities. Here
law and economics remained closely linked and empowered many of their
representatives to take a direct part in the politics of the country. They
represented liberal, fascist or Marxist tendencies. These positions lasted
beyond 1945 and remained influential despite strong Anglo-Saxon influ-
ences. After Mussolini, Italy both stood on the side of free trade and the
international interdependency of markets and also on the side of a strong
state-controlled economy. It is only possible to talk of Americanization
to a limited extent. The closeness of economics to the everyday politics of
the country was just as difficult to reconcile with the abstinence shown
by many American colleagues towards practical politics as it was with
Soviet or Chinese theories of state planning.
In the 1960s and 1970s independent economics faculties were founded.
Although modern international methods of economics were adopted,
they had only a limited effect on the traditional theories and modes of
behaviour. Political economy viewed itself as an auxiliary discipline for
the other social sciences, law in particular. And yet considerably more
students than before opted for the subject, as, in view of the increased
demand, the career prospects seemed attractive. In the 1990s the faculties
began to take on board business studies, and the leader in this was the
private Bocconi University in Milan. The academic interest which had
been traditionally directed towards urban situations also grew stronger
in these fields of study.70
In SPAIN the foundation of a faculty of political and economic sciences
at the University of Madrid in 1944 represented the beginning of indepen-
dent economics courses. In 1955 Bilbao and Barcelona followed suit.71
As one might expect from the authoritarian regime of the time, the cur-
ricula, which were laid down by a teaching syllabus in 1953, were strictly
70 I. Maes, E. Buyst and M. Bouchet, ‘The Post-1945 Development of Economics in Bel-
gium’, in Coats, Development (note 68), 94–112. C. Schmidt, ‘Economics in France: A
Manifold System’, in Coats, Development (note 66), 129–47. P. L. Porta, ‘Europe and
the Post-1945 Internationalization of Political Economy: The Case of Italy,’ in Coats,
Development (note 66), 148–90.
71 S. Almenar, ‘The Development of Economic Studies and Research in Spain (1939–95)’,
in Coats, Development (note 66), 191–226.
402
controlled in a way which was more suited to secondary schools. During
the transition from dictatorship to democracy between 1975 and 1978,
the number of students increased rapidly. Economists now had access
to career prospects which previously had been reserved for graduates
of other disciplines. Reflecting the changed situation, a new curriculum
introduced new materials largely based on the American and in partic-
ular the Chicago model and made economics a very desirable subject.
A law of 1970 had already incorporated the business schools into the
universities, and this increased the number of faculties and the number
of those teaching and studying. The increase was not, however, reflected
in the number of doctorates, which in general were only undertaken by
those seeking a university career. Thus there was not a critical mass for
high-class research, however, and, as a result, the university economics
institutes failed to achieve a high ranking.
In GERMANY national economics was a well-developed discipline
taught mainly during the Wilhelminian era within the framework of the
law or humanities faculties, even if it was never introduced independently
at all universities. As has already been mentioned, the last university
foundation of the Wilhelmine period, Frankfurt am Main, had intro-
duced an economics and social studies faculty in 1914, and during the
Weimar Republic other universities followed. Again, as already shown
in the section on politics and sociology, economics could look back on a
distinguished tradition in Germany, which continued to exert a decisive
influence after 1945.72 Because of the border with the Soviet zone and the
existence of the DDR, Marxism was peripheral, and liberal, state-oriented
theories prevailed.
The Freiburg School, which was dominant after 1945, had emerged in
the 1920s and expressed its opposition to National Socialism by formu-
lating its liberal yet structuring principles founded on ‘Christian freedom’
and the rule of law. The policy of the Federal Republic under Adenauer,
and the influence of the minister of economic affairs, Ludwig Erhard – a
disciple of the Frankfurt economist Franz Oppenheimer, who had emi-
grated to Palestine – together favoured an economic understanding of the
country, summed up in the phrase ‘the social market economy’. These
developments also worked in favour of economic theory at universities.73
Their stress on freedom was not derived from the Western European
idea of freedom, however, and in the end they leaned on the state as an
organizing power. This hindered their general acceptance and stamped
72 H. Hagemann, ‘The Post-1945 Development of Economics in Germany’, in Coats, Devel-

opment (note 66), 113–28.
73 E. Heuß, ‘Kontinuität und Diskontinuität in der Nationalökonomie nach dem zweiten
Weltkrieg: Ordoliberalismus versus Keynesianismus’, in Acham, Nörr and Schefold,
Erkenntnisgewinne (note 37), 331–49, here 332f.
403
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them as a unique case of post-war development.74 Social policy in con-
junction with economic policy was central. Admittedly this did not mean
an acceptance of Keynesian positions, but it was not too far away from
many of them, and in view of the catastrophic situation in the country
the response in economic terms was bound to have a Keynesian form.
Characteristically, university teaching was determined by the textbooks
of the Kiel professor Erich Schneider, now returned from emigration, and
then a little later by those of the American P. A. Samuelson. The subject
gained enormous popularity in the 1960s, which was also reflected in the
considerable increase in the number of professorships. Between 1960 and
about 1980 the number of these rose from 537 to 2,907.75 The faculty of
economics grew to be the largest at the universities, although sociology
and politics also contributed to its rise. From the 1980s onwards the
subject grew largely thanks to business studies, which were and are more
practice-based than theoretical. In addition to the universities, but in
collaboration with them, six important economics institutes were founded
in the 1960s, which mainly carried out empirical investigations. They
not only offered career prospects for economists and sociologists but
also their theoretical principles to a large extent reflected the prevailing
research initiatives at the universities.
In AUSTRIA the development of political economy also has its roots
in the nineteenth century. In contrast to Germany it was not carried along
by the universities. Around the turn of the century in Vienna, schools of
psychology, medicine, legal theory and political economy as well as art
history emerged. They formed their own individual circles and developed
through the cross-fertilization of ideas. They attracted gifted young peo-
ple, with the result that teaching and research in these various subjects
moved out of the universities into these open and stimulating private cir-
cles. Famous examples are the ‘Geistkreis’ (Intellectual Circle), the Politi-
cal Economic Society, the ‘Private Seminar of Ludwig von Mises’ among
others. Many participants in these loose scholarly groups had to emigrate
in 1938 after the arrival of the National Socialists. The network of intel-
lectuals was scattered. Still, their ideas and also many of their members
continued to have an influence in Western Europe, and beyond that on the
study of economics in America. Gottfried von Haberler, Friedrich August
von Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Ludwig von Mises, Oskar Morgenstern all
emerged from the Viennese School, and as early as the 1920s and 1930s
they developed and stimulated what were to become essential methods
for economics after the Second World War.76
74 Heuß, ‘Kontinuität’ (note 73), 353. 75 Hagemann, ‘Development’ (note 72), 123.
76 K. H. Leube, ‘Über die Diskontinuitäten und Kontinuitäten der österreichischen Schule
der Nationalökonomie’, in Acham, Nörr and Schefold, Erkenntnisgewinne (note 37),
301–24.
404
This intellectual blossoming in Austria began before the end of the
imperial era, and in the case of economics it can be traced back to the
curriculum of 1856. The effect of this was to link legal education closely
to the study of economics. The emperor wanted a class of civil servants
with a general education, who could advance the multinational state both
economically and intellectually. This not only paved the way for the much
later independence of political economy, but also explains why its first
and most influential representatives were lawyers. The disappearance of
this inheritance under the Nazis has been a considerable loss to the coun-
try. Nevertheless, after 1945 and under very difficult conditions an effort
was made to re-establish links with this heyday of economic studies. It
was only possible to a limited extent as the division into zones of occu-
pation and the dominant position of the neo-Marxist social democrats
encouraged a concentration on other areas and favoured a cooperative,
state-controlled economy.
anthropology/ethnology
This often changing subject also has a long history, which at first did
not bring it independent status at universities. The concern with so-called
native peoples goes back a long way, as it was hoped it might shed light on
the early history of humankind. Reports from missionaries, colonial offi-
cials, military men and travellers formed the first foundations of a written
study of ethnology. Collections and museums were founded which took
an interest in native peoples and attempted to develop a scholarly exam-
ination of their artefacts – and thus of the world they came from. It
was principally in Germany and England that the first attempts were
made to introduce these materials into university teaching, and anthro-
pology as an already established subject offered itself for this purpose. It
is thus understandable that among the early ethnologists scientists pre-
dominated, especially as this unusual discipline could draw support from
physiology, physics, biology, geology, geography and palaeontology. ‘The
study of human nature through empirical investigation too’ was the goal
behind this analysis of usually small populations and their social order
and culture.77 How this was to be done was less clear and led to many
different theories and procedures.
One of the older teaching ideas, the diffusion theory, started from
the assumption that an originally uniform humanity had developed in
different ways – in accordance with the notion of progress – and that
European culture and lifestyle was the as yet most perfect realization of
this idea. Faced with the increasing number of empirically based studies
77 B. Shore, ‘Anthropology’, in Clarke and Neave, Encyclopedia II, 2081.
405
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in the early part of the twentieth century, this notion had to be aban-
doned. New theoretical approaches had to be found to take account of
them.
In the UNITED KINGDOM social anthropology took the lead with
the development of functionalism. Under the guidance of Bronislaw Mali-
nowski and R. Radcliffe-Browne, the subject gained university status. In
1927 the London School of Economics set up the first chair in social
anthropology for Malinowski and in 1937 Oxford followed suit with
a chair for Radcliffe-Browne. Even if their understanding of function-
alism was not identical, the same basic assumptions underpinned their
approach to the subject. Both of them were concerned with achieving
exact methodological procedures comparable to those of the natural sci-
ences. This determined the way they carried out analyses of the societies
they examined, viewing them as macro-organisms and systems, where
there was a necessary connection between the study of individual ele-
ments and a grasp of the whole.78 Their work on small societies for
which a comprehensive overview was possible enabled them to analyse
individual social or cultural institutions and to show what and how they
contributed to the totality of the society considered as a system. The result
was a static rather than a historical overview since it reflected the situa-
tion during the actual period of fieldwork. There was a connection here
with Malinowski’s conviction that all cultures had to satisfy the same
basic biological needs, and thus that culture was founded on nature. His
pupil Talcott Parsons attempted to make such assumptions bear fruit in
sociology.
Radcliffe-Browne was of the view that culture was not naturally con-
ditioned, but was instead an important function of social structures. This
corresponded, he argued, to general human traits. He analysed individ-
ual institutions with regard to their integrative function for the totality,
which was in turn sustained by the social structure that was essential
for its existence. Thus he guaranteed the maintenance of that continuing
order which is vital to societies.
In the 1950s this direction came under increasing criticism. The argu-
ment was that it concentrated too much on questions of kinship, did not
take into account sufficiently the work of non-English colleagues, and
neglected historical and social change.79 The beginning of the break-up
of the colonial empire also contributed to a rejection of its concentration
on statistical and synchronous analyses, and to a criticism of the related
image of society as founded on a consensual balance of forces. It was now
78 K.-H. Kohl, Ethnologie: Die Wissenschaft vom kulturell Fremden, 2nd edn (Munich,
2000), 138ff.
79 W. Petermann, Die Geschichte der Ethnologie (Wuppertal, 2004).
406
thought to reflect an ideological pipe dream. For British social anthro-
pology this represented a severe crisis from which it took a long time to
recover.
After 1945 American cultural anthropology, thanks to the important
advisory role of its representatives in the invading armies, began to play
an increasingly important role in the elevation of ethnology to a university
subject on the European continent. From its founding father Franz Boas
to Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Alfred L. Kroeber and Melville J. Her-
skovits, they all saw in every form of human culture something that was
unmistakably unique, and thus they managed to distinguish themselves
from the historicizing evolutionary theories of the Europeans.
The post-war period brought about an enormous growth in ethnology
in Europe and a general acceptance of the subject as a university disci-
pline. Admittedly there had already been professorial chairs in Germany
and France in the Netherlands and in Belgium which dealt with this ma-
terial, but they mostly bore other names such as national psychology, or
Völkerkunde. The colonial powers were often motivated to set up corre-
sponding institutions because of their overseas possessions. Significantly,
many of these institutes in the Netherlands, England and France were
closed after decolonization, and ethnology remained, initially at least, a
small subject at universities despite a spate of remarkable ethnological
works.
In GERMANY the establishment of chairs in Hamburg, Cologne and
Frankfurt am Main after the First World War could largely be attributed
to a mix of motives including commercial policy, cultural and sociologi-
cal interests, and romantic and philosophical impulses. In 1945 these old
ideas continued to hold sway. The events of 1968, however, not only
forced a change of paradigms, but also brought about an enormous surge
in the popularity of ethnology – largely for political motives, as foreign
models were now honoured as better.80 Professorships were mainly estab-
lished in the humanities, though also at times in the economics and social
science faculties.
In FRANCE ethnology grew after 1945 in a similar fashion. At
once a new anthropological theory emerged, which built on specifi-
cally French traditions and went on to become very influential in the
1950s and 1960s. It is most closely bound up with the name of Claude
Lévi-Strauss and deliberately goes beyond the great influential figures
of Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. Lévi-Strauss took his methodology
from other subjects, in particular from Saussure’s linguistics, and con-
sidered geology, psychoanalysis and Marxism to be important auxiliary
80 In 1999, 12,888 students were inscribed in the twenty-two institutes then existing in the
Federal Republic; see Kohl, Ethnologie (note 78), 13.
407
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disciplines.81 The investigation of kinship and marriage behaviour as
well as the myths of undeveloped peoples caused him to come to the
view that every social order follows logical rules, which are attributable
to the roughly identical genetic make-up of human beings. Every cul-
ture is determined by clear anthropological constants – founded in
the cross-cultural identity of the human mind. In contrast to function-
alism, which in this basic assumption it otherwise resembles, struc-
turalism locates this identity in the unconscious. It is also ahistorical.
Thanks to its debts to modern concepts of literature and language,
it had a powerful influence on the study of history and literature –
not only in France – and also on philosophy and psychology. Michel
Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser despite all
their differences owe crucial concepts to Lévi-Strauss, and all share his
basic anti-historical position.
In the late 1950s anthropologie structurale became the prevailing mode
of thought in France, but Lévi-Strauss was not accepted into the Collège
de France and the Sorbonne until the 1960s. He had already built up
a following at the Musée de l’homme, the École pratique des hautes
études and the Institut d’ethnologie. Forming a sharp contrast to the
previously dominant existentialism, this way of thinking had a formative
influence on the French, and in part also the European intelligentsia, into
the late 1970s, before it was replaced by Foucault and Derrida’s post-
structuralism. Outside France this line of thought found no followers
within ethnology.
geography
Geographers describe, analyse and explain human and physical (material)
characteristics of the earth. One peculiar feature of their work is that they
both store and express this information in maps. The broad spread of
the natural landscape as well as the built environment is their concern
and has been from time immemorial. Methodologically this points to an
empiricism which divided itself between physical and human geography,
since the subject took hold in many universities in the late nineteenth
century.82
Merely tolerated and not taken really seriously in its early stages,
geography developed as a university subject in Europe from the 1920s
onwards, and in the USA it formed part at least of the basic curriculum
81 Kohl, Ethnologie (note 78), 856ff.; Petermann, Geschichte (note 79), 854ff.
82 J. Bird, The Changing Worlds of Geography: A Critical Guide to Concepts and Methods
(Oxford, 1989).
408
for undergraduates.83 It was considered to be particularly helpful for his-
torians, and this connection was made obligatory in France, which makes
its elevated status there understandable. It was not only in the Annales
school that geographical considerations were given a central significance
in the study of the human condition. Because of its interest not only in
human artefacts, but also in natural phenomena, geography appeared
useful to the representatives of the humanities and social sciences, and
indeed more than that: it appeared essential as an easy bridge to relevant
facts about the natural world. It was either integrated in the human-
ities faculty and/or into the science faculty. As economic geography it
sometimes found a home in the social sciences. What actually constitutes
geography remained a matter for debate, even if the relative ease with
which an overview of the subject could be achieved encouraged cooper-
ation between colleagues.
The Second World War demonstrated the usefulness of geographers
and led after 1945 to a sort of boom in the subject, especially in France,
England and the Federal Republic of Germany. Between 1950 and 1970
it grew considerably. Many of the geographers who came back from the
war were shocked at the conservative university policies of their older
colleagues who dominated the subject, and they initiated new develop-
ments. The theoretical bases for these were often derived from older
German approaches; the practical, methodological ones were taken from
the post-war Swedish school of the University of Lund. The growth of the
subject encouraged specialization, which in turn led to criticism from both
the left-wing and traditional representatives of the subject. In England in
particular the criticism was especially vocal, as the subject had become
as popular there as history or economics. In the 1990s the methodolog-
ical and theoretical conflicts between the various concepts of geography
diminished, as geographers were able to provide important contributions
to the new field of ecology.84 The simultaneous contemporary ‘postmod-
ern’ criticism from Marxists and phenomenologists had as little effect
on the subject as the claim of deconstructivists to be able to demystify
geographical language and maps.
history
In contrast to most of the other social sciences, history, if not always
treated as one, was already represented at all universities in the nineteenth
century. Its academic bona fides were as little questioned as its prominent
83 B. W. Blouet (ed.), The Origins of Academic Geography in the United States (Hamden,
Conn., 1981).
84 D. E. Leary, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia II, 2136–50.
409
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role as a discipline and its central significance for each particular nation.
As a result, 1945 did not bring a sudden breakthrough to recognition and
effectiveness. History shared, however, in the spread of professorships
and the founding of new institutes throughout the years of re-building
and growth.
In another respect 1945 did represent a turning point, for the subject
changed along with the value previously placed on it. The study of his-
tory had not been able to prevent the horrors of the twentieth century,
although it had often posed as a political tutor. Nor had it contributed
anything to the development of a modern democratic society in those
countries of Europe which did not already enjoy such a political struc-
ture. Historical study had tended to support positions of power, it was
alleged, rather than examining them critically. Many were inclined to
place more hope in the new social sciences.
History reacted in turn against this re-evaluation, and increasingly
moved away from the depiction of national and political history, of great
men and great powers and favoured other themes. The post-war period,
though continuing older approaches, brought a fundamental change of
direction from the history of states to social history.85 This reflected not
only contemporary ideas and experiences, but also a change in scholarly
methods. At the same time positions were adopted, which from the 1920s
onwards had led in the USA to the development of social history and in
France to the Annales school. It was an approach thought to be bet-
ter suited to a highly rationalized and technologically driven world and
permitted the focus to be on the state, law, administration, anonymous
structures, emotional movements and mass phenomena rather than indi-
viduals. The new economic history, histoire sérielle, not only used a mass
of computerized data and other technical innovations, but also expected
to gain new knowledge and new directions for research from apparently
ahistorical phenomena such as climate, birth and death rates, prices and
agricultural techniques.
In FRANCE Philippe Ariès, François Furet and Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie in the 1970s hoped to gain insights into clear historical laws
which could be revealed using these methods. The Annales school even
went beyond such social and historical questions. Its founders Marc
Bloch and Lucien Febvre, who used these approaches long before the
Second World War, strove for a broader cultural history. They saw reli-
gion, the geographical region and ideas as highly influential and to be
taken into account. In the Sixième section de l’École pratique des hautes
études, Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse sought to reduce these to
one concept. History, they argued, did not follow a linear pattern but
85 G. G. Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1996), 9f.
410
moved along different timescales according to the region. Traditional
national history lacked reality, and regional or even transnational and
super-regional investigations were what was needed to gain access to
the historical past. Geographical and biological preconditions as the per-
manent basis of human action received transforming impulses from the
prevailing social and economic circumstances, and they in turn set the
trends and recurring cycles that formed the basis of the collective and
programmed political and social conflicts. Only against such a back-
ground could the political and military events of the ‘great men and their
ideas’ be viewed and analysed.86 It was not a question of the actions of
persons or of idealized notions of individuals. What was of interest was
the complex of interhuman relationships and modes of behaviour. In the
history of mentalités pursued by a younger generation, this approach was
taken a stage further into the realm of cultural history. Robert Mandrou,
Georges Duby and Jacques LeGoff attempted to link agrarian, economic
and social history to cultural history.
All the various directions of the flourishing Annales school of the 1960s
and 1970s were concerned with themes from the Middle Ages and the
Early Modern period. They avoided the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies and contemporary history. On the whole this form of historical
thought was deeply embedded in French traditions, which partly explains
the fact that it never achieved the same unified and successful form else-
where. Some impulses from it were adopted in Europe, particularly in
Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and the German Democratic Republic,
and even in the USA, but only to a limited extent in other countries.
In the 1980s, however, the French historian and publisher, Pierre Nora,
launched an important collection on the sites of memory, Les lieux de
mémoire, which included in its scope not only major national events
and mythologies, but also places, objects and festivals.87 This was a new
approach to rethinking France and the French nation, and it had reper-
cussions on other European national histories.
In the FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY history took another
turn. The experience of the Nazi era and the knowledge of the crimes
committed caused the younger representatives of social history, which
also flourished there, to ascribe a critical function to every form of his-
torical investigation.88 The older historiography had in their view failed
completely; as the influential French Annales school was only concerned
with the pre-modern, they were left with the task of describing the recent
86 L. Raphael, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme: Theorien, Methoden,

Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2003), 96ff.
87 P. Nora (ed.) Les lieux de mémoire (Paris, 1984–92; 3 vols. in 7).
88 W. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989), particularly
207ff.
411
Notker Hammerstein
past using an approach based strictly on social history, so as to analyse
the errors and unique features of the national German past. To many
the critical theory of the ‘Frankfurt School’ seemed to provide adequate
guidelines.
In ENGLAND, in the leading social history journal Past & Present,
founded in the 1950s, Lawrence Stone opted in 1979 for a return to narra-
tive history, which, as the ‘cultural history of the everyday’, could initiate
a move away from grand structures and back towards the individual. In
so doing he was in tune with a much older form of criticism of social
history such as that practised by the Annales school, which was scep-
tical towards a belief in progress and scientific methods, the paradigms
of modernization. This criticism was repeated in other countries, and in
France it came from post-structuralism and deconstructivism (Foucault,
Derrida and Lyotard). Alterity, otherness, became a new code word, not
least thanks to the related American New Cultural History.
Thus a heterodox culture, which had hitherto been neglected, suddenly
became evident, and it was of a kind corresponding to the oppositional
commitment of many of these historians of the post-’68 generations.
It made it possible to carry out reliable reconstructions of past ages,
which were an alien and distant realm for modern historians. At the same
time, the great models of social studies had to plead guilty to the charge
of harbouring an all too optimistic belief in progress. Literature before
1970 was no longer needed, so the argument went, and a canon of guiding
values and leading works was as obsolete as the idea of national culture.
Pluralism was the name of the game.89
Not much trust was placed in a rationally determined history. This
was certainly true for French post-structuralism with its emphasis on lin-
guistic theories. Outside the texts there were no historical facts according
to Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes; instead it was always simply a
matter of linguistic codification. History, Barthes and Hayden White pos-
tulated, was like poetry: objective knowledge was not possible. In so far
as language appears as a closed text, it cannot explain anything beyond
itself, and only its inner purposes and ever present pretensions to power
can be decoded (Foucault). Power is not only a matter of central institu-
tions; everywhere it determines human communal life. From here it was
but a small step to women’s and gender history, to a political history of
ideas, and to discourse as the linking together of an author’s intentions
in the context of time.
The field of historical questions has expanded enormously without
there now being a general paradigm, such as still existed in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, to hold the various lines of questioning
89 Raphael, Geschichtswissenschaft (note 86), 215ff.
412
together and to lead them back to one another. The most that can be
cited is that an unusually critical attitude to the modern world, which after
1980 included certain anti-enlightenment components, are characteristic
features of this development.90
The fact that the older form of historiography continued to exist in
many countries does not detract from the value of the new developments
after 1945. Biographies continued to be written as before and also mono-
graphs on particular epochs and events, intellectual and political history,
treatises on the history of science and universities, on the history of inter-
national relations, on ecclesiastical and religious history; all paid due
homage to the new theories and their results, while attempting to meet
the need felt by every generation to confront or come to terms with the
past appropriate to their times.
A sub-field of history peculiar to the post-war period, whose develop-
ment well illustrates the themes of this chapter, is the history of science
and technology. Apart from a few episodic cases, the institutionalization
of the history of science in universities began shortly after the war, in
the USA, in order (as the Harvard programme put it) to teach future
citizens of the republic what they needed to know about the ‘tactics and
strategies of science’. The intellectual structure of the discipline, however,
was built (again in the US) on the teachings of Alexandre Koyré, a French
philosopher who approached the history of science as the history of ideas.
The union of Koyré’s ideas and Harvard’s programme produced Thomas
S. Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) became the
paradigm (to use the concept that made the book famous) of science for
practitioners of the social sciences throughout the world.
Beginning in the late 1960s, in response to the role of science-based
technologies in the wars in South East Asia and in large-scale indus-
trial pollution, historians of science, by then ensconced in departments of
history, science faculties, institutes of history and philosophy of science
and/or sociology of science, and programmes in ‘science, technology, and
society’, deconstructed science to what many of them saw as its ugly core.
Scientists turned out to be as susceptible to ambition, power, reputation
and greed as anyone else; their theories were no more than negotiated
settlements in what amounted to power politics, that is, social constructs.
This tendency originated in academics who knew little science, whereas
the older intellectual history of Koyré’s type was cultivated mainly by
converts to history who had been trained in science. The intellectual
direction has dominated some European countries, notably Italy, Spain,
Denmark and, though to a lesser degree, France, whereas the social direc-
tion has characterized university work in the history and sociology of
90 Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft (note 85), 101ff.
413
Dirk Heirbaut
science in the UK and, to a lesser extent, in Germany and Sweden. Since
the 1960s, and increasingly, some historians have tried to integrate the
two approaches.
As in the special case of the history of science and technology, general
history developed along parallel lines in Europe and the United States
after 1945. The possibility of a new start, the determination to learn
from the ‘errors of the past’ and the desire of ever more young people
for a university education contributed to an optimistic expansion of all
elements in the tertiary education sector. New professorial chairs opened
up unheard of opportunities for the new generation of academics and
led to a further specialization of disciplines.91 New journals appeared
together with new specialized academic societies, to serve an increasingly
internationally oriented generation of scholars. New means of transport
as well as the change in the new self-esteem of the professoriate facilitated
interchange of people and ideas.92 But this fairly long phase of reconstruc-
tion came to an end in the 1980s. Support for the social sciences and the
humanities faltered and their disciplinary foundations were questioned.
A new phase of international university and academic history had begun.
law
The history of the faculties of legal education and legal research is a part of
the history of the universities, but it is more than that. Law schools belong
to two worlds: the academic and the legal, and many law professors,
teachers and researchers are more familiar with legal professionals than
with their colleagues from other faculties. In fact, many academic lawyers
are also practising lawyers, and true academics are a rare breed in law
schools, only to be found in some non-practical, and hence very minor,
fields like the philosophy of law. Moreover, unlike the subject of other
sciences, law is not universal, but national, which means that national
law, national legal culture and national legal professions have done as
much to shape the law schools in the second half of the twentieth century
as the global evolution of science and education,93 which is generally
disregarded by lawyers, even academics, when they discuss the history,
the current situation or the reform of law faculties. Nevertheless, law
schools took part in the general evolution of the European universities,
91 In the historiographical sciences there is in addition to the traditional division into

ancient, medieval and modern history the division into early modern, contemporary,
economic, regional, scientific, ecclesiastical and administrative history.
93 Cf. J.-F. Flauss, ‘Deux siècles d’enseignement de droit constitutionnel: Esquisse d’un
bilan’, in J.-F. Flauss, L’enseignement du droit constitutionnel (Brussels, 2000), 204–5.
414
but sometimes the common pattern was warped by elements specific to
the legal world, and some developments were unique to law schools.
After the Second World War, ‘the wind changed’.94 European univer-
sities lost their leadership in the legal field to their American counterparts
for a host of reasons, such as the political and economic domination of
the United States and the emigration of some of the brightest and most
creative German scholars thence95 (and also to England96 ) in the 1930s.
In this, law only conformed to a general tendency in which the United
States displaced Germany as the world’s scientific leader. However, the
decline of German law had already started before the 1930s. After the
great codifications around 1800, European countries had developed their
own national legal systems instead of the ius commune, the common law
of Europe, which had prevailed until then. This meant that legal education
and legal science had become national, without much influence beyond
a country’s borders. Germany was an exception, as the country was not
politically unified until 1871 and thus adhered to the old ius commune,
which allowed German lawyers to keep and even expand upon their lead-
ing role in European law gained in the eighteenth century. This ended with
the codification of private law in 1900, when German law also became
national and German lawyers lost their universal status.97 Even without
the Nazi era and the emigration it engendered, German law would have
lost its key position, though the decline would have been more gradual.
The atrocities of the Nazi regime also meant that, even if German lawyers
still had the ability to lead the way in the field of law, they no longer had
the moral authority to do so. German lawyers themselves were aware
of this, and the first years after the Second World War therefore saw a
(short) flowering of the study of natural law in Germany.98
The success of German refugee lawyers in the United States and the
influence of American legal science in Europe were less marked than in
other fields, because the national character of law was an obstacle for the
94 U. Mattei, ‘Why the Wind Changed: Intellectual Leadership in Western Law’, American
Journal of Comparative Law, 42 (1994), 195–218.
95 M. Lutter, E. C. Stiefel and M. H. Hoeflich (eds.), Der Einfluss Deutscher Emigranten
auf die Rechtsentwicklung in den USA und in Deutschland (Tübingen, 1993).
96 J. Beatson and R. Zimmermann (eds.), Jurists Uprooted: German Speaking Emigré
Lawyers in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford, 2004).
97 R. C. Van Caenegem, An Historical Introduction to Private Law (Cambridge, 1992),
155–9; see also R. Zimmermann and M. Reimann (eds.), The Reception of Continental
Ideas in the Common Law World, 1820–1920 (Berlin, 1993).
98 A. Kaufmann, ‘Die Naturrechtsrenaissance der ersten Nachkriegsjahre – und was daraus
geworden ist’, in M. Stolleis, Die Bedeutung der Wörter, Festschrift für Sten Gagner
(Munich, 1991), 105–32. See, however, also M. Stolleis, ‘Reluctance to Glance in the
Mirror: The Changing Face of German Jurisprudence after 1933 and post-1945’, in C.
Joerges and N. Ghaleigh (eds.), Darker Legacies of Law in Europe: The Shadow of
National Socialism and Fascism over Europe and its Legal Traditions (Oxford, 2003),
1–18.
415
Dirk Heirbaut
diffusion of ideas. Hence, the achievements of the émigré lawyers in the
United States were limited to fields in which the national element is less
important or even absent: philosophy of law, legal history, Roman law,
public and private international law, and most of all, comparative law,
and even then acceptance was sometimes only achieved after retraining.99
National boundaries also hindered the transplant of American legal ideas
and theories in Europe, even though the United States became the for-
eign country of choice for European lawyers to study for a postgraduate
degree. Nevertheless, important new American schools of jurisprudence,
such as law and economics or critical legal studies,100 have not really
taken root in Europe; European education and research have remained
much more positivistic and authority based: law is what the law lords,
the legislators, the judges and the leading professors say it is.101 There
are of course exceptions to this. For example, even though the tradi-
tional lectures were not replaced by the American case-study method, in
which leading decisions by the courts are analysed in a Socratic dialogue
between a teacher and his students, casebooks based on the American
model that supplement the lectures have become popular, but they are
used in another context – more to teach the rules than to teach the process
of legal reasoning that has shaped these rules.102
The case-study method, which is only fit for small bodies of students,
was not transplanted to Europe after the Second World War not only
because of differences in the legal culture, but also because of the democ-
ratization and ‘massification’ of education in Europe since the 1960s,
which had an even greater impact on law faculties than on other parts
of the university. Both university boards and governments considered
law teaching to be cheap. As long as the lecture hall was not filled, no
extra cost accrued for adding an additional student and, if one, why not
hundreds? The result was that classes of hundreds of students became
the norm, although this did not lead to any greater investment in staff
or facilities. In many countries law faculties are the faculties that receive
the least money,103 even though law professors have been increasingly
burdened with advising government about new legislation. Nevertheless,
99 K. Graham, ‘The Refugee Jurist and the American Law Schools, 1933–1941’, American
Journal of Comparative Law, 50 (2002), 777–818.
100 See N. Duxbury, Patterns of American Jurisprudence (Oxford, 1997).
101 J. H. Merryman, ‘Legal Education There and Here: A Comparison’, Stanford Law
Review, 27 (1975), 869.
102 Cf. F. Ranieri, ‘Juristen für Europa: Wahre und falsche Probleme in der derzeitigen
Reformdiskussion zur deutschen Juristenausbildung’, in D. Strempel (ed.), Juristenaus-
bildung zwischen Internationalität und Individualität (Baden-Baden, 1998), 292–301.
103 R. Wahl, ‘Die Misere der Betreuungsrelation in der Juristenausbildung. Wie eine Juris-
tenausbildung durch gesetzlich vorgesehene Normen denaturiert wird’, in Strempel,
Juristenausbildung (note 102), 379–94.
416
law faculties became popular with students in the 1960s for a number of
reasons: a legal education was the best general education on the market, it
opened the door to some high-status professions or top jobs in the admin-
istration, and students had to work less to obtain their degree. Hence the
law faculty became a refuge for superfluous young people wanting an
easy ticket to a diploma – a tendency that was more marked in the Latin
countries than in the north of Europe.104
The popularity of law studies made them harder. Although a law degree
is necessary, it is not sufficient for being allowed entry into most of the
legal professions. The greater influx of newcomers has led to stricter
entrance requirements; new lawyers, judges, notaries and so on have to
take mandatory professional training and/or exams. Apart from Germany
and Switzerland, where the regional authorities organize the exams, entry
to the legal professions is controlled by professional organizations.105
Whereas other faculties acquired more freedom after the war, with less
government intervention in their affairs, law schools slipped under the
tutelage of the legal professions. As these tend to be rather conser-
vative, new and unconventional forms of law teaching have not been
able to break through, and the same holds for legal scholarship.106 The
increased importance of legal practitioners has also led to a certain dis-
dain for academics, and this trend is most pronounced for those profes-
sions with their own training schools, as in France, where magistrates
study at a special school.107 Experiments to integrate theory and prac-
tice into university education, such as in Germany from 1971 to 1984,
have failed.108 In general, the legal professions, supported by students
who wanted their education to be as useful as possible, have promoted
the idea that a legal education should be practical instead of liberal, and
this has led to the disappearance or reduction of meta-juridical courses
in the curriculum. A victim was the study of Roman law, which for cen-
turies had been the only law (together with canon law) to be studied at
universities.109
104 Cf. W. Twining, Blackstone’s Tower: The English Law School (London, 1994), 51.
105 J. Lonbay, et al., Training Lawyers in the European Community (London, 1990).
106 Cf. M. Feldman, ‘The Transformation of an Academic Discipline: Law Professors in the
Past and Future (or Toy Story Too)’, Journal of Legal Education, 54 (2004), 471–98;
R. Zimmermann, ‘An Introduction to German Legal Culture’, in W. F. Ebke and
M. W. Finkin (eds.), Introduction to German Law (The Hague, 1996), 22.
107 C. Atias, ‘Enseigner le droit’, in ‘L’enseignement du droit civil à la fin du XXe siècle.
Libres propos sur une question fort débattue’, Revue trimestrielle de droit civil, 96
(1998), 287.
108 J. Brunnée, ‘The Reform of Legal Education in Germany: The Never-Ending Story and
European Integration’, Journal of Legal Education, 42 (1992), 416–18.
109 See, e.g., for France, J. Hilaire, ‘La place de l’histoire du droit dans l’enseignement et
dans la formation du comparatiste’, Revue internationale de droit comparé, 50 (1998),
323.
417
Dirk Heirbaut
Apart from the greater interference of the legal profession, law stud-
ies have also become harder because of the enormous proliferation of
laws. Like the United States, the countries of Europe are ‘nations under
lawyers’.110 In the decades after the Second World War, law has intruded
into all parts of society. Law and lawyers have invaded factories, farms,
hospitals, schools, sports clubs and so on. Consequently, all kinds of
new fields of law, such as aviation law or sports law, have come into
existence and are studied at university, but mostly in the form of elec-
tives. Insurance or labour law, for example, may have become of extreme
importance to ordinary citizens, but the law curriculum does not always
give them their due.111 Law has come to dominate society because it is
an instrument of government for social engineering. Public law, which
deals with government and its relationship with the citizens, has thus
overtaken private law, which deals with the relationships of citizens
amongst themselves. In many law schools, however, private law still
dominates, because its professors are well entrenched; public law has only
been taught as a separate discipline since the seventeenth century or even
later.112
The rise of public law is a minor effect of government interference
when compared with the growing body of legislation. In other sciences
the basics may be rather stable, but in law one has to keep in mind the
following adage: ‘With three words from the legislator, whole libraries
become waste paper.’113 Unfortunately, regular overhauls of major parts
of the law have become so common and judges have become so active
in the creation of case law that many jurists can no longer find the time
for new research, but have to limit themselves to describing the latest
changes. This does not enhance their status among their colleagues at
the university.114 Not writing for the practitioners would, however, lead
to an even greater rift with the legal professions. From the 1960s critics
have been stating that it would be better to educate lawyers than to teach
110 M. A. Glendon, A Nation under Lawyers: How the Crisis in the Legal Profession is
Transforming American Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
111 B. Bercusson, ‘Law, Legal Education and Practice and Labour and Social Law’, in B. De
Witte and C. De Forder (eds.), The Common Law of Europe and the Future of Legal
Education (Deventer, 1992), 429–31.
112 See, e.g., J. W. F. Allison, A Continental Distinction in the Common Law: A Historical
and Comparative Perspective on English Public Law (Oxford, 2000).
113 ‘Drei Berichtigende Wörter des Gesetzgebers und ganze Bibliotheken werden zu Maku-
latur.’ From an 1847 lecture by J. H. von Kirchmann (for a recent edition of this
lecture, see H. Meyer-Tscheppe, Julius Hermann von Kirchmann: Die Wertlosigkeit
der Jurisprudenz als Wissenschaft (Heidelberg, 2000).
114 W. Twining, W. Farnsworth, S. Vogenauer and F. Tesón, ‘The Role of Academics in
the Legal System’, in P. Cane and M. Tushnet (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Legal
Studies (Oxford and New York, 2003), 940.
418
the law.115 In reality, this has not happened, and the exploding body of
case law has led to ever growing demands on students, because, although
professors may claim to be interested in general principles only, exams
still focus on ever more detailed problems.116 One reaction to the flood of
legislation was the call for deregulation, which was started by the law and
economics movement in the United States in the 1970s,117 but adherents
of law and economics have been less influential in Europe, despite some
successes in the 1980s, because their scholarship has been associated with
right-wing anti-welfare state politics. (In fact, the 1990s saw another great
growth of legislation.) Another way of dealing with the growing body of
law is specialization,118 but this is not always welcomed; many lawyers
prefer a generalist over a specialist, and most law programmes reflect this.
Specialization is growing, however, in professional practice and research,
where the isolation of individual fields of law is becoming a growing
problem.119
The evolution outlined above influenced all countries in different ways,
not only because their universities are different, but also because of their
national legal tradition. England is a special case, as its legal system went
its own way and relegated the universities to the sidelines.120 Not until
after the war were most practitioners willing to answer ‘yes’ to the ques-
tion: ‘Can English law be taught at the universities?’121 Universities have
since come to dominate legal studies in Britain, but even today it is still
possible to become a solicitor without having an LL B.122 Nevertheless,
there is a convergence of legal systems in Europe and thus also of legal
education and research.123
115 E.g. M. Storme, ‘Beschouwingen over de juridische opleiding’, in F. Fleerackers (ed.),

Recht en vorming: Juridisch onderwijs in de kering (Brussels, 2003), 23.
116 See, e.g., for Germany, E. W. Böckenförde, ‘Juristenausbildung – auf dem Weg ins
Abseits?’, Juristenzeitung, 52 (1997), 317–26.
117 See about this subject in general, J. Den Hertog, ‘General Theories of Regulation’, in
B. Bouckaert and G. De Geest (eds.), Encyclopedia of Law and Economics, Vol. III
(Cheltenham, 2000), 223–70.
118 H. Palm, ‘Gedanken zum Einheitsjuristen’, Juristische Zeitschrift, 45 (1990), 609–18.
119 Cf. more generally A. Kronman, The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession
(Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
120 See R. C. van Caenegem, Judges, Legislators and Professors: Chapters in European
Legal History (Cambridge, 1987).
121 This question was posed by A. V. Dicey in his inaugural lecture as holder of the Vinerian
chair in Oxford (A. V. Dicey, Can English Law be Taught at the Universities? (London,
1883)).
122 R. Burridge, ‘Landmarks, Signposts and Directions in Legal Education in the United
Kingdom’, Journal of Legal Education, 51 (2001), 315–24; A. Wilson Green, ‘Legal
Education in England’, Journal of Legal Education, 28 (1976), 137–80.
123 Cf. B. Markesinis, ‘Learning from Europe and Learning in Europe’, in B. Markesinis
(ed.), The Gradual Convergence: Foreign Ideas, Foreign Influences and European Law
on the Eve of the 21st Century (Oxford, 1993), 1–30.
419
Dirk Heirbaut
The main cause of this is the drive towards European Union, which
began in the 1950s. Initially, its impact upon the law schools was limited,
and in many cases – even in some of the old Member States – European
law only became part of the curriculum in the 1990s,124 which proves
that law faculties were slow to catch on to this evolution. Europeaniza-
tion was contrary to the experience of European lawyers. Law was
national, and at the university one could only study the national law
of one’s own country; the diploma one obtained had an effect lim-
ited to that country. However, from the 1970s both the institutions
and the citizens of Europe strove for a European-wide recognition of
diplomas. Several directives (in 1977, 1989 and 1995) and, since the
1990s, famous cases (Reyners, Van Binsbergen, Thieffry, Klopp, Vlas-
sopoulou, Kraus and Gebhard) enlarged the market for lawyers.125 Yet
the freedom to establish oneself in another country as a lawyer is still
limited, mainly because at university one is still taught the law of one’s
own country, not the legal systems of the other Member States of the
Union. Universities have therefore placed a greater emphasis on Euro-
pean and comparative law, but the bulk of what most of them teach is still
national.
Several scholars have called for a European law school, modelled on
the American national schools,126 in which one does not learn the law
of the home state but rather the general principles of the law of all fifty
states of the US. Likewise a European law school should teach the general
principles of the legal systems of the European countries rather than that
of only one country. The first example is the European Law School at
Maastricht University, founded in 1995,127 but the Maastricht experience
has shown that a truly European law school is not yet a reality, as the
Maastricht students still have to study Dutch law. Moreover, at first,
the Maastricht teachers had a problem, because they wanted to teach a
subject that had led only a marginal existence when they started. The
bulk of law is still national, and before the 1990s textbooks, law reviews,
124 Cf. R. Bakker, ‘Europeanization of Law and Lawyers v. National Provincialism in

Legal Education’, in B. S. Jackson and D. McGoldrick (eds.), Legal Visions of the New
Europe (London, 1993), 346.
125 H. Schneider, ‘The Free Movement of Lawyers in Europe and its Consequences for the
Legal Profession and the Legal Education in the Member States’, in M. Faure, J. Smits
and H. Schneider (eds.), Towards a European Ius Commune in Legal Education and
Research (Antwerp, 2002), 15–38.
126 See for references, the first articles in De Witte and De Forder, Common Law (note
111).
127 A. W. Heringa, ‘Towards a European Law School: A Proposal for a Competitive, Diver-
sified Model of Transnational Co-operation’, in Faure, Smits and Schneider, European
Ius Commune (note 125), 5–6.
420
casebooks and the like were still national, with only a few exceptions
such as comparative law or legal history.128
However, in the 1990s, several international groups of lawyers started
to write down the general principles of European law,129 the first and most
famous of these collaborations of European lawyers being the Lando com-
mission for contract law.130 The enthusiasm these projects have engen-
dered is enormous. In 2001 the European Parliament accepted a resolu-
tion calling for a common body of rules on contract law in 2010131 and,
less ambitiously but more realistically, the European Commission put for-
ward an action plan in 2003 to establish a ‘common frame of reference’
for European contract law.132 Moreover, European journals appeared in
the 1990s,133 as did European casebooks134 and textbooks.135 One may
wonder whether some scholars are not exaggerating, as there is even a
commission that wants to harmonize and unify European family law.136
The new enthusiasm for European law also received stimulation from
research into legal history, for example, from Reinhard Zimmermann’s
The Law of Obligations.137 Its message can easily be reduced to:
Europe had one legal science in the past, the ius commune of the era before
the great codifications, and it will once again have a common legal science.
This message has been misunderstood by many who thought it wanted

to have one common law instead of one common legal culture, in which
national or regional rules would not disappear, but in which lawyers
128 Since 1974 the European University Institute in San Domenico di Fiesole near Florence
(see chapter 3, 119) promotes in its law department graduate studies on the legal
implications of the EC/EU.
129 R. Zimmermann, Roman Law, Contemporary Law, European Law: The Civilian Tra-
dition Today (Oxford, 2001), 108–9.
130 The work of the Lando commission is available in several European languages. In
English: O. Lando and H. Beale (eds.), Principles of European Contract Law, Vols. I
and II (Dordrecht, 1999); O. Lando, E. Clive, A. Prüm and R. Zimmermann, Principles
of European Contract Law, Vol. III (Dordrecht, 2003).
131 ‘Resolution for the Approximation of the Civil and Commercial Law of the Member
States 15 November 2001’, Official Journal of the European Union (2001), C 140 E,
538.
132 Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and Council, a
More Coherent European Contract Law – an Action Plan, COM 2003, 68 (final).
133 E.g. Zeitschrift für Europäisches Privatrecht and European Review of Private Law,
both since 1993.
134 E.g. W. van Gerven, P. Larouche and J. Lever, Cases, Materials and Text on National,
Supranational and International Tort Law (Oxford, 2000).
135 E.g. H. Kötz and A. Flessner, European Contract Law, Vol. I (Oxford, 1997) (first
published in German in 1996).
136 See K. Boele-Woelki (ed.), Perspectives for the Unification and Harmonisation of Family
Law in Europe (Antwerp, 2003).
137 R. Zimmermann, The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundations of the Civilian Tradi-
tion (Cape Town, 1990; Munich, 1992; Oxford, 1996).
421
Dirk Heirbaut
would use a common legal grammar, common textbooks, casebooks and
so on.138
One should not overestimate the importance of the new ius commune.
There will always be a need for purely local lawyers,139 and it can be
argued that there will also be more need of them, as the decades since the
war have also seen a growing importance of regional law and institutions
in countries as diverse as the United Kingdom and Spain.140
Moreover, today’s lawyers can still get by, even if they only read pub-
lications from their own country, and there are still many obstacles to be
overcome, not least the lack of a common language.141 However, thanks
to Europeanization there exist once again scholars like Zimmermann,
Lando, von Bar, Gandolfi and Van Gerven, to name only a few, who are
known all over Europe, at least in academic circles. Perhaps the new Euro-
pean lawyers will be able to regain the leadership lost to the American
law schools, but that belongs to the future, not to history.
138 S. Mittelsten Scheid, ‘Zimmermann und das römisch-kanonische Recht als Grundlage
einer europäischen Zivilrechtsordnung’, in T. Hoeren (ed.), Zivilrechtliche Entdecker
(Munich, 2001), 442. See also D. Heirbaut, ‘Comparative Law and Zimmermann’s
New ius commune: A Life Line or a Death Sentence for Legal History?’, in Ex iusta
causa traditum: Essays in Honour of Eric Pool, Fundamina, Editio specialis (Pretoria,
2005), 136–53.
139 E. Hondius, Juridisch onderwijs in vergelijkend perspectief (Deventer, 1999).
140 H. L. MacQueen, A. Vaquer and S. Espiau (eds.), Regional Private Laws and Codifica-
tion in Europe (Cambridge, 2003).
141 Hence the importance of law and language programmes (P. Goldsmith, ‘Globalization:
The European Experience’, Journal of Legal Education, 46 (1996), 319).
422
select bibliography
Acham, K., Nörr, K. W., and Schefold, B. (eds.) Erkenntnisgewinne, Erkennt-
nisverluste: Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten in den Wirtschafts-, Rechts-
und Sozialwissenschaften zwischen den 20er und 50er Jahren, Stuttgart,
1998.
Albrecht, C., Behrmann, G. C., Bock, M., Homann, H., and Tenbruck, F. H. Die
intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der
Frankfurter Schule, Frankfurt and New York, 1999.
Andrews W. C. (ed.) International Handbook of Political Science, Westport,
Conn., and London, 1982.
Barbano, F. La sociologia in Italia: Ingressi teorici negli anni della formazione
(’50–60), Turin, 1986.
Beatson, J., and Zimmermann, R. (eds.) Jurists Uprooted: German Speaking
Emigré Lawyers in Twentieth Century Britain, Oxford, 2004.
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1982 (German translation, Die Sozialwissenschaften seit 1945, Frankfurt
and New York, 1986).
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and New York, 2003.
Clark, B. R. and Neave, G. (eds.) The Encyclopedia of Higher Education, Vol. II:
Analytical Perspectives, Oxford, New York, Seoul and Tokyo, 1992.
Coats, A. W. Bob (ed.) The Development of Economics in Western Europe since
1945, London 2000.
De Witte, B., and De Forder, C. (eds.) The Common Law of Europe and the
Future of Legal Education, Deventer, 1992.
Faure, M., Smits, J., and Schneider, H. (eds.) Towards a European Ius Commune
in Legal Education and Research, Antwerp, 2002.
Heilbron, J. L. (ed.) The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science,
Oxford and New York, 2003.
Iggers, G. G. Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen, 1996.
Kohl, K. H. Ethnologie, die Wissenschaft vom kulturell Fremden, 2nd edn,
Munich, 2000.
Lemert, C. E. (ed.) French Sociology, New York, 1981.
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Lutter, M., Stiefel, E. C., and Hoeflich, M. H. (eds.) Der Einfluss deutscher
Emigranten auf die Rechtsentwicklung in den USA und in Deutschland,
Tübingen, 1993.
Manicas, P. T. A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Oxford, 1987.
Petermann, W. Die Geschichte der Ethnologie, Wuppertal, 2004.
Raphael, L. Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme: Theorien, Metho-
den, Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart, Munich, 2003.
Sills, D. L. (ed.) International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, New York,
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Strempel, D. (ed.) Juristenausbildung zwischen Internationalität und Individu-
alität, Baden-Baden, 1998.
423
CHAPTER 11
THE MATHEMATICAL, EXACT

SCIENCES
JOHN ZIMAN∗
a traditional scene in a larger frame

Our concern in the present chapter is with ‘the mathematical, exact sci-
ences’. What should that include? As always in university affairs, reality
can never be simply categorized. Mathematics has a proud humanistic
tradition and important applications throughout the natural and social
sciences: in many universities, it is not even in the same faculty as physics,
the epitome of an ‘exact’ science. Chemistry is normally arithmetically
exact, but is not limited in principle to what can be described mathemati-
cally. Geology is usually classed as one of the physical sciences (although
with important biological elements), but relies very much on diagram-
matic and verbal description. The increasing difficulty of demarcating
between these great areas of university activity is one of the historical
phenomena with which we shall deal.
Another long-established boundary is between science as knowledge
and science as know-how, between the basic sciences and their associ-
ated technologies. Previous volumes have traced the emergence of the
physical sciences as disciplines in their own right, differentiated aca-
demically from the various branches of engineering to which they are
cognitively connected. Nevertheless, university-type institutions devoted
explicitly to the education of technological practitioners, such as tech-
nische Hochschulen, hautes écoles techniques and colleges of technology,
have always provided their students with formal instruction in the fun-
damentals of physics, chemistry and mathematics, to which their faculty
∗ The late John Ziman was a theoretical physicist and an expert on science policy. His
chapter is as much a primary as a secondary source for the development of the exact sci-
ences since the Second World War. Its particular value lies in its treatment of the physical
sciences that deal with the solid state and of policy considerations related particularly to
them.
424
The mathematical, exact sciences
members have often made distinguished research contributions. By the
middle of the twentieth century, a frontier that was never easy to define
in principle was already becoming indefensible at many points.
By this time, university education in the exact sciences focused on
preparing students for research careers in academic, governmental or
industrial institutions, or for teaching the same subjects to aspiring scien-
tists in secondary schools. For the last half-century, the history of the exact
sciences and mathematics in the university in Europe has been dominated
by attitudes and activities related to original research, at the expense of
attention to undergraduate teaching, learning and career development.
This again is a theme which we shall explore further.
By 1945 the centre of the research enterprise had migrated across the
Atlantic, along with many eminent European scientists seeking refuge in a
free country not ravaged by war. Following the American example, gov-
ernments and industrial firms throughout the developed world began to
invest much more heavily in basic research inside their own laboratories,
as seedcorn for technological innovation. The history of the mathemati-
cal, exact sciences in the university in Europe can no longer be presented
as a chronicle of research developments confined principally to universi-
ties or to Europe. A much larger frame is now required to enclose a scene
whose origins lie deep in the past.
The interval from 1945 to 1995 divides conveniently into three equal
periods of some fifteen years each.
Post-war reconstruction 1945–1960

In the cynical language of soldiering, the physical scientists ‘had a good
war’. They came back into civilian life with a very high reputation for
their military achievements, especially radar and the atomic bomb. The
public were encouraged into great expectations of future peaceful benefits
on the same grand scale.1 The scientists themselves had become accus-
tomed to a high level of government funding for their defence research,
and in this period had no difficulty in retaining this privileged status for
all their work. They had also acquired a taste for much more elaborate
instrumentation, and had learnt to use a wider range of engineering tech-
niques. In Europe, however, material resources were still very scarce, and
the main desire of most university scientists was to take up again the
lines of research that had made the first half of the century scientifically
so exciting. It took them a while to realize – and to persuade their gov-
ernments – that a much more sophisticated research methodology had
developed in the United States during and after the war, and that their
1 V. Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier (Washington, D.C., 1945).
425
John Ziman
countries would have to invest much more boldly in advanced equipment
if they were to keep up.
Expansion 1960–1975
In this period, the resources and personnel devoted to the exact sciences
expanded at an enormous rate. It is not clear whether this was driven
by the mass expansion of higher education itself (as it might have been
in the humanities) or whether it fed on the hope of technological ben-
efits. For example, student numbers in the exact sciences may not have
risen in proportion to research activity. European laboratories were now
being re-equipped on a scale comparable to those of North America,
many European scientists had had experience of working in the United
States, and the German research machine was back on the road. Although
science in Europe was still fragmented and incoherent, with no central
source of massive funds to compare with the US Departments of Defense
and Energy, it was becoming competitive with the US effort in many
areas.
Steady state 1975–1995

The levelling off in research funding in this period was more marked in
the UK than elsewhere.2 Nevertheless, there was a distinct transition from
an almost freely expanding system, and much more questioning of the
priorities of academic research, especially in relation to its economic capa-
bilities. Yet this was a time of unprecedented scientific progress, fuelled
and lubricated by the new communications technologies. In the West,
the scientific programmes of the European Community and other inter-
national bodies were beginning to play an important part in university
science. In Central and Eastern Europe, however, earlier hopes of ‘catch-
ing up with the West’ were fading, as economies slumped, technology
faltered and the national scientific academies, which had taken over basic
research from the universities after the war, stagnated.
The detailed history of developments in different countries, disciplines
and institutions is obviously far more complicated and diverse than could
possibly be presented here. But this scheme does indicate the successive
changes in the general climate of the scientific enterprise, as experienced
in Europe by the author since 1945.
2 S. Cozzens, P. Healey, A. Rip and J. Ziman, The Research System in Transition

(Dordrecht, 1990).
426
policing the internal frontiers of knowledge

The history of the university, like the history of the nation state, is of a
dialectic between small and large domains and internal consolidation. At
the beginning of our period, the exact sciences were sharply delineated
into a few separate disciplines, such as chemistry, physics, geology and
mathematics. Each of these was taught to undergraduates as if it were
a single subject, dealing with a particular aspect of the world according
to a distinctive and unique method. It was the task of the university to
turn out ‘chemists’ or ‘physicists’ or ‘geologists’ or ‘mathematicians’ who
understood things in the appropriate way and knew how to improve that
understanding.
At that time, also, the various sciences were carefully differentiated aca-
demically from their corresponding technologies. Physicists might even-
tually become expert at applying their knowledge, but they did not attend
the same courses as mechanical or electrical engineers. Real chemists were
not supposed to be interested in the messy reactions that take place in
petrochemical plants and so-called ‘applied mathematicians’ learnt how
to solve the equations of fluid flow without ever studying the properties
of a real propeller or turbine.
These boundaries between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ science, and between the
various disciplines, extended upwards and outwards from the university.
In the UK, for example, it was not until the 1960s that the Physical
Society, whose members were mostly university teachers, merged with the
Institute of Physics, representing physics graduates working in industry.
German industrial firms still do not employ ‘physicists’ in ‘engineering’
roles. In most countries, professional scientists working side by side in
government R&D establishments were classified separately as chemists,
physicists, mathematicians and so on, with their own career paths to
pursue.
This ideological ‘disciplinism’ was both a reflection of and a resource
for professional and organizational differentiation within universities.
Like all other academic subjects, the exact sciences were separated into
distinct departments or faculties, each staffed almost entirely by gradu-
ates of the corresponding discipline, all supposedly engaged in original
research on topics within that discipline. Even if they had been qual-
ified formally to move to other departments, university teachers were
trapped in their disciplines, not so much by their teaching expertise as
by their heavy personal investments in highly specialized research. Inter-
institutional mobility within the same discipline was strongly encouraged
in most European countries by the arrangements for personal promotion,
but it was only the ablest, most enterprising, or most pressed, that would
move permanently to another country.
427
John Ziman
It has been argued3 that organizational structures within academia
correlate with intellectual structures – for example, that an abstract dis-
cipline such as mathematics would develop quite different departmental
arrangements from an observational discipline such as geology. This may
be so across the whole academic spectrum, but structural variations of
this kind within the exact sciences are completely swamped by the general
variation of university systems from country to country in Europe.4
It was recognized that certain fields of research lay athwart the regular
disciplinary boundaries. But interdisciplinary subjects, such as chemical
physics, geophysics, mathematical statistics and meteorology (to name
but a few), were marginalized both for teaching and research, and often
led a precarious institutional existence in small, poorly esteemed districts
of the academic map. It was also understood, though seldom officially
acknowledged, that the major scientific disciplines, like the major states of
Europe, were internally subdivided into provinces whose inhabitants had
little in common. The organic and inorganic chemists were as united as
the Czechs and the Slovaks. Pure mathematics claimed a nobler heritage
than its various applications but was as divided as North Italy into the
ancient republics of analysis, number theory, algebra, geometry and so
on. Physics, which had been forcibly united, like nineteenth-century Ger-
many, by Newton and Maxwell, was falling apart into those who used
quantum theory, those who used relativity, those who used both, and
those – still quite a number in the 1940s and 1950s – who used neither,
and did not understand them well enough to teach them properly.
There were significant local institutional variations in the institutional
location of theoretical physics. It might be housed in a professional insti-
tute of its own, as at Copenhagen, or in an informal research group of a
physics laboratory, as at Bristol, or bundled in with applied mathematics
in a mathematics faculty, as at Cambridge. Exactly the same research in
theoretical chemistry might be practised as chemistry, physics, or mathe-
matics, according to the circumstances. According to the way that it had
developed locally, metallurgy was studied as a part of chemistry or of
physics or of engineering – or it might even boast a department of its
own.
The honours list of outstanding centres, whose research advances prior
to the war had set the pace of curriculum development in particular
subjects, retained its influence over the national flow of students, faculty,
research funds, and the trans-national traffic in scientific visitors from
outside Europe. But the excision of the great German schools of research
that had dominated the exact sciences in the previous era opened the
3 R. Whitley, The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences (Oxford, 1984).
4 See chapters 2 (‘Patterns’) and 7 (‘Curriculum, Students, Education’).
428
way for new centres of excellence to emerge in various other European
countries, even though these could not compete seriously with the leading
American departments in their various specialties. The best European
research groups, along with the many, many mediocre groups who aspired
to emulate them, sought their scientific inspiration across the Atlantic,
rather than in neighbouring countries.
Those who experienced the broad but intensive education characteris-
tic of American graduate schools returned to Europe (if they did return)
with important shared experiences and ambitions. Another spur to inte-
gration was the textbook. Translations of such famous works as P. A.
M. Dirac’s Quantum Mechanics or Richard Courant and David Hilbert’s
Methoden der mathematischen Physik could be used throughout Europe,
showing that there was already an established common culture of teach-
ing and research. It was thus easy from a scientific point of view, although
often still very difficult for other reasons such as language or conditions
of employment, for physicists to cross national boundaries for work. The
differences between national university systems and, indeed, between dif-
ferent universities within the same country were not so much in the
subjects taught or in the approach to these subjects, as in the depth and
competence of the instruction.
In the first phase of our period (1945–60), professional ‘disciplinism’
was still the dominant ideology in the exact sciences in European uni-
versities. Nevertheless, these traditional disciplinary and subdisciplinary
boundaries were actually becoming as obsolete as national and regional
frontiers. The exact sciences were beginning to merge into what might
be called a ‘language area’, characterized by mathematical models built
around differential equations. The frontiers of this area were not officially
defined, since they ran right through the centres of several entrenched
disciplines. Inorganic chemists belonged to this area, in so far as they
were mainly concerned with simple compounds whose properties could
best be understood in the terminology of quantum theory. They could
scarcely understand the organic chemists, across the border, who spoke
a very different technical language centred on a subtle non-quantitative
phenomenology for inferring the structures of more and more elaborate
molecules of biological significance, such as DNA.
Within the language area of the physical sciences, however, it was
already intellectually feasible to move from one discipline to another,
using the same repertoire of basic skills. In the 1950s and 1960s, this
could be risky, since it usually meant abandoning a hard-won academic
niche and scholarly reputation for a new speciality.5 But as time went
5 J. Ziman, Knowing Everything about Nothing: Specialization and Change in Scientific

Careers (Cambridge, 1987).
429
John Ziman
on, the social barriers that previously differentiated the various exact
sciences, and framed them off from the non-academic world, began to
fade and dissolve. This shows up in the emergence of new interdisciplinary
research areas and trans-sectoral institutions, for example, centres for
research on materials, ‘systems’, the atmosphere and so on, jointly funded
by universities, governments and industrial firms. Beneath the surface
there was more cross-fertilization and interdependence of the disciplines,
university departments, scientific professions, government agencies and
economic sectors that span the many dimensions of R&D in the exact
sciences.
‘Interdisciplinarity’ is one of the perennial slogans of academic reform –
and perennially its champions are disappointed. How was it that it has
developed so extensively in the exact sciences in European universities
in the last twenty years? A number of factors have contributed, some
internal to the academic enterprise, some stemming from changes in the
social, political and economic environment of advanced science.
The most obvious factor is the diffusion of new research technolo-
gies from physics and electronic engineering into all the neighbouring
disciplines. This methodological revolution began during the interwar
years, with the introduction of electronic measuring instruments into
chemical and geological research. This process was hastened by scientists
returning to their laboratories with wartime communications and radar
experience; by the 1960s ability to apply these techniques was essential
for experimental or observational research in all the exact sciences. But
the real revolution came in the 1970s, as microelectronic control, data-
processing and digital computing capabilities were linked to, combined
with and eventually incorporated into every kind of research instrument.
This development was irresistible. By definition, all research in the exact
sciences involves the acquisition and logical manipulation of quantitative
data. This is a task that can be performed by digital microelectronics with
ever-increasing capacity, speed and algorithmic sophistication. The Euro-
pean universities did not play a major role in initiating this revolution.
Their scientists were only marginally involved in the invention and devel-
opment of the hardware and software that made it possible, and they were
relatively slow in adopting the new instruments and techniques that were
becoming common in American research laboratories. But by the early
1980s, they had caught up; university physics or chemistry laboratories
in Western Europe were as well equipped with computers, data terminals
and computerized instruments as their counterparts in the United States.
The same cannot be said of the exact sciences in the universities of Central
and Eastern Europe, where the lag in instrumental capabilities sometimes
made it impossible to keep at the international frontier in experimental
research.
430
The penetration into all the exact sciences (including pure mathemat-
ics) of information technology brought them closer together. The linkages
were not merely technical, in the sense that the same visual display units,
circuit boards and high-level languages were in use in almost every build-
ing of the science area of every campus. All the sciences were beginning to
learn the same new ‘intellectual’ procedures, such as pattern recognition,
computer simulation of spatial phenomena, or tomographic reconstruc-
tion of observational data. A procedure that had been developed in geo-
physical prospecting could be just what was needed for non-destructive
testing of materials. A massively parallel supercomputer acquired origi-
nally for oceanographic studies could later be used for working out the
whole history of the universe, or the interaction of quarks inside a nucleus,
or the chemical reactions in a flame.
X-ray diffraction, electron microscopy, laser optics, synchrotron radia-
tion, radioactive isotopes, mass spectrometry – the list is endless – are put
to use nowadays in all branches of the natural sciences from astronomy
to zoology. The scanning tunnelling microscope can provide exquisitely
detailed topographic information about a solid surface, whether of a
structural alloy, a silicon chip, a meteorite, a mineral or a large organic
molecule. A laser beam may be used to measure the creep of conti-
nents or catch a chemical reaction in a state of transition. This diffu-
sion of new experimental techniques does not stop at the boundaries of
the exact sciences. X-ray optics is exploited to study stars and starfish,
macromolecules and membranes. Synchrotron radiation has applications
throughout the sciences. The recent emergence of a whole cluster of
generic research technologies is a major force for change in every Euro-
pean university.
trans-disciplinary disciplines
According to the old image of the tree of knowledge, various aspects of
the natural world can be characterized according to an innate structure,
ranging from the quark to the quasar in scale, and from the particle to the
political party in complexity. An observation or theory could be assigned
to a particular science according to the aspect of nature that it illuminated.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the tree metaphor was in trou-
ble. To switch metaphors, all the Dark Continents, the terrae incognitae,
had been traversed, roughly surveyed and colonized by eager pioneers.
At the junctions of the continental plates, buffer zones were established,
whose compound names – geochemistry, astrophysics, geophysics, chem-
ical physics (not to be confused with physical chemistry!), mathematical
physics and so on – indicated their hybrid status. Only molecular biology,
located between the biochemical and cellular aspects of organic nature,
431
John Ziman
has emerged as a brand new science with a previously unexplored subject
matter.
Despite the wonderful progress and amazing discoveries the exact sci-
ences have made in the past fifty years, they did not open doors to quite
unsuspected realms of being. Physics, for example, seeking the funda-
mental constituents of the natural world, has dug down into the atomic
nucleus, through the strata of electrons and nucleons, photons and neutri-
nos, to lay bare the deeper levels of quarks and gluons. But most physicists
would regard these discoveries, including their theoretical interpretations
and unifications, as successive stages in a grand research programme that
began with the discovery of the constituents of the nucleus in the 1930s.6
Astronomy, similarly, has obtained striking evidence of a much wider
range of objects and phenomena than was imagined in the 1930s, but its
general conception of the cosmos is not totally different from what was
being taught to students at that time.
Since the early 1970s, most European universities have been partici-
pants in a new academic phenomenon: the coalescence of elements drawn
from a number of existing disciplines into a broad new field of science.
Indeed, these trans-disciplinary fields are often so wide in their scope that
they extend far beyond the exact sciences. Cognitive science, for example,
involves philosophy, psychology and physiology, as well as mathematics
and computing. Earth science includes many geographical aspects of the
social sciences as well as geology and geophysics. Information technol-
ogy is not just advanced engineering, since it depends fundamentally on
mathematics and physics on the one side, and on psychology, sociology
and management science on the other.
As a case in point, materials science extends right across the estab-
lished exact sciences and their associated technologies.7 The knowledge
and techniques that it derives from physics and chemistry come from the
main stream of research in these traditional disciplines, whilst its applica-
tions are radically transforming all branches of electrical, mechanical and
structural engineering. Originally it might have been described as a very
loose alliance of recognized subdisciplines such as metallurgy, continuum
mechanics, crystallography, polymer chemistry and solid state physics.
Now it might be represented as a confederation of innumerable research
specialities, concerned with a variety of material properties such as semi-
conductivity, magnetism, crystal growth, mechanical strength and so on.
Or it could be defined in practical terms as the search for peculiarly strong,
6 A. Pais, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (Oxford, 1986).
7 I. Bernstein, ‘Materials Science and Engineering’, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia IV,
2362–72.
432
elastic, light, insulating, transparent, superconducting, biologically inert,
new materials.
The champions of this new science tend to exaggerate its academic
coherence. In spite of the pervasive influence of some very powerful post-
war conceptual developments, such as lattice defects, it does not have a
unifying intellectual theme. Its practical goals and research problems are
so diverse that it fragments into subdisciplines defined in terms of classes
of materials, such as ceramics, metallic alloys, semiconductors and optical
materials. Nevertheless, each of these subdisciplines is multidisciplinary,
if not fully trans-disciplinary, since it requires the combined efforts of
physicists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers with a sound general
understanding of these distinct disciplines as well as special expertise
relevant to a particular type of material. Whether or not materials science
is recognized within a particular university as a distinct discipline, it is no
longer a reformist slogan, but is firmly established in many institutions
as an academic category that cuts right across the traditional scheme of
the exact sciences. In effect, it does not belong to that scheme at all, but
presents itself as a member of an alternative classification. The emergence
of a genuine ‘matrix structure’ of this kind is empirical evidence of the
growth of interdisciplinarity in the exact sciences. In a later section we
discuss the very severe educational and organizational problems that this
is posing for European universities.
The increasing traffic across the interfaces between the exact sciences
is both a cause and a consequence of closer contacts between the sciences
and their associated technologies. Thus, on the one hand, interaction
between chemistry and physics suggests new developments in chemical
engineering; on the other hand, practical problems encountered in the
petrochemical industry can only be solved by the joint application of
chemical, physical and mathematical knowledge. But the gap between
‘basic’ and ‘applied’ science has also been closing as a result of finaliza-
tion. This refers to the degree to which research in a particular field can be
‘finalized’, that is, usefully oriented towards realistic goals. The original
Finalisierung thesis,8 which was put forward by a science studies group
at a Max Planck Institute at Starnberg near Munich in 1973, ran into a
political storm because it seemed to advocate greatly increased state con-
trol of academic research. This interpretation was not justified, since the
thesis was descriptive rather than normative, but it has tended to divert
attention from the common factor in a series of major historical develop-
ments in the place of the exact sciences in most European universities in
the past half-century.
8 G. Böhme, W. van den Daele, K. Hohlfeld, W. Krohn and W. Schäfer, Finalization in

Science: The Social Orientation of Scientific Progress (Dordrecht, 1983).
433
John Ziman
The finalization thesis depends on Thomas Kuhn’s account of the life
cycle of a field of study,9 which typically falls into two phases. One
phase is characterized by an agreed-upon paradigm, which so structures
a field that its practitioners do not quarrel over fundamental questions of
method or interpretation. The other phase, revolution, is characterized by
anomalous observations that do not fit into any existing interpretations
together with a general feeling that conditions exist for a breakthrough
into a more coherent theoretical regime. In this phase, it is still unrealistic
to direct research towards designated technological objectives; instead,
a major effort towards better basic understanding is likely to be very
rewarding in the long term. We might say that high energy physics, astro-
physics and cosmology are in a protracted revolutionary phase in that
there remain fundamental phenomena that are quite unexplored, there
is still widespread uncertainty about the theoretical framework within
which research ought to be planned, and a broad spectrum of highly
speculative projects are being actively pursued, mostly under academic
auspices.10
One of the exciting features of science since the Second World War is
that many major fields have undergone a Kuhnian revolution apparently
so conclusive that they are now definitively finalized. At the beginning
of the period, classical macroscopic physics (e.g. hydrodynamics) had
already established a paradigm within which research could be concen-
trated on the unexplained but important phenomena already observed,
for example, in the oceans and atmosphere as well as in many engineer-
ing systems. By the end of the period, this condition applied to many
aspects of condensed matter physics (e.g., in semiconductor devices),
simple molecular structures (as in physical and inorganic chemistry),
and to macroscopic terrestrial phenomena (through the theory of plate
tectonics).
This development is clearly of peculiar significance in the exact sci-
ences since a strong theoretical paradigm is the essential condition for
the realistic computer modelling of any natural or artificial system. Such
models, in turn, are essential tools in the advancement of both knowl-
edge and practice. University scientists are increasingly requiring access to
more and more supercomputing facilities to simulate chemical reactions
in the upper atmosphere, the folding of protein molecules, fluid flows and
magnetic fields in the core of the earth, the interactions of quarks inside
nucleons, the first five minutes of the history of the Universe. Industrial
scientists and engineers are putting the same paradigms through their
paces on even more supercomputers in order to model the flow of gases
9 T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).

10 J. Barrow, Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation (Oxford, 1990).
434
in a jet engine, the electron currents in a microchip memory, the geo-
logical shaping of a mineral deposit, the flux of neutrons in a nuclear
warhead, or whatever else they are employed to make or do.
The possibility of carrying out research more systematically, accord-
ing to a more certain schedule, influences all the other dimensions of the
scientific enterprise. The immediate effect of finalization is usually for
scientific work to move out of the university into industrial R&D lab-
oratories, where it can be pursued on a much larger scale with serious
commercial intent. An obvious example of this is in basic semiconduc-
tor physics, where the pace is set by the multinational electronic firms,
mostly outside Europe, in spite of determined efforts in many European
countries to maintain a university presence in this field. But finalization
(which is basically a concept of applied science) makes the results of
academic research seem more relevant to practical goals, and potentially
more immediately exploitable for profit. It thus brings the university and
industrial sectors closer together for the basic education of scientists and
engineers, for training in advanced research, and for the formulation and
support of research projects. These considerations, in turn, affect the
institutional and sectoral location and framing of scientific activity, and
the place of the university in society.
collectivism
During our period, the performance of research in the exact sciences has
changed even more radically than its subject matter. This change is most
economically described as a move from individual scientific effort towards
highly organized collective modes of research.11 The most direct evidence
of the change is the phenomenon of multi-authored scientific papers.12
Before the Second World War, the great majority of such papers in the
physical sciences and mathematics were published either in the name of
a single author or of two scientists in close collaboration, typically a stu-
dent or junior researcher together with his or her professor. This did not
necessarily mean that people were doing their research entirely alone. In
most cases, there would have been students or staff members of a univer-
sity department or institute, with a dozen or so scientists and technical
staff sharing the basic facilities of a research and teaching laboratory. But
they would normally have had their own stretch of laboratory bench and
their own personal projects, for which they took individual responsibil-
ity from conception through performance to publication. This applied in
principle even in a large ‘research school’ where almost all the research
11 J. Ziman, Of One Mind: The Collectivization of Science (New York, 1995).

12 D. Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York, 1963).
435
John Ziman
was actually being carried out under the close supervision of a famous
professor, who also claimed much of the credit for its successes.
What we now find, in all the exact sciences, is that papers that are
not exclusively theoretical usually appear above the names of a group
of ‘authors’ ranging in number from two or three up to dozens, or even
hundreds. This reflects a reality of collaboration, whether in voluntary
partnership as professional colleagues or under managerial instruction as
members of an organized research team. Although the group may have an
easily recognized leader, the research is presented as the collective product
of the labour of all its members. This phenomenon varies in scale and
intensity from field to field, but it is not confined to the exact sciences.
Indeed, it is so pervasive that it cannot be ascribed to any single simple
cause. It may represent a cultural form diffusing back to Europe from the
richer, more business-like universities of the United States. The example
of military research during the war, and of technological R&D in large
industrial firms, demonstrated the effectiveness of large research teams
focused on the solution of well-defined problems. In some fields of the
exact sciences – notably high energy physics and space research – this
model is almost unavoidable. Even in a revolutionary phase of a science,
the effective finalization of many technical aspects of the research makes
it feasible to mount projects that are so elaborate that they can only be
undertaken by large highly organized groups of very skilled people.
Where the science itself has effectively become interdisciplinary or
trans-disciplinary, research programmes cannot be broken down into
independent projects suited to the limited range of expertise of individ-
ual researchers. Progress requires the active, day-to-day collaboration of
specialists from a number of different scientific traditions. Even when the
investigation is apparently located within the main stream of a traditional
discipline, it may require inputs from a number of different technical spe-
cialities. Few physicists nowadays are masters of both the experimental
and theoretical techniques that contribute to their field and, as a result,
it may be found advantageous to publish jointly with colleagues with
complementary skills.
One of the most obvious and significant developments during this
period has been the rapidly increasing sophistication and cost of the
equipment required for useful research and for up-to-date instruction in
most fields of the exact sciences.13 This is owing to factors already noted –
the application of discoveries in one field as research technologies in oth-
ers (e.g., NMR in chemistry), systematic redesign and manufacture of
novel but very powerful standardized instruments by commercial firms,
13 J. Ziman, Prometheus Bound: Science in a Dynamical Steady State (Cambridge, 1994).
436
and the automatic control of instruments by electronic computers. A par-
ticular investigation may not always involve the construction and use
of one dedicated piece of apparatus, but it will often require the rou-
tine use of several elaborate instruments such as electron microscopes,
mass spectrometers, infra-red spectrographs, and access to high-powered
computers and databases.
An effective research institution such as a university department has to
make a heavy investment in such instruments, even though their use is
shared by many ‘little science’ research groups. The scale of aggregation
necessary to make such a department economically viable is a matter
of opinion, but it is now quite clear that it is of the order of dozens,
if not hundreds, of research scientists. This does not necessarily mean
that their research plans have to be closely coordinated (as they would
certainly be in an industrial R&D laboratory) or that they come under a
single centralized management. Indeed, it is possible in principle, though
often difficult in practice, to arrange for sharing such facilities amongst
several academic departments in different university buildings, or even
by the staffs of other institutions in the locality. In any case, the scientific
staff of a university must have regular access to a wide range of research
instruments supported by a strong communications network and other
infrastructural facilities.
This requirement is expensive in organizational effort as well as money.
But it is a sine qua non. Since the Second World War, the standard of
equipment necessary for competitive research in the exact sciences has
been set by the United States. One of the signs of completion of the
phase of post-war reconstruction in Western Europe was that university
laboratories could claim parity with the United States in this dimension.
One of the most grievous signs of current scientific weakness in Central
and Eastern Europe is the crippling lack of such resources, especially in
the universities, but also throughout their academic research institutions.
internationalization
The economic and administrative advantages of funding and managing
research resources in relatively large units do not mean that the research
itself needs to be organized on the same scale.14 Quite small research units,
say half a dozen professional researchers with accompanying assistants,
students and technical staff, are still optimal for ‘strategic basic research’
over wide areas of the exact sciences, provided that they have access to
the necessary instrumental facilities. Systematic intellectual collaboration
14 M. Franklin, The Community of Science in Europe: Preconditions for Research Effec-

tiveness in European Community Countries (Aldershot, 1988).
437
John Ziman
between such units in several universities can also bring their combined
efforts above the ‘critical mass’ required for a competitive contribution to
knowledge. But there are research fields where the essential instruments
are so large and so indivisibly costly that they are far beyond the personnel
and material resources of even the largest university, and can only be
provided as national or international facilities. This is a peculiar feature
of the exact sciences, and a major aspect of their place in the university
world. Physical scientists throughout Europe are having to spend more
and more of their research time as active ‘users’ of ‘Big Science’ institutions
outside their home universities. Some of these facilities were originally
provided and managed nationally, but elementary economies of scale
continually push towards multinational sharing of investments, running
costs and usage.15
We cannot cover here the diverse historical origins and contemporary
status of such collectivized scientific institutions as CERN and DESY,
ILL, EMBL and the ISIS, Garching and JET, not to mention the astro-
nomical telescopes, computer networks, space platforms and so on which
now constitute a major fraction of all European effort in the exact sci-
ences. Suffice it to say that the arrangements by which such facilities are
constructed, managed and shared in use are major factors in the way
that European universities now perform their research and educational
missions. The emergence and institutionalization of this highly practical
transnational dimension to their activities may be considered one of the
most significant developments in the collective history of the European
universities since the Reformation.16
However, international institutions are not taking over all the roles
and functions of universities in the exact sciences, even in the realm of
research. There are a few institutions like JET – the Joint European
Torus – where research scientists from a number of countries are
employed full time, under international management, to carry out large-
scale experiments on the magnetic confinement of high temperature plas-
mas. But this particular enterprise scarcely belongs in the university
sphere, even though it is still very far from its ultimate practical objec-
tive of generating electric power by nuclear fusion. Such self-contained
research establishments are quite rare at the international level, and have
been set up mainly to fulfil very special scientific or technological needs.
Even CERN, with its enormous resources and facilities, does not have
a large academic staff of its own. The extraordinarily elaborate and costly
experiments that are performed on its immense particle accelerators are
15 A. Hermann, J. Krige, U. Mersits and O. Pestre, History of CERN, Vol. I (Amsterdam,
1987); Vol. II (Amsterdam, 1990); J. Krige (ed.), History of CERN, Vol. III (Amsterdam,
1996).
16 R. Herman, The European Scientific Community (Harlow, 1986).
438
planned and carried out by so-called ‘collaborations’ – that is, by ad
hoc teams of hundreds of academic scientists drawn from dozens of uni-
versities in many different European countries. They remain employees
or students of their home universities, to which they return from time
to time to carry out their normal academic duties, although with useful
international experience.
Many of the Big Science facilities that seem to dominate research in the
exact sciences are sources of special radiations or very powerful observing
instruments used by small research groups working independently. Thus,
a university researcher may go to Grenoble for a few days, carrying a
previously prepared specimen to be placed in a beam of neutrons work-
station at the high flux nuclear reactor of the Institut Laue-Langevin.
Or astronomers from Northern Europe may spend time at La Palma,
observing at the Northern Hemisphere Observatory. The intergovern-
mental agreements for running such facilities are often very elaborate
and sometimes contentious, but they are very distant from the affairs
of universities, and scarcely impinge directly on the working lives of the
scientists who routinely use the instruments.
Another way in which academic science is ‘going European’ is through
the development of international programmes where the individual
projects require the active collaboration of university research groups
based in several different countries. Sometimes this is done for politi-
cal reasons, to emphasize transnational ‘cohesion’ between stronger and
weaker scientific communities, or to foster ‘pre-competitive’ research as
a basis for marketable technological innovations. But it may also have a
compelling scientific rationale, particularly in the earth sciences. Thus the
European Geo-Traverse Project involves the systematic study of geologi-
cal formations running right across the Continent, regardless of national
frontiers. But here again, however closely and harmoniously the individ-
ual research groups collaborate in such projects, they do not merge their
legal or administrative identities, and they remain firmly rooted in their
home institutions.
The Europeanization of research is not, therefore, diminishing or super-
seding the role of the universities in the exact sciences. There is no signifi-
cant pressure for the creation of an all-Europe institution for undergradu-
ate or postgraduate instruction in any of these disciplines.17 Most research
in the physical sciences is still carried out by university or national research
council employees in laboratories located on university campuses. Even
where the research is actually performed by a multinational team work-
ing most of the time at an international facility, its results are attributed
to all the separate universities involved in the ‘collaboration’.
17 See chapter 3 (‘Relations with Authority’).
439
John Ziman
In fact, the political and economic unification of Western Europe and
the expectations for similar developments towards the East have strength-
ened the universities as independent corporate actors in the exact sciences.
A ‘European research system’, or a ‘European science base’, is emerging,
not as a command structure centred on Brussels, but as a loose network of
non-governmental organizations such as the European Science Founda-
tion, learned societies such as the Academia Europaea, multilateral inter-
governmental agencies such as CERN and the European Space Agency,
not to mention the shadowy powers of multinational commercial firms
such as Siemens, Airbus Industries or Shell. Many of the coordinating
and funding functions of national research councils and other agencies
are moving upwards into this network, leaving universities and their
research entities intact as performers or joint contractors for research
projects. Many professors and research directors in European universi-
ties now find that they are dealing as directly with the Community or
with ESA as with their own governmental agencies.
Because of these developments, the exact sciences are taking the lead in
making European universities more cosmopolitan. It is a commonplace,
exemplified in every volume and chapter of this history, that European
scholarship, learning and science has always been an international activ-
ity, and that scholars have moved from university to university and from
country to country in the course of their careers. Nevertheless, for most
physical scientists and mathematicians, such movements were inciden-
tal to personal circumstances – an offer of employment, political exile,
apprenticeship to a research leader and so on – rather than constitutive
of their scientific work. The work that counted was done at home with a
small group of colleagues and students.
The sheer research technology of the exact sciences has forced scientists
to become much more cosmopolitan in their outlook and working prac-
tices. High energy physicists were in the vanguard of this transformation,
first by building on their scientific camaraderie to create a permanent
research facility where they could work together, then by demonstrating
the effectiveness of multinational research teams and by establishing data
networks linking scientists in their own laboratories. The history of the
development of the academic electronic mail system has still to be writ-
ten, but the web arose at CERN in Geneva as an auxiliary function of
data networking in the exact sciences. The informal use of this network
for personal communication acquired a life of its own, and now provides
a permanent public space, open day and night, for the cosmopolitan
invisible colleges of all our academic disciplines.
Since the Second World War, international homogeneity in the formal
and technical cultures of the exact sciences has spread outwards from
the written paper, the conference hall and the laboratory bench to other
440
aspects of scientific life. It now seems quite normal to be working in
a multinational research team, communicating in the lingua franca of
broken English, and united against the obstructive local bureaucracy. A
day’s scientific business in Paris or Geneva is no more out of the way for an
Oxford scientist than one in Edinburgh or in Swindon. An international
committee allocating observation time on a European telescope seems
just as natural as a national peer review panel doing the same job. If, as is
often asserted, it is desirable to create a ‘United States of Europe’ on a par
with the United States of America, then the exact sciences have already
gone further down this path than most other components of Europe’s
universities.
For nearly half a century, university science in Europe has been strongly
motivated by the desire to catch up with science in the United States. But
this rivalry is only one element in a symbiotic relationship of partnership
and collaboration. The transatlantic linkages of people, research groups,
projects, programmes, industrial firms, military commands, computer
networks and so on have broadened in bandwidth and carrying capacity
since they helped European science back on to its feet after the war. These
linkages now extend right round the world.
The rapid development of international programmes of global environ-
mental research shows that the cultural infrastructure is already in place
for much closer collaboration on a global scale where this is necessary.
Research in fields such as meteorology is already worldwide in its techni-
cal management. The same will surely apply to all forms of Big Science.
Elementary economic considerations will force competitors to cooperate
and merge. For example, thanks to international cooperation the Large
Hadron Collider at CERN came on line in 2009, despite budgetary prob-
lems, whereas foreign support was unable to prevent the United States
from abandoning the Super Collider. If an even bigger particle accelerator
is ever built, it will be a world machine, where high energy physicists from
European universities will be working in teams with their peers from all
over the world.
linking the academy with industry

As observed earlier, at the end of the Second World War distinct frontiers
still existed between the exact sciences and their associated technolo-
gies, reflecting the professional differentiation between the academic and
industrial sectors of society. It is true that students of electronic engi-
neering were often taught their basics alongside students of physics and
mathematics, and some universities established departments of applied
physics to bridge the gap. It is also true that these frontiers were much
less marked in chemistry and geology than in physics. Chemistry was one
441
John Ziman
of the first of the physical sciences to be applied systematically in industry,
and the relatively modern profession of chemical engineering developed
from the beginning as an interdisciplinary subject, both in the basic edu-
cation of industrial engineers and in its research themes. Geology has
always been professionally linked with mining, oil prospecting and other
extractive industries. Nevertheless, the distinct role of academic research
was clearly maintained in all these disciplines.
Any history of technology will show, however, that the interfaces with
the exact sciences were essentially ideological and always highly perme-
able. Indeed, the major premise of the ‘linear model’ of technological
innovation is that basic scientific discoveries (e.g., of electromagnetic
induction) eventually give rise to technological inventions (the electric
dynamo). The significant feature of our present era is that the ideol-
ogy maintaining the boundaries was dissolved by the acid of practice,
especially at the research front. The characteristic research activities
and interests of the industrial and academic sectors interpenetrate in
detail, on university campuses, in science parks and in corporate R&D
laboratories.
A typical research question in materials science is ‘What are the optical
properties of an isolated chemical impurity in a glassy material?’ This
question might have been posed in the course of a basic study of the
fundamental quantum-mechanical states of electrons in such systems; it
might equally well have arisen along the way to developing and man-
ufacturing a more transparent glass fibre for opto-electronic communi-
cations. The research would involve exactly the same instruments, spec-
imens, theories, archival sources and technical expertise. Precisely the
same investigation might have been mounted in a university department
of chemistry, physics, materials science or electronic engineering, in the
R&D laboratory of a multinational electronics firm, or in a research
establishment of a national ministry of defence. And in every case, seri-
ous consideration would be given to whether the research results might
give rise to an application that could be patented or otherwise exploited
commercially.
This does not mean that all university work in the exact sciences
is now directed towards technological invention. ‘Curiosity-driven’,
‘exploratory’, ‘blue skies’ research is still being done ‘for its own sake’
by thousands of academic scientists ‘honestly seeking the truth’ all over
Europe. A great deal of the research carried out in European universities
is indeed ‘academic’ in that it is not undertaken in response to a specific,
immediate, practical need. Private-sector firms are not doing all the ‘basic’
research they think they might need to support their industrial R&D.
Although some fields of academic science like solid-state electronics have
442
moved out of the university into industry, the training of students and
researchers in these fields is still a university responsibility. Academia and
industry are much more open to each other than they used to be, but they
are still essentially complementary in their scientific and technological
activities.
The notion of ‘strategic’ or ‘pre-competitive’ research provides an
umbrella slogan for most of the exact sciences, except astrophysics, cos-
mology, very pure mathematics, and very high energy particle physics. It
is not implausible to say of any research project in the rest of physics,
in all of chemistry or in the earth sciences that it might produce knowl-
edge that might improve our basic understanding of a generic technology
that could eventually enable a profitable practical invention. This notion
is proving a valuable rhetorical resource for university scientists seek-
ing moral justification and financial support for their projects, however
distant these may actually be from the marketplace.
There is still a significant cultural divide between the academic and
industrial setting. Well-established academic attitudes and practices –
freedom of problem choice and of publication, theoretically defined objec-
tives, reference to disciplinary peer groups, personal autonomy within a
collegial structure, and so on – are not easily reconciled with adherence to
a programme designed to produce marketable intellectual property rele-
vant to the urgent solution of a practical problem already defined by cor-
porate management. This cultural mismatch deters the academy–industry
traffic more effectively than is usually recognized in public exhortations,
and they have not been altogether nullified by the wide range of new insti-
tutions that have been set up to bridge the divide. These include ‘science
parks’ designed to tempt high-technology industry on to university real
estate, German-style ‘Fraunhofer Institutes’ seeking an honest living as
brokers and developers of exploitable academic ideas, semi-autonomous
‘interdisciplinary research centres’ drawing support from universities,
industrial firms and government agencies, ‘joint research centres’ located
inside universities but heavily endowed by specific firms claiming first call
on their research results, and ‘venture companies’ set up by universities
to market the research output, scientific services and technical expertise
of their academic staff.
Some of these organizational developments are so radical that they
threaten the intellectual, social, financial and administrative principles on
which European universities are founded. The enabling and generic func-
tions of the exact sciences in the high-technology chemical and electrical
industries have opened these fundamental sciences up to very powerful
social, political and economic influences. Even in a university labora-
tory, the goals and outcomes of research projects may be determined by
443
John Ziman
commercial or military considerations, rather than by traditional aca-
demic values. This is one of the most significant developments in the
history of the exact sciences in European universities in the past half-
century. Attention is mainly focused on the administrative and career
problems of opening up the organizational interfaces between universities
and industrial firms. From a pragmatic, managerial point of view, these
are not really more difficult to solve than those that arose in reconciling
academic office with professional practice in medicine, law, engineer-
ing and architecture. The promise of large financial benefits overcomes
many high-minded scruples about scientific autonomy and academic
freedom.
In justification it is said that the creative integration of theory (the
academy) with practice (industry) promises substantial advantages to
society and demonstrates the vital social role of the university even in
its most esoteric and expensive activities. In these activities, as in all oth-
ers, the university cannot survive unless it continually renews itself by
its services and responses to society at large. But these linkages transmit
moral responsibilities along with lavish funds. Some areas of academic
research in the exact sciences, such as nuclear and plasma physics, have
ridden high on their contributions to military and energy technologies
and are now at risk as these technologies fall out of public favour. At the
other extreme, branches of the exact sciences epitomized by high energy
particle physics, which seem to have no ‘strategic’ escape from ever more
expensive and intellectually baroque ivory towers, are menaced.
teaching and/or research

The dynamism of the exact sciences is centred on their research capa-
bilities rather than their educational functions. The European university
tradition depended on a symbiotic relationship between teaching and
research within a disciplinary department or a faculty aggregated out
of specialized professorial institutes. The developments described above
have put this relationship under very severe stress. In effect, the research
frontiers have proliferated, diversified, intermingled and moved on, so
that they are no longer directly connected with the basic subjects that
need to be taught to students.
It is not that courses and curricula are out of date, irrelevant to current
practice or inconsistent with current knowledge. They are simply inade-
quate to the long-term career needs of the majority of students. Some of
these will go on into highly specialized subfields of academic research; oth-
ers will move out of academia into rapidly advancing areas of industrial
research and development. To do these jobs properly, they will require
444
acquaintance with a variety of exquisitely sophisticated theoretical con-
cepts and manipulative techniques, and a broad grasp of the capabilities
and inter-relationships of different approaches to a certain range of sci-
entific or technological problems. Three or four years of undergraduate
education in the exact sciences are not sufficient for a complete prepa-
ration either for professional employment or for an apprenticeship to
independent research.
This curriculum pressure is particularly strong in the physical sci-
ences, where knowledge is cumulative and progressive. New understand-
ing builds on past understanding, but does not supersede it. For exam-
ple, most theoretical understanding in physics and chemistry is based
on quantum mechanics. This is a sophisticated intellectual discipline,
whose principles and methods cannot be boiled down to a few elemen-
tary notions. A meaningful introduction to quantum theory takes time,
and has to occupy a considerable proportion of every university course
in disciplines that rely on it. The way in which certain central lines are
interconnected and built on one another makes it very difficult to con-
struct a coherent curriculum for these new subjects out of a limited num-
ber of otherwise unrelated modules taught by several different academic
departments.
European universities have therefore been forced to follow the Ameri-
can lead in developing formal instruction beyond the first degree to take
students up to a research frontier. The traditional professorial seminar is
no longer satisfactory as an introduction to the latest research topics. The
doctoral degree, which used to be a sign of mastery of scholarly prac-
tice achieved through personal apprenticeship, is being transformed into
a certificate of advanced instruction and training in research methods.
The exact sciences have been amongst the first disciplines to establish
more regular graduate schools for this purpose. Other bodies, such as the
NATO Science Committee, have also been active in organizing advanced
study institutes and summer schools with similar functions.18
Traditionalists naturally lament this downgrading of first-degree (or
first-cycle) courses, especially where this means the dilution of ‘main-
stream’ courses in the established disciplines with material from other
subjects. But the notion (already obsolescent before the war) of the pre-
formed, fully trained physicist, chemist, mathematician or geologist is
obsolete, and lives on only as a straitjacket restricting radical reform to a
flexible system of further and continuing education even for the academic
and technical elite.
18 See chapter 3 (‘Relations with Authority’) 98–9.
445
John Ziman
The American concept of postdoctoral training in research is catch-
ing on in European universities. But that does not solve the problem
of reconciling the relatively permanent disciplinary structure appropriate
for undergraduate teaching with the changing, interdisciplinary, multina-
tional intersectoral groupings that are now typical of advanced research in
all the exact sciences except, perhaps, pure mathematics. One solution is
to cut the cord tying teaching to research by setting up a separate system
of institutes, units, laboratories or centres staffed by full-time research
scientists. This is the French policy in the CNRS, the German policy with
its Max Planck Institutes and the practice of concentrating almost all aca-
demic research in a national academy of sciences that was copied from
the Soviet Union throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The same con-
siderations underlie the establishment of in-house research laboratories
by the UK research councils, although these are not predominant in the
exact sciences.
The pros and cons of the policy of hiving off the premier research
activities of universities, leaving very limited research facilities for uni-
versity teaching staffs, are discussed elsewhere in this volume.19 At first
sight, this arrangement would seem particularly favourable for the exact
sciences with their gargantuan instrumental needs and high technological
potentialities. And yet experience in countries such as the USA, the UK,
Holland and Sweden shows that these complications can still be han-
dled inside the university framework without separating teaching from
research in the working careers of academic scientists.
The key point here, as has been hinted previously, is not to allow the
traditional disciplinary departments to manage the research activities of
their teaching staffs, but to give them research time in a matrix of rela-
tively independent research entities – units, centres, groups, laboratories,
committees and so on – within, across and beyond the departmental struc-
ture. Something like this is emerging in some UK universities and may
well spread, in due course, to other universities in Europe.
looking backward and forward

The end of the cold war is a convenient standpoint for a backward look
and a peep into the future. Throughout the period, the exact mathe-
matical sciences have flourished. Scientifically and technologically, they
have lived up to the promise of immense cognitive progress and prac-
tical achievement with which they came out of the Second World War.
These have been good times for the knowledge industry. An immense
19 See chapter 7 (‘Curriculum, Students, Education’).
446
amount of reliable, significant information about the physical world has
accumulated.
The application of this knowledge has also proved a very prosperous
enterprise, in which the university has been a major partner. To be sure,
some of the prospects seen from 1945 were illusory. Euphoria for the new
age of nuclear fission and/or fusion has evaporated. Civil nuclear power
was oversold, and the mad rush into nuclear weaponry is now seen as a
fearful and loathsome moral aberration. The scheduled take-off into plan-
etary space was also disappointingly delayed. On the other hand, there
have been unforeseen successes. The European academic physicists who
had led the way, before the war, to an understanding of semiconductors
would scarcely have predicted the immense information and communi-
cation potentialities of their obscure specialty.
The post-war revival of the university in Europe was not expected
to re-establish its pre-eminence in the exact sciences. But it came back
into a relatively comfortable position of high repute in most fields, and
world leadership in many. It is no longer meaningful, as it was in earlier
periods, to single out particular universities, departments, institutes or
individuals as centres of outstanding excellence in particular subjects.
Of course there is an unleavened lump of mediocre research in the less
competitive universities, but top quality work is being done by immensely
talented scientists in a large number of institutions distributed across the
whole region.
This solid achievement was made possible by a vast expansion of
material and human resources. The former came from national gov-
ernments convinced of the value of the exact sciences as a long-term
techno-economic investment. The latter were the fruit of a long European
tradition of very high standards of secondary and technical schooling in
these sciences. This was the secret of the rapid regrowth of high science
in West Germany. It also facilitated the extension of industrially relevant
R&D into southern Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece. In other
words, the general modernization of society throughout Western Europe
has been accompanied by an upgrading of the conventional sciences of
technological modernity – that is, the exact, mathematical sciences.
The challenge now is to bring the scientific communities of Eastern and
Central Europe up to the same standard. Despite the desperate shortages
of scientific apparatus and communication facilities, the exact sciences
probably suffered least of all academic disciplines under communism.
They were favoured by the regime, and not interfered with ideologi-
cally. The universities, although downgraded for research by comparison
with academy institutes, maintained their strong tradition for thorough,
if unimaginative, technical education in the fundamentals of the vari-
ous disciplines. Indeed, these countries are seriously overstocked with
447
John Ziman
well-trained scientific workers, who could, with a little experience with
more modern facilities, compete for research employment in academia or
industry anywhere in the world.
This is one of the most serious problems facing the university in Europe
at the turn of the century. The only way to stem the drain of the best young
scientific brains from Central and Eastern Europe to other regions is to
build up attractive research conditions in their own countries. This is
bound to be costly in terms of scientific instrumentation and other ma-
terial facilities. But a lot could be done at quite modest expense by proper
connections to the international electronic networks and other channels
of scientific communication. This is both essential and relatively easy for
the physical scientists, who must have access to the vast international
databases in astronomy, geophysics, chemistry and so on, and who have
learnt the hard way to make the most out of electronic hardware and
software.
For the research system as a whole, however, the real need is for a
far-reaching structural reform to fit it for post-socialist conditions. Since
these conditions have not yet stabilized, the precise objectives of these
reforms cannot be stated. A general move towards the established West
European model would require selective downsizing of research estab-
lishments, linking strategic and applied research directly with industrial
development, and revitalizing the tradition of combining high-quality
basic research with university teaching. These structural changes are
already under way, especially in what was once East Germany, but they
are still far from complete, and still quite uncertain in their ultimate effect.
One consequence of the scientific crisis in the former Soviet Union and
other socialist countries is to draw attention to the social function of the
university, and of the sciences it advances. This heightened consciousness
applies even to the exact sciences with their relatively uncomplicated tech-
nical roles. Until, perhaps, the 1970s, it was generally assumed that the
advancement of basic knowledge in the physical sciences and mathemat-
ics was an unquestionable social good, to be promoted without moral
qualms. Academic scientists were often involved personally in general
debates about the ethics of nuclear war, but they usually argued that
these were about the unanticipated uses of scientific knowledge, not about
the processes by which this knowledge was originally obtained. A career
devoted to the ‘honest search for truth’ was valued by many physical scien-
tists for its relative insulation from social corruption, whether communist
or capitalist. The university was considered an autonomous knowledge-
generating and knowledge-transmitting social institution, which could
not be held directly responsible for the follies or crimes of politicians,
industrialists, gangsters or generals.
448
Paradoxically, the attempt by these very same politicians and others to
squeeze more utility out of the research system has fractured this notion
of ethical neutrality. As we have seen, the university is much more tightly
wired-up into society than ever before. One of the major trends in the
exact sciences is tacit recognition of the validity of the call for ‘social
responsibility in science’ and of the need for education and research on
‘science, technology and society’.20 Reformers with objectives ranging
from managerial corporatism to critical anarchism are working to intro-
duce such matters into the school and university curriculum. This runs
against the long-established academic tradition of emphasizing technical
objectivity, rationality and impersonality to the exclusion of all that is
human in many other respects.
select bibliography
Barrow, J. Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation, Oxford,
1990.
Böhme, G., Van den Daele, W., Hohlfeld, K., Krohn, W., and Schäfer, W. Final-
ization in Science: The Social Orientation of Scientific Progress, Dordrecht,
1983.
Bush, V. Science: The Endless Frontier, Washington, D.C., 1945.
Cozzens, S., Healey, P., Rip, A., and Ziman, J. The Research System in Transition,
Dordrecht, 1990.
Franklin, M. The Community of Science in Europe: Preconditions for Research
Effectiveness in European Community Countries, Aldershot, 1988.
Galison, P. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, Princeton,
1997.
Herman, R. The European Scientific Community, Harlow, 1986.
Hermann, A., Krige, J., Mersits, U., and Pestre, D. History of CERN, 2 vols.,
Amsterdam, 1987–90.
Hoddeson, L. et al. Out of the Crystal Maze: Chapters from the History of Solid
State Physics, New York, 1992.
Kragh, H. Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century,
Princeton, 1999.
Krige, J. (ed.) History of CERN, Vol. III, Amsterdam, 1996.
Kuhn, T. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, 1962.
Lemaine, G., MacLeod, R., Mulkay, M., and Weingart, P. (eds.) Perspectives on
the Emergence of Scientific Disciplines, The Hague, 1976.
Pais, A. Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, Oxford,
1986.
Price, D. Little Science, Big Science, New York, 1963.
20 J. Ziman, Teaching and Learning about Science and Society (Cambridge, 1980).
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John Ziman
Veltman, M. Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics, River Edge,
N.J., 2003.
Whitley, R. The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences, Oxford,
1984.
Ziman, J. Knowing Everything about Nothing: Specialization and Change in
Scientific Careers, Cambridge, 1987.
Ziman, J. Of One Mind: The Collectivization of Science, New York, 1995.
Ziman, J. Prometheus Bound: Science in a Dynamical Steady State, Cambridge,
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Ziman, J. Teaching and Learning about Science and Society, Cambridge, 1980.
450
CHAPTER 12
THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
HERBERT C. MACGREGOR
from bones to biotechnology

The first forty years of the twentieth century saw steady progress in our
understanding of living systems. No particular field of biology dominated.
The major hypotheses of the nineteenth century were tested and in some
cases confirmed and integrated into other fields of science. Biology was
represented by zoologists who studied animals, botanists who studied
plants, physiologists who, if they were not zoologists, studied human-
related animal systems, geneticists who worked mainly with fungi, cereal
plants or the fruit fly Drosophila, and biochemists who were the pio-
neers of investigation into the molecular events that characterized living
systems. All branches of biological science were academic subjects. There
were some clear medical objectives, such as understanding cancer or deal-
ing with pathogenic microbes, and amongst the geneticists there was an
ongoing commitment to selective breeding in the service of agriculture,
but for the most part the biological sciences were distant from application.
After 1945, biology and its divisions transformed under the pressure
of new discoveries and their technologies. Stronger links were forged
between medicine, science and technology, and new breeds, like cell-,
developmental-, molecular-, marine- and neuro-biologists made their
appearance. Questions and hypotheses became smaller and more cir-
cumscribed, therefore more quickly and objectively tested. An investi-
gator who examined animal cells with an electron microscope could be
called a cell biologist although he or she might be a zoologist interested
in the growth of eggs in insect ovaries. Accordingly, a wide range of
new job descriptions emerged. Today European universities offer over
fifty different first-degree titles in the biological sciences. In addition to
diversification, the biological sciences in the early post-war years became
451
Herbert C. Macgregor
capital-intensive and more collaborative as the increasing complexity of
techniques made it difficult for one person to accomplish a useful research
objective without the help of others with different expertise. Science by
numbers meant working as a team, publishing as a team and sharing
success.
One of the most important trends over the past fifty years relates to our
attitude towards animals, plants and the environment. In the immediate
post-war years, the vast majority of European adults regarded animals
as pets, game, pests or food. Plants commanded a little more respect and
interest, perhaps because in wartime many of us learned, through neces-
sity, how to cultivate them for food and took pleasure in constructing
pretty and productive gardens around our homes. The concept of the envi-
ronment did not exist in 1945. Few species were known to be endangered.
The major oil products had yet to be developed. Oil consumption itself
was relatively low. There were few automobiles, no pesticides and no her-
bicides. The harvesting of forests seemed to be under control and commer-
cially sustainable. The construction industry was in its infancy, though
slated to expand at a truly phenomenal rate. Perhaps most significantly,
there was no television. Mass media impact in defence or glorification of
the natural world was impossible. It took the deaths of over three thou-
sand people following the famous London ‘smog’ of December 1952 to
begin to convince us that we might be abetting environmental changes
that adversely affected the quality of our lives. Television changed all
that by bringing the natural world into the living room and by making
news out of environmental catastrophes. For many the condition of the
air was unimportant until the London smog, and there was no life in
the sea until the fully laden oil tanker Torrey Canyon foundered off the
south-west of England in 1967. Environmental science and all its related
fields suddenly became respectable, and the living world became more
precious and exciting.
progress, development and discovery in

biology 1945–2004
Nearly all the major new techniques developed for biological science
since 1945 were aimed at improving the resolution and understanding
of living systems at the molecular level.1 Chromatography allowed the
separation of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, on paper, with
1 For overviews, see B. Glass, ‘Milestones and Rates of Growth in the Development of Biol-
ogy’, Quarterly Review of Biology, 54 (1979), 31–53; H. C. Macgregor (ed.), ‘Biological
Sciences’, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia IV, 2181–270.
452
The biological sciences
the result that proteins could be analysed and compared. Electrophor-
esis, centrifugation and ultra-centrifugation were all used to separate and
purify the molecules of living organisms. Thus the significance of their
variation from organism to organism, from cell to cell and from time to
time within cells and organisms could be evaluated. Electron microscopy
was perfected in the 1950s and became readily available to biologists
for the examination of living organisms at the macromolecular level by
the early 1960s. Radioisotopes employed as tracers followed molecules
through cells and tissues and, most importantly, helped determine the
behaviour of macromolecules that seemed to be specially important in
inheritance and development.
the unravelling of dna

All of the core technologies for molecular biology were in place by 1953
when James Watson and Francis Crick made one of the greatest discover-
ies of the twentieth century in biological science. After their revelation of
the structure of DNA, its significance in relation to inheritance, evolution
and development quickly became clear. Never before and never since has
there been an advance in biology that was so swift and so instantly enor-
mous in its impact. Biologists have come to understand how information
contained in DNA is transferred and expressed in living cells. They have
learned how this expression is controlled, how DNA itself replicates and
passes on information to generation after generation of cells and organ-
isms according to specific rules implicit in the nature of the molecule itself,
and they have learned how DNA changes and some of the effects of these
changes in living organisms.
Understanding of the molecular biology of DNA has changed every
field of biological science. The study of the immune system is a good exam-
ple. Until 1976 most of the effort in immunology went into understanding
the shape of antibodies and the specificity of antigen/antibody interaction.
In the early 1970s the three-dimensional structure of immunoglobulin was
solved,2 the essential step for an understanding of the basis of antibody
diversity. There followed a complex history of investigation and experi-
mentation, leading to the publication of nearly a thousand papers a year
over the past fifteen years into the genes, the DNA sequences, concerned
with antibody specificity. There is now little that is not known about
the genes of the immune system and the information transfer processes
that regulate antibody production. The greatest challenge, the cell biology
2 D. R. Davies, E.-A. Padlan and D. M. Segal, ‘Three-Dimensional Structure of Immuno-

globulins’, Annual Review of Biochemistry, 44 (1975), 639–67.
453
of the immune system, remains, involving complex cellular interactions,
information transfer between cells, transformations of cells, changes in
cellular behaviour – all of which happens with lightning speed amidst huge
numbers of cells swimming in the almost endless system of blood vessels
and lymphatics that keeps the vertebrate body in good living condition.
A major technological advance came in the late 1960s with the discov-
ery of restriction enzymes, for which Werner Arber and Daniel Nathans
received a Nobel Prize in 1978. Restriction enzymes can cut DNA at spe-
cific sites, creating pieces that can be rearranged and tied together by ligat-
ing enzymes. These discoveries and older techniques for injecting foreign
DNA into bacteria or integrating it into the DNA of viruses combined to
furnish the tools for genetic engineering. Specific pieces of DNA could be
isolated, trimmed with restriction enzymes in a controlled manner, and
joined with other pieces or ligated into special places in whole genetic sys-
tems of living organisms. Quite suddenly scenarios previously confined to
the pages of science fiction became possible. In so far as genes control the
entire working of a living cell, it became possible to change their orders
and compositions in ways that would have predictable consequences
for the cells. In this sense molecular biology through its techniques
of genetic manipulation has come to dominate almost every branch of
biology.
In 1940 cancer was a sure killer. Twenty-five years earlier Theodore
Boveri (1862–1915) had suggested that cancer was associated with
changes in chromosomes,3 and between 1940 and 1950 scientists in
Europe became convinced that cancer had to do with changes in cells
that involved their nucleic acids.4 Then, following the discovery of the
‘Philadelphia chromosome’ (an abnormality causing leukaemia that arises
from an exchange of genetic material between two chromosomes),5 there
came a general realization that the transformations that produced the
cells of malignant tumours were caused primarily by lesions in the chro-
mosomal DNA brought about by environmental factors, radiation, toxic
chemicals, free radicals and so on. Molecular biology suddenly zoomed
in on cancer, and only a few years later most of the general cellular
characteristics of malignant tumour cells were known and DNA became
the prime target for future research. In the early 1980s, after an intri-
cate series of investigations by several laboratories, Michael Bishop and
Harold Varnus proved the existence and established the nature of onco-
genes, for which they received the Nobel Prize in 1989. By 1990 more
3 T. Boveri, Zur Frage der Entstehung maligner Tumoren (Jena, 1914).

4 T. Caspersson, Cell Growth and Cell Function (New York, 1950); J. Brachet, Biochemical
Cytology (New York, 1957).
5 J. D. Rowley, ‘The Philadelphia Chromosome Translocation: A Paradigm for Under-
standing Leukaemia’, Cancer, 65 (1990), 2178–84.
454
than fifty good correlations had been recognized between specific tumour
types and specific chromosome lesions, and by far the greater part of the
world effort in search of a better understanding of the biology of cancer
was sharply focused on the DNA, the genes and the expression of genes
in cancer cells. People are still dying of cancer, but at least we now know
more or less exactly what we are up against.
Molecular biology has to do with more than DNA. Watson and
Crick may have announced their discovery of DNA as the revelation
of the ‘secret of life’, but theirs was just one of the secrets. Fifteen years
before them, another young scientist, also working at Cambridge Univer-
sity, explained how green plants, using only water and carbon dioxide
(CO2 ), utilize the energy from sunlight to synthesize carbohydrates.6 Since
then, the molecular biology of photosynthesis has progressed step by
step to the point at which we now understand the transfer of energy
among the light-harvesting pigments in plant cells, the molecular arrange-
ment at the reaction centres and the events that characterize the primary
photochemical reaction and bring about the conversion of the energy
of the photon to a form of chemically based energy that is usable by a
living cell.
The molecular biology of energy systems, which includes everything
to do with movement and growth as well as the original capture of the
sun’s energy by green plants, shares two important characteristics with
the molecular biology of DNA but differs from it in one very interesting
respect. Both fields seek to understand and explain the key events in living
systems; both choose biological objects for study that provide the simplest
model systems for experimental analysis. The difference between them is
with respect to the instruments and procedures applied. The molecular
biology of energy has relied almost entirely on tools developed in the
physical sciences and modified for application to biological problems. In
the early days, the study of DNA also relied on equipment and tech-
niques that originated in physics: ultracentrifuges, radioisotope detection
systems and transmission electron microscopes. All this has disappeared.
The tools of molecular genetics in the twenty-first century are either
whole micro-organisms or have been forged by biologists out of selected
components of living systems. The molecular biology of DNA and the
information-transfer processes of cells are now examined using some
of the most primitive approaches known to humankind: we investigate
things by taking them apart using a blunt instrument in the expecta-
tion that we will discover sharper tools that will enable us to do the job
more quickly and more carefully the next time round. This is the story
of restriction enzymes, of vectors, of recombinant organisms and all the
6 R. Hill, ‘Oxygen Evolution by Isolated Chloroplasts’, Nature, 139 (1937), 881–2.
455
galaxy of ‘natural’ implements that are employed in today’s molecular
biology labs.
the rise of ecology

The study and measurement of the interactions between living organ-
isms and with their environment made a second revolution in biology
during the twentieth century. Up to 1950, ecology was a relatively low-
technology and low-cost science focused in the United States on succession
in plant communities and in Europe on statistical description of commu-
nity types, the causes of population fluctuations and species interactions
in the wild. The ecology of the 1950s also was descriptive and speculative.
The ecosystems under study were immensely complicated and immensely
variable, so statistical data analysis was of paramount importance. Break-
throughs required computers.
After 1970, computing and statistical techniques allowed ecologists to
design experiments, to undertake more extensive sampling programmes,
to analyse their data more quickly and more searchingly and to con-
struct testable models. Charles Krebs’ Ecological Methodology of 1989,7
which ranks as one of the most important texts of the twentieth cen-
tury, describes these modern approaches. Like all other branches of biol-
ogy, ecology profited from technological developments in other kinds of
science. Gas–liquid chromatography with electron capture amplification
permitted the detection and measurement of toxic chemicals, such as the
residues of pesticides. Radioisotopic tracers followed the flow of chem-
icals through ecosystems and of elements through nutrient cycles. More
recently, the use of photography from aircraft and from orbiting space
satellites, coupled with sophisticated computer modelling and analysis,
has proved to be immensely valuable in the study of the mapping and
classification of vegetation communities and of global changes that relate
to human activity and intervention.
Inevitably, DNA technology has penetrated into ecological science.
During the 1950s and 1960s, ecologists and molecular biologists did not
talk to one another. One group wore wellington boots, the other white
coats. Then it was shown that different species could be identified by cer-
tain quite easily detectable properties of their DNA and that, by examin-
ing these properties, taxonomic relationships and species divergence times
could be determined with remarkable resolution and precision. This was
something ecologists had wanted to do for a long time. DNA technology
crept in. The first users were molecular biologists who needed to know
more about the rates at which different classes of DNA sequence were
changing in nature, and others who were curious about the relationships
7 C. J. Krebs, Ecological Methodology (New York, 1989).
456
between genes and speciation. Then, quite suddenly, DNA fingerprinting
was invented.8
Ecology is concerned with interactions between individuals and species.
These interactions are difficult to follow in animal populations, in which
individuals are much harder to identify and trace than they are in human
populations. How can we examine family relationships among birds, for
example, when to our eyes all the males look exactly alike and young
adults are not easy to distinguish from old ones? DNA fingerprinting has
solved all that. It has transformed and accelerated an important section
of ecology.
There is now not much that we do not know about life – except how
to make it. We can manipulate organisms of all kinds at a level that was
science fiction in the 1950s. We understand nearly all the major aspects
of living systems. There are still problems with animal development, but
most of them are well defined, and there is no doubt that we will solve
them in due course. We can control most of the diseases and afflictions of
the human species. We may never find a ‘cure’ for cancer, but it represents
real progress to be able to say that we have given up looking for one;
modern strategies are more informed, more reasonable and much more
promising than those available fifty years ago. We have it within our
grasp to eliminate ageing and establish virtual immortality. The greatest
problem for the human species today is how to keep pace with evolution
and with our own artificial forces of planetary destruction. Microbes,
HIV, cancer and the major parasitic diseases of the tropics represent the
evolution and diversification of cells and organisms at speeds that often
outstrip both our immune defence systems and our scientific ingenuity.
Future generations may wonder why it took us so long to discover how
living systems work. A hundred years ago, E. B. Wilson (1856–1939)
concluded his book The Cell in Development and Inheritance with the
words, ‘The study of the cell has, on the whole, seemed to widen rather
than to narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest forms
of life from the inorganic world’.9 Sixty years later, Jean Brachet, one of
the most advanced and experienced cell biologists of his time, concluded
his book Biochemical Cytology (1957) with the words, ‘The more we
delve into these problems [he was referring to the basic concept of a
living system], the more life remains a mystery’.10 Today, there is not
much mystery left, which is perhaps just as well, because the practical
problems relating to human survival and quality of life on earth today
8 A. I. V. Jeffreys, D. Wilson and S. L. Thein, ‘Hypervariable “Mini Satellite” Regions in

Human DNA’, Nature, 314 (1985), 67–73.
9 E. B. Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance (London and New York, 1896).
10 Brachet, Cytology (note 4), 464–6 (Final remarks).
457
are formidable, and a comprehensive understanding of living systems is
fundamental to our success in meeting them.
The Human Genome Project was a fifteen-year research programme
spanning most of the last two decades of the twentieth century. It cost
around 200 million dollars a year, which, although a very large sum
of money, was less than 1 per cent of the total research budget of the
United States National Institute of Health. The project was acclaimed
as the first internationally coordinated effort in the history of biological
research. Although the US provided most of the funds and investigators,
the European involvement, particularly that of France and the United
Kingdom, was significant. European laboratories already had experience
of large-scale collaborative genome research from their work on the yeast
genome, and in the early 1990s French scientists led in gene mapping
technologies.
The aim was to determine the complete sequence of nucleotides that
make up the DNA of one complete set of twenty-three human chro-
mosomes. DNA is composed of very long sequences of four nucleotides
designated A, C, T and G in varying order, for example,
ATTCGCTAGCTAAGTCGAGTCCATGCATC
The longest human chromosome has 300 million nucleotides. To give

a sense of dimension, if we were to type out the entire arrangement of
A, C, T and G on the longest human chromosome using the type size
and format of the boxed sequence just given, the row of letters would
extend for 400 miles. The Human Genome Project set out to determine
the precise sequence of A, T, C and G that makes up this enormous
string, as well as that in the twenty-two other strings (chromosomes) that
make up the human chromosome set. It was a massive task that required
the bringing together of a wide range of sophisticated technologies and
expertise on an unprecedented scale.
The sequencing made clear how DNA determines an organism’s phe-
notypic characteristics and controls its development. The sequencing also
pointed to genes that govern a variety of human diseases. It was hoped
that this information would lead to the development of new strategies for
diagnosis, prevention, therapy and cure.
As of 2005, the project started to pay off. Molecular prognostics and
diagnostics – the sciences of pre-disease by examining DNA – are devel-
oping fast. The Human Genome Project has spawned technologies that
are now being applied to mapping the genomes of a range of commer-
cially important organisms, both plant and animal, and it has provided
molecular tools for tackling all kinds of questions and problems across
the entire spectrum of living organisms. The claims of some of the early
458
proponents of the project back in the early 1990s were shockingly bold,
doubtless intended to encourage financial backing, but it is beginning to
look as if they were not entirely unjustified.
Something like the Human Genome Project had to be done. Technolo-
gies were there, looking for problems. Questions were there looking for
answers. At the end of the 1980s, biology was in danger of stalling if a
new level of investigation could not be initiated. DNA sequencing was
the answer. The kind of money that was needed could only be raised if
the DNA was human.11
the role of the university

In the author’s view, the business of a university is to transfer existing
knowledge and to develop new and more effective transfer processes, to
generate new knowledge through analysis and discovery, and to develop
potential for future enhancement of knowledge. The marketable prod-
ucts of a university are, therefore, units of new knowledge and units
of personal ability. In common parlance they are called ‘research’ and
‘graduates’. The two are closely linked to the needs of the commu-
nity. Knowledge and ingenuity must outpace the inexorable expansion
of world human activity, and future generations of men and women must
be equipped to cope with a faster and more complex environment than
that of their ancestors. It is imperative that the ‘manufacture’ of these
two products continues apace.
National policies vary, but in general a student can obtain training in
some aspect of the biological sciences at virtually any university in Europe.
Some universities do better at this than others. In general, however, the
production of undergraduates is neither a good nor an objective way of
assessing the contribution made by universities to the advancement of
biology. Research is a much better yardstick and, since it is reported in
small measurable bits that we call ‘scientific papers’, it is entirely possible
to assess and compare institutional performance by counting papers.
Table 12.1 shows the extent of growth in scientific literature overall
since the seventeenth century and the growth in biomedical literature
during the past 100 years.
Is Europe a significant contributor to biological research in terms of
publications in learned journals? According to the author’s personal
research on the geographical locations of authors of scientific articles
published in 1991, Western Europe, the UK and Eire together represent
the second largest source of publications in biological sciences, next to
the United States and Canada. Eastern Europe and the former USSR
11 N. Grant Cooper (ed.), The Human Genome Project: Deciphering the Blueprint of
Heredity (Mill Valley, Cal., 1994).
459
Table 12.1 Scientific literature and biomedical
literature published in Western Europe a
No. of No. of
Year science journals biomedical articles
1670 4
1800 90
1879 20,000
1900 10,000
1979 250,000
1991 70,000 400,000
a Personal communication from Dr A. P. Swan, Senior Man-

aging Editor, Current Awareness in Biological Sciences
(Oxford and New York, 1991).
represented only 4 per cent of published work in 1991, although that

proportion has certainly increased in recent years.
How much of this work is generated by universities? Table 12.2 dis-
aggregates the publications of 1991 in eleven different areas of modern
biology with respect to the kinds of institution in which the research was
carried out. Data for Eastern and Western Europe are presented sepa-
rately. At the time of the survey, just 43 per cent of Western European
science came from universities, whereas in Eastern Europe and the former
USSR the corresponding figure was 86 per cent.
The fact that now well under half of research in biology takes place
in universities gives rise to considerations that are best developed here
from the author’s experience in the UK. There, fifty years ago, the main
functions of a university were to educate young people, to promote and
maintain scholarship amongst those who were responsible for conduct-
ing the education process, and to provide an environment within which
particularly able scholars could apply their brains with the concentration
and intensity needed to advance the frontiers of knowledge. It was an
elitist sector of society but a highly respected one. Today more young,
and not so young, people want educating, and the task of teaching them
is exceedingly hard work and only rewarding to those few teachers who
have the skills to do it properly. Also knowledge in all fields is more
diverse, more complex and much more abundant than it was fifty years
ago, so that promoting and maintaining scholarship is, like teaching, an
exceedingly demanding and potentially overwhelming process. But per-
haps the greatest change of all concerns the relations between universities,
government and industry.
In recent years, government has invested money, taxpayers’ money,
in universities. For a time, universities enjoyed their nations’ confidence
460
Table 12.2a Different areas and origins of biological publications 1991: Western Europe
Genetics & Physiology & Ecological &

Pharmacology molecular Plant Clinical developmental environmental
Microbiology & toxicology Biochemistry Immunology biology science Neuroscience chemistry Cell biology science Total
Universities 2403 2784 3588 1905 1797 2181 135 723 1583 3367 1173 21639
Polytechnics 370 247 387 79 140 324 11 42 70 191 232 2093
Colleges 473 409 806 145 237 683 28 59 321 621 369 4151
Companies 619 2144 799 491 317 333 31 164 231 486 127 5742
Institutes 1543 2159 2084 1596 1373 625 140 384 1181 2197 82 13364
‘National’ 1059 707 501 773 270 219 33 161 156 537 180 4596
Total 6467 8450 8165 4989 4134 4365 378 1533 3542 7399 2163 51585
University 37 33 44 38 43 50 36 47 45 46 54 42
percentage
Table 12.2b Different areas and origins of biological publications 1991: Eastern Europe and the former USSR
Genetics & Physiology & Ecological &

Pharmacology molecular Plant Clinical developmental environmental
Microbiology & toxicology Biochemistry Immunology biology science Neuroscience chemistry Cell biology science Total
Universities 1048 851 1622 638 485 1399 51 310 884 1416 420 9124
Polytechnics 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 3
Colleges 0 2 6 0 2 15 2 0 0 13 7 47
Companies 16 71 21 6 4 8 1 2 2 12 0 143
Institutes 65 28 23 80 29 143 1 3 20 54 5 451
‘National’ 111 145 107 160 70 34 5 34 70 72 10 818
Total 1241 1097 1780 884 590 1599 60 350 976 1567 442 10586
University 84 78 91 72 82 87 85 89 91 90 95 86
percentage
The data for table 12.2 were kindly provided by Dr A. P. Swan, Senior Managing Editor of Current Awareness in Biological Sciences (Oxford and New York,
1991).
and were expected to deploy their resources responsibly. Then several
things happened. Science and technology became very expensive, and
industry turned to universities for help. These events were to set in motion
a cycle of change that would have far-reaching effects in and beyond our
educational systems. Universities had to be held accountable to their gov-
ernments. Their business had to be inspected, their policies criticized,
their methods evaluated and their expenditure justified. Universities had
become industries with shareholders. At the same time their relations
with real industry were expanding. The private sector was less willing
to commit capital and staff costs to advanced research and development
programmes, so they turned to universities for help. Universities were
quick to respond. This was a new dimension and a lucrative one too for
the impecunious but enterprising academic who was tired of teaching
badly and having to account for every penny spent on his or her favourite
research programme. Education and the promotion of scholarship had to
be replaced by training, contract and consultancy. Research was expen-
sive and so had to be accurately targeted. Finance was foremost in the
minds of management. Management learned from its new-found indus-
trial partners and, in effect, converted the laboratory, the library and
the lecture theatre into factory workshops occupied by employees and
manufacturing materials.
There remain a few old-timers who deplore these trends and yearn for a
return to old traditional values and practices. The changes, however, have
not all been misguided, even though the happier consequences have often
emerged by luck rather than through good judgment! There were times
when the industrial influence seemed likely to stifle scientific progress by
overfocusing on applied research that might generate profit. There were
cries of anguish when university departments were closed, merged or
starved out of existence by overzealous government. There were serious
misgivings when universities in the UK tried to bribe their senior aca-
demics to quit the system: the most astonishing aspect of that policy was
the discovery that many of our ablest men and women actually wanted
to quit and were only too glad to accept the bribes of the premature
retirement compensation schemes, much to the detriment of a system
that was actually looking for ways of conserving talent and offload-
ing ‘deadwood’. The system, however, is emerging from thirty years of
change looking healthier, more streamlined, more efficient and very much
better equipped to operate at the pace that is needed in modern times.
Industrial support is widespread and substantial. An appropriate level
of high-quality fundamental research is flourishing amidst the hubbub
of applied projects. Objectives are clear, universities are retaining public
respect, and very little of real substance has been lost along the way.
Real scientific progress at a rate that would have satisfied the demands of
463
modern society simply would not have been possible within the frame-
work of the traditional university system of the 1950s and 1960s.
The most significant factor affecting policies relating to university bio-
logical science has been the spiralling costs of research. In 1979 Bentley
Glass published some remarkable and significant data on this subject.12
According to him, the number of scientific research publications in biol-
ogy has doubled every fifteen years since 1750. The enormous prolifer-
ation in scientific literature, mentioned earlier in this chapter, reached
a total of nearly half a million publications a year in 1993. Glass also
examined the rate of increase in ‘breakthroughs’ or ‘milestones of achieve-
ment’ in the biological sciences, and he found that this rate, although still
exponential, is far slower than the rates of increase in publications, the
cost of science or number of scientists. Accordingly, although the rate at
which new major achievements are recorded is still increasing, the ratio
of normal or ‘ordinary’ scientific papers to major breakthrough reports is
also increasing dramatically. Glass observed that it took more and more
effort to produce appreciable gain. Therefore more and more money and
resources must be allocated in order to maintain our progress.
Glass took a pessimistic view of these circumstances and anticipated
that we would have to develop science in the next century on the basis of
non-expanding scientific human resources and a fixed, non-increasing,
proportion of gross national product. He also anticipated that in the
relatively near future, a few hundred years hence, scientific knowledge
of nature will be so complete that there will only be a scattering of
inconsequential matters to explore. A different view – and one held by the
author – is that we are really only at the end of the beginning of biological
science and that future progress can and indeed must be sustained by our
own efficiency and technical ingenuity. One thing is absolutely certain,
however: in the year 2100 we will not be communicating scientific
progress in the form of a million articles a year written on 20 tonnes of
paper.
the biology undergraduate

Three very different categories of person present themselves at the desks
of admissions tutors in universities throughout the world. The first cate-
gory come in by default. They find the arts and social sciences subjective
and intellectually unappealing. They cannot or will not come to grips
with the concepts of mathematics and natural philosophy, so they opt for
biology. Then there are those who fail to make the grades for medicine
or veterinary science and for whom biology is a second best, offering
12 Glass, ‘Milestones’ (note 1).
464
the chance of a modest return on the investment of effort that went into
competing for medicine or vet school. Thirdly, there are the few who are
already biologists with enough experience to know that they want to con-
tinue as biologists for the rest of their lives. No other subject in the entire
compass of learning has been more haphazard in its recruitment of talent.
What has been on offer for young would-be biologists in our uni-
versities? Here, once again, we see an intricate interplay between the
development of technology, the expansion of knowledge, the ability of
a young person to cope with advancing science and, most important of
all, the resources of the science educator. The transition may well signify
an ominous trend towards the loss, decay and fossilization of vast tracts
of knowledge and experience, devalued and neglected beneath the loga-
rithmic curve of technology. The technology of modern discovery, with
its young, immaculate, white-coated operators in clean, colour-coded and
usually very expensive laboratories, is a powerful attractant for the young
and impressionable. The old knowledge gathers dust in the basement. Uni-
versity undergraduate biology in the 1950s was an almost comprehensive
reconstruction of developments since the beginnings of scientific discov-
ery. It was possible to teach and learn within the space of three or four
years almost all there was to know about plants, animals and microbes.
Fifty years on, three years is scarcely enough to establish a foundation
in biotechnology, and only just enough to implant the principles of some
branches of modern biology that were mere twigs in the 1950s. There
has been a precipitous decline in the world bank of deep knowledge in
areas like animal comparative anatomy, plant diversity, adaptive radia-
tion, growth and form. There are now very few persons who could teach
in these areas, still fewer who could do it effectively, and probably even
fewer who would wish to learn. But let there be no mistake, biology of this
kind is of absolute value. It represents the catalogue of life, and without
it all the magnificent technological progress of the past fifty years would
be impotent. Universities should consider the relative merits of adopt-
ing specific policies for the conservation of knowledge and operating a
free-market economy in their recruitment of undergraduates.
New recruits into the biological sciences are better equipped for their
advanced training than ever before. So too is the educational system that
is committed to teaching them. Freshmen undergraduates of the 1950s
and 1960s probably knew more about animals and plants than their
counterparts in the twenty-first century, but they were generally weak in
the mathematical and physical sciences, naive in scientific logic, unaccus-
tomed to the experimental approach, and hopelessly terrified of data. The
educational technology of those times consisted of the blackboard, the
textbook and a library stacked with weighty journals full of articles writ-
ten in disparate unconventional styles so that the science could often only
465
be truly evaluated by those who knew something of the author’s per-
sonality and background. Conference proceedings, symposia volumes,
subject reviews were scarce. The abstracting journals of the 1950s were,
of course, of immense value, but they were difficult and slow to use.
Without doubt, The New Scientist, first published in 1956, represented
an important milestone for the advancement of science in Europe. The edi-
tors proclaimed that their aims were to make an ‘intensive effort to stim-
ulate nation-wide interest in scientific and technological development’,
to ‘capture the imagination of young people who have latent scientific
aptitudes, but are uncertain about a choice of career and to appeal to all
those men and women who are interested in scientific discovery and in
its industrial, commercial and social consequences’.13 They also made life
much easier for teachers by making them more aware of current science
and providing them with something other than dry textbooks or learned
journals to supplement their classroom activities.
Those same teachers presented information in lectures and in the teach-
ing laboratory, and they recommended books. They had no video equip-
ment and no computers. Visual aids in the form of projection slides
were expensive to make and of unrewarding quality. Overhead projec-
tors arrived in the late 1960s. Photocopiers were definitely not available
for undergraduate use, and such reprographic equipment as did exist
could only be exploited with the aid of a secretary or clerical assistant.
The principal source of advanced undergraduate learning right through
to the mid-1960s was the single author book. Some remain as classics
and are still widely recommended and read today. All were written by
leading scientists and scholars. By the most modern of standards, the
best of them were absolutely magnificent productions of timeless value.
E. B. Wilson’s The Cell in Development and Heredity (1896)14 appeared
in several editions down to 1924. The 1896 edition was reprinted as a
facsimile in 1966 and the 1924 edition was last reprinted in 1955. The
book occupied 370 pages in 1896 and 1,232 pages in 1924. It still serves
as a major source of information on natural variation at the cellular
level.
Michael White’s Animal Cytology and Evolution, first published in
1945, with second and third editions in 1954 and 1973, also remains
a classic, a fund of timeless valuable information on chromosomes and
the evolution of genetic systems.15 Goldschmidt’s Theoretical Genetics,
563 pages of facts and ideas based on a lifetime of involvement with the
genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila, is the kind of book that no one would
consider writing today, yet in its time it was one of the most important
13 ‘Editorial’, New Scientist, 1:1 (1956), 5. 14 Wilson, Cell (note 9).

15 M. J. D. White, Animal Cytology and Evolution (Cambridge, 1973).
466
pieces of literature in its field.16 Bullock and Horridge’s Structure and
Function in the Nervous Systems of Invertebrates in two volumes and
1,715 pages stands as one of the very last truly monumental, beautifully
produced and illustrated classics of modern zoology.17
Today, such is the pace of progress in all fields of biology that, for
everyone above the first grade of university undergraduate biology, the
textbook has been replaced by review journals such as Current Biology,
BioEssays, the Recent Advances series and a host of other quarterly or
monthly publications that specialize in helping scientists, teachers and
students to keep abreast in the trendiest areas of modern biology. These
publications have their shortcomings, but they do seem to be appropriate
for scientists whose entire efforts are necessarily concentrated into sharply
defined and fast-moving areas of biological science. And, of course, all
this has changed dramatically since the birth of the Internet.
Some say that biology is a practical subject and that it can only be
taught effectively in the field and the laboratory. That view was rarely
contradicted when universities were richly funded, teachers were in plen-
tiful supply, technology was simple, animals and plants were exploitable
and computers did not exist. Then technology expanded and became
expensive, universities had less cash to spare, teachers were encouraged
to spend more time on research, animals and plants became endangered,
and computers became available for modelling and data processing on
an unprecedented scale. The graduates of the 1950s commanded a broad
field of simple science and possessed a wide range of practical transferable
skills. They were generalists and stood a good chance of survival and suc-
cess on their own. The graduates of the twenty-first century are products
of a system that generates specialists who have learned more science than
would ever have been thought possible in earlier times, but whose real
expertise is confined to highly specific areas. Just as in nature, specialists
succeed by being members of a community made up of individuals with
complementary skills.
Universities across the world have adjusted their philosophies and prac-
tices accordingly. The most important advance was recognition of the
unity of biology, the inevitability of specialization in the face of a vastly
expanding volume of science, and the importance of providing enough
early experience in all aspects of modern biology to allow young persons
to choose the specialization that best suited their individual personalities.
The pattern of training changed from the steady progression through
one major field of biology, occupying three or four years, to one-year
16 R. B. Goldschimidt, Theoretical Genetics (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1955).

17 T. H. Bullock and G. A. Horridge, Structure and Function of the Nervous System of
Invertebrates (San Francisco and London, 1965).
467
broad-based introductory courses, followed by short modular courses
in specific areas, capped by one or two years of intensive study right
through to the very frontiers of a narrow area of modern science. Empha-
sis was on the production of graduate technologists. The trend began in
the early 1960s, reached its climax in the mid-1980s and reversed sud-
denly in the 1990s. The reasons for the reversal were simple. Technology
is expensive. Progress in biological science is struggling to remain cost-
effective. Biology retains its identity as a science of living organisms, and
all that is happening is that the organism is proving to be more intrin-
sically interesting and rewarding than the technologies we adapted for
investigating it.
the internet
The Internet has had an impact on the entire fabric of university life of
unprecedented magnitude. Its effects have been swift and dramatic. The
main areas of change have been the accessing and publishing of scientific
information, methods of teaching, and the conduct of undergraduate
study.
In the 1990s, European scientists in universities or research institutes
accessed published work by using abstracting services that scanned and
classified all publications across the entire field of biomedical science.
Having identified items of particular interest, the scientist would then go
to a library, pull journals off shelves and read the relevant articles. As
the Internet became established, publishers started selling online versions
of their journals as well as the printed versions, so that teachers and
researchers could consult recent publications from the computer in their
office or laboratory. The practice became more widespread as publish-
ers added more and more archival material to their websites. Now, in
2005, the past ten years or more of published material in most reputable
scientific journals can be accessed online. For a few journals, the older
archives of science and medicine cannot, for the moment, be consulted
online.
Library usage is changing in the US as a result of the advent of net-
worked electronic services in the medical field. It shows that remote users
outnumbered in-house users of electronic information. At five major med-
ical libraries, medical library users, and especially faculty, staff and fel-
lows, found that virtually all of their information needs could be satisfied
from outside the library. The trend is happening in other disciplines,
including the biological sciences, as more and more networked electronic
resources become available. For many users, ‘library’ is now just a word
on an authentication or link page. The only thing tying them to the library
468
is that access to content is currently purchased by and controlled by the
library. That tie will be cut when open access to all scientific literature
becomes the norm. This does not mean that libraries will become irrele-
vant. It means that they will not look the way they do today, and paper
journals, and perhaps also books, will disappear entirely.
The most remarkable change brought about by the Internet is speed of
communication. Recently published scientific literature can be accessed
in minutes from home, office or laboratory. Messages, data and images
can be instantly transmitted and exchanged worldwide. Whereas in the
1960s a scientist might write a dozen letters and make a few phone calls to
colleagues each week, in 2005 the exchange of a hundred e-mails a week
would be regarded as conservative. This easy and cheap high-speed com-
munication has proved in many instances to be an enemy of diplomacy,
careful planning, decisiveness and acceptance of responsibility.
Teaching by computer is now commonplace in European universities.
Teachers provide students with suggested strategies for accessing online
information. Models, graphics and video recordings replace laboratory
and fieldwork. E-mail communication between students and teachers is
encouraged, essays and projects are written and submitted online, and
feedback takes place the same way. Self-assessment tests and even exami-
nations are conducted by e-mail. The average science undergraduate may
spend up to 90 per cent of his or her formal learning and private study time
in front of a computer. Just where this trend is leading is impossible to tell.
The quality of the teaching material currently available on the Internet is
highly variable but it is improving, as are the means for accessing the most
appropriate and the best material for the job in hand. Putting modern sci-
ence in a proper perspective remains difficult without going to a library
and reading the printed page – a facility that fewer and fewer universities
are able to provide. Opportunities for hands-on practical experience of
science are diminishing because it is much cheaper and simpler to use the
Internet. In biology, the Internet is proving to be a timely and welcome
facility, since laws relating to health and safety and the use of animals,
dead or alive, in teaching have strangled traditional approaches to lab-
oratory and fieldwork.
universities, graduates and employment

The time taken to reach first degree seems to be broadly related to the
‘density’ of students on university campuses. In general, the larger the
institution and the less money allocated by government per year per stu-
dent, the longer it takes an individual to reach first-degree level. In this
regard, the British system, with its small campuses, low staff–student
469
ratios and relatively generous government support has always succeeded
in producing reasonably good quality first graduates after an average of
just ninety weeks of on-campus training. Other systems that are based on
very large campuses with high staff–student ratios take longer to bring
their undergraduates up to the same academic standard. A major concern
related to the widespread increase in student numbers has been ensuring
that they find employment that will utilize their talents. Approximately
25–45 per cent of biological science graduates become professional biol-
ogists or biology teachers. The remainder are recruited into all manner of
occupations that tend to exploit transferable personal skills rather than
specific biological knowledge.18
In the 1960s, during the first phase of the great expansion of Euro-
pean universities, those who wished to be researchers were happy to
follow up their PhD training with short-term contracts as postdoctoral
fellows or research assistants, confident that they would eventually be
able to secure a permanent post in a university. The expansion phase
ended in the late 1970s. There was a drop in recruitment of academics.
Researchers were forced to hop from one short-term contract to another,
and if they did not find a secure foothold in academia by the time they
reached their mid-thirties, they moved away from biology into industry or
management.
Up to 1975 most undergraduates in biology expected to find employ-
ment as professional biologists of one kind or another. Between 1975
and 1980 jobs were scarce and the outlook seemed bleak. Of course, it
was nothing of the sort. It took some coldly objective surveys to prove
in the early 1980s that most biology graduates were finding employ-
ment appropriate to their qualifications within one year of graduating.
Of the remainder, the majority were occupied with further training or
parenthood and less than 2 per cent were convincingly and involuntarily
unemployed.19 But the early 1980s did see a decided shift in attitudes
amongst both prospective biology graduates and employers. Employers
came to recognize that biologists can cope with large amounts of informa-
tion in a systematic way. Biologists have a broader scientific training than
most other scientists because biology cannot be studied in isolation from
the physical sciences. Biologists have to know about statistics and com-
puting. They often have to work in groups and are accustomed to respon-
sibility for their own part of a project and to working with other people.
Living organisms are exceedingly complex, and designing experiments to
18 S. Green, ‘Biological Science Graduates – Employment Prospects and Flexibility’, Biolo-
gist, 36 (1989), 209–13.
19 R. W. Pethen and P. Calow, ‘Zoology Graduates of 1980 – Where are they Now?’,
Biologist, 35 (1988), 126–8.
470
study them usually involves a wide range of variables, analysis of complex
datasets, and skilful interpretation. A background of this kind is an excel-
lent training for management. A 1987 survey by David Hind at Newcastle
Polytechnic showed that 38 per cent of advertisements for new gradu-
ate recruits in industry made explicit reference to personal transferable
skills.20
Apart from the undoubted lure of the United States, European grad-
uates have until recently opted to stay at home. Exchange between
European countries has been confined largely to the leading universities
and research establishments and has involved the very best of research-
orientated graduates. Language and culture have doubtless been strongly
influential in this regard. Winds of change are now being fanned quite
vigorously by government commitment to the funding of cooperative
research between Western European universities and institutions, and by
a widespread tendency for big industry to become multinational and to
operate above the level of language and cultural barriers.
select bibliography
Boveri, T. Zur Frage der Entstehung maligner Tumoren, Jena, 1914.
Brachet, J. Biochemical Cytology, New York, 1957.
Bullock, T. H., and Horridge, G. A. Structure and Function of the Nervous System
of Invertebrates, San Francisco and London, 1965.
Caspersson T. Cell Growth and Cell Function, New York, 1950.
Davies, D. R., Padlan, E. A., and Segal, D. M. ‘Three-Dimensional Structure of
Immunoglobulins’, Annual Review of Biochemistry, 44 (1975), 639–67.
Glass, B. ‘Milestones and Rates of Growth in the Development of Biology’, Quar-
terly Review of Biology, 54 (1979), 31–53.
Goldschmidt, R. B. Theoretical Genetics, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1955.
Green, S. ‘Biological Science Graduates – Employment Prospects and Flexibility’,
Biologist, 36 (1989), 209–13.
Hill, R. ‘Oxygen Evolution by Isolated Chloroplasts’, Nature, 139 (1937), 881–2.
Jeffreys, A. I. V., Wilson, D., and Thein, S. L. ‘Hypervariable “Mini Satellite”
Regions in Human DNA’, Nature, 314 (1985), 67–73.
Krebs, C. I. Ecological Methodology, New York, 1989.
Macgregor, H. C. (ed.) ‘Biological Sciences’, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia
IV, 2181–270.
Pethen, R. W., and Calow, P. ‘Zoology Graduates of 1980 – Where are They
Now?’, Biologist, 35 (1988), 126–8.
Rowley, J. D. ‘The Philadelphia Chromosome Translocation: A Paradigm for
Understanding Leukemia’, Cancer, 65 (1990), 2178–84.
20 Green, ‘Biological Science Graduates’ (note 18).
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Watson, J. D., and Crick, F. H. C. ‘Genetical Implications of the Structure of
Deoxyribonucleic Acid’, Nature, 177 (1953), 964.
White, M. J. D. Animal Cytology and Evolution, Cambridge, 1973.
Wilson, E. B. The Cell in Development and Inheritance, London and New York,
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472
CHAPTER 13
THE EARTH SCIENCES
GORDON CRAIG AND STUART MONRO
introduction
Given the diverse interests of European geologists, we decided to ask
some of our more distinguished geological friends to choose the three
major topics that have revolutionized geology in Europe since the Second
World War. All mentioned plate tectonics and all identified their own
research area as particularly exciting. The third choice was a potpourri.
But not one mentioned the study of planetary geology accompanying the
enormous post-war efforts to conquer solar space, which arose from the
rocket research of the Germans towards the end of the Second World War,
the spectacular flight into space by the Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin,
and the ensuing enormous American effort which led to the landing of
man on the moon in 1969.
But geology, after all, is about rocks – rocks which are economically
useful and which frequently serve to mark national boundaries by moun-
tain chains, river courses or coastlines. In the early development of geol-
ogy, natural scientists looked at local rocks. The Netherlands with few
rock outcrops has a vast amount of sand, silt and mud derived from
the Rhine delta. Not surprisingly, Dutch geologists were particularly
renowned for their work on sediments and hydrology. Most of Norway
and Sweden is underlain by metamorphic rocks – rocks that have been
changed by burial at higher temperatures and pressures. Teaching and
research naturally focused on that group of rocks. Landlocked Switzer-
land is not known for its marine geology but is understandably famous for
its contribution to the understanding of mountain-building and glacia-
tion. Italy has the only active volcanoes in Continental Europe and its
scientists have made distinguished contributions to our understanding of
vulcanology. And so on.
473
Gordon Craig and Stuart Monro
After the Second World War this understandable parochialism gave
way to research into geological problems extending beyond the bound-
aries of countries and the geological sciences. The question of continental
drift and its mechanism, the desire for quantitative explanation of cli-
matic changes in the geological record, and an increasing curiosity about
outer space have led to unparalleled international cooperation among
geologists and other scientists in related disciplines. Somewhat surpris-
ingly, many of the answers to geological questions are being found in the
rocks and mud on the bottom of the major oceans.
Our choice of the three major themes is:
1. planetary geology, which examines the origin and rocks of the solar
system and the unexpected consequences of that research,
2. plate tectonics, the all-embracing theory that seeks to explain changes
in the crust of the Earth as the result of movements of crustal plates,
driven by the heat of the Earth, and
3. climatic change, which reflects changes in the solar system, atmo-
sphere and lithosphere.
We shall look at how each problem arose, how it was or is being
solved, and to what extent European universities contributed to that
research. We will also explore what we consider to be a landmark in the
teaching of earth sciences that was brought about by the formation of the
Open University in the United Kingdom. That involved the use of new
technologies and the incorporation of rapidly changing research results
into a frequently updated curriculum.
planetary geology
The research carried out by astronomers, geophysicists, geologists, petrol-
ogists, geochemists and geomorphologists in preparation for and fol-
lowing the conquest of space was a great triumph of international co-
operation. Space research developed from the German rocket effort1
towards the end of the Second World War and culminated in the flights
of Sputnik and Gagarin. He was the first to observe the planet as a
whole – a small blue ball hanging in space. The interaction between the
geosphere, the atmosphere, the cryosphere, the hydrosphere and the bio-
sphere became clear, and the subject we now call ‘earth system science’
was born – although we doubt that it was recognized at the time. In the
same year President Kennedy announced the intention of the USA to land
a man safely on the Moon within a decade. Following on the early USSR
Luna spacecraft and the US Surveyor, the US Apollo missions took a man
1 W. von Braun, Across the Space Frontier, ed. E. Ryan (New York, 1952).
474
The earth sciences
to the Moon in 1969. Space photographs and lunar rock samples from
these missions were studied more thoroughly than any rocks and pictures
of the surface of the earth.
The Earth and its satellite the Moon, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury and Venus
are among the major planets in the solar system. Age dating from available
material from the solar system including meteorites indicates a common
date of formation of about 5,000–4,600 million years ago. The planets
have a similar chemical composition, but the Earth, because of its atmo-
sphere and continuing internal heat, has evolved both structurally and
lithologically – insofar as it can be compared with the dead planets and
the Moon.
The initial intense meteoritic bombardment which pock-marked the
surface of the Moon and the planets decreased about 4,000 million years
ago so that the shapes of the continuing active volcanoes and volcanic
rifts have not been destroyed by ‘meteoric fire’. Volcanic craters and
widespread lava flows – the maria – are plainly visible. But this volcanic
activity also waned and finally stopped about 2,500 million years ago as
the Moon cooled down. The Moon’s present residual core heat is now
insufficient to generate volcanic activity.
From space photography and craft that have landed on Mars we know
that it has impact craters and volcanic eruptions, but unlike the Moon it
also has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, which is capable of generating
dust storms and other aeolian features. In the distant past, water flowing
on Mars cut channels. Much of it is now locked in subsurface ice and
permafrost.
The space competition between the USSR and the USA was founded on
political decisions based on perceived military advantage and necessity,
and on an estimate of national prestige. The unexpected winner at the
end of the three decades has been science – certainly the most expensive
science project ever unwittingly authorized by two nations. The geological
rewards include an understanding of the similarity of the planets of the
solar system, especially the discovery of ‘fossil planets’, which reveal in
great detail what planet Earth must have been like in the early stages
of its evolution. The landing on Titan, a moon of Saturn, in January
2005 produced new insights into this process. There must have been a
considerable amount of impact cratering during the first 1,000–2,000
million years of Earth’s history.
The most interesting spin-off was a resurgence of interest in the effects
of impact craters on the Earth – transient features because they are gradu-
ally lost by erosion – which must have had catastrophic effects at the time
of impact. Meteoric impacts may have caused mass extinction of major
groups of organisms such as the dinosaurs by generating dust storms,
blotting out the Sun’s rays and causing marked climatic and vegetative
475
changes. Impact craters have been mapped and early records such as the
Ensisheim meteoritic impact have been investigated.2 Harrison Schmitt,
the only geologist to have walked on the moon, which he did in 1972, is
a Harvard graduate whose PhD thesis was concerned with metamorphic
rocks in Scandinavia.
plate tectonics
At the beginning of the twentieth century a few scientists argued that the
present continents had once been a super-continent, which had broken
into a fragmented jigsaw and drifted apart. The most obvious clue was the
apparent fit between the eastern coast of the Americas and the western
coast of Europe and Africa. Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), astronomer
and meteorologist, born in Berlin and educated at the Universities of
Heidelberg, Innsbruck and Berlin, was the leading proponent of the
hypothesis of continental drift. Continents consist of lighter rocks (granite
etc.), whereas the oceans are floored by heavier rock (principally basalt).
This heavier rock behaves as a very viscous liquid on which the conti-
nents float. Wegener suggested that the present continents had at one time
been one super-continent, which had broken apart. The close similarity
between rocks and fossils on either side of the Atlantic Ocean was an
excellent indication of this early togetherness. After the First World War
the hypothesis of floating continents received guarded support among
geologists in Europe, but in North America opposition remained strong.
In the UK, the two leading geophysicists disagreed. Harold Jeffreys (1891–
1989), professor of geophysics at Cambridge, argued that the Earth was
too strong to allow such a drift. Arthur Holmes (1897–1965), a grad-
uate of Imperial College London and professor of geology successively
at Durham and Edinburgh, guardedly supported the hypothesis of con-
tinental drift for which he proposed a a mechanism in 1928: hot, rising,
convective magma ‘mantle plumes’, which could act as a horizontal con-
veyor belt capable of moving the relatively light continental masses.
The Second World War turned the attention of geologists to the essen-
tially practical business of reserves of fuel and other raw materials.
Younger academics in universities and potential research students were
called up. Most of the remainder were over the age for military service
or were employed in more essential work. Opportunities for scientific
research were minimal. After the war, staff returned and a new gener-
ation of students was educated. Geologists could turn to investigating
the major problems of pure science, including the enigma of continental
2 U. B. Marvin, ‘The Meteorite of Ensisheim: 1492 to 1992’, Meteoritics, 27 (1992), 28–72.
476
The earth sciences
drift. Had the continents really been part of one mass, and, if so, by what
possible mechanism or mechanisms might it have been torn apart?
In the 1950s geophysicists at Imperial College London3 and the Uni-
versity of Cambridge began to measure remnant magnetism in rocks
by the use of sensitive magnetometers. Many rocks contain iron in one
form or another. The iron is locked into position in accordance with the
direction of the earth’s magnetic field at the time that the rock formed.
The magnetometer determines the magnetic declination and inclination
at the time of formation. It is also possible to date the age of the rock
by analysing the isotopes of radioactive minerals. By these techniques
the original geographical latitude of the rock and its time of formation
can be determined. Gradually it became apparent that rocks were formed
in latitudes far from their present position and that either the Earth’s
poles or the continental masses (or both) had moved, leaving behind a
palaeomagnetic ‘trail’ of evidence in successively younger rocks. These
trails were consistent within each continental mass but differed between
continents. They revealed that Europe and North America had moved
apart by about 30 degrees of longitude.
Yet the mechanism of movement remained elusive. Detailed magnetic
studies in Iceland by J. Hospers of Cambridge University4 showed that the
magnetic N–S direction in successive lava flows was frequently reversed.
Similar magnetic reversals were also mapped during oceanographic sur-
veys carried out in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, especially by Henry
Hess of Columbia University.5 The surveys also revealed rocks that were,
without exception, geologically young. The two studies are complemen-
tary; magnetic flips occur from time to time and are recorded in lava
flows, notably those flanking volcanic mid-oceanic ridges. In 1963 Fred
Vine and Drummond Matthews of Cambridge University postulated that
the main crustal layer of the ocean is formed over a convective up-current
in the mantle along an oceanic ridge. (In 1981 they received for this dis-
covery the Balzan Prize for Geology and Geophysics.) Successive volcanic
eruptions became magnetized according to the then current polarity of
the Earth’s field.6 Here, then, was a mechanism – sea-floor spreading –
that could account for the physical separation of major continents.
3 P. M. S. Blackett, ‘Comparison of Ancient Climates with the Ancient Latitudes Deduced

from Rock Magnetic Measurements’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, A263 (1961),
1–30.
4 J. Hospers, ‘Remnant Magnetism and the History of the Geomagnetic Field’, Nature, 168
(1951), 1111–12.
5 H. H. Hess, ‘History of Ocean Basins’, in A. E. J. Engel, H. L. James and B. F. Leonard
(eds.), Petrologic Studies: A Volume in Honor of A. F. Buddington (New York, 1962),
599–620.
6 F. J. Vine and D. H. Matthews, ‘Magnetic Anomalies over Ocean Ridges’, Nature, 199
(1963), 947–9.
477
There was more to come. In 1965 Tuzo Wilson, a Canadian geo-
physicist, postulated that the Earth’s surface was divided into large rigid
plates.7 In 1968 Xavier Le Pichon, a French geophysicist, recognized six
major plates that moved relative to each other.8 The continents were seen
as parts of plates rather than as discrete entities defined by a coastline.
The revolutionary theory of plate tectonics had been born.
What one believes in depends on one’s education and colleagues. As a
very junior member of staff in 1947 in Edinburgh, under Arthur Holmes,
one of us (GYC) believed in continental drift. The way that he explained
it made it seem logical. And yet when GYC spent a year in 1958 at a
midwest university in the United States and in California he met almost
total disbelief and was made acutely aware of the battles that even John
Crowell of the University of California encountered when he demon-
strated a strong lateral movement of hundreds of miles along the San
Andreas Fault in California.9 Geologists and geophysicists in the North
American continent were as united in their opposition to drifting as the
pro-Europeans and distinguished ‘drifters’ in South Africa, like Alexander
du Toit and Lester King, were for it.10 Isolationists could be geological
as well as political.
palaeoclimates and global warming

Switzerland is the only country in Europe with substantial mountain
glaciers. Large foreign boulders of granite and schist (erratic blocks) lie on
outcrops of sediment on the valley floors. They had obviously been carried
there. The only realistic means of transport were water or ice. Horace
Bénédict de Saussure was the first to describe (in the eighteenth century)
these piles of waste rock that we now call moraines. He concluded that
a catastrophic flood had been the cause.11 Over two hundred years ago
James Hutton, the Edinburgh geologist, had argued – although he had
never visited Switzerland – that the most probable explanation for the
transport of these foreign boulders was by flowing rivers of ice.12 They
were able to carry erratic blocks many kilometres from their source.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century it had become accepted that
7 J. T. Wilson, ‘A New Class of Faults and their Bearing on Continental Drift’, Nature,
207 (1965), 303–47.
8 X. Le Pichon, ‘Sea-Floor Spreading and Continental Drift’, Journal of Geophysical
Research, 73 (1968), 3661–97.
9 J. C. Crowell, Displacement along the San Andreas Fault, California, Geological Society
of America Special Paper, 71 (New York, 1962).
10 A. L. du Toit, Our Wandering Continents (Edinburgh, 1937).
11 H. B. de Saussure, Voyages dans les Alpes (Neuchâtel, 1779–96).
12 J. Hutton, Theory of the Earth, Vol. II (Edinburgh, 1795), 218.
478
The earth sciences
ice had at one time covered most of northern Europe, and that the climate
had then been much colder.
In 1842 the French mathematician J. A. Adhemar founded an astro-
nomical theory to account for glaciation.13 The theory was developed
in 1864 by the Scottish geologist James Croll14 and expanded by the
Yugoslavian geophysicist Milankovitch in 1930 and 1941.15 This theory
is based on changes in insolation brought about by variations in the eccen-
tricity of the orbit of the Earth and by the tilt of its rotational axis and
its ‘wobble’ or precession. The periodicity resulting from these changes
has recently been found to agree with the waxing and waning of the ice
sheets, which are reflected in temperature changes in the major oceans in
the recent past.16 This exciting work is the result of an international ini-
tiative (Climate Project) involving scientists from many countries. Cores
drilled in the mud of the major oceans have provided a geological suc-
cession from which microscopic organisms, especially foraminifera and
diatoms, have been collected. The relative abundance of the different
species, some of which lived in warm waters, some in colder waters, can
be used to pinpoint former ocean temperatures, and the age of the layer
of sediment in which the fossils were found can be determined by radio-
metric and palaeomagnetic analyses. Ocean floor sediments thus record
the changing temperatures of the seas over many thousands of years. This
deep-sea fossil record has proved to be one of the most important sources
of past climatic patterns worldwide.
Understandably, the evidence for former glacial periods is much more
continuous in undisturbed marine deposits than in the incomplete record
left behind by former continental ice sheets after thousands and mil-
lions of years of erosion. Nevertheless, rocks in the Sahara reveal that
the area had been covered by ice some 400 million years ago, when
Africa was still near the South Pole. Rudolf Staub, professor of geology
at Zurich, reckoned as early as 1924 that Africa had drifted north some
5,000 kilometres since Precambian times, and that the strongly folded
Alpine chain of mountains – the product of the closure of Africa and
Europe – involved crustal shortening of some 1,000–1,500 kilometres.17
But perhaps geologists are too blasé about such matters. As we sit here in
Edinburgh, comfortably warm from our gas central heating derived from
13 J. A. Adhemar, Révolutions de la mer (Paris, 1842).

14 J. Croll, ‘On the Physical Cause of the Change of Climate during Geological Epochs’,
Philosophical Magazine, 28 (1864), 121–37.
15 M. Milankovitch, ‘Mathematische Klimalehre und astronomische Theorie der Kli-
maschwankungen’, in W. Koppen and R. Geiger (eds.), Handbuch der Klimatologie,
Vol. I (A) (Berlin, 1930), 1–176.
16 J. Imbrie and K. P. Imbrie, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery (London, 1979), 1–224.
17 R. Staub, Der Bau der Alpen, Beiträge zur geologischen Karte der Schweiz, N.F. 52
(Bern, 1924).
479
natural gas (which might be a mere 100 million years old) in the North
Sea, we are aware that only some 10 thousand years ago a kilometre or
so of ice sheet would have covered us, and that the Carboniferous coal
seams below ground were once trees that grew in a tropical climate when
Scotland was hovering near the equator about 350 million years ago. Evi-
dence from other continents has enabled geologists and meteorologists to
piece together climatic changes associated with the drift of continental
landmasses across many degrees of latitude. During these great move-
ments of plates, the circulation of ocean currents has repeatedly changed
the complexity of climatic patterns.
In the 1990s it was shown that meteoritic impacts have not only played
an important part in changing the Earth’s topography, but that it is
possible that larger impacts in the geological past caused fires, dust clouds
blanking out the Sun’s radiation, chemical changes leading to acid rain
and other damage to the environment. The scenario of a ‘nuclear winter’
is frequently used. And it has been argued that such impacts could well
have led to the extinction of major fossil groups such as the dinosaurs.18
Such grand, long-term perspectives must now include the shorter and
more urgent consideration of the possible consequences of what has been
called ‘man’s greatest geochemical experiment’ – the burning of our fossil
fuels, accumulated over nearly 400 million years, in a mere 400 years or
so. The considerable increase of CO2 and other gases, with its implications
for changes in the greenhouse effect, is now a matter of worldwide con-
cern. It has prompted the creation of taskforces by the International Coun-
cil of Scientific Unions, such as the International Geosphere-Biosphere
Programme,19 which sets out to examine global change through coop-
eration among scientists from a wide variety of disciplines – biology,
chemistry, geology, physics – working closely with social scientists.
impact on earth science education

Two major political actions have recently transformed geological teach-
ing and research in the United Kingdom. The first was to create a
distance-learning university, the Open University, the second to concen-
trate resources on fewer but larger departments following implementation
of the Oxburgh Report.20
Many of these advances in understanding the way the Earth operates
can be related to the development of what is now called earth system
18 A. Hallam, Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities: The Causes of Mass Extinction (Oxford,
2004).
19 W. Steffen et al., Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet under Pressure (Berlin,
Heidelberg and New York, 2004).
20 R. Oxburgh, Strengthening Earth Sciences: Report of the Earth Sciences Review Ad Hoc
Committee (Oxburgh Report) (London, 1987).
480
The earth sciences
science, echoing James Hutton’s concept of looking at the planet as a
holistic entity. In particular, the development of the plate tectonic theory
brought together many of the subdisciplines within earth science and
demanded a new way of teaching. At the same time as the researchers
were developing new concepts of plate tectonics, in Britain a new idea
in higher education was emerging. This was what Harold Wilson, the
then prime minister, described as the ‘University of the Air’, subsequently
known as the Open University. The vision was to make higher education
accessible to all, regardless of previous academic qualifications. Some
called it ‘The University of the second chance’. Accessibility was achieved
through the new medium of television to communicate with students in
their own homes. For earth science, as a visual science, this presented
enormous opportunities and challenges – opportunities to present the
science in a new and holistic way and challenges to deliver this science
using the new technology.
The concept of a teaching text emphasizing the vitality of the earth sci-
ences gave rise to the commissioning of a textbook entitled Understanding
the Earth.21 Twenty-six internationally known scientists were invited to
contribute. The list of authors now reads like a Who’s Who of modern
geology: Sir Edward Bullard, E. R. Oxburgh (now Lord Oxburgh), the late
John Sutton, P. C. Sylvester-Bradley and Fred Vine all contributed. More-
over this was a teaching text, a reader, through which current research
influenced the content of the curriculum, even at the level of a first-
year student. The book was conceived in March 1970 and published in
December of the same year – a remarkable achievement.
The concept of academic currency at a time when the ideas and concepts
taught were continuing to move forward was retained, and in October
1972 a second edition was published with updates of the various chapters
and, in some chapters, with complete revision. In this way landmark
research found its way both into the journals and into the teaching ma-
terials of higher education.
A further major political action that transformed geological teaching
and research in the United Kingdom was the decision to concentrate
resources as recommended by the Oxburgh Report, which resulted from
a government enquiry into ways of strengthening university earth science
departments in British universities. The report, published in 1987, con-
cluded that there were too many geology departments and advised that, by
reducing the number by about one-third and redistributing resources and
staff, the remaining departments would have greater critical mass and bet-
ter research potential. As a result, the number of geology departments fell
21 I. G. Gass, P. J. Smith and R. C. L. Wilson, Understanding the Earth: A Reader in the

Earth Sciences (Sussex, 1971).
481
from thirty-three to twenty-two. Opponents saw it as ‘a divisive, destruc-
tive, and insensitive imposition’.22 The exercise cost many millions of
pounds and prudently was not repeated, as had been the intention, in the
other sciences.
But worse was still to come. Another government department later rec-
ommended that the polytechnics (the technical centres of higher educa-
tion) should become universities. Consequently there now existed almost
as many university geology departments as before! The Open University,
which is funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England,
despite its spread across England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, is rec-
ognized as a great success: it has introduced many tens of thousands
of students to geology since its inception, and thus helped to undo the
consequences of the Oxburgh Report.
The political aspects illustrated here are generally valid for other Euro-
pean countries as well.23 Although the ‘Open University’ experience is
unique to the UK, its principal idea can be found in other forms of earth
science education, such as in the many regular and special broadcast
or television programmes aimed at the general public.24 New problems,
ideas or methods are incorporated into university courses or aired at con-
ferences of learned societies or in the international research programmes
of the European Union or the European Science Foundation, which are
open to students from all participating universities. Unfortunately, the
tendency to concentrate resources on ever fewer earth science depart-
ments has become a general problem. Germany, the Netherlands and
Switzerland all suffered from this policy. The opposition of geological
experts to this concentration has been only partially effective. This is
because earth science education retains strong regional aspects. A student
has first to gain experience by mapping in the field, working in mines or
aboard a research vessel, notwithstanding all the fascinating global topics
available in the fields of planetary geology, plate tectonics or palaeoclima-
tology. These new fields of research are, of course, influencing university
education and curricula directly, but in different ways. Planetology, for
example, seems to evoke less interest than marine research. The oceans,
from the coasts to the deep sea, have become a major focus in earth
science over the past decades. Consequently, many new classes and even
departments, some with their own ships, have been established. To run
national research vessels or even international ones requires students with
special knowledge. Incidentally, learning about international cooperation
22 E. N. K. Clarkson, ‘Academic Geology in the UK: A Matter for Grave Concern’, Euro-
pean Geologist, 17 (2004), 6–7.
23 The information on earth-science education outside the United Kingdom was kindly
contributed by Eugen Seibold, from Freiburg-im-Breisgau (Germany).
24 See chapter 1, 19.
482
The earth sciences
can never be better acquired than aboard a research vessel with an inter-
national team of scientists! Although this is only one example of the
specialization needed in today’s higher-education systems, the general
problem for universities remains that of finding ways to help students
digest all the new specialisms, with their different methods, at a given
moment of time in their curricula.
In addition to the classic courses offered by universities across Europe,
several innovations are now necessary. Resolving new problems and
methods in earth science requires intensive training in computer tech-
nologies; quantitative aspects and approaches are now essential, even
when considering geology as a historical science; collecting, document-
ing and using ever more data from observations constitute a challenge
of data handling; and, finally, modelling implies new sophistication in
visualization techniques.
Finally, the development of environmental earth sciences stems from
global, regional or even local needs. Such needs require the application
of geology, geophysics, satellite geodesy, isotope technology, geochem-
istry, many branches of biology, as well as other sciences. A modern and
increasingly important trend concerns mineral resources – oil, gas, coal,
ores, building materials or water. The challenge for the future is not only
how to find and use them, but also how to protect and exploit them in a
sustainable way.
conclusions
In this short review it has been shown that initial speculative ideas, which
came from individuals in Europe in the earlier part of the twentieth
century, were developed by teams of scientists – especially in the United
States, which rapidly became the world’s leading nation in the geological
sciences after the war. Money was available for ships and mega-science in
the USA, and the universities there had access to bright young scientists
in a country physically undamaged by war. Moreover, with high salaries
and good research funding, they were able to attract many of the brightest
young earth scientists who had studied at European universities.
International collaboration across many disciplines has resulted in a
new understanding of our solar system and the planetary bodies within it.
The oceans have played an unexpectedly major part in contributing to our
understanding of plate tectonics (volcanic activity and magnetic stripes
in the hard rock floor) and past global climatic changes (fossils in the
overlying mud). The consequences of climate change, the foundations of
which were laid down through science developed over two hundred years
ago, are now regarded as the greatest challenge facing humanity. The
study of earth sciences in the European universities continues to meet and
483
face up to the challenges of life on an ever-changing planet; understanding
a little better how the Earth works is essential for our survival.
select bibliography
Braun, W. von. Across the Space Frontier, ed. E. Ryan, New York, 1952.
Gass, I. G., Smith, P. J., and Wilson, R. C. L. Understanding the Earth: A Reader
in the Earth Sciences, Sussex, 1971.
Glen, W. The Road to Jaramillo: Critical Years of the Revolution in Earth Science,
Stanford, 1982.
Hallam, A. Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities: The Causes of Mass Extinction,
Oxford, 2004.
Imbrie, J., and Imbrie, K. P. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery, London, 1979.
Le Pichon, X. ‘Sea-Floor Spreading and Continental Drift’, Journal of Geophysical
Research, 73 (1968), 3661–97.
Oxburgh, R. Strengthening Earth Sciences: Report of the Earth Sciences Review
Ad Hoc Committee (Oxburgh Report), London, 1987.
Steffen, W. et al. Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet under Pressure,
Berlin, Heidelberg and New York, 2004.
484
CHAPTER 14
MEDICINE
JOHN ELLIS
the changing context of university

medicine 1945–1995
From 1945 onwards university faculties of medicine functioned in a con-
text characterized by constant rapid change in medical knowledge, in
medical and educational practice, and in the material way of life, includ-
ing the political life, of most people in Europe. The growth of medical
knowledge increased very rapidly during the Second World War. Three
developments in particular ensured that after the war medicine would be
very different from what it had been before: blood transfusion, anaesthe-
sia and antibiotics. In 1939 blood transfusion in some countries, such as
Britain, had been an infrequent procedure largely dependent on relatives
as donors, but at the end of the war a national blood transfusion service
was firmly established, and intravenous therapy was beginning to play a
major role in therapy everywhere. Before 1939 anaesthetics had been in
use for upwards of a century but, while improvements had been made in
the means of administering them, the actual agents had changed little –
nitrous oxide, ether and chloroform. Intravenous anaesthesia was much
extended during the war, and muscle relaxants heralded a new era. Coun-
tries that had been training anaesthetists in their armed forces found
themselves with many more specialists in this field at the end of the war
than at the beginning, and this enabled peacetime surgery to advance far
more quickly than would otherwise have been the case.
The revolution in the control of some infections (such as lobar pneu-
monia, a major killer) brought about by the use of sulphonamides in the
late 1930s faded into relative insignificance with the introduction of peni-
cillin during the war. From 1945 onwards the development of antibiotic
drugs, limited at first by their scarcity or unavailability in Britain and
485
John Ellis
continental Europe, continued ceaselessly, keeping ahead of the devel-
opment of organisms resistant to them. The range of antibacterial drugs
widened, and antifungal and even some antiviral drugs were added. Much
of that development was achieved by the pharmaceutical industry, much
by universities, and still more by collaboration between the two.
After the war great advances were made in chemotherapy for non-
infective illnesses, both physical and mental, including cardiovascular
conditions such as high blood pressure, leukaemia and other forms of
cancer, depression and some psychoses such as schizophrenia. Equally
dramatic progress took place in the whole field of surgery and by the
growing capacity artificially to take over the function of organs such as
the kidneys, heart and lungs. The ability accurately to measure the various
functions of the body likewise increased continuously after 1945, as did
the capacity to visualize its structure by endoscopy, radiology and nuclear
magnetic resonance imaging. These advances enabled diagnoses to be
made with ever greater precision and steadily increased the possibility of
successfully intervening in the course of disease at any time in the life of
a patient from before birth to extreme old age.
Surgery, which in the 1930s was largely concerned with removing dam-
aged parts of the body, became more and more involved with repair in the
1950s and 1960s, and in the 1970s began the successful replacement of
hips and other joints by prostheses, and in the 1980s (thanks to advances
in immunology) successful organ transplantation. Bone marrow trans-
plants opened up new avenues of therapy in blood disorders, and the
development of molecular biology led in the 1980s to a greater under-
standing of genetic disease with possibilities for prevention and perhaps
treatment.
Unfortunately all too often the new medicine had initially to be prac-
tised in the premises and under the conditions of the old. In Britain,
where perhaps medicine changed more rapidly after 1945 than elsewhere
in Europe, the total cost of maintaining a National Health Service (NHS),
introduced on comprehensive lines in 1947, was so much greater than had
been anticipated that capital investment in hospitals had to be ruthlessly
cut. In a period of general capital shortage and austerity, capital invest-
ment on the NHS averaged roughly £10 million a year from 1948/9 com-
pared with more than £30 million in 1938/9. Nearly half the country’s
hospitals pre-dated 1891 and one in five pre-dated 1861.
Specialization, which had developed slowly in the medical profession
in the first half of the twentieth century, progressed rapidly in the second,
with sub-specialties like paediatrics and geriatrics soon forming within
older specialisms. Dentistry similarly became more specialized. Mean-
while, the demand from all the new branches for nurses specially trained
to work in special departments led in the 1970s to the development of
486
Medicine
post-basic courses and to organizations for controlling them. Those other
health professions that had existed before the Second World War, such
as physiotherapy and radiography, expanded and themselves began to
subdivide into new specialties, while in most countries new categories of
health-care workers were brought into action. The practice of medicine
soon came to range from simple rule-of-thumb procedures easily and
safely applied by non-medically qualified personnel to highly complex
and costly activities requiring teams of health-care professionals of vari-
ous kinds using special facilities in purpose-built premises.
Cultural, social and economic changes doubtless had more effect on the
pattern of disease than did the advance of medical practice, great though
that was. Within years of the end of the Second World War infant mor-
tality began to decline and the incidence of acute florid organic disease
began to fall in many parts of Europe, especially in the West. Tuberculosis
was brought under control, osteomyelitis virtually disappeared, and great
killers of the past such as lobar pneumonia, diphtheria and rheumatic
fever became rarities – to be replaced as major causes of mortality by
road traffic accidents, suicide and diseases of unknown origin such as
cancer, high blood pressure and coronary artery disease. Chronic disor-
ders and degenerative disease soon exceeded acute bacterial (but not viral)
infections among the causes of morbidity. Life expectancy lengthened in
most countries. For a man in the East End of London in the late 1930s it
had been estimated at 42; in 1990 the average life expectancy at birth for
men in England was 72.5.1 The lowest increase in life expectancy at birth
in 1990 in OECD countries was in Denmark, where male life expectancy
was 72.2 and female 77.7.2 In 1988, WHO figures showed all Eastern
European countries to have shorter life expectancies than any in Western
Europe; Portugal, with a life expectancy of 74.1, ranked below all other
Western countries but still above all Eastern ones. Romania and Hungary
had the lowest expectancies, that for Hungarian males being 66.1 years.3
Despite this increased life expectancy and a rising standard of living, the
late twentieth century was characterized by much ill health, particularly
in the form of emotional disorders, as well as by a considerable increase
in all forms of crime – both likely to be related, at least partly, to rapidly
changing environments and lifestyles. The number of old people increased
in every country, and in 1992 the European office of the WHO forecast
that twenty-one European countries would have less than 30 per cent
of their population under the age of twenty by the year 2000. Whilst
1 World Health Organization, Health for All (Geneva, 1990).

2 ‘Danes’ Life Expectancy Stagnates’, British Medical Journal, 306 (8 May 1993), 1226–7.
3 D. Rowland, ‘Health Status in East European Countries’, Health Affairs, 10:3 (1991),
202–15.
487
John Ellis
progress was made in overcoming the disabilities of the mentally and
physically handicapped through medicine and the law, the pace of life
quickened even in rural areas to make independent existence beyond the
scope of those with minor mental or physical defects.
People’s attitudes to health, disease and medical care altered in many
ways. By the 1950s the right to medical care was widely seen as a
basic human right. Expectations of what it could achieve quickly became
grossly inflated, not least because of the often ignorant and irresponsible
reporting of new therapeutic agents by the media. Not surprisingly the
accelerating advance, complexity and specialization of medicine made it
difficult to comprehend. The sense of personal responsibility for maintain-
ing health tended to diminish, particularly in the face of increasing faith
in the capacity of medicine to cure all ills and in the presence of national
health services designed to dispense it to all. In much of Europe immu-
nization was accepted as a means of preventing infectious disease and
employed by governments to a varying extent. Lowering the incidence of
diseases such as cancer or AIDS, the presence of which was announced in
1982, by means of a change in lifestyle (by abandoning smoking or less-
ening promiscuity) progressed slowly despite heavy investment in health
education. The medical profession’s own contribution to health education
remained limited, partly because of a longstanding tradition that doctors
are more concerned with treatment than prevention and partly because
the profession was nowhere organized to present the public at large with
an agreed view on anything. National medical associations might repre-
sent the majority of doctors on matters of finance and employment, but
in many countries specialization resulted in a fragmented profession. Not
infrequently one fragment would contradict another.
The doctor came to be rated more by his demonstrated competence
than by the mystique of his calling4 and not infrequently to be seen
more as a figure of authority than as a guide and friend. The investiga-
tion of physical, chemical, psychological and social factors, frequently
necessary in the elucidation of acute illness in the elderly, tended (by pro-
longing doubts and fears) to worry patients and relatives, while doctors
employing scientific means of helping the patient were in danger of being
seen as impersonal and interested only in ‘high technology’. They faced
not only criticism but litigation, although not on the same scale as in the
United States. They were also confronted by ‘alternative medicine’, which
appeared to many to be more human, less demanding, more attractive
and in some countries cheaper than ‘orthodox medicine’.
The demand, though not necessarily the need, for medical care
increased everywhere during the 1950s, especially where free care became
4 Report of the Royal Commission on Medical Education (London, 1968), 30.
488
Medicine
available. But it was specialization, which rapidly increased the amount
of care given in the wards and out-patient clinics of hospitals, that pro-
duced in all countries an urgent need for more doctors, nurses and other
health-care workers. Each new specialized department necessitated not
only more senior and junior doctors as well as nurses, but also more physi-
cists, chemists, technicians, physiotherapists and medical social workers.
More administrators were needed to manage this expansion, with a con-
comitant demand for cleaners, porters and catering staff.
There was less change, however, during the 1950s in the total number
and different kinds of personnel providing health care outside hospitals
in the community. Some countries, such as the Netherlands and Britain,
continued to depend very largely on general practitioners, dentists, district
nurses and midwives, and to discourage direct access to specialists. At the
other end of the spectrum, as in the Soviet Union, more reliance contin-
ued to be placed on less highly trained cadres of middle grade medical
personnel.5 It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that it became increas-
ingly apparent that primary health care requires many kinds of personnel,
each trained to fulfil particular functions but working together as a team.
Different kinds of health professionals emerged in most countries, includ-
ing eventually ‘paramedics’ trained and licensed to administer drugs and
carry out life-saving procedures.
Alterations in the pattern of delivery of health care occurred partly
in response to rising costs and even more because of the requirements
of changing medicine. Thus, specialized departments had to be grouped
together in one institution, not just in order that they might share expen-
sive supporting services, but because diseases and accidents commonly
affected more than one part of the body, especially in the elderly. In
planned health services it became necessary for the catchment areas of
hospital departments to be large enough to ensure that specialist teams
had sufficient practice to remain competent. A doctor who had spent the
1970s undergoing training in a number of specialties would not be able
to provide a rural community with high quality care in any of them in
the 1980s unless called upon to practice them frequently and provided
with adequate assistants to enable them to do so. In most countries each
decade of the last quarter of the twentieth century ended with fewer but
larger hospitals, size being measured not in numbers of beds so much
as in the range of departments, clinics and facilities for out-patient care.
Each decade ended also with a more varied range of community ser-
vices, mainly comprised of nurses and other categories of non-medically
qualified personnel.
5 Ministry of Health of the USSR, ‘The Training and Utilisation of Feldshers in the USSR’,
WHO Public Health Papers, 56 (1974), 7–52.
489
John Ellis
The new pattern of delivery of health care differed greatly in the
early 1990s from that seen as ideal in some Western European coun-
tries fifty years before, when a family doctor met the immediate needs
of every 2,000 or so people and every local community had its own full
range of hospital services. Instead, the emerging concentration of medical
resources in fewer centres, reaching out to surrounding areas through
non-medically qualified staff, resembled the pattern of health-care deliv-
ery found in the first half of the twentieth century in Soviet Russia and in
the colonial territories of Western European empires.
In Britain, which for most of the period after 1945 spent a lower pro-
portion of its wealth on health care than many countries, net government
expenditure on the NHS in 1949/50 amounted to £446 million, or 3.5%
of GDP. It rose to 5.7% of GDP during the next 45 years to almost
£40 billion (1994/5). The cost of drugs prescribed by general practition-
ers during the 1990s was a little less than half the cost of primary care. No
two European countries’ ratios were the same, nor the share in the costs
of medical care borne by government (national or regional), by private
health insurance and by charitable organisations. Throughout Europe,
however, central government played an ever-increasing role not only in
the financing but also in the planning and management of health care.
Nonetheless, nowhere were all the needs of all the people met from public
funds alone, and everywhere private medical care was available alongside
public provision.
Everywhere the demand for medical care continued to rise throughout
the half-century, almost certainly exceeding, in some countries, the need
for it. Screening for conditions such as cancer of the breast or cervix
revealed previously undetected need in symptomless disease, whereas
in dentistry need probably exceeded demand.6 Increasingly the conflict
between the demands of individuals and the good of the community as a
whole necessitated hard decisions on national priorities.
Not surprisingly, there were many critics who questioned the way in
which medicine was developing, with the questioning reaching a peak in
the 1970s. Supporters of ‘alternative medicine’ considered that doctors,
dominant in policy-making, did more harm than good.7 A different view
was that the past contribution of medicine to the improvement of health
had been much overrated – nutrition had played a bigger part – and, as a
result, there were unrealistic expectations for the future.8 Others held that
medical services were less effective and more costly than they should have
6 J. S. Bulman, N. D. Richards, G. S. Slack and A. J. Willcocks, Demand and Need for

Dental Care (London, 1968).
7 I. Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (London, 1974).
8 T. McKeown, The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage or Nemesis? (London, 1976).
490
Medicine
been because of the poor use of scientific method in health management,9
for example in the failure to use experimental designs such as randomized
control trials.10 There was a need for ‘audit’.
the adaptation of medical education to

a changing context
The WHO, calling in 1977 for ‘Health for All by the Year 2000’, redefined
the objectives to be pursued in medicine, placing emphasis on primary
health care.11 In fact, since 1945 there had been substantial progress in
the organization of primary medical care. Nevertheless, deliberate edu-
cational changes tended to be made at relatively infrequent intervals and
often met with as much opposition as support.
During the Second World War many medical schools had been dam-
aged, destroyed or forced to close, and many that continued to function
had necessarily been required to alter their courses to meet wartime needs.
At the end of hostilities, however, most countries took immediate steps
to restore their education to its pre-war state, and by the late 1940s Euro-
pean medical education was for the most part re-established on pre-war
lines. In some countries, notably West Germany, however, the return to
pre-war conditions was slowed by a shortage of university teachers, and
most countries in Eastern Europe enjoyed only a brief period of liberation
before communist regimes imposed new and usually alien arrangements
generally similar to those in the Soviet Union.
With the exception of the Soviet Union, all countries set out in their
medical school courses (with or without an internship) to produce general
practitioners, some of whom might later become specialists by means of
further study and experience. The courses were of two main kinds. The
majority were modelled on the German system that aimed at the unity
of teaching and research in the university. Teaching was by lectures and
demonstrations. Students were still largely free to determine their own
route to completion of the syllabus, although some schools might rec-
ommend a particular curriculum. Licensing was by state examination.
Originally intended to foster the scientific method, the approach was
increasingly criticized for failing to do so because of its essentially theoret-
ical nature.12 Practical clinical work was largely limited to an internship
9 A. L. Cochrane, Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services
(London, 1972).
10 C. Alvarez-Dardet and M. T. Ring, ‘Thomas McKeown and Archibald Cochrane: A
Journey through the Diffusion of their Ideas’, British Medical Journal, 306 (8 May
1993), 1252–4.
11 World Health Organization, Alma-Ata, 1977.
12 R. Dahrendorf, ‘Traditionen der deutschen Universität’, in P. Kipphof (ed.),
Hochschulführe (Hamburg, 1965).
491
John Ellis
of one year, which in Germany had been extended in 1939 to include
three months’ supervised practice in a rural area.13
In France and Britain the medical schools in the immediate post-war
period were more under the influence of hospitals than universities. Some
‘secondary’ medical schools in France had no university connection. The
four old faculties of medicine in Scotland were influential, but in Lon-
don the connection between the twelve hospital medical schools and the
University of London was in many respects more nominal than real. All
French and British schools emphasized practical clinical work.
In France the last year of a six-year medical school course contained
compulsory periods of duty in clinical departments, but the main oppor-
tunity for practical experience was through the system of externat and
internat. Externs, chosen by competition through examinations set by
hospital authorities, spent three months assisting in hospital and thereby
becoming eligible to compete for internships offering longer periods of
residential hospital practice. Around one in eight individuals achieved an
internship.14
In the UK students in the hospital medical schools of London
had always been regarded as apprentices rather than undergraduates,
although coming to the wards as informed apprentices by virtue of a
short period of vocationally orientated study of basic medical science.15
After the war the emphasis remained on bedside teaching and clinical
clerkships, although no internship was required in the UK in 1950. In
Scotland lectures were a more important method of teaching. Courses in
the English provincial medical schools suffered from a lack of standardiza-
tion and a compromise between London and Scotland. In Scandinavia16
and the Netherlands, universities that had modelled themselves on the
German pattern had increased the amount of practical clinical work in
the years before 1939, and were now anxious to extend it further.
In general, teaching everywhere in Europe in the immediate post-war
period remained didactic, dogmatic and authoritarian, whether it was
pursued with a small group of students at the bedside in London, Upp-
sala or Leiden, or encapsulated in ex cathedra lectures to scores of stu-
dents in Bologna, Berlin, Edinburgh or Paris. The minimum length of
course was nowhere less than five years, more often six, but many stu-
dents took longer. When they emerged at the end, most of them had been
13 H. H. Simmer, ‘Principles and Problems of Medical Undergraduate Education in Ger-
many during the 19th and Early 20th Centuries’, in C. D. O’Malley (ed.), The History
of Medical Education (Berkeley, 1970), 173–200.
14 C. Coury, ‘The Teaching of Medicine in France from the Beginning of the Seventeenth
Century’, in O’Malley, History (note 13), 121–72.
15 A. Flexner, Medical Education: A Comparative Study (New York, 1925).
16 W. Kock, ‘Medical Education in Scandinavia since 1600’, in O’Malley, History (note
13).
492
Medicine
programmed to identify (mainly by physical examination) currently com-
mon conditions and to respond to them in a given way; this was generally
recognized as satisfactory preparation for practice when diagnosis was
by pattern recognition and when treatment was changing only slowly.
When licensed by state or university examinations (or in the case of many
British students by examinations held by professional organizations) most
newly registered doctors in the late 1940s were capable, as their pre-war
predecessors had been, of providing most of what medicine then had to
offer in the home (of patient or doctor), in a nursing home or in a small
hospital.
Post-war changes in medicine, however, soon made competence in the
basic clinical skills of gaining information from the patients (by taking a
‘history’ and making a physical examination) both more important and
more difficult to acquire. Diagnosis came to depend more upon a full
and accurate case history, including highly personal details difficult to
obtain even when there were no language barriers, as there came to be in
Europe’s increasingly multiracial communities. Coincidentally, from the
1950s onwards patients had less and less time to spare in which to allow
students to practise their basic clinical skills. Although chronic disorders
increased and the amount of acute illness lessened, medical and socio-
economic changes combined steadily to shorten the length of patients’ stay
in hospital. Those attending casualty, out-patient and general practitioner
clinics preferred to hurry home after seeing the doctor than to suffer delay
while students made their inevitably slow enquiries.
The impact of such changes on the German model of medical edu-
cation (and in any medical school where the size of the annual entry
prohibited the supervision of students in clinical practice) fell mainly on
the period of internship. For undergraduate courses it was not difficult to
find, even amongst a declining number of acutely ill people, the relatively
small number of patients needed to illustrate the diagnosis and treatment
of disease by lectures and demonstrations to large classes of students.
The direct effects of the changing context of medical education on the
acquisition of clinical skills were not immediately great or obvious.
The direct effects of changing medical practice were much greater in
the schools in which the emphasis was on bedside teaching and practical
clinical work. They were immediate and profound in the UK, where what
students learned was decided more by the range of conditions seen in the
wards than by lectures and demonstrations. Opportunities for practising
basic clinical methods, to carry out diagnostic procedures and to perform
minor surgical operations, declined. Moreover, with the advent of the
National Health Service in the UK in 1948, the kind of student partici-
pation in medical care that had been necessary in charity hospitals was
considered inappropriate once they had been taken over by the state.
493
John Ellis
While many doctors in the UK continued to consider the traditional
apprenticeship approach to British medical education both necessary
and still possible, and struggled to maintain it despite specialization and
the changing patterns of disease, it was progressively eroded during the
1950s. By the mid-1960s questionnaire studies of all the final-year stu-
dents in the UK17 revealed that they had become observers rather than
providers of medical care. The average number of student lumbar punc-
tures performed by the end of the course was 1.1, 75 per cent of students
had never washed out a stomach, and only 33 per cent believed that they
had ever contributed to the making of a decision of any importance to
a patient. (Most of this last group had done so during holidays spent as
interns in American hospitals unable to attract local doctors.) Meanwhile,
the continuing belief that students must learn from acutely ill patients in
non-specialized units led to their dispersal around an increasingly large
number of widely scattered district hospitals, swelling medical schools’
body of teachers (already expanded by specialization). While the effects
of changing medical practice on clinical training varied from country to
country according to its type of medical school, all were directly affected
in much the same way and at much the same speed by the growth of
medical knowledge and specialization. New material and new subjects
had to be included in the syllabus, whilst older departments struggled
to maintain their share of it. Curricula rapidly became more crowded
and fragmented, and students lost their freedom to proceed at their own
pace.
In most countries the minimum length of studies remained at five to six
years (followed by internship). Extensions became increasingly difficult,
especially where grants to cover fees and living expenses were limited to
the minimum period. Attempts by individual teachers, or even faculties,
to revise the syllabus and lessen the burden of memorizing facts could
be easily frustrated by the examinations system controlled in the 1950s
either by departments, universities or central state licensing authorities.
Details varied. In Sweden in the 1950s each student was still examined
individually at a time of their choosing by the professor in each subject. In
Denmark, the professor’s interrogation might be witnessed by two local
practitioners, who might suggest, but could not themselves ask, additional
questions. In very many countries, however, national licensing examina-
tions were set by state authorities who, with public safety in mind, tended
to concentrate more on what had been common and important in the
past than on what might become so in the future. When examinations
by universities or professional bodies were used for licensing purposes,
17 Survey of Medical Students in 1966. Summary report by the Association for the Study
of Medical Education and the National Foundation for Educational Research. Report
of the Royal Commission (note 4), Appendix 19.
494
Medicine
as in Britain, they too were of the pass-fail variety. Even when one year
of ‘pre-registration’ training or internship became compulsory in 1953,
‘finals’ continued to be dominated more by concepts of what a doctor
should know or be able to do than by the needs of an intern practising
under supervision.
the reform of medical education

As the direct effects on medical education of changes in medical practice
and in society proceeded inexorably, medical schools could no longer turn
out doctors in six or seven years. By the 1950s it was accepted everywhere
that nobody could in future master the whole of medical knowledge. It
was accepted, too, that it would remain necessary, and possible, for all
doctors to acquire an understanding of the sciences basic to medicine,
to comprehend the normal human being and the causes and results of
abnormality, and to become competent in basic clinical skills. Beyond
that, each student would have to acquire the detailed knowledge and
skills relevant to the current practice of a particular branch of medicine –
a single body system (e.g., neurology), a specific age group (e.g., neo-natal
paediatrics) or a specified range of care (e.g., primary health care).
To be safe and effective, all doctors would clearly have to measure as
precisely as possible all aspects of a patient’s problem, both scientific and
humanitarian approaches to it. They would have to think like scientists
but be prepared to make decisions and take action while still lacking suf-
ficient evidence to be altogether certain. All doctors were being required
too to accept change as ‘normal’ in every feature of their professional
life and work.18 They would be certain to be confronted with clinical
problems that could not be solved by pattern recognition, with situations
about which they had received no instruction during training, and with
new, unfamiliar ethical dilemmas.
In future, doctors unable to work in a changing context with some
degree of equanimity in all but the narrow specialties would be likely to
become insecure, forced either into referring increasing numbers of their
patients to other doctors, or turning into uncomprehending technicians
applying a limited range of remedies, or pursuing an unending and
inevitably unsuccessful search for all knowledge.19 Those, on the other
hand, who developed the ability to think and reason for themselves would
be able and willing to make good use of continuing education.
18 Report of the Royal Commission (note 4).

19 E. E. Boesch, ‘Psychological Basis for the Education of the Physician’, in Preparation of
the Physician for General Practice, WHO Public Health Papers, 20 (Geneva, 1963).
495
John Ellis
Educational strategies and the employment of methods not previously
included in all undergraduate courses would facilitate the process. Cur-
ricula in continuing postgraduate training would need to minimize the
conflict between training and education, between programming students
to do precisely what they have been told and encouraging them to ques-
tion everything they are told to do. The translation of as much vocational
training as possible from undergraduate education to a later stage in med-
ical education, necessary on other grounds, would help, and so would
postponing the teaching of the very considerable amount of empirical
knowledge still useful in medical practice.
Logically, therefore, the preparation of all doctors would need to be a
three-stage process, with undergraduate education no longer seeking to
provide the knowledge and skills relevant to general practice. All medical
students would need to take up an internship not only for vocational
training, but in order to learn those aspects of many subjects (such as
therapeutics, community medicine and ethics) which could not be fully
meaningful without some experience of actively participating in the care
of patients. All medical students would need a postgraduate in-service
training to equip them with the knowledge and skills relevant to the prac-
tice of a particular branch of medicine – and to enable them to learn
how to work as members of a multidisciplinary team and to participate
in management. All doctors would need continuing education to enable
them to keep abreast of developments in their own field of work and
aware of change in others. Their ability to make use of continuing educa-
tion would depend on the success of their initial university course, which
in turn would depend on the adequate provision of the second and third
stages of training.
In the absence of a university course enabling doctors to learn for
themselves and evaluate new developments, there would be no alternative
but to provide regular compulsory retraining. That would lead inevitably,
wherever medical education depended on government funding, to making
public decisions relating to what branches of the profession to maintain,
the functions of each branch, and the number of students required to
fulfil those functions. Defining functions in a relatively narrow specialty
would not be particularly difficult, and updating would consist mainly of
keeping abreast of development in the specialty. Defining the functions
of a generalist, however, would be far from easy and would extend the
role of government in medical education.
The situation in the Soviet Union, when government was already to
define the objectives and context of medical education, differed in 1945
from that anywhere else. In 1930 Soviet medical schools had been sep-
arated from the universities and academic research institutes and placed
under the Ministry of Health, and in 1934 the medical schools (renamed
496
Medicine
institutes of medicine) had been subdivided into three segments: one in
general medicine, one for paediatricians and one for public health officers.
The first part of the course was taken by all the students. This partially spe-
cialized basic vocational training was followed by compulsory post-basic
training tailored to adult or paediatric care or to public health work –
with opportunities for some to proceed on to further training in other
specialties.
This pattern of medical training remained little changed over four
decades, although adjustments were occasionally made so as to match
government decisions about medical care. In 1958, however, it was laid
down that attention had to be paid to inculcating a scientific method of
cognition, a creative approach towards the study of sciences, a responsi-
ble attitude towards study, and the ability to work independently. This
did not lead to the return of the medical schools to the universities,
but ‘scientific circles’ were established in medical schools where, on an
optional basis, students could consider and discuss new developments in
medicine and in the process practise a foreign language. Most other coun-
tries in Eastern Europe continued to maintain medical faculties in their
universities, though much influenced by the Soviet Union’s approach to
medical care and medical training. It was not until the late 1980s that the
restoration of the Russian institutes of medicine to universities began to
be considered.
No Western country followed the Soviet system. All set out instead to
strengthen and improve the influence of the university on basic medical
education. The first countries to embark on a policy of reform in the
1940s were those in which the pre-war system was most rapidly altered
by the direct effects of changing practice. Sweden and Britain were among
them. Their reliance on practical clinical experience by students, which
had made them vulnerable to those direct effects, had also ensured that
their medical schools (three in Sweden and thirty in Britain) were small,
and had made a numerus clausus necessary. Both sought to reform the
university course and to improve the period of general professional train-
ing, and in the 1960s both recognized the need to provide a third stage
of postgraduate training for all doctors. The difference in their speed of
progress reflected the influence of factors acting as a spur or as a barrier
to change.
Agitation among the younger doctors in Sweden produced a royal
committee on medical education in 1948. It reported in 1953. Fifteen
of its proposals were accepted by the government in 1954, and a new
undergraduate curriculum, which had ‘the sole aim of preparing the doc-
tor for the coming years of postgraduate studies’, was set in motion in
the medical faculties in 1955. Organization of postgraduate training in
the specialties followed, and in 1967 postgraduate training for general
497
John Ellis
practice was made compulsory. This rapid progress was much assisted
by the fact that medical education had always been based on universi-
ties, that higher education was under the central control of a government
well positioned to consult with a small number of universities, and that
postgraduate training was, from 1960 onwards, under a single authority,
the National Board of Health. Moreover most generalist doctors were
salaried employees of the state.
In the UK, over half the country’s medical students before the war
received all or part of their training in medical schools in London owned
and run by the governors of charity hospitals. The planning of a state
medical service led to the setting up in 1941 of an interdepartmental
committee to consider its implications for medical education, and its
report, the Goodenough Report (1944), recommended that every medi-
cal school become an integral part of a university with a much increased
number of university-appointed teachers.20 Each university should offer
an undergraduate course that, by its nature and standard, would provide
the student with a university education on ‘broad and liberal lines’, and
follow it up by a one-year period of internship and further postgradu-
ate training for specialists. Each medical school should relate to, but be
separately financed from, a group of hospitals and clinics.
The committee warned that the standard of a national health service
would depend on the quality of medical education and research, which
in turn would depend on a great increase in government funding. It rec-
ommended, as a means of ‘shortening the inevitable time-lag between the
initiation of educational reforms and their fruition’, the ‘urgent building
up of an adequate supply of teachers, the granting of priorities for build-
ing materials and labour, and the provision of postgraduate courses’. The
report attracted little attention from the profession or the public in 1944,
as both were fully occupied with the war. But it was not forgotten. Imple-
mentation began in 1948 with the closing of non-university schools, and
proceeded thereafter with government funds made available through a
medical sub-committee of the University Grants Committee to medical
schools willing to have more university-appointed teachers.
The influence of universities over British medical schools increased
throughout the 1950s as the number of full-time medical staff rose from
432 in 1938/39 to 2,163 in 1961/62.21 One year of compulsory internship
was introduced in 1953. In 1957 the General Medical Council abandoned
its previous policy of recommending a detailed minimum curriculum, and,
in exhorting the medical faculties ‘to instruct less and educate more’, it
20 Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Medical Schools (Goodenough Report)

(London, 1944).
21 University Grants Committee, University Development 1957–62 (London, 1964).
498
Medicine
reminded them of their right and duty to experiment with different courses
and methods of teaching. An Association for the Study of Medical Edu-
cation was founded in the same year to collect and transmit information
on medical education and to promote and conduct research into it, lead-
ing later to the publication of the British Journal of Medical Education.
Universities now began to introduce new curricula.22 A programme of
rebuilding the country’s medical schools (to about twice their previous
size) began in the 1960s, and three new schools were started. The policy
of combining modernization with expansion was adopted because most
existing schools lacked facilities for university education.
Early in the 1950s an optional scheme for the postgraduate training
of general practitioners was introduced, based on one year as a trainee-
assistant in an approved practice. The University of London set up its
British Postgraduate Medical Federation, comprising fourteen special-
ist institutes and the Postgraduate Medical School of London. Between
them they offered courses in all specialties. In 1961/2 they provided post-
graduate education for 3,800 students, of whom 2,500 came from other
countries, mainly from the British Commonwealth.23
In Britain and Ireland registration of specialized postgraduate training
was not required before one engaged in private practice as a specialist,
but appointment as a specialist to a hospital was conditional on years of
in-service assistantships in large hospitals and on passing examinations
set by the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, traditional, long-
established institutions.
The introduction of the National Health Service was followed by
a vast increase in junior hospital posts offering further experience to
young graduates who in Britain, as everywhere else in the world, were
already determined to specialize. The posts were not designed for train-
ing, however, and working conditions were poor. When the government
imposed restrictions on the expansion of specialist appointments, there-
fore, not surprisingly many graduates chose to emigrate, especially to
the United States, where residency training programmes provided every-
thing a trainee needed to gain accreditation. Their departure facilitated
the immigration into the UK of graduates from other countries, especially
from hastily established, over-large and understaffed medical schools in
poorer newly independent countries prepared to recognize as specialists
anyone with a British higher diploma, even if obtained after little more
than theoretical courses of study. Between 1962 and 1967 some 800 UK-
born medical graduates left the UK each year, only about 400 of whom
22 P. O. Williams and V. M. J. Rowe, Undergraduate Medical Curricula: Changes in Britain

(London, 1963).
23 University Grants Committee, University Development 1962–67 (London, 1968).
499
John Ellis
were later to return.24 The country received, however, more doctors than
it lost. Those taking up medical occupations in Britain in 1967 consisted
of 2,050 non-British doctors, compared with 1,810 British medical grad-
uates. In 1969 almost a quarter of all doctors employed in the NHS were
born, and mostly trained, outside the UK, even though the annual entry
to British medical schools had been doubled from around 1,500 in 1959
to around 3,000 in 1969.25
Since the net effect of migration was in the country’s favour, little was
done in the 1950s and 1960s to improve postgraduate training for the
specialties by defining its content or duration, approving training posts or
establishing training programmes. Completion of training continued to be
signalled by appointment as a ‘consultant’ (specialist) in the NHS, rather
than by completing a given period of apprenticeship or passing exami-
nations. In the 1960s, however, conditions of work for junior hospital
doctors were improved and short periods of study leave were allowed.
Continuing education for all doctors continued to be necessary, and to
assist in its provision 300 postgraduate medical centres were established
(complete with library, lecture theatre, study rooms and offices), financed
partly by foundations, partly by public appeals and partly by the Ministry
of Health.
In 1965 a Royal Commission on Medical Education was set up to
advise on better organization of postgraduate training, the need for more
doctors and the rationalization of the many university medical institutions
in London. It reported in 1968, recommending that the policy begun by
the committee of 1944 be continued, with a more flexible undergradu-
ate course (providing for optional studies in addition to basic knowledge
and skills), a period of general professional training, and postgraduate
training for all doctors, specialists and general practitioners, followed
by continuing education. Ways of organizing postgraduate training were
recommended, as was an indicative register informing the public of the
branch of medicine in which each doctor had been trained. The Commis-
sion also recommended the regrouping of London’s 27 university medical
institutions (12 undergraduate schools and 15 postgraduate institutions)
into six centres, each joined with a multi-faculty university college.
Organization of postgraduate training for the specialties then began,
defining the content of each course, and designing training programmes
for linked in-service posts. Appointment as consultant in the NHS marked
completion of training. Coincidentally, general practitioners were trained
to contribute to the training of the next generation. The hostility of the
24 O. Gish, ‘British Doctor Migration 1962–67’, British Journal of Medical Education, 4
(1970).
25 O. Gish, ‘Medical Education and the Brain Drain’, British Journal of Medical Education,
3 (1969).
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Medicine
profession to postgraduate training of general practitioners was gradually
overcome and the range of continuing education increased.
It was not, however, until 1978 that postgraduate vocational train-
ing for those wishing to become principals in general practice was made
mandatory, and not until 1983 that the General Medical Council (GMC)
was made responsible for the standard of all stages of medical education.
But when, ten years later, the GMC proposed ‘recommending’ all medi-
cal faculties to adopt a curriculum combining a compulsory core of basic
knowledge and skill with optional studies aimed at intellectual devel-
opment, university medical institutions in London resisted this reform,
despite the urging of reports done in 1979 and 1992. It took Britain some
fifty years, therefore, to achieve much the same degree of reform reached
in less than twenty years in Sweden, where the production of doctors had
also been doubled in the sixties.
It was said of the UK in the 1960s that no country had produced so
many wise reports on the reform of medical education, and no country
had done so little about them. In fact, the progress made in the UK was
remarkable, especially considering the many difficulties in the way, such
as the absence of university hospitals, great resistance by many clinical
teachers (particularly in London) to any increase in university staffing, a
system of hospital organization consisting of as many autonomous clinical
units as senior members of staff (mainly part-time clinicians appointed
by the NHS), the wide range of licensing bodies, including the Royal
Colleges of Medicine (in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow), and an even
larger number of professional colleges and associations involved with uni-
versities and the NHS in the organization of postgraduate training. Even
the one great spur to reform, the emigration of young doctors to coun-
tries providing better postgraduate training, was to some extent blunted
by the immigration of equally large numbers from other countries willing
to work in British hospitals while taking examinations for British diplo-
mas. Moreover, general practitioners, instead of being salaried employees
of the NHS, which had originally been intended but was unacceptable to
the British Medical Association, remained independent of it, contracting
with it to provide the same ‘general medical services’ for all that had
been provided for insured working men since the National Insurance
Act of 1911.
A similar line of development to that pursued quickly in Sweden and
more slowly in the UK was followed in Norway, Denmark, Finland and
Iceland, allowing sufficient uniformity to enable a free interchange of doc-
tors. In the Netherlands the absence of national licensing examinations
and of close government control over universities gave medical facul-
ties, especially new ones like Rotterdam, considerable freedom to deter-
mine the nature of their own courses. The powerful position of general
501
John Ellis
practitioners in the health-care system led in 1968 to an optional year of
vocational training for those entering general practice, the basic course
being reduced from seven to six years.26 In 1974 postgraduate training
for general practitioners became compulsory. The period was extended
to two years in 1987 and to three years in 1993.
Consideration of reform began in France in the 1940s, with the coun-
try’s medical education still based on a mixture of medical faculties and
‘secondary’ medical schools.27 University teachers were appointed by cen-
tral authorities and many lacked both hospital and research facilities. The
Paris faculty had upwards of twenty-one municipal hospitals at its dis-
posal, but had no say in the appointment of their staff, who provided
much of the clinical teaching – a problem not unlike that in the UK,
but complicated by the lack of a numerus clausus. A loosely defined
curriculum began with clinical studies in wards crowded with students.
A fundamental restructuring of medical schools was deemed essential,
therefore, and was carried through as the Réforme Debré by Professor
Robert Debré, whose son was prime minister and later finance minister
of France.
An inter-ministerial committee, set up in 1956 with Professor Debré as
chairman, led in 1958 to proposals for the establishment of new medical
teaching centres in which universities and hospitals would be more closely
integrated, and in which university teachers in all subjects would be full-
time and required to combine teaching with patient care and research.
As this reform began, the curriculum was revised, entry to the second
year was limited by examinations to relate student numbers to clinical
facilities, and the system of externat and internat was expanded; the
high cost of reform, however, slowed its progress, leading to increasing
dissatisfaction with the part played by medical students, assistants, chief
residents and researchers, leading in turn to the dramatic events of May
1968.28 By that time the reform of medical education had made less
progress than in England as far as a university course culminating in the
licensing doctorate of medicine was concerned.
The postgraduate situation, however, was different. To obtain a ‘cer-
tificate of special studies’, teaching spread over some three years and
the passing of theoretical and practical examinations were necessary.
26 P. A. J. Bouhuijs et al.,‘The Rijksuniversiteit Limburg, Maastricht, Netherlands: Devel-

opment of Medical Education’, in F. M. Katz and T. Fülöp (eds.), Personnel for Health
Care, WHO Public Health Papers, 70 (Geneva, 1978); J. C. van Es, ‘Clinical Teaching in
General Practice’, in H. Beukers and J. Moll (eds.), Clinical Teaching, Past and Present,
Clio Medica (Acta Academiae Internationalis Historiae Medicinae), 21 (1989).
27 Coury, ‘Teaching’ (note 14).
28 C. Escoffier-Lambiotte, ‘Review and Analysis of Medical Education in France’, in J. R.
Krevans and P. G. Cunliffe (eds.), Reform of Medical Education: The Effect of Student
Unrest (Washington, D.C., 1970).
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Medicine
Postgraduate teaching was provided not only in universities, but in offi-
cial organizations under the control of or with the support of the National
Centre for Scientific Research and the National Institute of Health and
Medical Research. Since there was no control over the number of spe-
cialists, the number of graduates choosing to specialize increased rapidly.
In 1967, 5,300 postgraduates were registered in Paris in the faculty of
medicine alone.
In other parts of Europe, where medical faculties were modelled on the
pre-war German pattern and were less immediately subject to the direct
effects of change in medicine, there was a less-obvious need in the 1950s
for haste in adapting medical education to changing circumstances. There
were also numerous impediments to change: the post-war condition of
medical schools and hospitals and the degree of central control over
them, the tendency to maintain large medical faculties, a tradition of
powerful, autonomous professorial units firmly under the direction of
centrally appointed professors with no retirement age, national licensing
examinations controlled by central authorities, and, not least, the state of
the national economy and the degree of priority given to the financing of
medical education. In some countries, such as Belgium, racial differences
added further difficulties.29
Pressure for change came mainly from three sources: teachers, students
and new graduates. While the most senior and powerful teachers tended to
wish to maintain the status quo, many with less seniority (both clinicians
and researchers) were anxious to see reform, if not necessarily prepared to
risk promotion prospects by public criticism of the existing state of affairs.
Groups wishing to discuss change sometimes thought it wise to meet in
secret. Teachers from many countries, including Greece, became members
of the Association for the Study of Medical Education in London, where
their attendance at meetings would not be noticed back home.
In West Germany in the 1950s it was easier for one of the ten differ-
ent states to construct new university buildings than to change the fed-
eral laws regulating the requirements for qualifying as an MD or being
approved by the state board to enter practice. A ministerial committee
made relatively small changes apart from extending the internship to two
years. The Federal Research Council suggested various improvements,
but the first major step forward came with the start of new universities
and a medical faculty in one of them, the University of Ulm. Planning
began in 1954, preclinical teaching in 1969, and postgraduate teaching
earlier. The teachers planning the new medical school were not so much
concerned with curriculum as with organization – seeking a system of
29 J. E. Dumont, ‘The Example of the University of Brussels’, in Krevans and Cunliffe,

Reform (note 28).
503
John Ellis
governance and departmental structure which would facilitate interdis-
ciplinary teaching and research, achieve the unity of the two so long
desired, and foster the acquisition of scientific method by students.30
The second pressure for change in much of Western Europe in the late
1960s was student unrest. Unrest among medical students was least in
countries like the UK where efforts had already been made to reform
undergraduate medical education. Elsewhere, medical students shared
the antagonism of youth to authority. But they differed from others in
suffering the frustration of having no responsibility for anything but their
own education while spending long years preparing for an occupation
carrying great responsibilities for others. In at least the early years of
that long preparation they had difficulty in seeing the relevance of much
that they were required to learn. Many had probably chosen to take
up medicine for reasons other than an interest in science and, whether
altruistic or not, they were readily moved by the growing gap between
the haves and the have-nots and inadequate medical care for the poor.
Most were well aware that the range of conditions to be seen in teaching
hospitals no longer mirrored that to be seen outside.31
Students were not the only ones to imagine that less ‘science’ in the
curriculum would somehow lead to providing the patients with more
of ‘what they really need’. They were also able in the 1960s to travel
and to see in other lands aspects of medical care or medical education
which, though difficult to evaluate, they would like to see adopted at
home.32 In general, however, when unrest reached its peak in 1968,
medical students were far from clear what reforms they wanted, other
than a share in the reforming process. In Paris, where demands were
most vociferous, ‘through the shattering noise of offensive grenades and
tear-gas bombs outside the bronze doors of the faculty, the students
imperturbably concentrated all the power of their imagination to drawing
up a white paper setting out their proposals and demands’.33 They claimed
to have won the battle for substantially more clinical practice in the
curriculum.
Those who demonstrated in other countries may have achieved their
aim of a place in the decision-making process in universities, although
succeeding generations of medical students proved less keen to use it.
Ironically, one change of great importance to the reform of medical edu-
cation, a numerus clausus, was opposed by students in some countries as
30 E. F. Pfeiffer, ‘Organisation of New Medical Schools’, in Krevans and Cunliffe, Reform

(note 28).
31 J. R. Ellis, ‘Demands and Responses’, in Krevans and Cunliffe, Reform (note 28).
32 M. Zelter, ‘The Need for Reforms as Seen through Students’ Eyes’, in Krevans and
Cunliffe, Reform (note 28).
33 Escoffier-Lambiotte, ‘Review’ (note 28).
504
Medicine
the loss of a democratic right. Nonetheless, limitation of entry to medi-
cal schools was imposed by various means throughout Western Europe,
beginning with Germany and the Netherlands in the 1960s, and intro-
duced in Italy in the early 1990s. Belgium was left (without a numerus
clausus) as the main recipient of foreigners unable to gain access to a
medical school in their own countries.
Student unrest undoubtedly drew attention to the need for reform in
medical education, but the determination of young doctors to specialize
proved a more powerful force leading inexorably to changes not only
in postgraduate training but in undergraduate education as well. Some
indication of the speed at which specialization progressed is given by the
increase in the number of separate special departments in Sweden, 10 in
1890, 332 in 1940 and 778 in 1960.34 In England and Wales, despite
tight government control over the expansion of consultant (specialist)
posts, the number of specialists rose from 3,037 (full-time equivalent) in
1949 to 4,634 in 1955, an increase of 52.6 per cent.35 In 1975, out of
20,200 registered doctors in the Netherlands, a country placing much
emphasis on general practice, 4,800 were general practitioners, 6,600
were specialists, and the number of specialists was rising faster than that
of general practitioners.36 In the UK as late as 1990 general practitioners
made up less than half of the total number of doctors.
In most European countries universities offered higher medical degrees,
obtainable mostly by thesis, but sometimes by examination, and most
required graduates to take further courses of instruction and pass exami-
nations for some kind of certificate (like the French ‘Certificate of Special
Studies’) before being licensed to practice as specialists. The mode and
content of training for each specialty had to be adjusted promptly to
advances in medicine, but as the number of specialists was decided more
by market forces than by state health services, postgraduate training had
to meet demand if emigration were to be controlled.
During the 1950s and 1960s more and more graduates attended post-
graduate courses in universities, separate postgraduate medical schools
or specialized institutes, with accreditation of specialists ranging from
theoretical examinations at one extreme to apprenticeship in British state
hospitals at the other. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the importance
of practical experience was increasingly recognized throughout Western
Europe. Even so, the European Community, as it tackled the task of
standardizing the accreditation of specialists in Member States in the
1990s, was confronted with the fact that many more years were required
34 H. Bergstrand, Lakaekaren och provisiallakarevandet: Medicinalvasendet i Sverige
(Stockholm, 1963).
35 C. Webster, The Health Services since the War, Vol. I (London, 1988).
36 Bouhuijs et al., ‘Rijksuniversiteit Limburg’ (note 26).
505
John Ellis
to become a specialist in the NHS in the UK than anywhere else. The
criteria were different. Nowhere was there adequate postgraduate train-
ing for general practice. Optional training was provided in 1973 in the
Netherlands and made compulsory the following year, and elsewhere the
period of internship was extended, but in general the failure of graduates
to enter general practice was not attributed to the paucity of training for
it – or to any other possible reason – but to ‘over-specialization’ in an
undergraduate course of studies given mainly in hospitals.
In the 1970s, in a number of countries new ‘experimental’ medical
schools were set up, among them the medical faculty of the Autonomous
University of Madrid in 1969 and of the new University of Maastricht
in 1974. In 1975 the Department of Community Medicine at the new
University of Haceteppe in Ankara provided a two-month rural internship
in community medicine in addition to the teaching of preventive medicine,
and a two-month clerkship in rural health centres. The planning of a new
course at the Medical University of Pécs in Hungary was completed in
1975; it set out to educate a community-orientated general practitioner.
All these schools had limited entries. Pécs took in 200 annually on the
basis of performance in biology and physics, and social factors such as
being children of industrial workers or farm-labourers.37 Social factors
also determined the choice in Norway, of Tromsø, north of the Arctic
Circle, as the site of a new medical school in 1969.38
In the 1970s all medical schools in Europe faced the problem of find-
ing time in already crowded undergraduate curricula for both additional
educational activities and additional training to meet specific local needs
or to encourage a community orientation. Many schools began to inte-
grate teaching around organ systems, as pioneered in the 1950s at the
University of Western Reserve in the United States, as a means of freeing
part of the curriculum for educational activities such as study in depth,
projects and problem solving.39 Some faculties in the UK were thereby
able to set aside one year of the five-year course for such activities, while
others continued to persuade as many students as possible to spend an
additional year studying for a BSc degree in a single subject.
More commonly, in countries unable or unwilling to provide postgrad-
uate training for general practice, the time saved by integrated teaching
was used to provide additional training for community medicine or some
other aspect of medical practice. Growing awareness that different stu-
dents had different aims and educational needs led to the concept of an
37 Katz and Fülöp, Personnel (note 26).

38 L. Cerych and P. Sabatier, Great Expectations and Mixed Performance: The Implemen-
tation of Higher Education Reforms in Europe (Stoke-on-Trent, 1986), ch. 6.
39 A. G. Swanson, ‘Medical Education in the USA and Canada’, in J. Walton et al. (eds.),
The Oxford Companion to Medicine, Vol. I (Oxford, 1986).
506
Medicine
integrated core curriculum followed by options. A continuing desire to
relate the educational process as much as possible to medical practice
led to the concept of integrating teaching around problems of medical
practice or around competencies required in practice, rather than around
organ systems.40
Meanwhile, the advance of educational technology in the 1970s
and 1980s produced much of great value to medical education. Self-
learning devices ranged from tape-slide programmes to computer-assisted
learning – all of which could be used by individual students working in
their own time at their own speed. Similarly, many of the difficulties sur-
rounding the teaching of the practice of basic clinical skills could be over-
come by the use of closed-circuit television, one-way screens and videos,
together with simulation techniques ranging from the use of models to
the employment of actors playing the parts of patients. All these devel-
opments contributed in the 1980s to the advance of medical education as
a subject, with the establishment of departments of education in medical
schools, the setting up of courses (including degree courses) in education
for medical teachers, and an increased amount of research into techniques
of teaching, methods of learning, and reliable methods of assessment.
Unfortunately, measurements of the quality of care given by the products
of new forms of medical education remained tantalizingly out of reach.
the cost of medical education

Medical education had been very cheap in a few European countries
before the Second World War. In Britain it was largely a by-product of
patient care in charity hospitals, and most teachers were hospital staff.
It was more costly in countries that relied on university courses. After
1945 costs rose rapidly, especially in the UK. Everywhere specialization
and improvements in technology necessitated more teachers, and in most
countries more research facilities. To the rising cost of basic medical
education (making medicine the most expensive faculty in a university)
was added that of providing more and better-organized postgraduate
training and, before long, the cost of continuing education.
In the late 1950s, however, before the cost of reform could be met,
and in some countries before reform even began, it became essential
to increase the number of doctors as quickly as possible. In countries
without a numerus clausus this could be done without great difficulty,
provided no great change was made in the type of education provided.
40 W. C. McGaghie, G. E. Miller, A. W. Sajid and T. V. Telder, Competency-Based Cur-
riculum Redevelopment in Medical Education, WHO Public Health Paper, 68 (Geneva,
1978).
507
John Ellis
In France, the faculty of Paris had 7,690 students in 1964, with 4,050
in the preliminary pre-medical year. In 1966 there were 9,481 students,
with 4,903 in the pre-medical year. The increase continued: the number
of medical doctorates issued in France rose from 3,000 in 1968 to 9,000
in 1978.41
Where medical faculties were small and a numerus clausus was in
operation, increased production was more difficult and costly. Never-
theless, both Sweden and the UK doubled their production of doctors
between 1960 and 1970. In Sweden each of the existing three schools
was increased in size, and three new ones started. The total number of
medical students rose from 3,316 in 1960 to 6,575 in 1969.42 The UK
began a programme of rebuilding all its existing schools so as to equip
them for a university education and at the same time to allow them to
take a student entry (120–160) about twice that of the country’s previous
average annual entry.43 One new medical school was started, and two
more added in the 1970s. The annual national student entry rose from
about 1,500 in 1959 to around 3,000 in 1969. In addition, students were
no longer admitted from countries such as Norway and South Africa,
from which many had previously come for medical education and then
returned home. In the UK, and everywhere else, the need for expansion
of medical education inevitably slowed its reform.
After the war the cost of medical education throughout Europe was
met mainly by government funds, though very considerable sums contin-
ued to be raised by teachers from other sources for research in medical
faculties and postgraduate institutes. The University of Witten/Herdecke,
established in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany, in 1982, was a very rare
instance of a private state-independent university with a medical faculty.44
The combination of rising costs and state funding led to an increasing
number of decisions affecting medical education and training being taken
at national level. Whereas before the Second World War such decisions
related to national mechanisms for granting licences to practise medicine
and for maintaining standards, they soon came to include such matters
as:
1. how many and what kind of doctors the country needed and what it
could afford;
2. how much should be invested in medical education and research;
3. how such investment would be distributed across the country;
41 Coury, ‘Teaching’ (note 14).

42 Svenska utbiedningestatistic årsbok (Stockholm, 1978).
43 University Grants Committee, University Development (note 23).
44 R. Wedersheim, ‘The First Private Medical Faculty in the Federal Republic of Germany’,
Medical Teacher, 11 (1989).
508
Medicine
4. what proportion of the total resources available should be devoted
to ensuring, through better education today, better health care
tomorrow;
5. how the clinical resources provided by and for the medical schools
would be related to the remaining health-care services of the country
or province or region;
6. how postgraduate training would be spread across the country, and
who was to be responsible for organizing it, providing the neces-
sary facilities, recognizing the satisfactory completion of it by each
individual, and maintaining its standards.
Countries differed as to which ministry or ministries were responsible
for funding medical education. In some a single authority, usually the
ministry of health, was made responsible for both health care and all
stages of medical education and training.
In the Soviet Union this system allowed the training of doctors to be
tailored very precisely to the perceived needs of medical care, or the
needs (present and future) perceived by the government. It was less sat-
isfactory in regard to education as a preparation for a changing future,
particularly in medical schools separated from universities and research
institutes. In most of the rest of Europe the ministry of education carried
responsibility for funding universities and through them basic medical
education. The same ministry might also fund postgraduate medical edu-
cation where universities provided the bulk of postgraduate training and
continuing education. In the Netherlands, the ministry of education was
until the 1980s responsible also for the teaching hospitals and other clin-
ical facilities needed by the medical faculties. Alternatively, the ministry
of education was responsible for funding universities, and the ministry of
health for providing the clinical resources needed by medical schools.
This last alternative overcame the disadvantages of an educational
department being responsible for a country’s most complex and expen-
sive hospitals, but brought about the difficulty that each university faculty
of medicine had to deal with a government health service on a detailed
day-to-day basis. Regional and local health authorities, being solely con-
cerned with local health needs, were often reluctant to provide the clinical
facilities necessary to fulfil the national functions of a medical faculty.
National health authorities were better placed to perceive the national
role of medical schools, but often too remote to recognize variation in
local health-care needs.45
Some European countries endeavoured to ensure that government
funding did not restrict academic freedom. Thus, in the UK, the University
45 J. R. Ellis, ‘The Responsibility of Medical Schools for Teaching Hospitals and the Pro-
vision of Clinical Services’, Medical Education, 15:3 (1981), 171–83.
509
John Ellis
Grants Committee (composed mainly of academics recruited on a part-
time basis, backed by a small permanent secretariat) was responsible for
giving government an estimate of the universities’ financial requirements
and for dividing between the universities the funds allocated by govern-
ment. This buffer mechanism worked well on a quinquennial basis, but
was inevitably less effective when forced by economic circumstances to
function on an annual basis. Its replacement by the University Funding
Council after 1988,46 followed by the elevation of polytechnics to uni-
versity status in 1992, meant closer government control.
In countries where medical schools provided educationally oriented
preparation for later training, it was not easy to define a single set of
clinical facilities that was essential to every undergraduate medical school.
Education of course can adapt to a clinical situation to a degree that is
impossible in training. A student can learn how to solve clinical problems
in any one of a number of specialties, but a doctor training to be a
neurologist must see and treat neurological disorders. Education requires
a much smaller quantity of clinical facilities than does training. In many
European countries, however, failure to define the training to be given in
the later stages of the preparation for medicine left medical faculties with
the virtually impossible task of trying to provide both a general training
and a university education in the same course, and contributed still further
to the lack of clarity as to the financial and clinical requirements of the
basic course.
The situation in such countries was not helped by the fact that in oth-
ers the purpose of the undergraduate course continued for many years to
be the production of generalist doctors, some of whom might later spe-
cialize. And in the seventies and eighties international agencies ardently
advocated matching the content of courses to current national health
needs, a policy likely to appeal not only to politicians but to a general
public unlikely to be able to judge the soundness of university education.
It is perhaps surprising that medical faculties in a number of European
countries were to some extent enabled to orientate their basic courses
to the needs of education rather than to current practice, considering
the pressures on government and the fact that not all political parties
were particularly anxious to see the medical profession intellectually well
equipped to query the aims and methods of treating individuals or the
priorities of health care or the pattern of its delivery.
The general public, however, easily appreciated the need for postgrad-
uate training, at least for the specialties, and for continuing education. In
most countries governments responded relatively promptly to the need,
46 See chapter 1, 15 (note 27).
510
Medicine
financing either the universities or other organizations (including gov-
ernment health services) as the main providers of postgraduate medical
education. Postgraduate training for general practice, on the other hand,
even when considered essential, suffered from the fact that general practi-
tioners were employed by the state in only a few countries. In the UK, for
example, hospital doctors, being employees of the NHS, could easily be
incorporated as trainers of postgraduates, but general practitioners, being
independent contractors providing general services, could be employed
as trainers only with difficulty and at much greater cost.
In many ways, therefore, the cost of medical education had a profound
effect on the speed with which it was adapted to the changing medicine
of the second half of the twentieth century. Although all countries were
eventually striving to introduce more education into the university course
and to postpone much general training to a later period, their governments
had difficulty in curtailing the range or standard of care so as to ensure
future improvement by devoting more current resources to education.
The public, as always, was more concerned with the present than with
the future.
the outcome of reform

All available indicators, however, suggest that the health of all European
nations improved during the second half of the twentieth century, to a
greater extent in the West than in the East.47 But the part played in that
improvement by medicine, as opposed to socio-economic changes, was as
difficult to assess in the twentieth century as it had been in the nineteenth.
The quality of medical care remained equally difficult to measure and
the extent of iatrogenic disease was seldom explored. Even in countries
with state health services facing escalating costs, medical audit began on
a large scale only during the last decade of the twentieth century.
Poor quality of care might be due to poor education or training, but
it might just as well be the result of other factors – the type of persons
attracted to medicine as a career, unsatisfactory facilities or terms and
conditions of service. Litigation against doctors rose rapidly in some
countries in the 1980s; in the UK, the great majority of doctors turning
for help to the Medical Protection Society were general practitioners. Yet
only a small minority of such cases came to court. In hospital practice,
increasingly under the scrutiny of the media during the 1990s, the cases
that were published often suggested a lack of adequate supervision in the
earlier stages of long in-service apprenticeship.
47 Rowland, ‘Health’ (note 3).
511
John Ellis
Although undergraduate examinations tended to become multiple-
choice, the final examination at the end of the medical school course
was a more rigorous assessment of basic competence in the 1990s than
it had been in the 1920s. As no student could begin to practise or enter
the next stage of training without passing such examinations, it might be
expected that he or she had truly demonstrated the achievement of the
aims and objectives of the undergraduate medical course.
During the 1970s and 1980s medical schools spent much effort defining
aims and objectives. By the 1990s it was becoming evident that their
precise definition was more relevant to postgraduate training than to
undergraduate education. Public safety demanded detailed specification
and careful testing of the competences required for licensing, but no
limit could wisely be set as to the extent of intellectual development to
be aimed at in the university course. Nevertheless, in some countries
greater faith in the length of training than in examinations as a means of
ensuring public safety removed testing at the end of postgraduate training
from many specialties, and in the absence of adequate objective evidence
as to the ability of doctors to perform satisfactorily, it was customary
in virtually all European countries throughout the second half of the
twentieth century to criticize medical education on one or other of several
different counts.
Critics convinced that university medical faculties should be producing
graduates prepared for and anxious to engage in primary health care
(with emphasis on the prevention of disease) continued to blame the
medical faculties for placing insufficient emphasis on preventive medicine
and general practice. Such criticism was commonly accompanied by a
plea that university medical faculties should be influenced by a firmly
declared government policy. ‘A main obstacle to the primary health care
orientation approach, as far as education of future doctors is concerned,
has been the communication gap that exists between ministries and the
medical education system in their countries.’48
Nonetheless, while every patient might be the better for the presence
of ‘listening’ and ‘caring’ doctors mostly concerned with primary care,
substantial sections of the European public demanded specialists who
were involved in or in touch with current scientific research.49
In 1985 a survey of the teaching of primary health care in Europe
revealed that not all medical schools had departments of primary medical
48 H. Walton, ‘Primary Health Care in Europe’, Medical Education, 19 (1985).

49 The Edinburgh Declaration of 1988, promoted by the World Federation for Medical
Education and assisted by the WHO, stated that ‘the aim of medical education is to
produce doctors who will promote the health of all people, and that this aim is not being
realised in many places despite the enormous progress made during this century in the
biomedical sciences’.
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Medicine
care (e.g., general practice).50 In Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands,
Norway and the UK there were departments in all medical schools,
and there were also departments in some schools in Finland, France,
the Federal Republic of Germany, Ireland, Poland, Sweden, Turkey and
Yugoslavia. There were, however, no departments of primary medical
care in any medical school in Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the Ger-
man Democratic Republic, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Portugal,
Romania, Spain, Switzerland or the USSR, although many schools in
these countries may in fact have used polyclinics for teaching.
The evidence that undergraduate medical education was responsible
for students choosing to specialize rather than engage in primary health
care (often referred to as ‘working in the community’, with the infer-
ence that in some way hospitals were not part of the community) was
never very strong. Nevertheless, in the last quarter of the twentieth cen-
tury great efforts were made in many countries to ensure that students
observed medical practice ‘in the community’, thus substituting one prac-
tical emphasis for another and in the process weakening the university
atmosphere of the undergraduate course. Very probably Fisek, respon-
sible for the progressive community medicine teaching programme at
Haceteppe University, Turkey, was correct when he observed in 1978
that ‘the behaviour of physicians is determined by the socio-economic
structure of their society, not by their undergraduate education’.51 The
outcome of medical schools dedicated to the production of preventive
and community-orientated graduates keen to practise in isolated areas
tended to confirm that view.52
Teachers in some schools in the 1990s reported ‘the transformation of
eager, motivated school-leavers into narrow-minded, disillusioned medi-
cal graduates’,53 echoing earlier criticism in the United States that its very
different four-year medical school course developed cynicism. In Europe
evidence of such a transformation was largely anecdotal and at any time
varied from place to place. In the UK, discontent and disillusion was
not uncommon or surprising among graduates emerging at the age of
twenty-four from a five- or six-year undergraduate course, lacking any
responsibility for others, to face an internship requiring them to care for
patients from eighty to a hundred hours per week. So abrupt a passage
from modified education to traditional training was not, however, to be
found in other countries, and even in the UK the much-publicized low
50 Walton, ‘Primary’ (note 48).

51 N. Fisek, ‘School of Medicine, Haceteppe University’, in Katz and Fülöp, Personnel
(note 26).
52 B. Porter and W. E. Seidelmann, The Politics of Reform in Medical Education and Health
Service: The Neger Project (New York, 1992).
53 S. Lowry, What’s Wrong with Medical Education (London, 1993).
513
John Ellis
morale of junior hospital doctors (attributed by the media to inadequate
government funding of the NHS) did not prevent a 15 per cent rise in the
number of applicants for medicine in 1992.
Criticism of the products of medical education continued from the
1940s to the 1990s. Their criticism varied considerably from country
to country, even among those within the European Community, despite
Article 23 of Council Directive 93/16 stipulating that the period of basic
medical training for the medical profession should comprise six years
or 5,500 hours of theoretical and practical instruction in a university or
under the supervision of a university. Everywhere, however, the main
criticism was the same and remained unchanged – the undergraduate
curriculum was overcrowded. The curriculum actually followed by indi-
vidual students was doubtless much less crowded than the official reports
on which criticism was based, but there was general agreement through-
out Europe that students were handicapped by overloading.
In the Federal Republic of Germany, despite major changes in the
established pattern of medical training in 1970 and the replacement of old
oral examinations with new multiple-choice question papers, the course
content constantly increased, forcing the students to concentrate on short-
term learning. In the UK, where reform of medical education had begun
in 1944, the General Medical Council stated in 1993 that there was
still ‘gross overcrowding of most undergraduate curricula, acknowledged
by teachers and deplored by students. The scarcely tolerable burden of
information that is imposed taxes the memory but not the intellect. The
emphasis is on the passive acquisition of knowledge, much of it to become
outdated or forgotten, rather than on its discovery through curiosity
and experiment. The result is a marked tendency to under-provide those
components of the course that are truly education.’
In perspective, the striking feature of the very considerable changes that
took place in European medical education over fifty years was that they
all moved in the same direction. Recognition of the need for a university
medical course concentrating on education rather than training ought
to have produced such courses, especially in countries in which medical
education had long been university-based. Teachers were no doubt to
some extent to blame, as the British General Medical Council concluded
in 1993. There was a ‘persisting drive towards an unrealistic degree of
completeness in the curriculum, reinforced no doubt by the understand-
able reluctance of quasi-autonomous departments to surrender what they
see as their entitlement and by the laudable if sometimes excessive enthu-
siasm for their own subject’.54 The German reforms of 1970 aimed to
54 ‘Consultative Paper’, in Recommendations on Undergraduate Medical Education

(London, 1993).
514
Medicine
overcome the problem of the fragmentation of medicine by integrating
examinations and relating the content of them to prescribed attainment
targets. Failure to get agreement as to the precise make-up of the targets
led inevitably to an increasing number of specialized examinations.
Much depended on the preparedness of medical faculties to change
their ways. However, much also depended on the cost of modernization
and expansion. By the 1990s not all the pre-war medical schools in Britain
had been rebuilt, and the faltering of reform schemes proposed in West
Germany in the 1970s could be largely explained by the fact that they
were based on a national student entry of around 5,000. By 1980 the
entry had risen to over 11,000 (reduced thereafter to 10,000).55
Without doubt, however, the most important factor accounting for
delay in implementing reforms recognized as necessary was the failure to
appreciate the difficulties involved in producing generalists, once medicine
had grown beyond the confines of a single mind. General practitioners
had emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century; special-
ists were henceforth general practitioners who, on completion of their
training, had acquired additional knowledge and skills, entitling them
to higher status and rewards. By 1945 this hierarchical concept of the
profession was nearly a century old and strongly held, especially by the
ever-growing army of specialists. It masked the fact that the wheel had
turned full circle, that while good specialists could easily be produced by
intensive training, it would be increasingly difficult to make good gen-
eralists and even more difficult to maintain their level of competence.
Their functions were seldom defined with any precision. In the UK,
where more than 20,000 independent general practitioners contracted
with the Department of Health to provide certain services, those ser-
vices were decided nationally by negotiation between the department and
the most powerful professional body, the British Medical Association.
The inevitable compromise led to terms such as ‘general medical ser-
vices’, making it extremely difficult to define the content and duration
of a postgraduate training for general practice. When in 1990 a signif-
icant change in the contract was made for the first time since 1911,
it was to increase payment for various preventive measures, such as
screening the elderly, and to reduce that for the general medical ser-
vices provided by ‘family doctors’ – a term which took little account
of the divorce rate or of ‘partners’ choosing to have different general
practitioners.
Thus, in many countries, teachers of undergraduates, having no way
of knowing which of their students would become general practitioners,
had good excuse for ensuring that the undergraduate course provided
55 R. Toellner, personal communication 1993.
515
John Ellis
full coverage of their particular portion of medical knowledge. In 1992
the British General Medical Council, in its consultative statement on new
recommendations for undergraduate medical education, observed that
‘there is now no reason why some of the factual learning embodied in
the undergraduate course should not be transferred to a later stage’.56 It
did not, however, define – this had to be included later – what aspects
could not be fully meaningful until the learner had some experience of
responsible participation in the care of sick people. It was not surprising
that the reform of medical education in the UK (requiring increasingly
heavy expenditure and several Acts of Parliament) was very gradual, but
as an English professor of medicine noted in 1993, ‘it is no use developing
a generation of creative critical thinkers only for many of them to become
disillusioned by a ridiculously long period of apprenticeship of the mind-
numbing requirements of our specialist examinations’.57
At the end of fifty years of change, therefore, problems remained in
medical education in most of Europe. There was general agreement that
all medical practitioners needed those attributes that it was always the
primary purpose of a university to develop, but the undergraduate med-
ical course was still rendered largely ineffectual because of the failure to
translate much general and all specialized training to later periods under
other auspices.
teachers and students

The number of teachers employed by each medical faculty increased from
1945 onwards because of the greater involvement in medicine of both
basic and behavioural scientists and because of specialization. In the
clinical field, specialties themselves began to subdivide, giving rise to
subspecialties such as, in the case of paediatrics, neonatal paediatrics and
paediatric neurology. With increasing demand, the so-called supporting
specialties such as pathology, anaesthetics and radiology also proliferated
as they advanced. A hospital which had been well served by a department
of histopathology and a central clinical laboratory in 1945 already needed
departments of microbiology, virology, chemical pathology, immunology
and haematology.
The number of teachers also increased because the medical faculty
became responsible for teaching people other than medical students. After
the war dental schools became the responsibility of a university medical
faculty in more European countries, with the number of dental teachers
56 ‘Consultative Paper’ (note 54).

57 D. Weatherall, ‘Crisis in Medical Education?’, British Medical Journal, 307 (1993), 55.
516
Medicine
increasing as oral pathology advanced along with oral medicine, peri-
odontology and oral surgery. Degree courses in nursing and other health
professions further widened the range of teachers. In countries such as
France and the UK, where before the war the majority of teachers in med-
ical schools were hospital staff, the changeover to more university-based
undergraduate courses also led to a great increase in staff appointed by
universities. In most European countries, however, increasing the num-
ber of teachers failed to result in an acceptable staff–student ratio, partly
because of the rise in student numbers and partly because of additions to
the total workload of medical academies.
The departmental basis of faculty governance became increasingly
strained by the proliferation of departments, many of them small. Many
professorial heads of department became as reluctant to fulfil increasingly
onerous administrative functions as some of the more junior members
were anxious to share in them. The authoritarian head of department
gave way to various kinds of management, including committees and
rotating headships. Both teaching and research called more and more
for interdepartmental activities, and many faculties searched for new and
more appropriate systems of governance than the traditional departmen-
tal organization. Thus, some institutions grouped departments into divi-
sions composed of related subjects, for example, medical, surgical, dental
or pathology, while others organized much of their research in areas of
like activity rather than through departments. No new system of faculty
governance emerged, however, to be universally recognized as an ideal
answer.
In most countries some kind of departmental structure lingered on,
and most medical schools continued to wonder how best to discover a
dean, rector, principal or director with first-class professional qualifica-
tions and reputation, an abiding interest in education, a deep respect for
research, wide experience of administration, the ability to lead and a clear
vision of what the future should be. Secondary problems included how
to prevent such leaders from swelling the ranks of those ‘medical educa-
tors’ who had long since abandoned the practice of both medicine and
education.
In most parts of Europe the relationships between staff and students
in medical faculties changed considerably. In countries such as the UK,
long periods of close apprenticeship to a small number of masters were
replaced by brief opportunities to observe a wide variety of practitioners
at work. Small-group teaching, however, and in some schools tutorial sys-
tems opened up new ways of ensuring close personal contact. Elsewhere,
the great gap between senior teachers and their students narrowed. In
Sweden, for example, it became not unusual for a professor to take his
class on an official visit to some other university or medical centre.
517
John Ellis
Medical academics continued to be held in high regard in Europe
throughout the twentieth century. Their numbers increased without
appreciably lessening the esteem in which they were held. In countries
in which they were previously few and far between their increase brought
heightened respect. While London’s twelve medical schools had between
them only eight professors of medicine or surgery, they tended to be
regarded as doubtless very clever and scientific but perhaps a little out of
touch with the real world, and too accustomed to experimenting to make
a consultation desirable save in a dire emergency. By the 1990s, attending
a university clinic was seen as at least the equal of seeing a ‘Harley Street
specialist’, even if the professor was away at a conference.
In the 1940s and 1950s the students entering many European medical
schools were a mixture of men and women returning from war service
and boys and girls fresh from school. Students in the Soviet Union were
required to complete two years’ work of some kind after leaving sec-
ondary school before entering medicine, and special arrangements were
made to facilitate the progress of nurses and feldshers through medical
school. Many other countries came to favour older applicants by giving
credit for experience gained outside medicine. As a result of that policy
the average age of entry to Swedish medical schools rose to twenty-five at
one period in the early 1980s. In the UK the majority of students contin-
ued to enter the medical faculty at eighteen, some at seventeen, younger
than anywhere else in the world.
The main criterion used in selecting medical students in countries
operating a numerus clausus was academic achievement in examinations
(commonly, but not exclusively, in scientific subjects) taken at secondary
school. Intelligence and aptitude tests were little used. Where interviews
were included, as in some British medical schools, comparison of unsuc-
cessful with successful candidates showed the difference to lie in academic
attainments.58 The level of attainment leading to entry rose not to keep
pace with the intellectual demands of the courses but with the intensity
of competition for entry. Judged by success in secondary school exam-
inations, during the first few decades after the war very many medical
students were considerably brighter than the majority of their teachers.
Yet the situation in medical schools in the Netherlands, where entry was
decided by lottery, did not appear to be significantly different from that
elsewhere.
By the end of the war more than half the medical students in the USSR
were women. Gradually a fifty–fifty ratio was reached in many other
58 M. L. Johnson, ‘A Comparison of the Social Characteristics and Academic Achievements

of Medical Students and Unsuccessful Medical School Applicants’, British Journal of
Medical Education, 5:1 (1971).
518
Medicine
countries, with positive discrimination in favour of men being used in
Poland to ensure that there was not a preponderance of women. But easy
access of women into medicine was not accompanied by equally easy
advance within the profession. In the UK fewer women than men reached
senior positions in surgery, perhaps because fewer attempted to do so.
The advent of a larger number of women into British medical schools
may have contributed to a change in the public image of medical students.
Before 1939 they had over a long period earned a reputation for being
coarse but kind, keen sportsmen, heavy drinkers and quite irresponsible.
From the 1960s onwards, however, medical students, though younger,
generally resembled those in the rest of Europe: hard-working, impecu-
nious and struggling through a long course of studies and an endless series
of examinations – still fond of fun and games, but with a more alert social
conscience than their forebears.
Although the main cost of medical education was borne by the state
in all European countries, living expenses over the long university course
(with only brief holidays in some countries) tended to result in a high
proportion of students being drawn from better-off families. Though
frequently thought to have received secondary schooling too quickly nar-
rowed down to basic sciences, most medical students enjoyed a reasonably
broad-based education even in the UK, where medical faculty entrance
requirements had to be obtained at an early age.
For those drawn into medicine by genuine altruism, it was hard to
spend long years with no chance to help anyone but themselves. The
wastage rate in the UK, however, often as high as 10 per cent, was almost
entirely due to students discovering they had made a wrong career choice.
Most students welcomed almost any opportunity to engage in the care of
sick people.
An ‘elective’ period of some two months was introduced into the cur-
riculum of some British schools in the 1950s, with the initial idea of
allowing the students to work on a project of their choice, and it soon
became accepted as a chance to travel, preferably to the Third World,
and to treat people with easily diagnosed, easily remedied, acute organic
disease. Coincidentally, German students welcomed every opportunity to
see practical work in British hospitals. Students in Eastern Europe sought
electives of whatever kind were available in the countries of Western
Europe, in the process meeting up with New Zealanders and Americans
also on electives. Government-funded European exchange programmes
such as Erasmus, Nordplus and Tempus added still further to the move-
ment of students.59
59 See chapter 3, 115–16; Epilogue, 564–66.
519
John Ellis
education and training

Although some universities continued to rely heavily on lectures and
demonstrations, especially where classes were very large, increasingly
didactic coercive teaching was seen as a hindrance, stifling intellectual
curiosity, reducing initiative and diminishing self-reliance. Many univer-
sities attempted to concentrate on those forms of teaching (normally to
small groups) that enabled students to participate, and on the creation
of learning situations in which the teacher’s role was to encourage rather
than to instruct.
Some medical schools designed the early years of the curriculum so
that teachers from both clinical and basic science departments together
introduced students to the basic knowledge of each body system in the
context of its anatomy, cellular biology and physiology, while identify-
ing the clinical manifestations of disease and the effects of therapeutic
agents.60 Students were thus helped to see the relevance of what they had
to learn to the practice of medicine; instruction was orientated to the
needs of students rather than the aspirations of departments.
Where the curriculum was of the traditional kind, the content was
selected for its relevance to current practice, ensuring a comprehensive
coverage of common conditions. Where the aim of the course had changed
to the production of graduates capable of independent thought and ready
for postgraduate training, it related more to educational needs and antici-
pated changes in medical care.
Remodelling long-established courses for medical students was natu-
rally more difficult than fashioning courses for other health personnel not
previously taking degrees. In some universities courses for nurses called
for less passive and more active learning than those for doctors. Den-
tistry also benefited from small numbers and from the fact that although
considerable instruction and practice remained necessary for the mastery
of its manual skills, such training could be relatively easily kept separate
from education.
The British medical faculty was ahead of most others in Europe in its
efforts to improve techniques of teaching and to encourage more effec-
tive methods of learning. Faculties sought and received the assistance of
educational psychologists, and many established their own departments
of education. Efforts were also made to increase the interest of individual
teachers in education. Universities provided courses to improve teaching
skills, without perhaps always appreciating that the first requirement of
the clinical teacher (especially in postgraduate teaching) was to be a good
60 Swanson, ‘Medical Education’ (note 39).
520
Medicine
clinician: improving the teaching skills of a poor clinician might well do
more harm than good.
By the 1980s, many countries had some kind of national association
for medical education, and the deans of the European medical and dental
schools began regular meetings. By the 1990s computer-based learning
began to make students more easily able to direct their own learning and
much less dependent on teachers. Increased ability accurately to simu-
late situations for practising basic clinical skills also reduced the need
for teachers and lessened the burden on patients. The possibility of using
computers in restorative dentistry pointed to similar advances in dental
training. Social changes, on the other hand, continued to make the dis-
cussion of a patient’s problems by a group of staff and students in an
open ward harmful and unsatisfactory for all concerned. The provision
of teaching rooms and the separation of teaching from the concomitant
care of patients added to the costs of medical education.
In some countries, however, specialization and the dispersal of students
to observe medicine outside hospitals resulted in a large and widely scat-
tered body of teachers over whom the medical faculty could exert little
close control. A similar but greater problem affected internship and gen-
eral professional training. Whether or not the university was responsible
for this important stage of preparation for medicine, its apprenticeship
basis necessitated very large numbers of trainers, most of whom carried
heavy service responsibilities. Clear-cut objectives could have enabled
most to ensure that their trainees achieved them, but precise objectives
were seldom laid down.
Varying in length from country to country (and often voluntarily
extended by graduates), this stage of training soon became, as practi-
cal experience diminished in the undergraduate course, the most inten-
sive learning period in the long preparation for medicine. While falling
short of the ultimate incentive to learning in medicine, being left entirely
alone to face the care of the sick and injured, the first experience of
responsible practice under supervision provided a powerful motivation
which was rarely made full use of. All too frequently trainees were
kept fully occupied, often for very long hours, dealing with immedi-
ate cares and left with little time for study or reflection. They were
provided with little teaching on those aspects of their work in which
practical experience had kindled new interest.61 Nor were they able to
acquire the understanding of people that comes more easily from car-
ing for patients than from reading, lectures, small group discussions or
seminars.
61 J. Grant and P. Marsden, Service-Based Learning (London, 1991).
521
John Ellis
In many countries, postgraduate training was based mainly on rela-
tively short theoretical courses given by universities. In others, particu-
larly Scandinavia and the UK, it was based mainly on apprenticeship in
hospitals. Gradually more practical training was introduced in most coun-
tries, in contrast to undergraduate medical education in which all coun-
tries moved towards greater university involvement. Where universities
controlled major departments of special clinical expertise they inevitably
carried the burden of training in those subjects, but the primary role of
the university was to provide trainees with an opportunity to engage in
some original work, completing that part of their education aimed at
preparing them for the critical evaluation not only of new developments,
but also of their own clinical practice.
The university’s role in continuing education varied much between
countries. In all of them, the twofold aim was the same: enabling the indi-
vidual to keep abreast of developments in his or her own field and become
aware of advances in others. Continuing education could be obtained in
the same three ways: by daily working ‘on the job’, by attending organized
teaching or courses, and by studying at home. Specialists could engage in
all three ways with relatively little help from a university. General prac-
titioners working alone or in small groups had less opportunity to learn
on the job and were more dependent on what was provided for them in
courses or for home consumption. Where, as in the UK, their take-up of
continuing education was fuelled by extra payments, the demands made
on university personnel became considerable, even if the hard work of
organization was done by clinical tutors drawn from the hospital staff.
Although some countries established separate institutes for continuing
medical education, in most of the others the universities collaborated
with health services and professional associations in its organization at
central, regional and local levels.62 Technological advances in communi-
cation and interactive learning such as electronic mail, computer-based
expert systems, satellite TV and video presaged the possibility of new
national and possibly international organizations.
Calls for help with continuing education came also from other pro-
fessions beside medicine. Dentists, for example, having little in the way
of hospitals, were in most countries more dependent than doctors on the
university for refresher courses and the updating of their skills. An increas-
ing number of dental auxiliaries, differently named in different countries,
were also dependent on the same source of training and retraining. Post-
basic courses to provide nurses with special skills such as coronary care
or intensive care required a special organization of their own in most
62 J. Vysohlid and H. J. Walton, ‘Development of Continuing Medical Education in Europe:

A Review’, Medical Education, 24 (1990), 406–12.
522
Medicine
countries, but universities found an increasing demand from nurses and
other health professionals for courses leading to a master’s degree or a
doctorate in some aspect of the health field.
research
The importance of research to the medical faculty, always great, became
still greater as the need grew for more education and less training in the
undergraduate medical course. ‘Unless the student associates with men
bent on the search for new knowledge he will never learn to appraise
accepted beliefs, or acquire that understanding which will allow him in
his turn to face the unknown.’63 As one British scientist put it, ‘Students
should be able to drink deep from the clear waters of a running stream
rather than sip the green mantle of a stagnant pool.’64
From the Second World War onwards faith in the potency of the exper-
imental method encouraged the idea that much-wanted answers to cur-
rent problems could be quickly forthcoming, if only sufficient money and
human resources were put to work. Organizations engaging in research
into the health field were mobilized, in addition to universities. These
included research institutes, scientific academies, professional colleges
and associations, health services and hospitals, industry (particularly the
pharmaceutical industry) and government departments. The sources of
funds included government, industry, foundations and the public.
In some countries government remained the major source, and in all
it increased its total contribution over the years. The amounts spent by
foundations and industry and collected by the public increased also. Up
to the 1970s the funds reaching universities from multiple sources were
in many cases very substantial in total, though difficulties occurred in
relation to projects that failed to catch the imagination of the public or
interest other sources. After the 1970s, costs continued to escalate, and
in many countries support failed to keep pace. In these circumstances it
was government support that was most curtailed.
By the 1990s most European countries had well-established national
organizations for biomedical research complementing that provided by
universities, their role being that of assisting ‘the balanced development
of medical and relevant biological research in the country as a whole,
in partnership with, but not in replacement of, the other instruments of
research in the same fields’.65
The extent to which governments funded medical research in univer-
sities, either directly or through research councils, varied from country
63 Ibid. 64 D. Dunlop, personal communication.

65 Report of the Medical Research Council, 1960–1961 (London, 1961).
523
John Ellis
to country and from time to time. In Germany, where medical research
in the universities had been outstanding in the early twentieth century,
basic research after the war was concentrated more in research institutes.
In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, research was carried out in the
universities from which the medical schools had been removed. In the
UK the amount of medical research in the universities increased greatly
as medical faculties were expanded and strengthened. From the 1980s
onwards, however, government funding of research councils faltered in
the UK, affecting universities indirectly, while their direct funding was
altered to take account separately of teaching and research.
Attempts were made to measure the quantity and quality of research
in the departments and faculties of each university and to relate future
funding to perceived past achievement. Those judged to have performed
poorly had perforce to do less research or seek greater funding from non-
government sources. Intense competition began between universities for
aid from and collaboration with industry. Many achieved more funds
for research than they were previously receiving for it from government.
Nonetheless, the overall trend was towards some universities becoming
major centres of research in many fields and becoming ‘centres of excel-
lence’ in a single field, leaving others with little opportunity for more than
a limited amount of applied research.
Everywhere applied research in the health field increased far more than
basic research – spreading from clinical medicine into methods and sys-
tems of health care and into education and training, carried out by health
professionals of every kind in every kind of hospital, school and health-
service facility as well as in universities. The introduction of ‘medical
audit’ further increased the number of medical personnel engaged in a
new form of applied research.
In the process fundamental research in medicine and allied fields
increasingly became interdepartmental, interdisciplinary and interna-
tional; consequently, the traditional departmental basis of faculty gover-
nance became as much of a hindrance to research as to the development
of a student-orientated undergraduate medical curriculum, perhaps more
so. Devising a system of governance minimizing the control of depart-
ments over the appointment of staff, the design of curricula, the choice
of research projects, the deployment of space and the use of resources,
while desirable in many ways, nevertheless threatened the freedom of
professors to engage in research of their own choosing, already eroded
for other reasons in the case of clinicians.
The vital freedom of academics to pursue knowledge for its own sake
was, at least in theory, safeguarded from government control in countries
where universities could turn to a multiplicity of sources of funding rather
than be dependent on government alone. In reality, it was commonly
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Medicine
more difficult for university researchers carrying major responsibilities
for teaching and patient care than for those without such responsibility to
attract support from industry, the public or foundations. Where support
was secured, teachers were sometimes led to concentrate so much on
research as to threaten the necessary but delicate balance of the essential
trinity of teaching, patient care and research.
The trend towards the concentration of research resources (similar to
the inexorable concentration of medical care resources into fewer but
larger hospitals) posed a further threat to research in the medical facul-
ties by limiting it in some and by siphoning off academic staff from others
to work full time in research organizations outside universities. Collab-
oration between European countries, however, did much to strengthen
Europe’s overall research activity. And the European Commission itself
started a biomedical and health research programme (BIOMED) in 1978,
its four main target areas being:
1. prevention, care and health systems,
2. major health problems,
3. human genome analysis, and
4. biomedical ethics.
There were three projects in 1978–81 and over 200 by 1990–4. Expendi-
ture rose from €1.09 million to €133 million over the same period, with
funds being spent on coordination rather than on particular projects.66
In addition to the European Community’s programme, collaborative
research activities included the European Molecular Biology Organi-
zation, founded in 1963, a private self-governing organization with a
laboratory in Heidelberg,67 encouraging and funding interaction between
700 European molecular biologists. The European Science Foundation
(with fifty-six member research councils, academics and institutes from
twenty countries, and funded by its members) was founded in 197468 to
bring European scientists together to work on topics of common concern,
to coordinate the use of expensive facilities and to discover and define new
endeavours likely to benefit from a cooperative approach. It included a
standing committee of European Medical Research Councils. Such effort
still left Europe far behind the United States in research outlays. The total
expenditure on health research of the twelve countries in the European
Community was $2,045 million in 1990, compared with $8,572 million
in the United States of America.69
66 Commission of the European Communities, EC Research Funding (Brussels, 1990).
67 European Molecular Biology Organisation, 1964–1989 (Heidelberg, 1989).
68 See chapter 3, 120.
69 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Basic Science and Technol-
ogy Indicators, ACCEDE (Paris, 1991).
525
John Ellis
Although the adaptation of medical education was still incomplete in
most of Europe by the 1990s, a decade of striking advances in biomedical
research, there was near consensus that university courses, once freed
from what were seen as impediments, offered the best, if not the only,
way to prepare doctors able to learn for themselves, critically evaluate
new data, face the unfamiliar with equanimity, and contribute usefully
to decisions on priorities in health care and how to meet them. By 1990
universities were responsible for more medical care – and a wider range of
it – than at any previous time, and their contribution to fundamental and
applied research in the field of health, which had increased continuously
over fifty years, was still growing.
Great as were the challenges ahead for the universities that could be
clearly visualized at the end of the twentieth century, the problems with
which they were confronted appeared equally formidable, especially as
regards the faculty of medicine. Problems of governance threatened the
ability to provide the necessary interdepartmental integration of teaching
and the interdisciplinary basis of much research. Problems of achiev-
ing an appropriate balance between education, research and patient care
might grow, as might problems of collaborating with government health
services more concerned with the demands of today than the needs of
tomorrow. Above all, problems of rising costs and of financing research
might threaten academic freedom, making the medical profession more
vulnerable, more dependent on and more exposed to the control of gov-
ernments, increasingly hard pressed to meet escalating demands for every
kind of medical care. Not only might the freedom of teachers to research
into areas of their own choosing be curtailed, but at any time a govern-
ment might decide to restrict the preparation of doctors to a process of
vocational training in whatever aspects of health care it thought fit to
provide at the time – with periodic compulsory reprogramming. Within
this context, the establishment of internationally sponsored projects in
selected universities (inevitable though not without risks, especially for
smaller universities) might result in medical faculties developing a more
powerful voice with which to draw the attention of governments to their
common purpose and needs.70
70 B. Rexed, ‘The Role of the University in the Future’, British Journal of Medical Educa-
tion, 1 (1967).
526
Medicine
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(Acta Academiae Internationalis Historiae Medicinae), 21, 1989.
Bie, K. N. Creating a New University: The Establishment and Development of the
University of Tromsø, Studies in Research and Higher Education, 3, Oslo,
1981.
Boesch, E. E. ‘Psychological Basis for the Education of the Physician’, in Prepara-
tion of the Physician for General Practice, WHO Public Health Papers, 20,
Geneva, 1963.
Briggs, A. The History of the Royal College of Physicians, Vol. IV, London, 2005.
Christie, R. V. Medical Education and the State, London, 1969.
Ellis, J. R. ‘The Future Doctor’, in Priorities for the Use of Resource in Medicine,
Washington, D.C., 1976.
Ellis, J. R. ‘Medical Education in the UK and Europe’, in J. Walton et al. (eds.),
The Oxford Companion to Medicine, Oxford, 1986.
Himsworth, H. Society and the Advancement of Natural Knowledge, London,
1962.
Krevans, J. R., and Condliffe, P. G. (eds.) Reform of Medical Education: The
Effect of Student Unrest, Washington, D.C., 1970.
Medawar, P. B. Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought, London, 1969.
Miller, G. E. et al. Teaching and Learning in Medical School, Cambridge, Mass.,
1961.
O’Malley, C. A. (ed.) The History of Medical Education, Berkeley, 1970.
Pickstone, J. V. (ed.) Medical Innovations in Historical Perspective, London,
1992.
Popper, K. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London, 1972.
Report of Interdepartmental Committee on Medical Schools, London, 1944.
Report of the Royal Commission on Medical Education, London, 1968.
Rothstein, W. G. ‘Medical Education’, in Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia II,
1163–73.
Wall, W. D. Child of our Time, London, 1959.
Wilson, C. ‘The Place of the University in Medicine’, British Journal of Medical
Education, 8:3 (1974), 160–71.
527
CHAPTER 15
TECHNOLOGY
CHRISTOPHER WATSON
the post-war context

The universities of Europe had two very different faces in 1945. Seen
from without, they represented to millions of young men and women the
embodiment of hope – repositories of knowledge, expertise and wisdom,
oases of detachment and objectivity – from which they had been cut off by
seven years of world war. Seen from within, by those who had struggled
to keep them alive during the war years, they seemed to be in a state
of grave debility, if not mortal danger. Their buildings and equipment
had all too often been destroyed or diverted to non-educational uses,
their teaching staff had been run down (particularly at the young and
perhaps most creative end of the spectrum) and they had been starved of
their principal life-blood – young people with enquiring minds who could
gratify their teachers and challenge them.
Both of these views, from without and from within, have been over-
painted, the first in too rosy, the second in too black a hue. And this is
particularly true if we consider those aspects of university life which relate
to technology. Although about half of the German universities suffered
severe bomb damage (particularly those in large cities),1 as did both the
main and technical universities of Helsinki,2 and Poland suffered partic-
ularly badly, losing over half of its pre-war laboratories and over 75 per
cent of its libraries, many of the universities of Europe in fact escaped
comparatively lightly overall from the physical destruction of the war.3
The use of their buildings and facilities for war work did not always lead
far from their pre-war purposes. Military and political leaders of Europe
1 N. Hammerstein, Statement at the International Conference on The History of European

Universities after World War II, Ghent University, September 1992.
2 M. Klinge, ibid. 3 J. Sadlak, ibid.
528
Technology
turned to the universities to provide much of the technical leadership,
especially in the early war years, and so ensured that the universities
were not completely stripped of their best and most creative teaching
staff. Their war work did not destroy, although it distorted, their pre-war
strategy for pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. They continued to
recruit teaching staff and to attract students, though not always on the
scale, and of the quality, of the pre-war years.
The young adults of 1945 were by no means starry-eyed about what the
universities had to offer. Both those whose university careers had been cut
short by the outbreak of war and those who had missed out altogether had
been exposed to a harsher education, and they were not prepared to revert
to the old-style discipline in 1945. Many of them had seen technology in
action, on a scale which dwarfed the provisions of a pre-war university
laboratory, and the traditional academic courses were no longer relevant
to their needs. But they did have needs – to re-establish a civilian (if not
academic) point of view, and to learn the skills appropriate to a world of
post-war reconstruction.
The universities were ill-equipped to meet these needs immediately.
Rewriting a curriculum takes time and requires motivated and energetic
teachers. Since these were not yet available on the necessary scale, the uni-
versities continued for a while along the course set during the war years.
Their technology teaching and research continued to focus on the war-
time priorities, outstandingly on the technologies of electronics (especially
its applications to communications and radar), aerospace (aerodynamics,
control, engines, rocketry), nuclear weapons (nuclear physics, chemistry
and engineering). This was not merely a matter of acquired habit – it
reflected the fact that seven years of priority study had made these the
exciting, leading-edge subjects, in which teachers could point to their
recent achievements, and draw on the personal experience of those that
they taught.
technology-related developments in the

universities
The developments driven by problems indigenous to the universities them-
selves, and not imposed by other institutions, were of enormous diversity
across Europe. Higher education in technology is ordered quite differently
in each of the major European nations; it is not obvious where the line
should be drawn between ‘university’ and ‘non-university’ higher educa-
tion. The list of hard cases includes the former UK colleges of advanced
technology, the French grandes écoles, the German Fraunhofer Institutes
and all the institutes of the Eastern European academies of science. In this
529
Christopher Watson
Table 15.1 Percentage of students entering to read
science and technology subjects at Oxford University
1951 1961 1971 1981 1986 1991
21 32 38 37 39 39
Table 15.2 Percentage of students entering to read science

and technology subjects at Birmingham and Manchester
Universities
1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970
Birmingham 38 42 46 49 50
Manchester 33 34 38 40
section, the term ‘university’ is used in a narrow sense, which excludes

such institutions.
Overall growth
Immediately after the war, science and technology enjoyed a prestige
among would-be university entrants, and within the European public
at large, which allowed admission standards in these subjects to rise
above the national average for all subjects. The universities responded by
expanding admissions in these areas. At Oxford, the percentage of stu-
dents entering to read science and technology subjects evolved as shown
in table 15.1 above.4
Similar trends held elsewhere in the UK, as shown in table 15.2.5
In British universities as a whole, science and technology accounted for
45% of all students as early as 1961.6 Still, this was regarded as too low.
The Robbins Report in 19637 recommended that to meet the needs of
the economy, the British government should actively encourage a 266%
increase in higher education as a whole over a twenty-year period, and a
392% increase in science and technology (these figures excluded medical
subjects). Within these figures, the committee recommended a particularly
strong growth in technology, to bring British higher education in this area
4 Oxford University Gazette (8 June 1992).
5 R. Low and A. Gaukroger, Ghent Conference (note 1); S. V. Barnes, ibid.
6 Lord Robbins, Higher Education, Cmnd. 2154 HMSO, para 66, 166.
7 Ibid., para 509, 165.
530
Technology
Table 15.3 The percentages
of technology degrees among
all first degrees in science and
technology in 1959
UK 36
France 48
USA 49
Sweden 54
Switzerland 59
Canada 65
Germany (FR) 68
Table 15.4 The percentages

of technology degrees among
all first degrees in science and
technology in 1980
UK 41
Switzerland 42
Germany 48
Sweden 49
France 53
USA 82
up to the level enjoyed elsewhere. It cited the comparison with Europe

shown in table 15.3; the figures are the percentages of technology degrees
among all first degrees in science and technology in 1959.8
The Robbins blueprint was implemented in broad outline. During its
twenty-year planning period, the university population did indeed rise by
252% – close to the projected 266%.9 If one sets aside doubts about the
comparability of the statistics, science and technology grew slightly faster
than proposed (341% as compared with 312%), and technology, as a
fraction of science and technology, grew faster still (445% as compared
with 331%).10 However, on the Continent and in the USA technology
grew even faster in respect to science. By 1980, the Robbins league table
read as shown in table 15.411
8 Ibid., table 46, 127. 9 See chapter 6, table 6.6.

10 A. Barblan and J. Sadlak, ‘Higher Education in OECD Countries: Patterns and Trends
in the 1980s’, CRE Standing Conference (April 1988), table 1.
11 Ibid., calculated from figures in table 1.
531
Christopher Watson
By this date, however, people questioned the link between the education
of technologists and general national economic growth accepted by the
Robbins Committee.
A significant trend has been the rise and (more recently) fall in the
relative importance of the second degree. In some measure, the rise
resulted from a form of competition with the US educational system.
There, because of the broad subject spread and relatively slow start dur-
ing secondary education, a three- or four-year first degree was required
to raise students of science and technology to a standard that European
students had already achieved on admission to university. The second
degree course, leading to the PhD, could then build on a strong under-
graduate preparation. European graduates who went to study at such
postgraduate schools as MIT or CalTech in the 1960s reported that the
experience was ‘like drinking water from a firehose’. Their enthusiasm
for the US-style second degree was infectious. Within Europe pressure
mounted in the same direction. Its strength varied from one country to
another. In France, for example, the technological elite (some 3,000 stu-
dents per year) had a two- to three-year course in an école préparatoire
before entering one of the grandes écoles for a further three-year course.
In Germany, degree courses in technology typically lasted five and a half
to six and a half years.12
A second novelty was joint degrees in two or more subjects which an
earlier generation would have regarded as unlikely partners. Engineering
and economics, physics and philosophy, science and management studies,
psychology, philosophy and physiology. The list has grown continuously
since the war, with a fine tuning in the 1960s. Teachers and students alike
wanted to ensure that scientific and technical education did not become
too narrow. The value of ‘breadth’ as an end in itself was expounded by
many leaders of public opinion throughout the 1950s and beyond. This
was perhaps a natural reaction in a generation returning to the academic
scene from the mind-broadening experience of a world war. It provoked
a negative response from a strand of academic opinion, which saw the
pursuit of breadth as a chimera which interfered with the achievement of
excellence in a chosen field. A compromise resulted in which either two-
(or three-) subject courses coexisted with the traditional single-subject
course (for example the physics and philosophy, and engineering and
economics courses introduced in Oxford in 1968), or a smattering of
‘broadening’ course material was introduced across the whole technical
curriculum.
A third trend, opposing the second, has favoured first degrees in a
much narrower speciality than earlier academics would have regarded as
12 Ibid., table 2.
532
Technology
suitable for a degree. Examples within British universities are biotechnol-
ogy, acoustic engineering, mining engineering, food technology and paper
science.13 This trend became evident in the 1950s, with the establishment
of chairs in subjects in which there was already a strong research activity
in the university, often funded by local industries, and it received a strong
boost in the late 1960s as the ‘relevance’ of academic studies came to be
debated widely by students and their teachers.
Another trend was decline in the relative importance of ‘practical’ work
in the first-degree syllabus. In the pre-war era, practical work was under-
taken using ‘state of the art’ equipment in most university courses. In the
post-war period, universities increasingly found it impossible to maintain
the quantity and standard of equipment required to sustain the concept
of ‘across the board’ practical work at this level. The equipment had
become too expensive and specialized, and changed too fast. Increasingly
the choice came down to maintaining practical work across the board,
but using out-of-date equipment, or narrowing the focus to a few selected
‘projects’, leaving the main burden of developing practical skills to post-
graduate education.
Technical infrastructure
A symptom, and also a cause, of the decline in practical work at the
undergraduate level was retrenchment in resources for the maintenance
of the technical infrastructure of science and technology departments
within the universities. Surprisingly, no major public debate took place
about the matter. The Robbins Report devotes just 2 of its 837 paragraphs
to the differential cost of educating science as against arts students.14 It
notes that the average public expenditure in 1962/3 per UK university
student (undergraduate and postgraduate) was £568 in arts, £774 in
applied science and £902 in pure science – and then drops the matter.
In partial compensation for this general decline in the technical infra-
structure, the past twenty years has seen a large relative increase in the
resources devoted to information technology. The electronic computer
was born in the military establishments of the USA and the UK during
the war (the motivation included fire control, design of atomic weapons
and breaking codes). In 1945 work began in the National Physical La-
boratory and in Manchester University (under Williams and Kilburn),15
and in 1951 this led to the development by Ferranti of the first commercial
13 B. Heap, Vocational Degree Course Offers 1987: A Student’s Guide (Richmond, 1987).
14 Robbins Report (note 6), paras 607–8, 201.
15 N. Metropolis, J. Howlett and G. C. Rota (eds.), A History of Computing in the 20th
Century (New York, 1980), 37; M. Croarken, Early Scientific Computing in Britain
(Oxford, 1990).
533
Christopher Watson
computer, the Ferranti Mark 1. In the late 1950s, the idea emerged that a
university should have a computer. Oxford purchased one of the earliest
commercial computers (for £100,000) in 1958 – the valve-based Ferranti
Mercury – and a small but faithful band of enthusiasts tended it night
and day. Its computing power was much less than that of a cheap PC
today (its disk capacity was 32K and its add time was 0.18 ms),16 but
its influence on the minds of a generation of university students was
enormous. For the mathematicians and scientists, access to a computer
led to a shift from analysis to computation as a means of solving most
practical problems. For engineers, it brought a vast range of problems
which had hitherto been tackled by exercising judgment, craftsmanship
or ‘rules of thumb’ within the scope of quantitative analysis (and hence
appropriately considered by universities rather than by apprenticeship
schemes).
For nearly two decades, the idea persisted that a university should have
a single computer, or at most a very few, probably located in ‘The Com-
puter Centre’. The machines grew rapidly in power and cost: by 1971,
Oxford was spending £67,000 per annum on its computer laboratory,
which by then had a professor and several research staff, and by 1985
annual costs had risen to £1,680,000.17 Then suddenly in the 1980s the
personal computer (PC) broke in. Individual scholars, or at least small
groups of them, could now afford to have their own computers, not one
with the number-crunching power of the supercomputer of the 1970s, but
something enormously more accessible and ‘user-friendly’. It was soon
discovered that, for the vast bulk of the problems facing an academic, the
power of the supercomputer was not really necessary, and even when it
was, a link from a PC through to the ‘mainframe’ was the appropriate
solution. Links between PCs became increasingly important during the
1980s, initially as a means to communicate programs and data, but soon
as a general means of academic communication, which combined high
speed with an appropriate respect for the academic’s need for freedom
from interruption during periods of creative thought.
PCs also provided word processing. In the 1980s, a new generation of
students emerged who used the keyboard in preference to the pen as a
means of committing their thoughts to paper. Surprisingly little research
has been published on the impact of this change on the nature and quality
of the resulting thought processes. Certainly, the ease with which a text
can be altered has led to a tendency to commit ‘half-baked’ ideas to paper.
Arguably, the comparative clumsiness of the process of shifting sentences
and paragraphs around within a word-processed text has tended to freeze
16 S. Lavington, Early British Computers (Manchester, 1980), 119.

17 As reported in the Oxford University Gazette for 26 May 1971 and 1985.
534
Technology
the initial macro-structure of the text at an early stage in the writing
process, to the detriment of logic and clarity. On the other hand, it is now
easier for several scholars to collaborate instantly over great distances in
the process of creative writing.
A second technological invention which dramatically altered academic
life in the late twentieth century was the photocopier. Prior to the intro-
duction of the Xerox (it was launched commercially in Europe in 1956,18
but did not become generally affordable by universities until the early
1970s), multiple copies of documents required for academic purposes
were either typeset and printed or made by a messy process involving
waxy paper, inks and jellies. In either case, the process was laborious,
and in consequence writers tried to get the text right the first time. The
arrival of cheap photocopiers has dramatically altered the style of aca-
demic life. It has made it possible for the enormously increased numbers
of students in the late twentieth century to read material that no univer-
sity library could otherwise have made available to all of them. It has
enabled scholars to circulate ideas before they have been frozen in the
mind or in print, so that their peers can judge, extend or improve them.
These liberating effects have to be set against the decline in the use of
the library, with its vast store of uncensored thought, and a reluctance
among scholars to take the time to put their thoughts into final form.
A third technology to revolutionize the university world was afford-
able nationwide radio and television communications to support ‘dis-
tance learning’. The idea of the ‘University of the Air’ was pioneered
in the UK by Harold Wilson in 1963, when the Labour Party was in
opposition. The necessary legislation to create the Open University was
passed in 1965, and the first students enrolled in 1971. By 1974 there were
40,000 undergraduates and by 1991, 120,000.19 Similar ideas were intro-
duced on the Continent: in 1974 in the Federal Republic of Germany the
FernUniversität Hagen began, attended in 1994/5 by 40,000 students;20
the Open University of the Netherlands began in 1984, and had a total
of 60,000 students by 1992.21
Student pressures
In the first two decades after the war, students in science and technology
accepted established curricula. During the late 1960s, however, student
representatives demanded a say in the curricula and management of the
18 J. Jewkes, D. Sawers and R. Stillerman, The Sources of Invention (London, 1962), 408.
19 W. A. C. Stewart, Statement, Ghent Conference (note 1).
20 C. Boden, W. Becker and R. Klofat (eds.), Universitäten in Deutschland, Universities in
Germany (Munich, 1994), 104.
21 H. C. de Wolf, Statement, Ghent Conference (note 1). Cf. chapter 1, 19.
535
Christopher Watson
universities. In relation to technology, the nub of their demands was
greater ‘relevance’ to the outside world (and in particular to their subse-
quent careers). In varying degrees, all the European universities made the
changes demanded.
In parallel with this movement, and to some extent influencing it,
was an upsurge of negative attitudes to technology. These first found
their focus in campaigns to abolish nuclear weapons, particularly the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which was founded in
1958 and enjoyed strong student support in the 1960s. Many students
expressed an unwillingness to allow universities to accept funding from
military sources. During the 1970s this evolved into a more general anti-
technology movement. Among its influential sources was growing con-
cern about environmental pollution (e.g., as expressed by Friends of the
Earth) and about the limits to economic growth set by finite natural
resources (e.g., the publications of the Club of Rome). These concerns
had an immediate impact on students of secondary school age, and in
due course fed through into a decline in the number of students apply-
ing to study science and technology. In Oxford, the numbers reading
chemistry began to decline in 1981, and similarly in physics from 1989
and in engineering from 1990.22 More positively, it led to a growth in
the demand for courses in ‘green’ subjects: ecology, alternative technol-
ogy, renewable energy sources, environmental and earth sciences. The
response of university teachers to these student pressures was generally
positive, though the decline in student numbers in conventional science
and technology has been a cause of serious concern.
The general public shared the tenor of student complaints, but dis-
liked the militancy of student politics in the 1960s and the apparent
willingness of some teachers to endorse the opinions which they so force-
fully expressed. During the 1970s there was a gradual decline in the
level of popular support for the funding of university education gen-
erally, and, by the 1980s, an associated decline in the status of aca-
demics within the community. This affected the willingness of the gifted
technology graduates to stay on within the university community after
graduation.
Throughout the first two decades following the war, national govern-
ments were overwhelmingly the dominant source of funding in all but a
handful of well-endowed ancient universities, but they were uncharacter-
istically restrained in the exercise of the power which this gave them. In
the UK, this was a consequence of the ‘arm’s length’ relationship with gov-
ernment which had been established in 1919 in the form of the University
Grants Committee (UGC), which though appointed by the government
22 Oxford University Gazette, 6 June 1994.
536
Technology
was independent of ministerial and departmental control.23 In the 1960s,
government began gently to exert influence: the Treasury-appointed
Robbins Committee, while bowing graciously to the principle of aca-
demic freedom, recommended a substantial shift in the direction of more
technology. By the early 1980s, Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative government
no longer felt the need to be so discreet when it imposed a substantial cut
in the UGC grant.24 Perhaps unexpectedly, the UGC distributed the cut
in a manner which directly penalized technology.25 This trend towards
direct government intervention developed rapidly, and by 1989 the UGC
had been abolished in favour of the Universities Funding Council, a body
much more concerned to see that the government obtained value for
money from the funds that it allocated to the universities.26
the marketplace for knowledge and research

in technology
Universities exist because there is a demand for what they have to offer –
access to existing knowledge and to the processes which create new
knowledge. They are not unique in offering to meet that demand: they
exist in a marketplace defined by it, and their survival depends on their
ability to adapt to the changing demands of that marketplace. The part
of that market labelled ‘technology’ has changed dramatically during the
twentieth century, and any account of the university response has to begin
with a survey of those changes. The universities have faced the rise of tech-
nology in this modern sense with a certain ambivalence – conscious that
they have contributed to its birth and development, but also aware that
it has acquired an independent existence, and has created a set of values
to which a university cannot always easily subscribe.
The information explosion

It is a familiar observation27 that information, however it is measured,
has been growing since the seventeenth century at a fairly steady expo-
nential rate. The numbers of books or journal articles published, the
number of radio and television channels, the number of telephone calls
made, all these measures tell the same story. In a sense therefore there has
been nothing special about the period since 1945. However, the resources
required to sustain this growth have, for the first time in recorded his-
tory, become a significant fraction of the national economy. Equally,
23 Robbins Report (note 6), para 728, 235. 24 See chapter 1, 15.
25 A. Sampson, The Changing Anatomy of Britain (London, 1982), 52.
26 D. E. Bland, Managing Higher Education (London, 1990), 2.
27 D. J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science and Beyond (New York, 1986).
537
Christopher Watson
the human resources required to access the stock of information have
become inadequate. The universities have made heroic efforts to improve
the means of access. The process advanced in several phases. In the 1950s
and 1960s, the main repositories of information were libraries. In the
older universities at least, these were broadly adequately resourced, and
the emphasis was on expanding the shelving and sustaining the cata-
loguing of an exponentially growing number of books and journals. These
publications and their readerships became progressively more specialized.
The issue was crystallized in a lecture by C. P. Snow entitled ‘The Two
Cultures’ (1959),28 in which he lamented the disappearance of the Renais-
sance Man equally at home in the worlds of arts and science. How many
of his arts friends, he asked, could even state the Second Law of Ther-
modynamics? Considerable effort was devoted to ‘popularizing’ the ideas
of science for the benefit of the arts community and adding a ‘cultural’
element to the education of scientists and engineers.
The 1970s saw computerized information technology. Library cata-
logues were computerized, titles of journal articles and often also ‘key-
words’ or abstracts were transferred into computer ‘databases’ which
could be searched for ‘relevant’ material. This approach has done much
to soothe the perennial fear of the academic of missing significant ma-
terial in his/her field; it has done nothing to stem the growth of informa-
tion. Now information is often held only in computer-accessible storage,
and the user consults it on a screen. Without some such development,
the continuing expansion of information will certainly be stopped by the
finite budgets of libraries, which already impose a severe and sometimes
arbitrary restriction on the books and journals purchased. At least within
a computerized IT environment, decisions about which information is
preserved may be made more rationally.
Big Science
Many academics returning to civilian life after the Second World War
had participated in a large team-research project, or knew of this style
of research from the experience of others. Governments were also keenly
aware of its effectiveness, and were therefore sympathetic to requests for
funds to introduce it into universities. The first examples concerned sub-
jects that derived more or less naturally from wartime military projects.
In the nuclear sphere, the scene had been set by the Manhattan Project –
the $2 billion29 project to construct the first atomic bombs. That project
and wartime radar work provided the model for all the Big Science
28 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1959).
29 R. G. Hewlett and O. E. Anderson, The New World (University Park, Pa., 1962), 724.
538
Technology
projects in the next three decades. The common themes were a hier-
archical organization, with a new breed of scientist-administrator at the
top (General Leslie Groves and Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer being the two
role models), specialized divisions with specific responsibilities within
the overall project, rigidly defined objectives with timetables, budgets
and human ‘resources’, and benevolent governmental (or latterly multi-
government) sponsors, committed in advance to the whole package, and
not expecting to interfere in detail in management. The Manhattan Project
demonstrated that this approach could work well even before the basic
science and technology were established. When there was serious doubt,
several parallel approaches were initiated, with ‘decision points’ along
the route once their relative merits had been established.
In the post-war era, the first such projects in Europe were the cre-
ation of nuclear weapons by France and by the UK.30 In both countries,
these were run concurrently with projects to create nuclear reactors capa-
ble of generating electricity for civilian purposes. The success of these
projects (the UK bomb in 1952, the French bomb in 1960, the Calder
Hall power station in 1956)31 confirmed the belief in government circles
that this approach to science and technology should receive a large pro-
portion of the available resources. It also ensured that the establishments
created to provide the physical infrastructure for these projects (Harwell,
Capenhurst and Windscale in the UK, Fontenay, Saclay and Cadarache in
France) enjoyed a unique prestige, and sustained large teams of gifted sci-
entists and engineers long after the initial project objective was achieved.
Once the initial nuclear projects had reached fruition, participants
in the process and others, including some in the universities who had
been watching or assisting from the side, conceived a range of new big
projects. These included fusion weapons, controlled fusion reactors and
high energy accelerators. Initially, all these projects were pursued on a
national scale. However as the size and cost of the projects rose, the
pressures grew for a more integrated European approach. In relation to
controlled fusion, this began under the auspices of Euratom, the organi-
zation set up by the European Community in 1957 to coordinate nuclear
research. Initially this amounted to no more than the funding by the
Commission of the European Communities (CEC) of selected projects
at the national laboratories. However, in 1977 it was agreed to estab-
lish a first European Community big project – the Joint European Torus
(JET) controlled fusion project at Culham in the UK.32 With a German
30 M. Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939–45 (London, 1964).

31 M. Gowing, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–52
(London, 1974).
32 E. N. Shaw, Europe’s Experiment in Fusion: The JET Joint Undertaking (Amsterdam,
1990).
539
Christopher Watson
director, a French chief engineer, an Irish administrator, and a staff drawn
from all the community countries, it represented a model for Big Science
collaboration, and has been a world leader in controlled fusion research,
outperforming its US, Soviet and Japanese competitors.
In relation to high energy accelerators, a similar cooperation was estab-
lished, but in this case the key step was taken by the governments of eigh-
teen European nations (including several not in the European Commu-
nity) to set up CERN (the Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire)
in 1952. The success of the first project, the Proton Synchrotron, com-
pleted under the leadership of J. B. Adams in 1959, led to a series of
more ambitious projects, including the Intersecting Storage Rings in 1971,
the Super Proton Synchrotron in 1976, and the Large Electron Positron
Collider – an accelerator of 27 km circumference built in a tunnel under
the Jura mountains near Geneva. The next step, the construction of the
Large Hadron Collider in the same tunnel, which smashes together beams
of protons with an energy of 14 TeV, has recently been agreed, and came
into operation in 2009. Here again, European collaboration has been the
key to the achievement of outstanding research – including the discovery
of a range of new particles.33
In aerospace, the big projects grew out of the military rocketry pro-
grammes in Germany in the Second World War directed by General Dorn-
berger and Wernher von Braun.34 In the years immediately following the
war, military and civilian projects proceeded in parallel, of rockets for
delivering nuclear weapons and rockets for space research. In this sphere,
Western Europe lost its pre-eminence to the US, where von Braun led a
series of large projects culminating in the Saturn rocket, which launched
the astronauts to the moon, and to the USSR, which sent up the first two
Sputniks in 1957.35 This unexpected achievement led to the establish-
ment of NASA in the USA in 1958 and to a series of European initiatives
to re-enter the field. In 1962 six European countries (Belgium, France,
Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK) formed the European Space
Vehicle Launcher Organization (ELDO) to develop major launchers, and
in 1964 the same group plus Denmark, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland
formed the European Space Research Organization (ESRO) to develop
satellites and other space-research equipment. ELDO and ESRO had a
number of successful launches, and a number of highly public failures.
They merged in 1975 into the European Space Agency (ESA), which
had a highly successful series of missions based on its Ariane rocket. It
33 M. Goldsmith and E. Shaw, Europe’s Giant Accelerator (Andover, 1977); A. Hermann,

J. Krige, U. Mersits and D. Pestre, History of CERN (Amsterdam, 1987–90).
34 Jewkes et al., Sources (note 18), 357.
35 20 Years of European Cooperation in Space, European Space Agency Report (Paris,
1984), 64.
540
Technology
has carried up a number of telecommunication satellites (including ECS1
and Intelsat) and a number of scientific missions, including Giotto’s ren-
dezvous with Halley’s comet and the Meteosat space meteorology station.
A feature of the ESA programme has been its close coordination with the
US programme, using NASA launchers when a European one was not
available, and collaborating on a 50:50 basis with NASA on the Spacelab
mission, launched on the US shuttle in 1983, with a laboratory designed
and made in Europe.
Other Big Science projects in Europe concerned astronomy (the Jodrell
Bank radio telescope in 195736 and the Cambridge radio telescope in
195837 , both with strong university connections), molecular biology (the
European Molecular Biology Organization was set up in 1963), comput-
ing (the UK Alvey project of 1985 and the CEC-funded Esprit project
of 1984 deserve special mention) and meteorology (the UK, Norwegian
and German meteorological organizations have led in developing large
computer models for short-term weather prediction, and a European
organization established at Reading in 1973 focused on medium-term
weather prediction).
sources of funding and competition

National and regional government
In the 1940s and early 1950s the principal source of funding for university
research in technology remained, as it had been before the war, a grant
from the national or regional government, with little if any earmarking.
Universities asserted, and were generally granted, autonomy in the allo-
cation of government grants. During the 1960s, the grants no longer met
the demands of the expanding universities, and governments began to
create (or extend the role of) non-university organizations through which
funds could be channelled, albeit increasingly with strings attached. In
the UK, as recently as 1962 (the year in which the Robbins Commit-
tee reported) the government, acting through local government (which
largely funded student fees) and the University Grants Committee, pro-
vided 88% of the external income of the British universities.38 The bal-
ance came largely in the form of research grants from the three research
councils which had by then been established – the Agricultural Research
Council (1931), the Medical Research Council (1920) and (predomi-
nantly) the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (1916).39 By
1987/8 (the last year before the UGC was replaced by the UFC), 68%
36 B. Lovell, Jodrell Bank (Oxford, 1968).
37 G. P. Kuiper and B. M. Middlehurst, Telescopes (Chicago, 1969).
38 Robbins Report (note 6), Appendix 4, 103. 39 Sampson, Anatomy (note 25), 241.
541
Christopher Watson
came from the UGC and local government sources, 10% from the (by now
five) research councils, and 10% from other research sources (industry,
charities etc.).40 By this date the research councils were no longer primar-
ily concerned with funding work at universities: they had become agents
in their own right, and had created major establishments in their areas of
speciality.
A further, and in some ways especially unwelcome, source of gov-
ernment funding grew up in the 1970s – the military. In the immediate
post-war era, the separation of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) from civil-
ian research was for a while almost complete, owing to the perceived need
for secrecy, and the secure position of the various defence establishments.
Thus although military R&D accounted for some 25% of all European
R&D expenditure during the period 1955–70 (and an even higher pro-
portion in the UK),41 it was not a significant contributor to university
funding during this period. However, the technological demands of the
cold war grew to a point where no source of technical expertise could be
ignored, and the MoD began to place contracts with the universities to
tackle the less sensitive work. This posed moral and practical dilemmas.
The research topics were often on interesting frontiers of knowledge, the
funding generous and often without onerous restrictions, but the applica-
tions were often repugnant and the security requirements on publication
irksome. Perhaps for these reasons, and unlike the US, MoD funding has
never been a major element in European university budgets. (It was less
than 1% of Oxford’s revenue in 1992.)42 Nevertheless, NATO has been
a steady source of enabling funding for conferences to bring European
technology experts together.43
These sources of national government funding were increasingly com-
plemented during the 1970s and 1980s by funds from supra-national gov-
ernment agencies. Within Europe, interest in establishing such agencies
began to develop almost immediately after the war, with initiatives such
as the European Coal and Steel Community leading in 1957 to Euratom
and the formation of the European Community. The role of the Commis-
sion of the European Communities (CEC) in R&D was initially that of
a coordinator; however, by the 1970s the funds made available to it by
the Member States had increased such that it could take significant inde-
pendent action. It did so by funding research in universities, at national
government laboratories, and at its own ‘Joint Research Centres’, such
as those at Ispra and Mol. By 1980 the scale of this funding had come to
40 D. Hague, Beyond Universities (London, 1991). 41 Eurostat 1970–80.

42 ‘Vice-Chancellor’s oration’, Oxford University Gazette (1992).
43 See chapter 3, 98–9.
542
Technology
Table 15.5 Percentage breakdown in R&D
expenditure for 1983
Higher-education State/non- Industrial

establishments profit-making research
UK 21 41 38
France 25 52 23
Germany 40 36 24
rival the total R&D expenditure of a small nation. Its influence has been
felt especially in the nuclear and information technology sectors.44
In parallel with government-led activity, private industry was also
increasing its R&D capability. In the years immediately following the
war, many industrial R&D labs were modest outfits devoted to minor
product enhancements or quality assurance. The few exceptions in the
chemical, pharmaceutical and electronics industries included AEG, ICI,
Shell, BP, Glaxo and Philips, which had labs that matched those of univer-
sity departments. During the 1970s industrial R&D grew enormously in
scope and quality, and began to compete significantly with the universities
for staff and resources. Most European universities now enjoy research
sponsorship from high technology industries, which ranges from the fund-
ing of chairs and lectureships, often with no overt strings attached, to
specific contracts for the investigation of problems where the university
has skills to offer, or even the establishment of complete departments in
subjects of interest to the sponsor.
An indication of the overall balance between the various sources of
funding is the percentage breakdown in R&D expenditure for 1983
shown in table 15.5.45
Quasi-university institutions
In every European country, a number of institutions undertake research
or teaching (or both) at a level comparable with that of a university, with-
out actually being one (or at least, without satisfying CRE criteria). In
France, the grandes écoles, the Université de technologie de Compiègne,
and the CNRS are examples of such institutions. Collectively they now
play a dominant role in the education of French technologists (especially
those who reach the top) and account for a larger fraction of the R&D
44 For the developments between 1971 and 1995, see chapter 3, for those between 1996
and 2005, see the Epilogue.
45 Eurostat 1975–85, 12.
543
Christopher Watson
budget than the universities (CNRS alone spent 7.5% of the French non-
military R&D budget in 1985).46 In Germany, the corresponding insti-
tutions include the Max Planck Institutes and the Fraunhofer Institutes.
In many Eastern European countries, the counterparts are the academy
of sciences’ institutes and the technical institutes. In the UK, the compa-
rable institutions are the Research Council laboratories and the colleges
of advanced technology. The common feature of all these bodies is that
they derive much, if not all, their funding from government sources but
do not have a narrowly prescribed technical mission. The majority enjoy
a prestige in the eyes of potential members related to the level of funding
for research which they enjoy and the career prospects of those who pass
through them.
Government establishments
In every European country, the war caused a step change in the number
and importance of government-funded research establishments with a
well-defined research mission. Although a few such centres existed before
the war (e.g., the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, the National
Physical Laboratory, the Royal Aeronautical Establishment), their num-
bers and relative importance grew substantially in the post-war years, and
(excepting the Federal Republic of Germany, as we have seen) by 1983
they had come to account for a higher proportion of R&D expenditure
than the higher-education sector. In the UK, the major players included
the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (formed in 1954) and the
research laboratories of the nationalized industries – the Central Electric-
ity Generating Board, the National Coal Board, the Gas Board, the British
Transport Commission, and so on, all brought into the public sector in
the late 1940s.47
successes and failures of the universities in

meeting the competition
We come to an assessment of the role of the European universities in
the development of technology since the war. Did they educate most of
the key individuals? Did they generate most of the key ideas? Did they
make the important innovations and then pass them on for development?
Did they play a major part in that process of exploitation? The rough
answer to the first of these questions is yes, and to all the remainder no.
It appears that the European universities have played, at best, a marginal
46 ‘Innovation Policy France’, OECD (1986), 77.
47 Sampson, Anatomy (note 25), 533.
544
Technology
role in what has surely been one of the defining developments of the
twentieth century.
Many academics might think this judgment unfair. But in a complex
modern world there has to be specialization, and the specialities of the uni-
versities are education and basic research. This line of defence is negated
both by the way in which the universities actually behave and by the
demands made of them by their paymasters, their students and society
at large. No university applied science or engineering department would
concede that applied (or applicable) research is outside its remit: even the
core science departments would put their research funding and their abil-
ity to attract students at risk if they pursued basic research exclusively.
And, certainly since 1980, society has expected that universities will oper-
ate in the marketplace for applicable ideas on broadly the same basis as
other organizations – private sector firms, government establishments and
the like.
The education and careers of technology graduates

With the exception of France, where the dominating position of the
grandes écoles creates a special situation, almost all the key men had uni-
versity degrees, and indeed a very high proportion also had PhDs or equiv-
alent. (A rare exception was J. B. Adams, director of the Culham Fusion
Laboratory in the UK and director of CERN from 1969 to 1980, who
achieved these positions without any degree qualification.) This training
has had important consequences for the style of R&D even in government
establishments and private sector laboratories – their senior management
have generally retained a nostalgic affection for the lifestyle of the aca-
demic researcher, and have sometimes sought to reproduce it (at least
in part) in a non-university setting. It also meant that these managers
knew, and could protect against, the limitations of the university style.
It is also true that most of the key individuals received their entire uni-
versity education within Europe; problems in the timings of the different
phases of higher education in Europe and elsewhere made it difficult to
pick and mix. However, many of them did postdoctoral research in the
USA or elsewhere. Thus although Europe has retained its own distinctive
technological culture, it has been strongly cross-fertilized from the USA
and (more recently) other parts of the academic world.
At levels below the top echelons, university technology graduates also
have had excellent career prospects throughout almost all the period
under review. However, the pattern of their employment has shifted
considerably. Until the late 1960s, many who had the necessary high
qualifications to stay on in the university on graduation (or even on com-
pletion of a further degree) generally did so: a university research/teaching
545
Christopher Watson
post was a prestigious and relatively well-paid job with tenure for life,
and offered considerable personal freedom to choose the mix of research
and teaching and the area of research. During this period the strongest
pressure experienced by the gifted technologically inclined graduate was
whether to work in the USA, where salaries and research resources were
better than at home. However, during the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s,
the salaries and prestige of posts in the production and service indus-
tries moved ahead of those in education, research and other government
service.
This did not prevent academic technologists from playing a useful role
in society. Indeed, as they have stepped down from their pedestals, they
have come to be valued as a source of independent, commercially unprej-
udiced expertise. They appear as chairs of committees of enquiry into
technical disasters, as the articulators of informed protest against com-
mercially motivated abuses of individuals and the environment, as the
defenders of the long-term view against short-term benefits. The con-
nection between the universities and the ‘green’ trend in politics has
strengthened and played a part in the striking decline in the popularity
of technology among the younger generation. This did not stop the rise
of technology graduates to the upper reaches of the new high-technology
commercial world. On the contrary, in the 1980s and 1990s, as in previ-
ous decades, members of the boards of the advanced companies continued
to include a good proportion of technology graduates. However, the pro-
portion of accountants grew at their expense, and ambitious graduates
began to take the point that the route to the top in the commercial world
might pass through the marketing and sales department, rather than the
research department.
Technology involves the embodiment of ideas in hardware or in an
activity or process, and it is not easy to identify unambiguously the point
at which the idea has ‘taken off’, or the stage in the development process
which really generated the ‘added value’. Take nuclear energy for exam-
ple. The idea of nuclear fission was first published by Ida Noddack in 1934
and the theoretical possibility of a nuclear chain reaction was described
by Houtermans, Szilard and Joliot-Curie at about the same time. The first
experimental evidence for nuclear fission was obtained by Houtermans,
Szilard and Joliot-Curie, and Hahn and Strassman in 1938, and for a
chain reaction by Joliot, Halban and Kowarski in 1939.48 The steps which
converted all this academic work into the basis for a new technology were
the proposal by Peierls and Frisch in 1940 of a scheme for separating ura-
nium isotopes, and the ideas of Fermi (1939) and Weizsäcker (1939)
48 R. Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns (Harmondsworth, 1960).
546
Technology
on the construction of a ‘pile’ capable of manufacturing plutonium.49
Almost every one of these individuals worked in a university. But their
ideas might never have ‘taken off’ without the wartime imperative that
used them to found a huge industry. This sequence of events – begin-
ning with pure research in a university setting and ending in a successful
industry – continued to be the paradigm of planners.
During the 1960s, this ‘trickle-down’ theory came into question. Was it
true that the best research ideas were generated by academics who did not
feel a strong commitment to the subsequent exploitation of those ideas?
The dramatic growth in the government establishment and private-sector
laboratories during this period suggested not. From them had come a
steady flow of ideas that any university might have been proud to produce.
The university response to this challenge took several forms. At the level
of the individual, a system of consultancies grew up in which academics
could offer some of the time they did not devote to teaching to government
or industry for a fee. The motivation mixed self-interest with an idealistic
concern to make the skills of the universities available for the benefit of the
national defence or economy. Initially, universities regulated this activity
lightly. During the 1970s, however, they moved to protect their interest
in the intellectual property generated by their staffs, taking out patents
in the name of the university and using public agencies, such as the (UK)
National Research Development Corporation, to help bring their ideas
to the marketplace.
A second development in relations with industry was the formation
of links at the departmental level: industries were encouraged to fund
the establishment of posts, chairs or even whole departments, in areas of
mutual interest. Examples of this were the links of Manchester University
with ICI and Metropolitan-Vickers dating back to the 1940s.50 In a few
cases, a third, much more ambitious approach was taken at the univer-
sity level – the establishment of a science park, a commercial enterprise
adjacent to the university, with a significant university investment, either
in the form of buildings or equipment, or through the secondment of
senior staff. Early examples in the UK were the science parks established
at Cambridge and at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
Nonetheless, European universities did not invent the technologies
which have had a major impact on the post-war world. They can claim
credit for some part in the invention of the jet engine, radar, rocket
propulsion, nuclear energy, wind energy, polythene, Perspex, synthetic
detergents, integrated circuits, valve-based computers, robots, particle
accelerators, space exploration and radio astronomy. But this list is rather
49 Gowing, Atomic Energy (note 30).

50 Barnes, Statement, Ghent Conference (note 1).
547
Christopher Watson
unimpressive when set against the achievements of the non-university
organizations. The role of universities in the development of innovative
ideas to the point of commercial exploitation has been still more modest.
However, for the most part the role of the universities in this phase has
been to solve minor problems to which the need for a solution was not
urgent, so that the contract duration could be aligned with the three-year
life-cycle of the ‘typical’ graduate student. These contracts are important
to the balance sheet of some universities, and usually marginal to that of
the funding organization.
In sum, in the area of top-level technological education, universities
have retained a commanding position, with significant competition only
from the grandes écoles in France and the technical institutes in Eastern
Europe. In basic or ‘blue skies’ research they have maintained a strong but
by no means dominant position. And in applied research and development
the government establishments and private sector R&D organizations
have become the leaders while the universities have had to withdraw to
a few ‘niche’ markets. Why did this happen, and could the outcome have
been different?
Clues to the answer to this question come from comparisons with the
USA, where the universities have been significantly more successful both
in fathering inventions and in nurturing them up to the point of exploita-
tion. Many more American than European academics leave the university
laboratory to set up a small firm which goes on to success. Their science
parks are more extensive and more significant in the technology of the
country. And they derive a much larger fraction of their funding from
industrially sponsored R&D. Europe has been slower to go down this
path in part because of an anti-commercial culture within the universi-
ties themselves. In part it is due to the legislative framework, which in
many countries still inhibits universities from exploiting their intellectual
property commercially. In some measure it is owing to the organiza-
tional structures within the universities, in which individual freedom is
given primacy over collective action, which inhibits promising starts from
reaching critical mass. But in large measure, it is surely due to the success
of technology itself, which has grown to the point that no one social
institution can expect to dominate it.
select bibliography
Barblan, A., and Sadlak, J. ‘Higher Education in OECD Countries: Patterns and
Trends in the 1980s’, CRE Standing Conference, April 1988.
Bland, D. E. Managing Higher Education, London, 1990.
Carson, R. Silent Spring, Boston, 1962.
Croarken, M. Early Scientific Computing in Britain, Oxford, 1990.
548
Technology
de Solla Price, D. J. Little Science, Big Science and Beyond, New York, 1986.
Forrester, T. (ed.) The Microelectronics Revolution, Oxford, 1980.
Goldsmith, M., and Shaw, E. Europe’s Giant Accelerator, Andover, 1977.
Gowing, M. Britain and Atomic Energy 1939–45, London, 1964.
Gowing, M. Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–52,
London, 1974.
Hague, D. Beyond Universities, London, 1991.
Hermann, A., Krige, J., Mersits, U., and Pestre, D. History of CERN, 2 vols.,
Amsterdam, 1987–90.
Hewlett, R. G., and Anderson, O. E. The New World, University Park, Pa., 1962.
Jewkes, J., Sawers, D., and Stillerman, R. The Sources of Invention, London,
1962.
Jungk, R. Brighter than a Thousand Suns, Harmondsworth, 1960.
Krige, J. (ed.) History of CERN, Vol. III, Amsterdam, 1996.
Krige, J., and Russo, A. Europe in Space, 1960–1973, Noordwijk, 1995.
Kuiper, G. P., and Middlehurst, B. M. Telescopes, Chicago, 1969.
Lavington, S. Early British Computers, Manchester, 1980.
Lovell, B. Jodrell Bank, Oxford, 1968.
Metropolis, N., Howlett, J., and Rota, G. C. (eds.) A History of Computing in
the 20th Century, New York, 1980.
Sampson, A. The Changing Anatomy of Britain, London, 1982.
Shaw, E. N. Europe’s Experiment in Fusion: The JET Joint Undertaking,
Amsterdam, 1990.
Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge, 1959.
Williams, T. I. (ed.) A History of Technology, Vol. VI: The Twentieth Century,
2 vols., Oxford, 1978.
Wolovich, W. A. Robotics: Basic Analysis and Design, New York and London,
1986.
549
EPILOGUE
FROM THE UNIVERSITY IN EUROPE

TO THE UNIVERSITIES OF EUROPE
ANDRIS BARBLAN
the origins of the project

The History of the University in Europe was first conceived in 1979,
when, as secretary general of the CRE, the European rectors’ conference
that has brought together European university leaders since 1955, I was
preparing a meeting in Galway on the regional role of higher education. I
was fascinated by the early history of the colleges set up in Ireland in the
1840s, following the terrible ‘potato blight’, to address the urgent social
and economic needs of a population decimated by famine and emigration.
They seemed to foreshadow the land-grant colleges of the USA, but their
role soon changed when Cardinal Newman reformed them to implement
his vision of an education-centred institution of higher learning. This
pragmatic vision was quite different from the Humboldtian model of
the German university that was spreading across much of Europe in the
nineteenth century. The issue at play reminded me of those taken up at
CRE meetings, when the role of the university was discussed in terms of
social service, research innovation and educational renewal. Could there
not be something to learn from an analysis of the past, especially at a time
when, with the growing differentiation of institutions, many universities
were going through some kind of identity crisis?
In Manila at the end of August 1980, during the seventh general confer-
ence of the International Association of Universities, I had a fascinating
conversation with Asa Briggs, the modern historian and former vice-
chancellor of the University of Sussex. In the air-conditioned humidity
of a tropical night, we agreed that a history of the university in Europe,
written from the perspective of its contribution to social development,
would offer new insights to academics willing to explore the underlying
forces shaping their own activities. It would try to identify similarities in
550
From the university in Europe to the universities of Europe
the behaviour of academics and universities over time, and to ascertain
whether the behaviour had led to parallel social development in Europe.
A history along these lines would be especially valuable at a time of ten-
sion between the Eastern and Western parts of the Continent, following
the failed attempt in 1975 to transform the CRE into an Association
of European Universities, a pan-European organization for intellectual
cooperation.
Out of that seminal discussion in the Philippines, and following the
later advice of several historians and sociologists of education, the board
of the CRE set up in 1981 an international consortium of researchers.
With the help of Guy Neave, the historian of higher education, who
acted as group facilitator, the consortium decided to embark on an inter-
disciplinary inquiry into the current situation of academia and its his-
torical and social context. The CRE member universities gave their sup-
port to this venture, by appointing experts who agreed to participate as
‘National Correspondents’ with information on national specificities. In
March 1983, the common inquiry resulted in a meeting, held in Berne,
Switzerland, where leading historians and sociologists of European uni-
versities discussed the feasibility of the CRE project and came to a positive
result. In September 1983, the board of the CRE appointed an editorial
board, responsible for executing and publishing the CRE project under
the leadership of Walter Rüegg, professor of sociology at the University
of Berne and a former rector of Frankfurt University.
In 1984, to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary, the CRE presented its
members with a brief chronology of all the universities in Europe, past and
present. This 350-page book, entitled a Historical Compendium of Euro-
pean Universities,1 was the preliminary stage of the much more ambitious
History of the University in Europe, a four-volume work depicting the
development of the university in European society during the late Middle
Ages, the Early Modern period (up to the French Revolution), the age
of industrialization and colonialism (up to the Second World War), and
the post-war years. An editorial board headed by Walter Rüegg included
historians and sociologists of universities from different parts of Europe
as experts in their respective fields: Asa Briggs (Oxford), Hilde de Ridder-
Symoens (Ghent), Aleksander Gieysztor (Warsaw), Notker Hammerstein
(Frankfurt am Main), Olaf Pedersen (Aarhus), John Roberts (Oxford),
Edward Shils (Cambridge) and Jacques Verger (Paris). Their task was
to identify specialists for each of these historical periods and to edit
and coordinate the contributions of the different authors. They had the
responsibility of highlighting the current state of historical research on
higher education, the gaps to be explored, and debates about questions
1 Jı́lek, Historical Compendium.
551
Andris Barblan
of special interest. Because many aspects of the university in society have
been neglected, the project was set up to encourage original approaches
and comparisons that delayed its completion. Although many of the chap-
ters were written in other languages, the editors did their work on the
English version. Overall, however, the work can claim the success of wide
international interest, since it has been translated into Chinese, German,
Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
the lessons of history

Apart from operational questions, intellectual concerns added to the dif-
ficulties of the project. Was it possible to commission a study that could
furnish the institutions under scrutiny (and their members) with explana-
tions, references and inspiration about their situation, both yesterday and
today? What is objectivity when the subject matter encompasses nearly a
thousand years of intellectual and institutional development? To counter
doubts of this kind, all four volumes were thematically structured in the
same way and, for each of them, a set of questions was presented to each
author based on common guidelines for all four volumes. This approach
also facilitated comparisons from one country to another and from one
century to another. The canvas helped the editors to locate areas needing
further research, while stepping back from the historical narrative. It also
showed that European perspectives are rare, as most authors are accus-
tomed to working in a specific language area or cultural context. This
led to the creation of a network of ‘national’ correspondents who were
invited to comment on the authors’ contributions and to suggest changes
that would reflect their own country’s concerns.
Subjectivity is an inherent part of an ambitious project of this nature.
For instance, when the period to be covered by each volume was debated,
the presuppositions of each partner predominated. When do the Middle
Ages end? Are the Renaissance and humanism a terminus ad quem or the
beginning of a new intellectual era? What is the Early Modern period –
and why should it end with the French Revolution? When does the nine-
teenth century begin or end as a historically meaningful period? Each
school of thought came up with different answers reflecting different
conceptions of what history is and does. The solution was to divide the
four volumes of the history according to major established social/cultural
cleavages. Despite the fact that the various parts of the Continent did
not experience humanism, nationalism or the industrial revolution at the
same time, all of these were developments that the university both shaped
and adapted to, and they can therefore serve as period limits for all.
The fourth volume was planned to cover the period from 1945 to
1990, because that year promised the best opportunities for statistical
552
comparisons; it could not be foreseen that in 1989 the fall of the Berlin
Wall would have proved more of a historical landmark. The year 1992,
with the Single European Act, could be considered almost as important,
marking as it did the transformation of the European Community into a
Union. Eventually, the end date of volume IV became 1995. Rather than
choosing a fixed date, however, this epilogue focuses on the last years
of the twentieth century, in so far as they heralded potential changes
in the academic world of the early twenty-first century. I will refer to
events of the last two decades when they document changes of perspective
supporting my basic hypothesis: that national universities in Europe are
slowly turning into European universities.
european images of the university

European academic institutions have recourse to ‘narratives’ to express
their identity. These narratives can be tools for action or grounds for
resistance to change, depending on whether a situation is perceived as
an opportunity or a possible threat. Humboldt, Newman and Jaspers
are the usual references for institutional self-portraits; to a lesser degree,
academics also refer to the students’ university of Bologna or to the
teachers’ institution of Paris. They rarely claim a Napoleonic heritage.
The Bologna model – in which the students hired the professors and
managed the institution – serves academics who stress the role of demand
and the importance of social relevance in the development of higher edu-
cation. It reinforces proposals such as student vouchers that allow the
‘clients’ to vote with their feet; that is what the universitas bononiensis
did when the institution left for Reggio Emilia to protest against the city
fathers who opposed student demands and behaviour. The Paris model
encourages professorial emphasis on quality and gives precedence to the
needs of the supply side in the teaching process, while controlling stan-
dards by a community of scientific peers. Both these models of academic
corporations, as discussed in the first volume of this History, had as their
social role the training of clerics, physicians and lawyers – the professions
that catered for individuals’ well-being in medieval society. The modern
university still serves the professions.
The second volume continues with the history of universities and adds
that of higher training facilities set up to fulfil practical needs in ship-
building, civil and military engineering, and mining. Usually, these insti-
tutions aimed at instilling a high level of competence that gave their
members a sense of participation in promoting national prestige, and
often comfortable material rewards as well. Their development was sys-
tematized by Napoleon and the imperial university, a centralized edu-
cation system with branches over much of the continent. Together with
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the grandes écoles, the elite technical schools, the Napoleonic university
enforced the idea that academic professions in the French Empire were
state services. In the nineteenth century, as explained in the third vol-
ume, many of those establishments – and the schools of engineering in
particular – prospered, and recently many of them have become uni-
versities. But not all: in France the grandes écoles remain independent
to this day, and most of them are funded by ministries other than the
Ministry of Education. The same is true for Russia. However, practical
training provided within an academic context has been incorporated as
an increasingly important function of the modern university.
The third volume also considers the Humboldtian model, which gives
academia a leading role in the development of science (in the broad sense
of Wissenschaft) as part of the development of the people. John Henry
Newman, the future cardinal, stressed the latter concept in his Idea of the
University – a book published in 1852, one year after he had accepted the
rectorship of the proposed national Catholic university in Ireland. Though
often found wanting and unrealistic, the Humboldtian model remains a
key reference in today’s Europe for those who believe the link between
research and teaching to be a fundamental feature of true academic iden-
tity. The emphasis placed by Newman on education and scholarship as
a means of preparing good citizens has found new academic acceptance,
as mass higher education characterized by the declining funding of uni-
versities as centres of scientific innovation has spread.
The fourth volume shows that these various narratives have conflicted,
converged or combined in the self-defining effort of institutions of higher
education after 1945, when the American model also became a refer-
ence point; as a result, the term ‘university’ today covers many different
realities. The documents of the European Union, such as the Decision of
the Parliament and Council of 24 January 2000 establishing the second
phase of the Socrates programme, state that ‘the term “university” means
any type of higher-education institution, according to national legislation
or practice, which offers qualifications or diplomas at that level, what-
ever such establishment may be called in the Member states’. In practical
terms, the university sector according to Brussels seems to be the equiv-
alent of tertiary education, namely, a very diversified supply of services
including every possible form of post-secondary training.
This is not necessarily the image that insiders would like to have of
their institution. For most of them, today’s university balances between
the poles of modernity and tradition. Propelled forward by this tension,
it fulfils three roles in society as creator, curator and critic of knowledge.
In doing so, it can aim either for social reproduction – that is, the use of
knowledge and people for the survival of communities as they are and
should be – or for the cultivation of heterodoxy, which is the exploration
554
of the unknown through questioning of accepted truths. To take one
image, the university is an institution for consent and dissent, for short-
term ambitions and long-term expectations, for Creons who implement
social order and Antigones who claim obedience to higher values of truth.
Inner tension is thus a constitutive component of academic identity.
Some institutions place more emphasis on their integrative role, oth-
ers on their innovative function. Or the same institution might incline
towards integration at one moment and towards innovation at another.
Moreover, both roles can be pursued simultaneously in different parts of
the university. The mix is so varied that academics of different persua-
sions often do not feel that they belong to the same institution; and this
fragmentation has been reinforced by the many functions that society has
required of the university since 1945. With the tremendous increase in
numbers of students, staff and institutions, an increase so large that, in
several countries, more than half the age cohort now enjoys some form of
higher education, the university has gone through an important democ-
ratization process; consequently, it has lost the prestige of distance and
secrecy.
In many regions of Europe, the university is often perceived as being
yet another training centre, a quality school intended for the local com-
munity, its employers and businesses, whether public or private. This
role has been strengthened by the need for lifelong learning: the return
to academia of a growing number of adult students has made the univer-
sity experience for many people something other than a place of passage
between adolescence and adulthood. When so large a sector of the pop-
ulation attends university, the institution can no longer satisfy all the
expectations of social mobility that prevailed in earlier years. It has nev-
ertheless retained a high social profile when viewed as a stepping-stone
towards the knowledge society of the future, which will require for most
occupations a higher level of literacy and skill than in the past. These
transformations have been documented in the preceding chapters. Where
will they lead us in the twenty-first century, and how have they affected
the recent past of the European university?
the premises of europeanization in higher

education
In 1985, Jacques Delors, as president of the Commission, proposed the
Single Act that would turn the European Community into a European
Union by 1992. In 1986, Spain and Portugal joined the Community,
bringing its membership to twelve. As far as the universities were con-
cerned, these two years (1985–6) were dominated by debate over the
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Andris Barblan
transformation of the Joint Study Programme2 – which had been a suc-
cess but in a rather limited way – into the Erasmus programme, proposed
to encourage multilateral collaboration in the teaching programmes of
the universities in the Community. In 1986, the universities had had
to pressure the European authorities to launch this programme of aca-
demic mobility and to by-pass last minute objections by some Member
States unwilling to internationalize their higher education. Erasmus was
considered a unique opportunity to offer some European experience to
help young people discover the shared attributes and differences of their
respective cultures. Erasmus was preceded by a few months by Comett,
an exchange programme between higher education and industry. These
programmes were designed not only to encourage comparisons between
institutions and national systems of higher education, but also to consider
the compatibility of curricula, the equivalence of studies, the importance
of common norms, and the need for a shared evaluation of university
activities. Thanks to them, ‘Europeanization’ became a phase of aca-
demic internationalization, even though it was restricted to the twelve
countries of the Community.
Meanwhile, in the Eastern part of the Continent, Mikhail Gorbachev
was launching the perestroika that would lead to a complete change of
structures in the communist countries of Europe. As a result, the Soviet
Union reappraised the modalities of cooperation in higher education. In
February 1987, a conference of universities from Comecon countries held
in Moscow decided to extend the possibilities for institutional coopera-
tion between Eastern and Western universities. The rectors of the uni-
versities in capital cities in the East asked their Polish colleagues – who
had always maintained links with other European universities through
the CRE – to organize a meeting with Western colleagues on the model
of the CRE bi-annual conferences.3 Grzegorz Białkowski, rector of the
2 In the Joint Study Programme (JSP), begun in 1976, the Commission moved away from
traditional student exchange by offering a structured learning experience that could be
used in different Member States as a constituent part of academic training. ‘Joint’ under-
lined the need for and the implementation of common practice – freely decided by the
teaching departments of the universities taking part. JSPs were the testing ground for
convergence procedures that were to become typical of academic integration in Europe.
In 2002, the ‘joint degrees project’ entrusted by the Commission to the European Univer-
sity Association, the organization that succeeded CRE after March 2001, encouraged the
same dynamics of change: to progress from simple programme elements (JSP-style) to full
curricular integration, which was to be the common responsibility of several institutions
in different countries.
3 On the early history of CRE see chapter 3, 94 and 100–1. CRE was created in 1959
in Dijon, France, after a meeting of European university leaders organized in 1955 in
Cambridge under the presidency of the Duke of Edinburgh. It was incorporated into
Swiss law in 1964 at its third General Assembly in Göttingen – when it was also decided
to locate the organization in Geneva. From 1969, CRE developed for its members a
regular series of half-yearly conferences to discuss aspects of academic management and
university development.
556
University of Warsaw, hosted a conference in June 1988 on ‘The Uni-
versity as a Crucible of European Culture’. The more than ninety
participants – thirty-five of whom represented universities from every
socialist country, except for Albania and Romania – insisted on academic
cooperation as a necessity.
At the same time, the origins of the university as a European institution
were being commemorated in Italy on the occasion of the nine hundredth
anniversary of the University of Bologna, the alma mater of all European
academic institutions. The festivities lasted a full year and culminated on
18 September 1988 on the Piazza Maggiore in a festive act involving some
430 university rectors, two-thirds from Europe, both West and East, and
one-third from other parts of the world. They all signed the Magna Charta
Universitatum, a document outlining the principles of academic integrity
for the future. The text had been drafted over the preceding months by a
small party of academic leaders brought together by the rector of the Uni-
versity of Bologna, Fabio Roversi-Monaco, under the chairmanship of
the CRE president, Carmine Romanzi. Traditional partners of academia
witnessed this symbolic assertion of institutional autonomy and academic
freedom – and of the universities’ concomitant social responsibilities.
The president of the Italian Republic attended, as did several ministers
and a host of ambassadors, church prelates and municipal leaders.
Following the lead of Giosué Carducci, the poet and professor of Italian
literature who had masterminded the eighth-centenary celebrations of
the University of Bologna in 1888 around the role of universities as the
common institution of Italian unity, the universities were recognized
in 1988 as institutions common to all countries in the region, perhaps
even as the crucible of Europe in the making. That is why, during the
centennial year, the university granted honorary doctorates not only to
famous scientists, but also to political figureheads of the continent – from
Pope John Paul II to Mikhail Gorbachev, from François Mitterrand to the
king of Spain. The idea of the rector and his adviser, Giuseppe Caputo,
was to reaffirm the political function of the university in the development
of society; the leaders of the various governments invited throughout the
year to Bologna were thus expected to acknowledge the critical role of
academia in shaping the ideas that would lead to the integration of the
different cultures of the continent into one harmonious, European whole.
lowering the iron curtain: 1989 and beyond

To some extent, all these moves and conferences – the CRE had also wel-
comed some twenty-five new members from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary and the Soviet Union willing to renew pan-European coopera-
tion at its Durham Assembly in September 1989 – had been portents of
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Andris Barblan
the big changes occurring two months later, in November 1989, when,
with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ‘iron curtain’ that had divided Europe
since the war disappeared. The polarization of European politics sud-
denly vanished (in a rather unexpected manner for most European citi-
zens), sweeping away more than forty years of intellectual habits, political
reflexes and cultural prejudices based on mutual fear of the ‘other side’.
Greater Europe was becoming a possibility, but turning it into reality
proved to be a monumental task, given the scope of the transformation
opening the way to regional differentiation, ethnic divisions, and the acti-
vation of long-repressed group identities.
The unification of Germany, involving a realignment of the country’s
Eastern provinces according to the rules and organizational patterns of
the Western Länder, led to changes in personnel and structures in the
universities of the former German Democratic Republic, many of whose
new leaders were academics from the Federal Republic. Important public
investments made this transformation possible, so much money indeed
that learning conditions sometimes became more attractive in the Eastern
than the Western part of the country. Thus, Germany braced itself for
a new role, becoming the axis of regional cooperation in Europe rather
than a player on the sidelines.
With the end of Soviet influence, loyalties shifted, and, at a time of
opening frontiers, Europe fragmented into ever smaller pieces rather than
uniting. Because of the cost of the economic and social transformation
of the East, as demonstrated by the German case, solidarity was fast
vanishing as an accepted political mode, and the easy solution seemed
to lie in laissez-faire. In a few years, Europe moved from grand ideals to
uncertainty, revealing a world without common reference points and a
society of interest groups at each other’s throats.
During the period of bipolar politics, from 1948 to 1989, Yugoslavia
developed a mediating role that allowed both sides to meet in Belgrade,
Zagreb or on the Adriatic coast. The yearly seminar, Univerzitet Danas,
organized in Dubrovnik by the University of Belgrade and the League of
Yugoslav Universities beginning in the sixties, offered a neutral ground
for East–West academic relations and facilitated multilateral academic
cooperation. This important international role was recognized in 1971
by the establishment of the Inter-University Centre, also in Dubrovnik.
With the fall of the iron curtain, however, Yugoslavia lost this special
role and, in 1991, the Yugoslav Federation fell to pieces. Slovenia and
Croatia were the first to affirm their independence and cultural differ-
ences. The war then spread to Bosnia in 1992, as Serbia tried to main-
tain its earlier ascendancy over the region. The universities, as centres of
culture, became prime targets for ethnic cleansing: academic centres in
Osijek, Sarajevo and Dubrovnik, for instance, were shelled and burned.
558
In Kosovo, a former autonomous province of Serbia, the Belgrade gov-
ernment dismissed the majority of Albanian-speaking lecturers during the
summer term of 1991, and, in October, it effectively closed the University
of Pristina to Albanian-speaking students. This led, in November, to the
creation of a parallel structure, the unofficial Albanian-speaking Univer-
sity of Pristina, which would function semi-clandestinely over the next
eight years. Another unrecognized Albanian-speaking academic institu-
tion appeared in Tetovo, in Macedonia, a province whose secession from
Yugoslavia in 1991 was recognized internationally only in 1993. In 1998,
the Milošević government in Belgrade passed a law that suppressed the
institutional autonomy of the Serbian universities; henceforth, the min-
istry directly appointed the rectors and other key staff. This led to resig-
nations of professors and strikes by students; many of them decided to
organize an alternative academic education network (AAEN) to uphold
the traditional academic values of tolerance and critical awareness.
A few months later, in 1999, NATO strikes on Yugoslavia resulted
in the UN’s taking over the administration of Kosovo; in Belgrade,
the fall of the Milošević government in 2000 brought AAEN members
to leadership in the reconstruction of the university system in Serbia.
The European academic community – as represented by the CRE in
particular – had been very much concerned by the deteriorating univer-
sity situation in the area. As early as 1990 it had sponsored an Academic
Taskforce (ATF) to intervene in the Balkans. With financial support from
Austria, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland in particular, but also from
individual universities, the ATF helped oppressed academics in the former
Yugoslavia to maintain their international links. An example of this sup-
port was CRE’s decision in 1998 to suspend the membership of Serbian
universities in order to limit access of the newly appointed ‘regime rectors’
to the European academic community. However, in conjunction with the
Council of Europe, the UN Mission in Kosovo, and the European Union,
the CRE organized meetings, summer schools and international audits to
contribute to the educational and management renewal of the academic
community of the region.
The European Community reacted quickly to the new situation.
Already in 1989 it had decided to set up the Tempus programme
that would contribute to the restructuring of higher education in the
former socialist countries. Initially conceived for Poland, Hungary and
Czechoslovakia, the programme soon embraced most of the other Central
and Eastern European nations, helping university departments to acquire
modern equipment as well as new connections with colleagues from
the European Union. The Union became the major political focus for
reform and transformation. Its influence increased still further when, in
1995, Austria, Finland and Sweden – countries close to the old post-war
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divide – joined it. EU universities in the 1990s were absorbed by the
growing scale of student exchange, embodied by the success of Erasmus,
the flagship programme of European cooperation, which, since its
inception in 1987, had involved thousands of participants. The success
of this programme depended on the commitment of professors ready to
compare their courses with those taught by colleagues in other countries,
and to adapt their teaching so that home and guest students could develop
a set of common values; in practice, these values were translated into
the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS). Universities in the former
communist countries considered that belonging to Erasmus was proof of
European identity. In the late 1990s, Central and Eastern nations asked
to move from the Tempus programme – seen as a kind of European
antechamber – to Erasmus, even at the cost of less favourable financial
conditions. For those countries, ‘Euro-compatibility’ had become a
greater force for university reform than in the countries of the Union,
where the European dimension was only too often a marginal aspect of
academic mobility. All this would change at the end of the decade with
the Sorbonne and Bologna Declarations.4 Earlier, associative activities
bringing together institutions from both sides of the old ‘iron curtain’ had
nonetheless flourished, as in the case of the Conference of Baltic Univer-
sity Rectors, founded in Gdańsk in 1990 on the model of the Conference
of Danubian Rectors that had existed since 1983. Others followed, link-
ing institutions from Eastern and Western traditions: Alps-Adria, Amos
(in the south-east of Europe) and the Black Sea universities are examples.
With the demise of communism, Russia was also obliged to redefine
its position. It first looked to US higher education as a benchmark for
academic quality and a tool for innovation – especially for those disci-
plines that previously had been taught along Marxist lines. In most for-
mer socialist countries, American institutions, whether universities, foun-
dations or governmental agencies, developed important programmes to
encourage change in the area after 1989, from the creation of private uni-
versities in individual countries to the setting up of the Central European
University (CEU). First based in Prague, then in Budapest, the CEU used
funds from the Soros Foundation (OSI) to offer graduate training to first-
class students recruited from all over the region, including Russia. The
teaching of English was a key innovation in countries that had not been
accustomed to cultivating it as a lingua franca for world communication.
From 1995 on, the Salzburg Seminar, a US-backed institution for intellec-
tual cooperation set up in Austria after the Second World War, involved
European as well as American academic leaders in a broad programme of
4 See below, 567–72, for the analysis of these two governmental declarations of 1998 and
1999 that asked for the transformation of European higher education into a harmonious
system of knowledge exploration and dissemination.
560
collaboration in university management for Central and Eastern Europe,
including Russia after 1998. As for European initiatives, in 1991 the CRE
had organized a meeting in what was then still Leningrad to discuss strate-
gies for achieving quality in higher education. In a follow-up in February
1993, the CRE together with the University of St Petersburg convened
a seminar for those CIS5 political and academic leaders interested in
the extension of the Tempus programme to the Republics of the former
Soviet Union (the future Tempus-Tacis programme). Various activities
thus developed over the years, often with the support of the Union or of
individual EU member countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Finland
or Sweden. In general, however, the universities of Russia, hindered by
a difficult financial situation that provoked a considerable brain drain of
both staff and students, did not play an important part in the development
of a European academic community in the 1990s.
the main issues of the 1990s: quality and mobility

As a network of knowledge institutions, universities are centres of social
integration, forums for showing that cooperation is not only desirable
but also possible in a European continent where work and life conditions
are still very dissimilar. Mobility and quality are two areas with strong
potential for overcoming structural differences, and they were both fre-
quently discussed throughout the 1990s. It was a question of identity: as
the founders of the European movement had claimed during and after the
Second World War, the integration of the region would only become a
reality if people, goods and capital were all mobile and comparable with
each other. Rather than being forced into the same mould for the sake
of compatibility, products, producers, nations and governments (as well
as universities) would need to recognize their common features and use
them as the basis for convergence policies that could be translated into
commonly accepted rules. Such was the incremental strategy developed
by the European Union. It often proved to be slow and cumbersome, since
it required consensus or at least agreement of the majority of the people
and countries concerned. A shared understanding of concepts that had
evolved differently over the years in different parts of the region imposed
a comparative approach or quality framework defining common pro-
cedures, modalities and standards. In this way it was hoped that there
would be less waste of human and national experience, and that the work
and intellectual capacity of citizens in one part of the continent might
dovetail with the know-how and knowledge in another. The resulting
5 CIS: Commonwealth of Independent States (i.e., the countries of the former Soviet Union,
excluding the Baltic states).
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Andris Barblan
shared language about quality would facilitate the mobility of people and
ideas.
Such a sentiment prevailed in an academic community that had always
claimed that its activities were intrinsically international – even if higher
education in the everyday experience of teachers and students seemed pri-
marily influenced by national interests, especially in the new states emer-
ging from the communist breakdown. Their renewed sense of national
identity clashed with the urge for a greater commitment to their European
allegiance. After forty years of internationalism, the intellectual elites of
Central and Eastern Europe needed some grounding in the national past
denied to them – even if this proved to be somewhat mythical – before
they could consider their cultural specificity in relation to a wider Euro-
pean community. Taken alone, the quality debate (i.e., the search for
shared norms) seemed very idealistic, if not purely ideological. However,
linked to mobility problems it came down to earth: how does the other’s
experience echo my own and, if so, is it possible to join in common ven-
tures, either here, there or in other parts of Europe? The practicality and
feasibility of common standards adapted to common needs proved much
easier to develop in the production of goods than that of services, such as
higher education, even if, in theory, academia everywhere dedicated itself
to the same search for truth.
Some argued that academic activities have an intrinsic value that reflects
the dynamics of a discipline, with each field developing over the years cri-
teria of excellence that are recognized as quality pointers by the scientists
involved. Others had a more process-oriented approach: once an institu-
tion sets itself goals, be they scientific, social or political, quality consists
in achieving them as efficiently and effectively as possible. Still others took
a practical view and asked if the outcome of academic activities served
society as expected. In the 1980s, the French, the Dutch and the English
all tried out evaluation procedures and developed very different institu-
tional structures combining the three approaches just mentioned. In the
1990s, the debate was enlarged by the European Commission to include
all the countries of the European Union while, in the East, the reshuffling
of university systems induced governments to ask whether the institu-
tions could operate at an advanced academic level – particularly where
there was a need to accredit the many new private institutions set up to
meet the growing demand for higher education that traditional providers
were unable to fulfil. To foster cooperation in the field of quality, in the
spring of 1991 the CRE organized the previously mentioned Leningrad
conference on managing quality in higher education. It was followed by
an autumn meeting in Utrecht, where the Dutch experience of university-
driven quality assessment encouraged CRE members to consider a pro-
gramme to analyse the quality strategies of academic institutions; the
562
programme was to be run by the Association of European Universities on
behalf of its members, both East and West, and would help to develop
their capacity to face current quality challenges. Between 1995 and 2003,
more than 100 universities in some thirty-five countries agreed to expose
their activities and management processes to the criticism and advice of
experienced colleagues from other European countries. This gave rise to
the development of a common language, shared concepts and a set of
references that reflected the needs of academic transformation all over
Europe.
In 1991, the European Commission broached the question of quality
in its ‘Memorandum on European Higher Education’. At the same time,
its members were experimenting with procedures for the assessment of
higher education that focused mainly on the relevance, cost and efficiency
of academic programmes rather than on institutional fitness for teaching
and research. The emphasis placed on programmes reflected the need
for social accountability, whereas the stress on quality management usu-
ally upheld the internal capacity for change of institutions confronted
with a great variety of obligations. Although concepts and modalities of
evaluation were being tested in most countries of the region, often in
very similar ways, the claim to national specificity remained so strong
that governments and their quality agencies would agree to meet and
exchange information on their national practices, but refused to embrace
common approaches and joint standards. On the basis of a study on
quality management delegated in 1993 to the Confederation of EU Rec-
tors’ Conferences, the Commission launched a number of pilot projects
in 1994. This led the fifteen States of the Union to recommend in 1998
that the comparison of national practices be institutionalized.
Governments nonetheless refused to recognize common standards.
There were two main reasons: firstly, the fear of European centralization
and of a sprawling bureaucracy that could reduce the role of national
governments in establishing university programmes and developing aca-
demic training; secondly, the growing autonomy of institutions of higher
education – granted usually not for ideological but rather for financial
reasons, owing to the growing costs of an expanding system of higher
education and research. With this autonomy, they could look widely for
external support. The resultant change in orientation and conception of
students and funders as ‘customers’ inspired a very influential book by an
American specialist of higher education, Burton Clark, who studied the
development of five entrepreneurial universities across Europe.6 In many
countries, ministries were unwilling to continue to oversee detailed aca-
demic operations, and in the nineties laws changed to substitute public
6 B. R. Clark, Creating Entrepreneurial Universities (Oxford and New York, 1998).
563
Andris Barblan
monitoring for state control of academic affairs. Thus the quality debate
increasingly took place in institutions in charge of their own development,
while governments checked to see that quality was maintained. This divi-
sion of responsibilities did not do much to encourage the development of
a European dimension in assessment, however.
After quality, mobility highlighted the need for a European dimension
in higher education across the Continent. Erasmus and Comett proved to
be ideal instruments for showing the commonality of purpose and action
of higher-education institutions. They were so successful that the Com-
mission soon had difficulties running programmes requiring thousands
of multilateral agreements between university departments (and compa-
nies, too, in the case of Comett). In 1995, in an effort to simplify the
administration, both Erasmus and Comett (now renamed Leonardo da
Vinci) were subsumed into the new Socrates framework, under which the
Commission contracted with institutions rather than individual depart-
ments. As a result, the universities’ leadership became aware of the many
European activities that had been developing in their establishments; they
discovered not only that they had a significant European practice already
but also responsibility for pursuing it. This meant that each of the 2,000
institutions taking part in the programme was able to foster a European
policy of its own. And to underline this strategic aspect, after 1995 the
Commission asked participating establishments to draw up a European
policy statement indicating the strengths and weaknesses of their aca-
demic commitment to Europe, and the measures they planned to take to
develop and consolidate their European profile over the next three years.
The Commission asked the Association of European Universities (CRE)
to monitor this aspect of the Socrates institutional contract. Over a period
of several years, the CRE analysed these statements and measured possi-
ble gaps between intent and practice by visits to hundreds of universities.
At first, no link was made between funding and the institution’s European
vision; in a second stage, however, following the renewal of the Socrates
programme, it was decided to implement such a link. Consequently, at
least at a central level, Europe was slowly becoming more than a slogan
in universities. With Socrates, the Commission insisted not only on stu-
dent mobility, but also on mechanisms that facilitate mobility, such as
staff exchange, joint curriculum development, and the use of the common
European credit transfer system, ECTS. Owing to minimal external sup-
port, however, the complementary mechanisms remained secondary to
student mobility. By 2002, Erasmus could claim to have exchanged more
than one million people among the member nations – thereby making
it the most visible and popular programme of the Union and provid-
ing clear proof of the importance of intercultural learning for European
integration.
564
This success highlighted the usefulness of universities in achieving Euro-
pean integration. The variety of cross-border and international projects
that each institution participated in also defined the university’s Euro-
pean profile and its image in the other countries of the region. That is
why so many institutions located outside the Union expressed the desire
to join the programme, or at least to mirror its activities, such as the
former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe or associated
countries like Switzerland, where the government paid all the costs nor-
mally paid by the Union for its Member States. Non-EU students wanted
to benefit from the cultural opportunities offered to colleagues and sister
organizations in other parts of the Continent.
The exchange tools introduced by the Union proved to be workable
outside its borders: for instance, ECTS offered a new approach to the
assessment of student workload that was no longer dependent entirely on
examinations. In 1999, when visiting Masaryk University in Brno – the
Czech Republic was not yet a participant in the Socrates programme – a
team of foreign advisers was surprised to see that the deans of this large
Moravian institution had decided to implement ECTS internally, in order
to compare the workload imposed on students by the various faculties.
By applying ECTS to all fields and all years of study, the university was
already turning the credit transfer system – originally conceived as a tool
to expedite mobility – into a credit accumulation system. This helped
to bring transparency and comparability to assessment to the benefit of
the 90 per cent of the student body that would never travel abroad.
This innovative use of ECTS outside the Union (Masaryk University was
not the only institution to experiment in this area) heralded the later
development of credit systems for compatibility purposes in the Bologna
Process begun in 1999. It also highlighted the European dimension that
all universities of the Continent were beginning to discover as their own,
whether their country was a member of the Union or not.
Another important element of the Socrates programme, although con-
sidered marginal even in Brussels, was the development of thematic net-
works. The original success of Erasmus built on the dedication and inter-
est of the teachers of one discipline, who offered joint studies forming
the core of the original contracts established with the Commission. When
the institutions took over responsibility for student mobility, the thematic
networks offered the possibility for teachers to pursue the comparative
work initiated in the early stages of the programme. Thus, historians,
chemists or geologists from all over the Continent continued to meet to
discuss the educational needs of students in their field. Did something
akin to a European understanding of what a historian, chemist or geol-
ogist should know exist? This question prompted the so-called Tuning
Project, an EU-supported contribution to the development of a European
565
Andris Barblan
understanding of higher education, which became a reference for the
Bologna process.
The success of Erasmus and Socrates in Europe had consequences for
the internationalization of higher education. Rather than following the
successful systems in terms of prestige or cost–benefit ratios operating in
North America or Japan, Europe did its own multicultural experiments
and exported the results. Thus, in 1993, the universities of the Asia/Pacific
region, from Japan to Australia and including most South-East Asian
countries, decided to develop UMAP, a mobility programme very similar
to Erasmus, to which the ECTS credit transfer system was adapted in
1998. In North America, efforts made to overcome differences in higher
education between the US, Canada and Mexico also drew lessons from
the successes and difficulties encountered in Europe, as illustrated in the
Wingspread Declaration of 1997 that calls for wider cooperation among
North American countries. In Latin America, the Columbus programme
launched by the CRE with early Commission support in 1987 opened the
gate to multilateral collaboration, not only in transatlantic terms but also
between the countries of Latin America, long accustomed to focusing their
international links on overseas institutions rather than on their neigh-
bours. The ALFA programme supported by the European Union (mainly
to promote student exchange) built on that experience and on the success
of Erasmus. And so did Asia-Link, the Union’s programme for Euro-
Asian academic exchanges based on specific disciplines and multilateral
cooperation involving at least three institutions in any one project. The
European model was thus both publicized by the Commission through its
intercontinental projects and studied for inspiration by decision-makers
from other parts of the world. To some extent, comparability for conver-
gence purposes, which is the European approach to internationalization,
was becoming attractive to other systems of higher education. Would the
approach also be useful in the wider debate linked to the globalization of
higher education considered as a marketable service, the so-called GATS
negotiations?
In 1995, at the end of the Uruguay round that brought to a close
decades of negotiations on tariffs and trade first initiated after the Second
World War, governments decided not only to upgrade the GATT system
of international trade negotiation into a full UN agency, the World Trade
Organization (WTO), but also to extend the field of bargaining from
goods – now nearly free in terms of international mobility – to services,
still a highly protected area but one that represented the fastest-growing
sector in world economy. Among these services, education was to be
included, though it would remain less conspicuous than banking, insur-
ance, transport and health. Several countries indicated that they would
be willing to discuss trade liberalization in educational services to enable
566
their own providers of higher education to export educational know-how
or to welcome foreign providers at home, thus stimulating competition in
their home market. The question was not of major importance for higher-
education leaders until 2001, however, as the whole discussion was in the
hands of trade representatives who rarely consulted either their education
colleagues at ministerial level or training institutions at an academic level.
In sum, in the late nineties, Europe was recognized around the world for
its innovations in higher education.
Although it continued to be hampered by regulations of the sort that
governments were thinking to cancel within the WTO framework, Euro-
pean higher education enjoyed untrammelled support from other UN
agencies, especially UNESCO. In 1997, 400 university leaders from more
than forty European countries met in Palermo under the aegis of CRE
and CEPES7 to prepare the European position for the World Conference
on Higher Education, scheduled to take place one year later in Paris at
UNESCO headquarters. Attended by more than 4,000 delegates from all
over the world, this conference made clear that Europe, as a cluster of
nations and problems, had a view of higher education significantly differ-
ent from approaches in other parts of the globe. When confronted with
outside issues, European universities discovered that they had more in
common than they had thought, and that their common ground could
be the basis for shared self-understanding. For instance, most European
countries held that the role of ministries was essential. This view was
anchored in the idea that higher education is a public good, and that its
development shapes the future of society as a whole much more than the
interests of individual graduates wishing to enter a well-paid career, and
for whom academic training might represent a private good or stepping
stone to social mobility. In this context, institutions were becoming the
direct partners of governments wishing to grant them ever more auton-
omy. The Lisbon Convention on the recognition of degrees, signed in
1997 under the aegis of the Council of Europe and UNESCO, helped
to define a possible European model of higher education, which was to
coalesce in the so-called Bologna Process.
the return of european integration policies

In May 1998, Claude Allègre, then minister of education and research in
France, presided over the commemoration of the eight hundredth anniver-
sary of the Sorbonne, the old University of Paris. He had asked his min-
isterial colleagues from the UK, Germany and Italy to participate in the
7 CEPES is the Centre européen pour l’enseignement supérieur, set up by UNESCO in 1973
in Bucharest, Romania.
567
Andris Barblan
meeting – not only for reasons of protocol, but also as leaders of group
discussions in a two-day event, to which university heads, professors, stu-
dents, and representatives from the unions, the media and industry were
also invited. The idea was to give a voice to the people directly involved
in the successful outcome of university education and research: the four
ministers would discuss with the ‘stakeholders’ the political conditions
needed to improve higher education in Europe. The conference ended
with a statement, the so-called Sorbonne Declaration, which invited gov-
ernments and institutions to ‘harmonize’ academic services and university
provisions. This constituted a challenge to the Commission in Brussels,
the habitual initiator of innovations in European integration, and a provo-
cation to the other governments of the Union, who might conclude that
the ‘big four’ were taking the lead without consulting their smaller neigh-
bours. The proposal was to start an inter-governmental process and to
give a new lease of life to European integration, which seemed to be
stumbling over bureaucratic obstacles – particularly at the ‘federal’ level
represented by Brussels.
When marginalized players expressed their concern, Luigi Berlinguer,
the minister of education in Italy, responded in the autumn of 1998 by
inviting to Bologna in June 1999 not only the fifteen members of the
Union but all the countries of Europe interested in the transformation of
higher education. The ‘big four’ agreed that the Sorbonne document could
be used as the basis for a new Declaration covering the expectations of the
wider group of nations invited to join the ministerial summit. In Paris, the
ministers and university representatives had sat around the same table; in
Bologna, the first day of discussions involved only academics. Their dis-
cussion of the proposals prepared for the ministers were forwarded by the
CRE president to the political leaders. On the second day, the politicians
finalized the Bologna Declaration, a text outlining their plans as govern-
mental representatives for the development by 2010 of a single European
Higher-Education Area (EHEA). Since Finland and then Austria chaired
the EU at the time, they organized the preliminary work with the support
of the host country, Italy. In June 1999, the Italian government presented
the final draft to ministerial colleagues from twenty-nine countries. The
document provoked heated discussions in Bologna before being signed
solemnly in the Aula Santa Lucia. The ministers agreed to a follow-up
meeting in Prague two years later.
Three elements made up the strength of the Bologna Declaration:
1. It was a declaration of intent, not a treaty requiring detailed compro-

mise, so it could present a series of intentions with no binding value,
i.e., a long-term vision for higher education in Europe, resulting in a
European Higher-Education Area.
568
2. It was also a calendar, with 2010 as the planned date for the comple-
tion of the EHEA.
3. It was a toolkit for action, since it outlined six concrete ways in which
governments could converge to the EHEA: a two-tier degree struc-
ture (BA and MA); the use of a Diploma supplement to make explicit
the content of learning; the development of ECTS into an accumu-
lation system; the strengthening of a culture of academic quality;
the promotion of academic mobility; and the ‘Europeanization’ of
curricula.
The Declaration did not pretend to be a blueprint or to define the char-

acteristics of the higher-education area to be completed by 2010. It left the
future open while pointing to tools that would require the development
of a shared understanding of how and why to use them. These tools had
been discussed and tested in the EU mobility programmes; they included
practical mobility support, the Diploma supplement, and the ECTS or
European curriculum development. The two-tier structure came from the
Sorbonne Declaration, and quality had long been debated within the EU.
What was new was the proposal to link together these different elements
to reinforce one another. Higher-education reform was on national agen-
das in all the countries represented in Bologna, and making change part of
a European intergovernmental process helped unblock stalemates in most
instances. The Declaration also kept alive the modalities of cooperation
put forward at the Sorbonne in 1998 by calling for permanent dialogue
and partnership with the academic world and its representatives, such as
the CRE, the Association of European Universities, the Confederation of
Rectors’ Conferences and ESIB, the Association of Students’ Unions in
Europe. These NGOs played a key role in the preparation of the Prague
summit in 2001 and, joined at that time by the European Commission,
the Council of Europe and the European Association of Institutions in
Higher Education (EURASHE), they kept the political dialogue moving
during the preparation of the summits that followed in Berlin in 2003 and
in Bergen in 2005. The idea was to progress from mutual distrust to col-
laboration. Bologna thus became a process that encouraged coordinated
legislative and administrative reforms in signatory countries. The reforms
were usually prepared by scores of meetings at an institutional, national
or European level, which were open to government and academic experts
invited to compare experiences from all parts of the Continent, often on
the basis of studies solicited and paid for by the Commission. The process
was not only open in terms of content and implementation, but also in
terms of geography: in Prague another four countries joined, including
Turkey, while in Berlin the number of signatories reached forty countries,
including Russia.
569
Andris Barblan
For learners, teachers and administrators, the goal beyond 2010 was
to attain freedom of movement in a common European intellectual space.
In hosting countries like in their countries of residence, they would enjoy:
1. comparable conditions of access to the many providers and users of

higher education;
2. comparable conditions of support for knowledge development
through investment in people and institutions;
3. comparable conditions of assessment and recognition of services,
skills and competence;
4. comparable conditions of work and employment.
The tools provided by the Bologna declaration were designed to build a

European model of higher education strong enough to foster discussions
about such difficult topics as lifelong learning, the social contribution
of students to institution building, the attractiveness of European higher
education to the rest of the world (themes added by the ministers in
Prague), and links between teaching and research (an issue stressed in
Berlin).
The Bologna Declaration was signed at a time that required adapta-
tion to new constraints by both European universities and governmental
authorities. It acted as a catalyst for change, and, because of its unique
character as a shared enterprise of all partners in higher education, from
students to ministers, it had important consequences not only in signatory
countries – the first to be affected by its snowballing implementation –
but also in other parts of the world. There was resistance. It emerged
first among groups of students and professors who considered that col-
laboration between the public authorities and university representatives
amounted to a sell-out of academic interests, exposing higher education to
commercialization and subjecting it to the economic strategies of trans-
national corporations. This generated confusion between the Bologna
process and the GATS discussions on trade in services, as if governmental
moves towards the EHEA were preparations for globalization led by pri-
vate interests. In the autumn of 2001, however, the European University
Association,8 the American Council of Education (ACE) and the Associa-
tion of Universities and Colleges in Canada (AUCC) signed a joint decla-
ration drawing the attention of education ministers and higher-education
8 EUA, the Association of European Universities, succeeded CRE on 31 March 2001 after
the latter’s merger with the Brussels-based Confederation of National Rectors’ Confer-
ences of the European Union. Both had been heavily involved in the preparation of the
Bologna Declaration, and their representation of the same universities seemed rather odd
to outsiders – hence the decision to have them merge as the only cooperative organization
of European universities.
570
institutions in Europe and North America to the dangers of trade dis-
cussions on services developed by the ministries of trade without much
consultation with academia and its stakeholders. To meet the danger of
the expansion of commercial providers, whose interest was their own
growth rather than the development of the systems of higher education in
which they operated, advocates lobbied at a national level and at WTO
meetings for higher education as a key ingredient in national develop-
ment strategies. Thus, in Prague and Berlin the governments of Europe
solemnly reaffirmed the importance of higher education as a public good
in terms of trade, employment and research transfer.
The Bologna Declaration itself, by proposing multiple exit points to
reduce the student drop-out rate, diminished the sense of wasted time
among students wishing to find employment after only three years of aca-
demic training. But was this not also a way of depriving young people of
their right to higher education, by offering education on the cheap (the
terminal three-year BA) while making the MA the only true academic
degree? The new system would deprive most students of a chance at
true higher education, since governments could not muster the resources
needed to support the number of students who might want to proceed
beyond the BA – some 60 per cent of the age cohort according to gov-
ernment forecasts. Resistance to change also grew with the success of
reforms that forced transformation in academic units long accustomed to
traditional routines. Thus, the French realized that European compara-
bility would reveal the unequal value of degrees that, nationally at least,
were considered equal. Old nationalist arguments about quality were then
used against the Bologna Process of European convergence. Moreover,
the speed of reforms, some of which were hasty, gave ammunition to
opponents who could point out that in Italy the reorganization of some
1,600 disciplinary curricula in less than eighteen months amounted to lit-
tle more than switching labels. But owing to the general desire for change
in Europe and the urging of thousands of people who had profited from
mobility under Erasmus and other programmes, the resistance was only
a rearguard action. Whatever its strengths, however, the Bologna Process
could still collapse, since it is based on tools that could fail in the face of
ideological choices.
European convergence has contributed to the vision of a coherent and
cohesive system of higher education on other continents. Latin Ameri-
can countries have not only discussed similar developments in their own
academic space, but they have also urged the creation of a Euro-Latin
American Higher Education Area exploiting the tools of the Bologna
Declaration. A step in this direction was taken in Berlin, where the Ger-
man host of the 2003 summit welcomed officials from Latin American
governments as observers at the ministers’ session. The Bologna Process,
571
Andris Barblan
especially the model of comparability for convergence purposes, has
aroused interest in North America, Asia and Africa. Still, academic train-
ing in Europe has not yet become attractive enough to compete well with
the USA, the main benchmark for Europe.
a european model of higher education

For nine centuries, the universities have been key institutions in Europe,
even if, since the French Revolution, their character has evolved in dif-
ferent ways to accommodate the nationalism of the societies that support
them. Despite the movement for European integration developed after
1945, the universities were slow to cultivate the European dimension of
their activities. It was initially considered to be a marginal part of interna-
tional relations facilitating the exchange of students, teachers and ideas,
preferably with North American institutions. In the European Commu-
nity, however, this dimension slowly became an obligation as the idea of
free circulation of people, goods and capital gained acceptance among
member countries and their associates. The upheaval of 1989, with the
collapse of the Berlin Wall, raised urgent questions about the idea and
its implementation. What is Europe, what are the elements of a cultural
model that can be called European, how can a core European identity
be defined, what role do universities play in its definition? The answer to
all these questions was a structured development based on comparison,
convergence and cooperation, the so-called Bologna Process – requiring
the commitment not only of governments but also of the institutions of
higher education, their students and their teachers. The approach was
novel, even if the aim of integration was ancient.
In Bologna in 1988, universities emphasized the similarity of their roles
throughout Europe as nodes of a single network of intellectual activities.
In a discrete way, they were the living proof that Europe existed as a cul-
tural entity. To ‘come out’ in the open, they had to wait until 1999 when,
again in Bologna, the European ministers of education launched a new
process of academic integration. The tools mentioned in their Declaration
excavated deeper levels of integration. But although the Diploma Supple-
ment and the BA/MA architecture of studies invited changes at a national
level, they did not call for adaptation to other members’ needs and ambi-
tions. ECTS asked for more, however, as the comparison of learning
outcomes could entail changes in national curricula or institutional activ-
ities in order to facilitate mobility and, at a later stage, to allow for
credit accumulation and the development of joint degrees.9 Cooperation
9 Such was the aim of the Tuning Project, which brought together – with EU support –
hundreds of university representatives after 2001 to explore the commonalities of curric-
ula taught all over the region.
572
in quality assessment finally translated comparability into compatibility,
so that institutions could have confidence in the level of higher education
provided all over Europe. Each stage required still greater commitment
to a commonality of purpose and action in the field of higher education
so that, by 2010, educational services might flow freely from one side of
the Continent to the other, as material goods have done for many years.
The Bologna Process has something of the structure of our History of
the University. Both move from relationships with the state to teaching
developments, from a study of the human and financial resources avail-
able to curricula and student life. Should Bologna succeed, the providers
of education would be able to draw upon resources (people or funding)
from all corners of Europe to develop and package their most enticing ser-
vices, whether courses or research projects, data or publications – perhaps
in cooperation with publishers, media companies and other specialized
communicators. Students of all ages would then be able to draw on the
most convenient services for their intellectual interests, career develop-
ment or social commitments. This model would be completed by common
measurements allowing for comparisons of the value of the service, a kind
of euro of the intelligence for assessing the compatibility and cohesion of
the knowledge society announced by the Lisbon Summit of EU heads of
state in 2000. The function of higher education, apart from exploration
(the university as a creator) and conservation (the university as a curator)
of knowledge, could therefore consist in making explicit the new com-
monalities of Europe, be they economic, social or cultural (the university
as a constructive critic). This criticism would reinforce the potential for
integration based on the search for the public good rather than on the
support of private interests. If this were the case, the European model
would certainly differ from its American counterpart while adhering – in
the twenty-first century – to the three basic roles of the university since
its medieval origins.
Will the European universities of 2010 have enough confidence in their
own cohesive strength to assume global responsibilities as their American
competitors did in the twentieth century? One of the underlying themes
in European integration has been the rise of ‘fortress Europe’, a continent
big enough and sufficiently rich to develop a protective system around its
borders in an attempt to divert external forces too difficult to face directly.
Certain aspects of European initiatives in higher education might seem
to favour the fortress. European competitiveness, a part of the Bologna
Declaration, could be understood as an effort to draw to Europe the best
brains to enrich the continent’s long-term future. The richly endowed
Erasmus-Mundus programme launched in 2004 could be interpreted as
European self-indulgence. However, the vitality of the Bologna Process,
complex and multi-faceted as it is, should strengthen Europe’s confidence
573
Andris Barblan
in its capacity to invent the future without a fortress. The true test will be
the external relations of the European higher-education community with
its counterparts around the world.
A fitting end to the long history of the university in Europe is the emer-
gence of universities of Europe – institutions expressing and defending in
the wider world the specificity of an integrated culture for Europe.
select bibliography
A travers l’histoire, CRE-Information, 39, Geneva, 1977.
Carrier, H. Rôle futur des universités, Rome, 1975.
CRE: 40 Years of History, CRE-action, 115, Supplement, Geneva, 1999.
Daxner, M. Die blockierte Universität, Frankfurt, 1999.
Marga, A. University Reform Today, 4th edn, Cluj, 2005.
Minogue, K. R. The Concept of a University, London, 1973.
Neave, G. Abiding Issues, Changing Perspectives: Visions of the University across
a Half Century, Paris, 2000.
Neave, G. ‘Apocalypse Now: The Changing Role of the University in the Emerg-
ing Information Society’, in A. Tuijnman and T. Schuller (eds.), Lifelong
Learning Policy and Research, Stockholm, 1999.
Neave, G. ‘The Bologna Declaration: Some of the Historic Dilemmas Posed by the
Reconstruction of the Community in Europe’s Systems of Higher Education’,
Educational Policy, 17:1 (2003), 141–64.
Sonder le passé à la recherche de l’université, CRE-Information, 69, Geneva,
1985.
Steger, H.-A. (ed.) Das Europa der Universitäten/L’Europe des Universités/The
Universities’ Europe: Entstehung der ständigen Konferenz der Rektoren und
Vize-Kanzler der europäischen Universitäten 1948–1962, Dokumentation,
Bad Godesberg, 1964.
Stewart, W. A. C. Higher Education in Postwar Britain, London, 1989.
Town and Gown: The University in Search of its Origins, CRE-Information, 62,
Geneva, 1983.
Weber, L. Challenges Facing Higher Education at the Millennium, Phoenix, Ariz.,
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574
APPENDIX
UNIVERSITIES FOUNDED IN
EUROPE BETWEEN
1945 AND 1995
The following list is based on L. Jı́lek, Historical Compendium of Euro-

pean Universities (Geneva, 1984), prepared and published by CRE as
a preparatory work for the History Project. The national entries were
revised and completed, partly by the National Rectors’ Conferences
(EUA), and partly according to the information given by the universi-
ties listed in the IAU World Higher Education DATABASE 2005/6 and
2006/7 (IAU).
The list gives for each country the new universities in chronological
order of their foundation year with the following information:
1. Year of foundation referring to the official recognition of the right to
grant the doctor’s degree (/ indicates year of inauguration or opening
to students, if reported to be different from the year of foundation).
2. Location.
3. Name (U. alone refers to the location: (University of loc.) or (loc.
University).
4. Later name and/or earliest precursor’s name.
ALBANIA (IAU)
1957 Tirana U. incorporating former Institutes of
Engineering, Medicine, Economics,
Law and Science, 1991 without
Engineering
1991 Tirana Polytechnic U.
AUSTRIA (EUA)
1962 Salzburg U.
1962/6 Linz Hochschule of 1975 Johannes Kepler U.
Economics and Social
Sciences
575
Appendix
AUSTRIA (EUA) (cont.)
1970 Klagenfurt Hochschule of
Pedagogical Sciences
1973 Linz Hochschule of Art and
Industrial Design
BELARUS (IAU)
1945 Brest Brest ‘A. S. Pukin’ State
U.
1961 Gomel Gomel State U. ‘Francisk
Skorina’
1978 Grodno Grodno State U. ‘Janki 1940 State Teacher Training Institute
Kupaly’
1992 Minsk Byelorussian State 1932 Academy of Music
Academy of Music
1992 Gorki Byelorussian State 1840 Gory-Gorecky Agricultural
Agricultural Academy School
1993 Minsk Byelorussian State 1930 Forestry Institute
Technological U.
1993 Novopolotsk Polotsk State U. 1968 Novopolotsk Polytechnical
Institute
1994 Minsk Byelorussian State 1924 Pedagogical Institute
Pedagogical U.
‘M Tank’
1994 Vitebsk Vitebsk State Academy 1924 Higher Agricultural Technical
of Veterinary School
Medicine
BELGIUM (EUA/IAU)
1965 Mons Centre universitaire de Merger of different faculties and
l’état institutes
1965 Mons Polytechnical faculty 1837 Mining school
1965 Mons Centre universitaire 1971 U. of Mons-Hainaut; 1899
Institute
1968 Leuven Katholieke U. 1425 Studium generale
1968 Louvain-la- U. catholique 1425 Studium generale
Neuve
1969 Brussels Facultés universitaires 1898 Facultés universitaires
Saint-Louis (FUSL) Saint-Louis
1969 Brussels U. libre de Bruxelles 1834 U. libre de Bruxelles
1969 Brussels Vrije U. Brussel 1834 U. libre de Bruxelles
1991 Hasselt Universiteit Hasselt 1964 Postuniversitair Centrum, 1991
Limburgs Universitair-Centrum at
Diepenbeek-Hasselt, changed its
name to Universeit Hasselt in 2005
2003 Antwerp Universiteit Antwerpen Merging of 1965 Rijksuniversitair
Centrum van Antwerpen RUCA
(1852 Dutch Higher Trade School,
1520 Jesuit Trade School), 1965
Universitaire Faculteiten
Sint-Ignatius Antwerpen (UFSIA),
and 1971 Universitaire Instelling
Antwerpen (UIA) (2nd cycle and
PhD faculty of subjects taught at
UFSIA and RUCA)
576
Universities founded in Europe between 1945 and 1995
BELGIUM (EUA/IAU) (cont.)
2007 Brussels Hogeschool en Merging of the 1969 Universitaire
Universiteit Brussel Faculteiten Sint-Aloysius (UFSAL)
(HUB) (1898 Facultés universitaires
Saint-Louis) and two non-
university schools for higher
education (VLEKHO and EHSAL)
BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA (IAU)
1949 Sarajevo U.
1976 Tuzla U. 1960 Faculty of mines
BULGARIA (IAU)
1971 Veliko Turnovo St. Cyril and 1963 Teachers Training College
Methodius U.
1972 Plovdiv Paillii Hilendarski U. 1964 Teachers Training Institute
1995 Bourgas Prof. Dr. Assem 1961 Higher Institute of Chemical
Zlatarov U. Technology
1995 Gabrovo Technical U. 1963 Higher Institute for Mechanical
and Electrical Engineering
1995 Pleven Medical U. 1974 Higher Institute of Medicine
1995 Sofia Medical U. 1917 Faculty of Medicine U. of Sofia
1995 Sofia Technical U. 1945 State Polytechnical Institute
1995 Sofia Agricultural U. 1945 Higher Institute of Agriculture
1995 Varna Prof. Dr. Parasker 1961 Higher Insitute of Medicine
Stoganov Medical U.
CROATIA (EUA/IAU)
1973 Rijeka U. 1624 Jesuit College
1974 Split U.
1975 Osijek U.
CYPRUS (IAU)
1989 Nicosia U. of Cyprus
CZECH REPUBLIC (EUA)
1945/6 Prague Academy of Performing
Arts in Prague
1946 Prague Academy of Arts 1885 School of Decorative Arts
Architecture and
Design in Prague
1947 Brno Janácek Academy of
Music and Dramatic
Arts in Brno
1950 Pardubice Institute of Chemical 1994 U. of Pardubice
Technology
1952 Prague College of Agriculture 1994 Czech U. of Agriculture in
Prague
1952 Prague Institute of Chemical
Technology
1953 Prague U. of Economics
1991 Ceské U. of South Bohemia
Budejovice
1991 Ostrava U.
1991 Opava Silesian U. in Opava
1991 Pilsen U. of West Bohemia in 1948 independent Faculty of
Pilsen Education
1991 Ústı́ nad Jan Evangelista Purkyne 1954 Faculty of Education
Labem U. in Ústı́ nad Labem
577
Appendix
CZECH REPUBLIC (EUA) (cont.)
1994 Pardubice U. 1950 Institute of Chemistry
1994 Liberec Technical U. of Liberec 1973 College of Mechanical
Engineering
DENMARK (EUA)
1966 Odense U.
1972 Roskilde U.
1974 Aalborg U.
ESTONIA (EUA)
1951 Tartu Estonian Agricultural U.
1991 Tallin U. Nord formerly Baccalaureate Private
College
FINLAND (EUA)
1950 Turku School of Economics
and Business
Administration
1958 Oulu U. 1956 Teacher training college
1966 Tampere U. 1926 Citizens’ College Helsinki
1966 Jyväskylä U. Teachers seminar 1863
1966/9 Lappeenranta U. of Technology
1972 Tampere U. of Technology 1966 part of Helsinki U. of
Technology in Tampere
1977 Turku Business School 1950 private foundation
1977 Vaasa Business School 1966 private foundation
1979 Rovaniemi Faculty of law and social
sciences
1980 Vaasa U. 1966 School of Economics and
Business Administration
1982 Helsinki Sibelius Academy 1882 Helsinki Music Institute
1983 Helsinki U. of Art and Design 1871 Crafts School
1984 Loensuu U. 1966 Institution of Higher Education
1984 Kuopio U. 1966 Institution of Higher Education
1987 Helsinki Theatre Academy 1943 without U. status
1987 Rovaniemi U. of Lapland 1979 Institution of Higher Education
1993 Helsinki National Defence 1779 Cadet School in Joroinen
College
FRANCE (IAU)1
1964 Villeurbanne École nationale
supérieure des sciences
de l’information et des
bibliothèques
(ENSSIB)
1965 Paris École nationale du génie 1824 National School of Water and
rural et des eaux et Forests of Nancy
des forêts (ENGREF)
1968 École des hautes études 1885 without U. status
d’ingénieur (HEI)
1 In 1793, the universities were suppressed and in the bigger cities replaced by schools of
medicine and law; later on also by faculties of letters, sciences and, to a lesser degree,
of theology. In 1896, these institutions of higher education were locally united by the
name but without the structure of a university. In 1970, following the University Reform
Law of 1968, they were re-founded as legally, but still not structurally, autonomous state
institutions, divided in the bigger cities into smaller universities.
578
FRANCE (IAU) (cont.)
1970 Amiens U. de Picardie 1964 Centre universitaire
1970 Talence U. Bordeaux I 1441 Studium generale
1970 Bordeaux U. Victor Segale 1441 Studium generale
(Bordeaux II)
1970 Pessac U. Michel de Montaigne 1441 Studium generale
(Bordeaux III)
1970 Brest U. de Bretagne 1461 Studium generale Nantes
occidentale
1970 Caen U. de Caen Basse 1412 Studium generale
Normandie
1970 Clermont- U. Clermont-Ferrand 1977 U. d’Auvergne
Ferrand (Clermont-Ferrand I). 1854 Fac.
lettres, sciences
1970 Clermont- U. Clermont-Ferrand 1977 U. Blaise Pascal (Clermont-II)
Ferrand 1854 Fac. lettres, sciences
1970 Dijon U. de Bourgogne 1722 U. Dijon
1970 Grenoble U. Joseph Fourier 1339 Studium generale
(Grenoble I)
1970 Grenoble U. des sciences sociales 1339 Studium generale
(Grenoble II)
1970 Grenoble U. Stendhal (Grenoble 1339 Studium generale
III)
1970 Villeneuve U. des sciences et 1560 U. Douai
d’Ascq technologies (Lille I)
1970 Lille U. du droit et de la santé 1560 U. Douai
(Lille II)
1970 Villeneuve U. Charles de Gaulle – 1560 U. Douai
d’Ascq Sciences humaines,
lettres et arts (Lille III)
1970 Limoges U. 1626 School of Medicine
1970 Villeurbanne U. Claude-Bernard 1245 Studium generale
(Lyon I)
1970 Lyon U. Lumière (Lyon II) 1245 Studium generale
1970 Marseille U. de Provence 1413 Studium generale
(Aix.-Marseille I)
1970 Montpellier U. Montpellier I 1220 Studium generale
1970 Montpellier U. des sciences et 1220 Studium generale
techniques du
Languedoc
(Montpellier II)
1970 Montpellier U. Paul Valéry 1220 Studium generale
(Montpellier III)
1970 Nancy U. Henri Poincaré 1572 U. Nancy
(Nancy I)
1970 Nancy U. Nancy II 1572 U. Nancy
1970 Nancy École d’architecture de
Nancy (EAN)
1970 Orléans U. 1306 Studium generale
1970 Paris 2 Panthéon-Sorbonne
(Paris I)
1970 Paris U. de droit, d’économie
et de sciences sociales
(Paris II)
2 The U. of Paris, founded around 1200 as Universitas Magistrorum et Scholarium Parisien-

sium, was split into thirteen universities.
579
Appendix
1970 Paris U. Sorbonne nouvelle
(Paris III)
1970 Paris U. Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV)
1970 Paris U. René-Descartes (Paris V)
1970 Paris U. Pierre et Marie-Curie
(Paris VI)
1970 Paris U. Denis Diderot (Paris VII)
1970 Paris U. de Vincennes à St-Denis
(Paris VIII)
1970 Paris U. Paris-Dauphine (Paris IX)
1970 Paris U. Paris-Nanterre (Paris X)
1970 Paris U. Paris-Sud (Paris XI)
1970 Paris U. Paris-Val-de-Marne
(Paris XII)
1970 Paris U. Paris-Nord (Paris XIII)
1970 Pau U. de Pau et des Pays de 1969 Centre universitaire
l’Adour
1970 Poitiers U. 1431 Studium generale
1970 Reims U. Reims 1548 U. Reims
Champagne-Ardenne
1970 Rennes U. Rennes I 1461 U. Nantes
1970 Rennes U. Rennes II – 1461 U. Nantes
Haute-Bretagne
1970 Mont- U. Rouen 1966 U. Rouen
SaintAignan
1970 Saint- U. Jean Monnet 1961 Centre universitaire
Étienne Saint-Étienne
1970 Strasbourg U. Louis-Pasteur (Strasbourg 1537 higher humanist school
I)
1970 Strasbourg U. des sciences humaines 1537 higher humanist school
(Strasbourg II)
1970 Strasbourg U. des sciences juridiques, 1537 higher humanist school
politiques, sociales et de
technologie (Strasbourg
III)
1970 Toulouse U. des sciences sociales 1229 Studium generale
(Toulouse I)
1970 Toulouse U. Toulouse-le-Mirail 1229 Studium generale
(Toulouse II)
1970 Toulouse U. (Toulouse III) Institut national polytechnique
1970 Tours U. François-Rabelais 1306 U. Orléans
1971 Nice U. Nice-Sophia Antipolis 1965 U. Nice
1972 Angers U. 1337 Studium generale
1972 Compiègne U. de technologie de
Compiègne
1973 Marseille U. de la Méditerranée 1413 Studium generale
(Aix-Marseille II)
1973 Marseille U. de droit, d’économie et 1413 Studium generale
des sciences (Aix-Marseille
III)
1973 Lyon U. Jean Moulin (Lyon III) 1808 fac. théol., lettres, sciences
1975/61 Corte U. of Corsica Pascal Paoli 1765–8 U. of Corte
1975 Mulhouse U. de Haute-Alsace 1970 Centre universitaire du
Haut-Rhin
580
1976 Vandœuvre- National Polytechnic 1971 Institut national polytechnique
lès-Nancy Institute of Lorraine de Nancy
1976 Nantes
1976 Nice
1976 Valenciennes U. du Hainau-Cambrésis 1970 Centre universitaire
1978 Le Mans U. du Maine 1960 Centre scientifique universitaire
1978 Perpignan U. Perpignan Via Centre universitaire de Perpignan
Domitia
1979 Chambéry U. de Savoie 1970 Centre universitaire de Savoie
1979 Toulon U. du Sud Toulon Var 1970 Centre universitaire
1984 Toulouse Institut national 1970 Institut polytechnique
polytechnique de
Toulouse (INP
Toulouse)
1991 Nantes École centrale de Nantes Institut polytechnique de l’Ouest
(ECN)
GEORGIA (IAU)
1990 Tblisi Georgian Technical U. 1922 Faculty of Tblisi U.
1991 Tblisi Georgian State Agrarian 1919 Faculty of Tblisi
U.
1992 Aieti Medical School
GERMANY (EUA)
1946 Mainz Johannes Gutenberg U. 1477–1798 U.
1946 Berlin Technical U. 1879 Technical College
1947 Speyer German U. of
Administrative
Sciences
1948 Saarbrücken U. of the Saarland
1948 Berlin Free U.
1948 Hamburg Hochschule of
Economics and
Politics
1953 Ilmenau Technical Hochschule 1992 Technical U. 1894 Private
Technical School
1962/5 Bochum Ruhr-U.
1962/6 Regensburg U.
1962/8 Dortmund U.
1963/8 Hannover U. of Medicine
1965 Düsseldorf U. 1978 Heinrich-Heine-U. 1923
Medical Hochschule
1966 Konstanz U.
1967 Ulm U.
1967 Hohenheim U. 1818 College for Agricultural
Teaching and Research
1967 Mannheim U. 1907 Municipal Trade College
1969 Bielefeld U.
1970 Augsburg U.
1970 Trier- U. 1975 split into Trier (1475–1798)
Kaiserslautern and Kaiserslautern (1779 College
of Public Administration)
1970 Cologne German Sports U. 1947 German College for Physical
Education and Sport (without
university rights)
581
Appendix
GERMANY (EUA) (cont.)
1971 Bremen U.
1971 Kassel U.
1972/5 Bayreuth U.
1972/5 Bamberg U. 1988 Otto-Friedrich U. 1647 Jesuit
College
1972/5 Duisburg Gerhard-Mercator-U.
1972/5 Essen U.
1972/5 Hamburg U. of the Federal Armed
Forces
1972/5 Paderborn U.
1972/5 Siegen U.
1972/5 Wuppertal Bergische U.
1973 Munich U. of the Federal Armed
Forces
1973 Oldenburg Carl von Ossietzky-U.
1973/4 Osnabrück U.
1973/8 Passau U.
1973/8 Vechta U. 1830 Teacher Training School
1974 Hagen Tele U.
1978 Hamburg- Technical U.
Harburg
1978 Hildesheim U. 1643 College of Art and Theology
1980 Eichstätt Catholic U. 1619 Jesuit Seminary
1985 Lübeck Medical U. 1964 Medical Academy
1986 Chemnitz Technical U. 1836 Trade Academy
1989 Lüneburg U. 1946 College of Education
1990 Koblenz- U.
Landau
1991 Cottbus Technical U.
1991 Frankfurt Europa U. Viadrina 1506–1811 U.
(Oder)
1991 Potsdam U.
1993 Magdeburg Otto-von-Guericke-U.
1994 Flensburg Bildungswissenschaftliche 1946 College of Education
Hochschule-U.
GREECE (EUA)
1964 Patras U.
1970 Ioannina U. 1964 Department of U. Thessaloniki
1973 Komotini Democritus U. of Thrace
1973 Rethymno U. of Crete
1977 Chaniá Technical U.
1984 Mytilene U. of the Aegean
1984 Volos U. of Thessaly
1989 Piraeus U. 1938 Free School
1989 Athens Harokopia U.
1989 Thessaloniki U. of Macedonia 1948 Industrial School
HUNGARY (IAU)
1949 Budapest U. of Veterinary 1787 Veterinary School, Buda U.
Medicine
1949 Miskolc Technical U. of Heavy 1990 Miskolc U.
Industry
1951 Budapest U. of Medicine 1769 Medical Fac. Buda U.
Semmelweis
1951 Veszprém U. 1949 Fac., Technical U. Budapest
582
HUNGARY (IAU) (cont.)
1952 Gödöllö U. of Agriculture
1953 Budapest U. of Horticulture 1894 School of Gardening
1962 Sopron U. of Forestry 1808 School of Forestry
1970 Debrecen U. of Agriculture 1868 National High School for
Economics
1970 Keszthely U. of Agriculture 1865 School of Forestry
1971 Budapest Hungarian U. of Crafts 1880 School of Crafts
and Design
1990 Budapest Budapest U. of 1920 Fac. of Economics,
Economics Evangelical-Lutheran Theological
U., 1557 Latin School
1993 Budapest Pázmány Peter Catholic 1638 Theological Fac. Nagyszombat
U.
ICELAND (EUA)
1971 Reykjavik Iceland University of 1907 Iceland College of Education
Education
1987 Akureyri U.
1989 Bifrost School of Business 1918 Co-operative School of Iceland
IRELAND (IAU)
1957 Dublin The Institute of Public
Administration (IPA)
1968 Dublin The Milltown Institute
of Theology and
Philosophy
1970 Athlone Athlone Institute of
Technology
1970 Carlow Institute of Technology
Carlow
1971 Sligo Institute of Technology
1977 Tralee Institute of Technology
1978 Cork Cork Institute of
Technology
1989 Dublin City U. 1975 National Institute for Higher
Education
1989 Limerick U. 1972 National Institute for Higher
Education
1992 Dublin Dublin Institute of
Technology
1992 Limerick Limerick Institute of
Technology
ITALY (EUA) (U. = Università degli Studi)
1967 Lecce U. 1955 Istituto autonomo di Magistero
1968 Arcavacata U. della Calabria
di Rende
(Cosenza)
1971 Ancona U. 1969 Libera U.
1977 Roma Libera U. internazionale 1966 U. pro Deo
degli studi sociali
‘Guido Carli’
1978 Udine U.
1979 Cassino U 1964 Istituto privato di Magistero
1979 Viterbo U. della Tuscia 1969 Libera università della Tuscia
1981 Potenza U. della Basilicata
1982 Roma U. Roma Tor Vergata
583
Appendix
ITALY (EUA) (U. = Università degli Studi) (cont.)
1982 Brescia U. 1969 Ente universitario della
Lombardia orientale
1982 Campobasso U. del Molise
1982 Chieti U. Gabriele D’Annunzio 1965 Libera U. Abruzzese degli studi
1982 L’Aquila U. 1952 Istituto universitario di
magistero
1982 Reggio U. Mediterranea 1968 Libero istituto universitario di
Calabria architettura
1982 Trento U. 1962 Istituto U. di scienze sociali
1982 Verona U.
1987 Pisa Scuola superiore di studi Merger Scuola superiore di studi
universitari e di universitari e di perfezionamento
perfezionamento S. (f.1967) + Conservatorio S. Anna
Anna (founded in 1785)
1990 Bari Politecnico
1990 Bergamo U. 1968 Istituto universitario di lingue e
letterature straniere
1991 Castellanza U. ‘Carlo Cattaneo’
(Varese) LIUC
1991 Napoli Seconda U.
1991 Roma Libera U.-Campus
bio-medico
1992 Roma U. Roma Tre
1993 Teramo U.
LATVIA (IAU)
1954 Lilpaja Lilpaja Academy of
Pedagogy
1990 Riga Latvian Academy of
Culture
1991 Jelgava Latvian U. of 1863 Department of Riga
Agriculture Polytechnical Institute
LITHUANIA (EUA)
1945 Kaunas Lithuanian National 1999 Lithuanian Academy of
Institute of Physical Physical Education
Education
1950 Kaunas Kaunas Medical lnstitute 1989 Kaunas Medical Academy
1950 Kaunas Polytechnic Institute 1990 Kaunas U. of Technology
1991 Klapeda U.
1994 Vilnius Vilnius Gediminas 1956 Vilnius Evening division of the
Technical U. Evening faculty of Kaunas
Polytechnic Institute
MACEDONIA (IAU)
1949 Skopje U. Sts. Cyril and
Methodius
1979 Bitola U. St. Kliment Ohridski
MALTA (no new U.)
MOLDAVIA (IAU)
1992 Chişinău Free International U. of
Moldavia
1993 Chişinău Technical U. of 1964 Polytechnic Institute
Moldavia
584
MONTENEGRO (IAU)
1973 Podgorica U. of Montenegro
THE NETHERLANDS (IAU)
1952 Den Haag Institute of Social
Studies for Graduate
Studies
1956 Eindhoven Technische Hogeschool 1986 Technische U. Eindhoven
Eindhoven (TU/e)
1961 Enschede Technische Hogeschool 1986 Twente U.
Twente
1967 Amsterdam Catholic Theological U.
1973 Rotterdam Erasmus U. 1913 The Netherlands School of
Economics
1975 Maastricht U. 1974 Faculty of Medicine
1982/4 Heerlen The Open U. of the
Netherlands
2004 Nijmegen Radboud U. 1923 Katholieke Universiteit
Nijmegen (KUN)
NORWAY (EUA)
1946 Bergen U. 1825 Bergen Museum
1968/72 Tromsø U.
1968 Trondheim U. 1910 Norwegian College of
Advanced Technology
POLAND (EUA)
1944/5 Lublin Maria Curie-
Skłodowska U.
1944/5 Wrocław Polish U.
1945 Gdańsk Politechnic
1945/6 Łódź U.
1946 Torun Mikołaj Kopernik U.
1968 Katowice Silesian U. Merger Educational Institute and
Jagiellonian U. branch
1970 Gdańsk U. Merger Education Institute + Sopot
Economics College
1984/5 Szczecin U. Merger Educational Institute +
Technical U.
1994 Opolski U. Merger Educational Institute +
Theological-Pastoral Institute
PORTUGAL (EUA)
1973 Lisbon Universidade nova
1973 Aveiro U.
1973 Braga U. of Minho
1979 Evora U. 1559–1759 U.
ROMANIA (IAU)
1948 Timişoara Banat’s U. of 1945 Faculty of Technical Institute
Agricultural Sciences
and Veterinary
Medicine
1962 Timişoara U. of the West 1949 Institute of Education
1965 Bucharest Politecnica U. 1867 School of Bridges, Roads and
Mines
1966 Craiova U. 1947 Institute
1971 Braşov U. 1956 Transylvania U.
585
Appendix
ROMANIA (IAU) (cont.)
1974 Galaţi U. ‘Dunărea de Jos’ din 1951 Naval and Mechanical
Galaţi Engineering Institute
1989 Bucharest Carol Davila U. of 1857 National School of Medicine
Medicine and and Surgery
Pharmacy
1991 Petroşani Technical U. 1995 U. 1864 Institute of Coal
1992 Bucharest National Academy of 1922 National Institute of Physical
Physical Education Education
and Sports
1992 Iaşi Grigore T. Popa U. of Medicine 1879 Medical Fac. U. Iaşi
and Pharmacy
1992 Cluj- Technical U. 1922 Electromechanical Institute
Napoca
1994 Bucharest Technical U. of Civil 1818 School of Land Surveyors
Engineering
RUSSIAN FEDERATION (IAU)3
1951 Moscow All-union Extra-Mural 1995 Russian State Open Technical
Institute of Railway U. of Railway Communication
Engineering
1956 Jakutsk Jakutsk State U. ‘M. K. 1934 Pedagogical Institute
Ammosov’
1957 Bashkir Bashkir State U. 1909 Teacher Training Institute
1957 Mahachkala Dagestan State U. 1931 Pedagogical Institute
1957 Nalčik Kabardino-Balkarian 1932 Pedagogical Institute
State U. ‘H. M.
Berbekov’
1957 Saransk Mordovian State U. 1931 Mordovian State Teachers’
‘N. P. Ogarev’ Training Institute
1958 Vladimir Vladimir State U.
1959 Novosibirsk Novosibirsk State U
1959 Moscow People’s Friendship U. of Before 1992 People’s Friendship U.
Russia Patris Lumumba
1959 Briansk Briansk Institute of 1995 Briansk State Engineering
Technology Academy, 1930 Institute of
Forestry Engineering
1967 Cheboksary Chuvash State U. I.
Ulianov
1969 Krasnojarsk Krasnojarsk State U. 1963 Affiliated to Novosibirsk State
U.
1969 Vladikavkaz North Ossetian State U. 1920 Pedagogical Institute
‘K. L. Hetagurov’
1970 Belgorod Belgorod State Institute 1994 Belgorod State Technical U.
of Building Materials ‘V. G. Shuhov’
and Technology
1970 Krasnodar Kuban State U. 1924 Kuban Institute of Public
Education
1972 Kemerovo Kemerovo Technological
Institute of Food
Industry
3 The information about the fifty-nine universities founded between 1945 and 1995, listed
in the IAU DATABASE among almost 800 Russian institutions of higher education, as
having the right to grant the doctorate, was kindly checked and supplemented according
to their websites by Natalia Nosova, Executive Assistant for International Affairs to the
Rector of Saint-Petersburg State University.
586
RUSSIAN FEDERATION (IAU) (cont.)
1972 Joškar-Ola Marij State U.
1973 Altaiskijkraj Altaj State U.
1973 Krasnodar Kuban State U. of 1918 previous institution
Technology
1973 Tjumen Tjumen State U. 1930 previous institution
1974 Ivanovo Ivanovo State U. 1930 previous institution
1974 Kemerovo Kemerovo State U. 1954 previous institution
1974 Omsk Omsk State U.
1974 Iževsk Udmurt State U. 1931 Pedagogical Institute
1976 Čeljabinsk Čeljabinsk State U.
1980 Volgograd Volgograd State U
1981 Novosibirsk Siberian State U. of 1952 Novosibirsk Institute of
Telecommunications Electrotechnics and
and Informatics Communications
1982 Krasnojarsk Krasnojarsk State
Academy of
Architecture and Civil
Engineering
1984 Rjazan Rjazan State Pedagogical 1853 College for Women
U.
1988 Moscow Moscow Institute of 1946 founded without U. status
Physics and
Technology (State U.)
1989 Moscow Moscow State 1872 Moscow Higher Women’s
Pedagogical U. Courses
1989 Samara Samara State U.
1989 Moscow Moscow Medical 1758 Faculty of Medicine of Moscow
Academy ‘I. U.
M.Sečenov’
1990 Krasnojarsk Krasnojarsk State 1956 previous institution
Technical U.
1991 Saint- Herzen State 1797 Hospice educating orphans
Petersburg Pedagogical U.
1991 Moscow International
Independent
Ecological and
Political U.
1991 Moscow International U. in
Moscow
1991 Moscow Moscow State Social U.
1991 Moscow Russian Law Academy 1970 previous institution
1991 Novosibirsk Novosibirsk State 1936 previous institution
Agrarian U.
1991 Saint- Saint-Petersburg State 1904 Agricultural Courses
Petersburg Agrarian U.
1991 Saint- St. Petersburg State 1773 previous institution
Petersburg Mining Institute
‘G. V. Plekhanov’
1991 Tomsk Tomsk Polytechnic U. 1896 Technological Institute
1992 Moscow International Institute of
Marketing and
Management
1992 Moscow Moscow Power 1930 previous institution
Engineering Institute
(Technical U.)
587
Appendix
1992 Moscow Moscow State 1930 previous institution
Automobile and
Highway Engineering
Institute (Technical
U.)
1992 Moscow Moscow Technical U. of 1921 Electrotechnical Institute
Communication and
Informatics
1992 Moscow Russian State Academy 1918 previous institution
of Physical Education
1992 Novosibirsk Novosibirsk State 1950 previous institution
Technical U.
1992 Saint- Saint-Petersburg State 1886 as Engineering College of Post
Petersburg Electrotechnical U. and Telegraph
1992 Samars Samara State Aerospace 1907 Psychoneurological Institute
U.
1992 Saratov Saratov State Technical 1930 previous institution
U.
1992 Tomsk Siberian State Medical 1878 previous institution
U.
1992 Tula Tula State Technical U. 1995 Tula State U.
1992 Ekaterinburg Ural State Academy of 1931 Sverdlovsk Institute of Law
Law
1992 Volgograd Volgograd State 1931 previous institution
Pedagogical U.
1993 Irkutsk Irkutsk State Technical 1930 previous institution
U.
1992 Ivanovo Ivanovo State U. of 1918 Ivanovo-Voznesensk
Power Engineering Polytechnical Institute
1992 Izevsk Izevsk State Technical U. 1952 Institute
1992 Kursk Kursk State Medical U. 1935 previous institution
1992 Maykop Maykop State
Technological
Institute
1993 Moscow Moscow State U. of 1919 Moscow Institute of Forestry
Forestry Engineering Engineering
1993 Moscow Moscow State Academy 1931 previous institution
of Law
1993 Moscow Moscow State Institute 1962 previous institution
of Electronics and
Mathematics
(Technical U.)
1993 Moscow Moscow State U. of 1779 Moscow Institute of Geodesy
Geodesy and
Cartography
1993 Moscow Moscow State U. of 1896 Engineering School
Railway Engineering
1993 Omsk Omsk State Pedagogical 1932 previous institution
U.
1993 Rjazan Rjazan State Radio 1951 previous institution
Engineering Academy
1993 Rostov-na- Rostov State 1931 previous institution
Donu Pedagogical U.
1993 Samara Samara State Medical U. 1919 previous institution
1993 Tambov Tambov State Technical 1958 Tambov Chemical Engineering
U. Institute
588
1993 Volgograd Volgograd State 1962 previous institution
University of
Medicine
1994 Ekaterinburg Ural State Academy of 1917 previous institution
Mining and Geology
1994 Krasnojarsk Krasnojarsk State 1942 Krasnojarsk Medical College
Medical Academy
1994 Rybinsk Rybinsk State Academy 1955 previous institution
of Aviation
Technology
1994 Saint- Saint-Petersburg State 1907 Psychoneurological Institute
Petersburg Medical Academy
1994 Stavropol Stavropol State Medical 1937 previous institution
Academy
1994 Tambov Tambov State U. 1930 Pedagogical Institute. 1994
merging with Institute of Culture
1994 Ufa Ufa State Petroleum 1948 Ufa Petroleum Institute
Technological U.
1994 Uljanovsk Uljanovsk State 1957 Evening Polytechnic Institute
Technical U.
1994 Kirov Vjatka State U. 1963 previous institution
1994 Voronež Voronež State Academy 1918 Forestry and Agriculture
of Forestry Institute
Engineering
1994 Voronež Voronež State Academy 1930 previous institution
of Technology
1994 Voronež Voronež State Medical 1918 department of Voronezh U.
Academy ‘N. N.
Burdenko’
1995 Groznyj Čečen State U. 1972 Čečeno-Inguš State U.
1995 Kirovy Vjatka State 1914 Pedagogical School
Humanitarian U.
1995 Kostroma U. of Technology 1932 Textile Institute
1995 Kurgan Kurgan State U. Incorporating Kurgan Pedagogical
Institute and Kurgan Mechanical
Engineering Institute
1995 Joškar-Ola Marij State Technical U. 1932 Povolzsky Forestry Institute
1995 Ussurijsk Primorsky State 1957 Primorsky Agricultural Institute
Primorskij Academy of
Krai Agriculture
1995 Ulan-Ude Burjat State Academy of 1931 Agropedagogical Institute
Agriculture
1995 Ulan-Ude Burjat State U. 1932 Pedagogical Institute, 1995
merged with local branch of
Novosibirsk U.
1999 Moscow Academy of 1929 Higher School of the Ministry
Management of the of Internal Affairs
Ministry of Internal
Affairs of Russia
SERBIA (IAU)
1960 Novy Sad U.
1965 Niš U.
1970 Kruševac U. of Pristina
1973 Belgrade U. of the Arts
1977 Kragujevac U.
589
Appendix
SLOVAK REPUBLIC (EAU)
1949 Bratislava Academy of Fine Arts
and Design
1949 Bratislava Academy of Music and
Dramatic Arts in
Bratislava
1949 Košice U. of Veterinary
Medicine
1952 Nitra Slovak U. of Agriculture
1952 Trnava U.
1952 Zvolen Technical U.
1952 Košice Technical U.
1953 Žilina U.
1959 Košice Pavol Jozef Šafárik U.
1973 Liptovský General Milan Rastislav
Mikuláš Štefánik Military
Academy
1990 Trenčı́n College of Management
1992 Bratislava Police Academy
1992 Banská Matej Bel U.
Bystrica
1992 Trenčı́n Alexander Dubček U.
SLOVENIA (EUA)
1975 Maribor U. 1961 Association of Higher
Education institutions
SPAIN
1945 El Escorial Royal College of Higher 1387 Studium generale
Education Maria
Cristina
1960 Madrid Pontifical U. Comillas 1890 in Santander
1962 Pamplona U. of Navarra 1952 Estudio general de Navarra
Opus Dei
1963 Bilbao Pontifical U. de Deusto 1878 Jesuit College
1968 Barcelona Autonomous (State) U.
1968 Bilbao U. 1973 U. of Basque country
1968 Badajoz U. of Extremadura
1968 Madrid Autonomous (State) U.
1971 Madrid Polytechnic U. of
Madrid
1971 Córdoba U. 1847 Veterinary school
1971 Madrid National U. of Distance National Tele-U.
Education (UNED)
1971 Malaga U.
1971 Santander U. 1967 Civil Engineering School
1971 Valencia Polytechnic U. 1969 Polytechnical School
1973 Barcelona Technical U. 1968 Polytechnical Institute
1977 Alcalá de U. 1499 Studium generale
Henares
1978 Alicante U.
1978 Palma de U. 1483 Studium generale
Mallorca
1979 Cádiz U. 1748 School of Medicine
1979 Las Palmas Polytechnic of Canary 1989 University of Las Palmas de
Islands Gran Canaria
590
SPAIN (cont.)
1979 León U.
1982 Ciudad Real U. of Castille-La
Mancha
1987 Pamplona Public U. of Navarra
1989 Madrid U. Carlos III
1989 Vigo U.
1989 La Coruña U. Separated from U. of Santiago de
Compostela
1990 Barcelona U. Pompeu Fabra
1991 Barcelona U. Ramón Llull
1991 Castelló de U. Jaime I
la Plana
1992 Lleida U. 1968 Colleges
1992 Tarragona U. Rovira i Virgili U. Barcelona’s faculties
1993 Jaén U.
1993 Madrid U. San Pablo-CEU
1994 Seville International U. of
Andalusia
1995 Madrid U. San Antonio de
Nebrija
1995 Madrid European U. of Madrid
SWEDEN (EUA)
1954 Gothenburg U. 1891 U. College
1960 Stockholm U. 1878 U. College
1965 Umeå U 1956 School of dentistry
1973 Linköping U. 1956 Branch of Stockholm U.
SWITZERLAND (No new U.)
TURKEY (EUA)
1946 Ankara U. 1925–43 Fac. Law, Letters, Science,
and Medicine
1955 Izmir Ege (Aegean) U.
1955 Trabzon Karadeniz Technical U.
1955 Istanbul Boğaziçi U. 1863 Private Liberal Arts College
1955 Eskişehir Anaadolu (Anatolian) U. 1958 Academy of Commercial and
Economic Sciences
1957 Erzerum Ataturk U.
1959 Ankara Middle East Technical
U.
1967 Ankara Hacettepe U.
1973 Adana Çukurova U.
1973 Diyarbakir Dicle U.
1974 Sivas Cumhuriye U.
1975 Elazig Firat (Euphrates) U. 1967 State Academy of Engineering
and Architecture
1975 Matatya Inönü U.
1975 Samsun Ondokuz Mayis (19th
May) U.
1975 Konya Selçuk U.
1975 Bursa Ululağ (Mount
Olympos) U.
1978 Kayseri Erdyes U.
1982 Antalya Akderiiz U.
1982 Izmir Dokuz Eylül U.
591
Appendix
TURKEY (EUA) (cont.)
1982 Ankara Gazi U. 1923 Teacher Training College
1982 Istanbul Marmara U. 1883 Academy of Commercial and
Economic Sciences
1982 Istanbul Minar Sinan U.
1982 Edirne Trakya (Thracian) U.
1982 Istanbul Yıldız Technical U. 1911 Vocational College
1982 Van Yücüncü Yil U. 1975 Teacher Training College
1984 Ankara Bilkent U.
1987 Gaziantep U. .
1992 Bolu Abant Izzet Baysal U.
1992 Aydin Adnan Menderes U.
1992 Afyon Afyon Kocatepe U.
1992 Balıkesir U.
1992 Manisa Celal Byar U.
1992 Çanakkale Çanakkale Onsekiz
Mart U.
1992 Kutahya Dumlupınar U.
1992 Tokat Gaziosman Paşa U.
1992 Gebze Gebze Institute of
Technology
1992 Şanlıurfa Harran U.
1992 Izmir Izmir Institute of
Technology
1992 Kara Kafkas U.
1992 Kahraman Kahraman
. Maraş Sütçü
Maraş Imam U.
1992 Kırıkkale U.
1992 Kocaeli U.
1992 Mersin U.
1992 Muğla U.
1992 Hatay Mustafa Kemal U.
1992 Niğde U.
1992 Denizli Pamukkale U.
1992 Sakarya U.
1992 Isparta Süleyman Demirel U.
1992 Zonguldak Zonguldak Karaelmas
U.
1992 Istanbul Koç U.
1992 Eskişehir Osmangazi U.
1993 Istanbul Galatasaray U.
1993 Ankara Başkent U.
UKRAINE (IAU)
1954 Kharkhov Kharkiv Institute of Fire
Safety
1965 Donetsk Donetsk State U. 1937 Donetsk Pedagogical Institute
1989 Kiev Inter-Regional Academy
of Personnel
Management
1992 Donetsk Donetsk State Academy
of Management
1993 Donetsk Donetsk Technical U. 1921 Donetsk Mining College
1993 Dnipropetrovsk Ukrainian State 1930 Dnipropetrovsk Chemical
Chemical Technology Engineering Institute
U.
592
UKRAINE (IAU) (cont.)
1993 Kharkov Technical U. of Radio 1930 Kharkiv Engineering Civil
Electronics Construction Institute
1993 Odessa Odessa State Polytechnic 1918 Odesa Polytechnical Institute
U.
1993 Ivano- Precarpathian ‘Vasyl 1940 Stanislav Teacher Training
Frankivsk Stefanyk’ U. Institute
Ivano-Frankivsk
1994 Kramatorsk Donbas State 1953 Part-Time Branch of Donetsk
Mechanical Industrial Institute
Engineering Academy
1994 Kharkova Kharkiv State Technical 1930 Kharkiv Engineering Civil
U. of Construction Construction Institute
and Architecture
1994 Khmelnitsky Khmelnitsky State U. 1967 Khmelnitsky Technological
Institute of Consumer Services
1994 Kiev Kiev National 1948 Kiev State Pedagogical Institute
Linguistics U. of Foreign Languages
1994 Kiev National Agricultural U. 1898 Department of Agriculture at
of Ukraine Kiev Polytechnic Institute
1994 Kharkov National Technical U. ‘Kharkiv Polytechnical Institute’,
1885 Kharkiv Practical
Technological Institute
1994 Odessa Odessa State Maritime 1930 Odessa Institute of Marine
U. Engineers
1994 Odessa Odessa State Medical U. 1900 Medical Department of
Novorosiysk U. Vinnytsya
1994 Vinniytsya Vinnytsya State ‘M.I. 1934 Vinnytsya Medical Institute
Pyrogov’ Memorial
Medical U.
1995 Kiev National Technical U. of 1898 Kiev Polytechnical Institute
Ukraine ‘Kiev
Polytechnic Institute’
UNITED KINGDOM (IAU)
1948 Nottingham U. 1881 U. College
1957 Leicester U. 1921 U. College
1961 Brighton U. of Sussex
1961 Colchester U. of Essex
1962 Keele U. 1949 U. College of North
Staffordshire
1963 Newcastle- U. 1834 Newcastle College of Medicine
upon- and Surgery
Tyne
1963 York U. 1953 Borrhwick Institute for
Historical Research
1964 Canterbury U. of Kent
1964 Hull U. 1927 U. College
1964 Lancaster U.
1964 Norwich U. of East Anglia
1964 Exeter U. 1922 U. College
1964 Coventry U. of Warwick
1966 Bath U. of Technology 1971 U. of Bath, 1804 Merchant
Venturers’ Technical College
1966 Bradford U. 1831 Mechanics’ Institute
1966 Guildford U. of Surrey 1891 Battersea Polytechnic Institute
1966 Loughborough U. 1909 Technical Institute
593
Appendix
UNITED KINGDOM (IUA) (cont.)
1966 Uxbridge Brunel U. 1957 Regional College
1966 Edinburgh Heriot-Watt U. 1821 Edinburgh School of Arts and
Mechanics’ Institute
1967 Salford U. 1896 Royal Technical Institute
1967 Stirling U.
1967 Dundee U. 1881 U. College
1969 Milton Open U.
Keynes
1982 Bolton Bolton Institute
1983 Buckingham U. 1973 U. College
1983 Southampton Southampton Institute 1856 Private Art School
1990 Edinburgh The Scottish
Agricultural College
1992 Chelmsford Anglia Polytechnic U. 1838 School of Art in Cambridge
1992 Poole Bournemouth U. 1990 Bournemouth Polytechnic
1992 Coventry U. 1970 Coventry (Lancaster)
Polytechnic
1992 Kingston- U. 1970 Kingston Polytechnic
upon-
Thames
1992 Leeds Leeds Metropolitan U. 1970 Leeds Polytechnic
1992 Liverpool Liverpool John Moores 1970 Liverpool Polytechnic
U.
1992 London Middlesex U. 1973 Middlesex Polytechnic
1992 Edinburgh Napier U. 1964 Napier College of Commerce
1992 Newcastle- Northumberland U. 1969 Newcastle Polytechnic
upon-
Tyne
1992 Oxford Oxford Brookes U. 1970 Oxford Polytechnic
1992 Sheffield Sheffield Hallam U. 1969 Sheffield City Polytechnic
1992 London South Bank U. 1892 Borough Polytechnic
1992 Stoke-on- Staffordshire U. 1992 Staffordshire Polytechnic
Trent
1992 Manchester The Manchester 1970 Manchester Polytechnic
Metropolitan U.
1992 Huddersfield U. 1970 Polytechnic of Huddersfield
1992 Wolverhampton U. 1989 Wolverhampton Polytechnic
1992 Birmingham U. of Central England in 1971 City of Birmingham
Birmingham Polytechnic
1992 Preston U. of Central Lancaster 1828 Preston Institute for the
Diffusion of Knowledge
1992 London U. of East London 1893 West Ham Municipal College
1993 Cranfield U. 1945 College of Aeronautics
1993 Glasgow Glasgow Caledonian U. 1985 Central Institution
594
NAME INDEX
Abendroth, Wolfgang (1906–85), German Bacon, Francis (1561–1626), English

jurist and political scientist 394 philosopher, scientist and statesman 9
Adams, John Bertram (1920–84), British Balibar, Étienne (b. 1942), French
nuclear physicist 540, 545 philosopher 392
Adenauer, Konrad Hermann Josef Bar, Christian von (b. 1952), German jurist
(1876–1967), German statesman 403 422
Adhemar, Joseph Alphonse (1797–1862), Barlow, (James) Alan (Noel) (1881–1968),
French mathematician 479 public servant 75
Adler, Alfred (1870–1937), Austrian Barthes, Roland (1915–80), French
psychologist 389 philosopher 408
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69), Bassi, Laura (1711–78), Italian physicist
German philosopher 289, 290, 384, 385 182
Albee, Edward (b. 1928), American Benedict, Ruth (1887–1948), American
playwright 30 anthropologist 407
Alfred the Great (849–899), king of Bergsträsser, Arnold (1841–97), German
Wessex 4 political scientist 395
Allègre, Claude (b. 1937), French politician Bergsträsser, Ludwig (1883–1960),
and scientist 567–8 German statesman 394
Althoff, Friedrich (1839–1908), Prussian Berlinguer, Luigi (b. 1932), Italian
Minister of Culture 18 statesman 568
Althusser, Louis Pierre (1918–90), French Białkowski, Grzegorz (1933–89), rector
philosopher 392, 408 of the University of Warsaw
Arber, Werner (b. 1929), Swiss 556–7
microbiologist and geneticist 454 Bishop, J. Michael (b. 1936), American
Ariès, Philippe (1914–84), French historian immunologist 454
411 Bloch, Marc (1886–1944), French
Aristotle (384–322 BC), Greek philosopher historian 411
4, 7 Blossfeld, Hans-Peter (b. 1954), German
Aron, Raymond (1905–83), French sociologist 227
philosopher, sociologist and political Boas, Franz (1858–1942), German-
scientist 380, 388 American anthropologist 407
Attlee, Clement (1883–1967), British Borodajkewicz, Taras (von) (1902–84),
statesman 77 Austrian professor 296
Boudon, Raymond (b. 1934), French
Baader, Andreas (1943–77), leader Rote sociologist 211, 212–13, 380–1
Armee Fraktion (= Baader–Meinhof Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002), French
group) 298 sociologist 381, 391
595
Name index
Bourricaud, François (1922–91), French Croll, James (1821–90), Scottish geologist
sociologist 380 479
Boveri, Theodore (1862–1915), German Crowell, John (b. 1917) American
biologist and cytogeneticist 454 geologist 478
Brachet, Jean Louis August (1909–98), Crozier, Michel (b. 1922), French
Belgian biochemist 457 sociologist 380
Braudel, Fernand (1902–85), French
historian 96 Dahrendorf, Ralf (1929–2009),
Braun, Wernher von (1912–77), German German-British sociologist and
physicist and astronautics engineer 540 philosopher 113, 258, 299
Brecht, Arnold (1884–1977), German Darwin, Charles (1809–82), British
political scientist 392 naturalist 382
Brill, Hermann (1895–1959), German Debré, Robert (1882–1978), French
statesman 80, 394 physician 502
Bröcker, Walter (1902–92), German Delors, Jacques (b. 1925), French
philosopher 83 economist and politician 555
Brzezinski, Zbigniew (b. 1928), American Derathé, Robert (1905–92), French
statesman 388 philosopher 389
Budé, Guillaume (1467–1540), French Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), French
legal humanist, diplomat and royal philosopher 408
librarian 9 Descartes, René (1596–1650), French
Bullard, Sir Edward (1907–80), British mathematician, scientist and philosopher
geophysicist 481 8
Bullock, Theodore Holmes (1915–2005), Devaquet, Alain (b. 1942), French
American zoologist 467 politician 314
Dewey, John (1859–1952), American
Caputo, Giuseppe (1936–91), Italian philosopher 27–8, 108
university politician 557 Dicey, A. V. (1835–1922), British jurist
Carducci, Giosué (1835–1907), Italian and constitutional theorist 419
poet 557 Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911), German
Carrero Blanco, Luis (1903–73), Spanish historian 389
statesman 305 Dirac, P. A. M. (1902–84), British
Charlemagne (c. 742–814), Holy Roman theoretical physicist 429
Emperor 4 Dornberger, Walter Robert (1895–1980),
Churchill, Winston (1874–1965), British German Army artillery officer 540
statesman 77, 92, 93 du Toit, Alexander (1878–1949), South
Cicero, M. Tullius (106–43 BC), Roman African geologist 478
statesman and author 28 Dubček, Alexander (1921–92), Slovak
Clark, Burton (1921–2009), American statesman 307
educationalist 563 Duby, Georges (1919–96), French
Coens, Daniel (1938–92), Belgian Minister historian 411
of Education 314 Durkheim, Émile (1858–1917), French
Cohen, Stanley (b. 1942), American sociologist 376, 379, 407
sociologist 302 Dutschke, Rudi (1940–79), spokesperson
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel (b. 1945), of the German student movement 290,
German-French politician 291 292, 296, 298
Comte, Auguste (1798–1857), French
philosopher 379 Easton, David (b. 1917), Canadian
Cossiga, Francesco (b. 1928), President of political scientist 390, 392
the Italian Republic 557 Ebbinghaus, Julius (1885–1981), German
Courant, Richard (1888–1972), German philosopher 91
mathematician 429 Eisenstadt, Shmuel (b. 1923), Israeli
Cox, Richard Howard (b. 1925), American sociologist 388
philosopher 389 Erasmus, Desiderius (c. 1466–1536),
Crick, Francis Harry Compton Dutch humanist 9, 21
(1916–2004), British molecular biologist Erhard, Ludwig (1897–1977), German
453, 455 statesman 403
596
Name index
Eschenburg, Theodor Rudolf Georg Gandolfi, Giuseppe (b. 1927), Italian jurist
(1904–99), German political scientist 422
394 Gaulle, Charles de (1890–1970), French
Euclid (fl. c. 300 BC), Greek statesman 75, 106, 108, 291
mathematician 28 Gerven, Walter van (b. 1935), Belgian
jurist 422
Faure, Edgar (1908–88), French politician, Gigon, Olof (1912–98), Swiss classical
essayist and historian 106–9, 110 philologist 92–3
Febvre, Lucien (1878–1956), French Gilcher-Holtey, Ingrid (b. 1952), German
historian 411 political theorist 300
Fermi, Enrico (1901–54), Italian physicist Glass, H. Bentley (1906–2005), American
546–7 geneticist and columnist 464
Fiebiger, Nikolaus (b. 1922), German Goldschmidt, Richard Benedict
physicist and university politician 167, (1878–1958), American geneticist
177 466–7
Fischer, Jürgen (1923–94), German Gorbachev, Mikhail (b. 1931), Russian
historian and university reformer statesman 311, 556, 557
93 Gouldner, Alwin W. (1921–82), American
Fişek, Nusret Hasan (1914–90), Turkish sociologist 378
scientist and politician 513 Gretškina, Elsa (b. 1932), Estonian
Flechtheim, Ossip K. (1909–98), German politician 311
political scientist 394 Groves, Leslie (1896–1970), American
Flitner, Wilhelm (1889–1990), German Army Engineer officer 539
educational theorist 93
Foucault, Michel (1926–84), French Haberler, Gottfried von (1900–95),
philosopher 391, 408 Austrian economist 404
Fraenkel, Hermann (1888–1977), German Habermas, Jürgen (b. 1929), German
classical scholar 394 philosopher 289, 385, 392
Franco, Francisco (1892–1975), Spanish Hahn, Otto (1879–1968), German chemist
general and statesman 285, 305 546
Frederick I Barbarossa (1123–90), Holy Halban, Hans von (1908–64), French
Roman Emperor 6 physicist 546
Frederick William III (1770–1840), King of Hallstein, Walther (1901–82), German
Prussia 10 jurist and statesman 80
Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), Austrian Hartshorne, Edward Y. (1912–46),
psychiatrist 389 American sociologist and university
Friedeburg, Ludwig von (b. 1924), German politician 91
philosopher and sociologist 392 Havel, Václav (b. 1936), Czech writer and
Friedrich, Carl J. (1901–84), American statesman 309
political theorist 388 Hayek, Friedrich August von (1899–1992),
Frisch, Otto Robert (1904–79), Austrian economist 404
Austrian-British physicist 546 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Fromm, Erich Seligmann (1900–80), social (1770–1831), German philosopher 388
psychologist, psychoanalyst and Heisenberg, Werner (1901–76), German
humanistic philosopher 292 theoretical physicist 167, 177
Fulbright, J. William (1905–95), American Hennis, Wilhelm (b. 1923), German
senator 22, 33, 89, 180 political scientist 395
Furet, François (1927–97), French Herskovits, Melville J. (1895–1963),
historian 411 American anthropologist 407
Hess, Harry Hammond (1906–69),
Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1900–2002), American geologist 477
German philosopher 83 Hilbert, David (1862–1943), German
Gagarin, Yuri (1834–68), Russian mathematician 429
cosmonaut 473, 474 Hirsch, Fred (1932–78), American
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand economist 233
‘Mahatma’ (1869–1948), political and Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945), German
spiritual leader of India 22 statesman 13, 74, 76, 96
597
Name index
Holmes, Arthur (1897–1965), British Kennedy, John Fitzgerald (1917–63),
geologist 476, 478 American statesman 474
Homans, Georges G. (1910–89), American Kerr, Clark (1911–2003), American
sociologist 377 economist and university politician
Horkheimer, Max (1895–1973), German 209–10
philosopher and sociologist 289, 384, Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946),
385, 392 British economist 209, 220, 235, 398,
Horridge, G. Adrian (b. 1927), British 399, 400, 404
geologist 467 Khrushchev, Nikita (1894–1971), Soviet
Hospers, Jan (1927–2008), American statesman 218
geologist 477 Kilburn, Tom (1921–2001), British
Houtermans, Friedrich Georg (1903–66), engineer 533
Dutch-Austrian-German atomic and Kimmel, Michael Scott (b. 1951),
nuclear physicist 546 American sociologist 301
Humboldt, Alexander von (1769–1859), King, Lester Charles (1907–89), South
German scientist and explorer 22, 90 African geologist 478
Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1767–1835), King, Martin Luther (1929–68), American
German philologist, philosopher, clergyman, activist and civil rights leader
politician and educational reformer 290
11–12, 16–17, 28–9, 31, 86, 104, 108, Kissinger, Henry (b. 1923), American
189, 209, 251, 257, 270, 335, 550, 553, political scientist and statesman 388
554 Kogon, Eugen (1903–87), German
Huntington, Samuel Phillips (1927–2008), sociologist and politician 394
American political scientist 388 Kołakowski, Leszek (1927–2009), Polish
Hutton, James (1726–97), British geologist philosopher and historian of ideas 306
478, 481 König, René (1906–92), German
sociologist 384, 385
Janne, Henri (b. 1908), Belgian university Kowarski, Lew (1907–79), French
politician 119–20 physicist 546
Jarratt, Sir Alexander (b. 1924), British Koyré, Alexandre (1892–1964), French
senior civil servant and Chancellor of philosopher of Russian origin 413
Birmingham University 15, 114, 139 Krebs, Charles J. (b. 1936), Canadian
Jaruzelski, Wojciech Witold (b. 1923), zoologist 456
Polish communist political and military Kroeber, Alfred L. (1876–1960), American
leader 282, 308 anthropologist 407
Jaspers, Karl Theodor (1883–1969), Kuhn, Thomas S. (1922–96), American
German psychiatrist and philosopher philosopher 413, 434
269, 553
Jeffreys, Harold (1891–1989), British Labrousse, Ernest (1895–1988), French
mathematician, statistician, geophysicist, historian 411
and astronomer 476 Lacan, Jacques-Marie-Émile (1901–81),
Jı́lek, Lubor (1926–75), Czech academic French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist
historian 44 408
John Paul II (1920–2005), pope Lando, Ole (b. 1922), German jurist 421,
1980–2005 557 422
Joliot-Curie, Irène (1897–1956), French Laslett, Peter (1915–2001), English
scientist 546 historian 389
Joliot-Curie, Jean Frédéric (1900–58), Lazarsfeld, Paul (1901–76), American
French physicist 546 sociologist 377–8, 380
Jouvenel (des Ursins), Bertrand de Le Pichon, Xavier (b. 1937), French
(1903–87), French philosopher 388 geophysicist 478
Juan Carlos I (b. 1938), King of Spain 557 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel (b. 1929),
French historian 411
Kalanta, Romas (1953–72), Lithuanian LeGoff, Jacques (b. 1924), French historian
student 311 411
Kallen, Denis (1922–2004), French Leisegang, Hans (1890–1951), German
educational commentator 40 philosopher 83
598
Name index
Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Mendès-France, Pierre (1907–82), French
1870–1924), Russian politician 82, 301, statesman 13, 95, 380
388, 397 Merton, Robert K. (1910–2003), American
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (b. 1908), French sociologist 377–8, 380
anthropologist 381, 389, 407–8 Meynaud, Jean (1914–72), French political
Levinson, Daniel (1920–94), American commentator 388
psychologist 389 Mickiewicz, Adam (1798–1855), Polish
Lipset, Seymour Martin (1922–2006), writer 306
American sociologist 373, 388 Milankovitch, M. (1879–1958),
Litt, Theodor (1880–1962), German Yugoslavian geophysicist 479
philosopher 83 Mills, Charles Wright (1916–62),
Loewenstein, Karl (1891–1973), German American sociologist 378
philosopher and political scientist Milošević, Slobodan (1941–2006), Serbian
394 and Yugoslavian statesman 559
Lorenz, Konrad (1903–89), Austrian Mises, Ludwig von (1881–1973), Austrian
zoologist 388 economist and philosopher 404
Lumley, Robert, British professor of Italian Mitterrand, François (1916–96), French
cultural history 303 statesman 114, 557
Lynd, Robert Staughton (1893–1970), Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi
American sociologist 376 (1919–80), Shah of Iran 14, 105, 290,
Lyotard, Jean-François (1924–98), French 297
philosopher 412 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1622–73),
Lysenko, Trofim (1898–1976), Soviet French playwright 10
agronomist 102 Morgenstern, Oskar (1902–77), Austrian
economist 404
Machlup, Fritz (1902–83), Austrian- Morgenthau, Hans (1904–80), American
American economist 404 political scientist 77, 388
Malinowski, Bronislaw Kasper Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–91),
(1884–1942), Polish anthropologist 376, Austrian composer 10
406 Mussolini, Benito (1883–1945), Italian
Mandel, Ernest (1923–95), German statesman 402
philosopher 400
Mandrou, Robert (1921–84), French Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte,
historian 411 1769–1821), French emperor 11, 12, 31,
Mannheim, Karl (1893–1947), German 86, 214, 218, 553–4
sociologist 269, 300, 383 Nathans, Daniel (1928–99), American
Mao Zedong (1893–1976), Chinese microbiologist 454
statesman 292, 297–9, 313 Neumann, Franz Leopold (1900–54),
Marcuse, Herbert (1898–1979), German political scientist 394
German-American philosopher 289–90, Newman, John Henry (1801–90), British
292 Anglican, later Catholic theologian 209,
Marshall, George (1880–1959), American 550, 553, 554
military leader 23, 94, 399 Newton, Isaac (1643–1727), British
Marx, Karl (1818–83), German mathematician, physicist and astronomer
philosopher and politician 300, 301, 428
303, 379, 381–2, 388, 397, 400 see also Noddack, Ida (1896–1978, born Ida
under Soviet bloc in Subject index Tacke), German chemist and physicist
Matthews, Drummond (1931–97), British 546
marine geologist and geophysicist 477 Nora, Pierre (b. 1931), French historian
Mauss, Marcel (1872–1950), French 411
sociologist 407
Maxwell, James Clerk (1831–79), British Oakeshott, Michael (1901–90), English
physicist 428 philosopher 389
Mead, Margaret (1901–78), American Oelssner, Fred (1903–77), German
anthropologist 389, 407 economist 83
Meinhoff, Ulrike (1934–76), German Ohnesorg, Benno (1940–67), German
left-wing militant 298 student 105, 290
599
Name index
Oppenheimer, Franz (1864–1943), Roversi-Monaco, Fabio (b. 1938), Italian
German sociologist 383, 403 jurist and university administrator 557
Oppenheimer, J. Robert (1904–67), Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970), British
American theoretical physicist 539 philosopher 234
Oxburgh, Lord (Ernest Ronald Oxburgh,
b. 1934), British geologist and university Sagan, Carl (1934–96), American
politician 480–2 astronomer 388
Salazar, António de Oliveira (1889–1970),
Palach, Jan (1948–69), Czech student 308, Portuguese statesman 285
309 Samuelson, Paul Anthony (b. 1915),
Pareto, Vilfredo (1848–1923), Italian American economist 404
sociologist and philosopher 376, 388 Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913), Swiss
Parsons, Talcott (1902–79), American linguist 407
sociologist 372, 376–7, 380, 406 Saussure, Horace Bénédict de (1740–99),
Peers, E. Allison see Truscot, Bruce Swiss physicist, geologist and
Peierls, Rudolf Ernst (1907–95), meteorologist 478
German-born British physicist 546 Schairer, Reinhold (1893–1971), German
Pender, R. H., British university educational expert 96
administrator 92 Schelsky, Helmut (1912–84), German
Piaget, Jean (1896–1980), Swiss sociologist 385
philosopher 389 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel
Pieck, Wilhelm (1876–1960), German (1768–1834), German theologian and
politician 83 philosopher 11–12, 169
Pizzorno, Alessandro (b. 1924), Italian Schmid, Carlo (1896–1979), German
sociologist 382 politician and academic 105
Planck, Max (1858–1947), German Schmitt, Harrison (b. 1935), American
physicist 80, 180, 187, 259, 265, 433, geologist 476
446, 544 Schneider, Erich (1900–70), German
Plato (c. 427–c. 347 BC), Greek economic theorist 404
philosopher 4, 13, 28, 76 Schreiber, Georg (1882–1963), German
Plessner, Helmut (1892–1985), German historian and politician 92–3
philosopher and sociologist 384 Schweitzer, Bernhard (1892–1966),
Polin, Raymond (1910–2001), French German archaeologist 83
philosopher 389 Short, James F. (b. 1924), American
Popper, Karl (1902–94), Austrian/British sociologist 375
philosopher and economist 76 Simmel, Georg (1858–1918), German
philosopher and sociologist 383
Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald Sloman, Albert Edward (b. 1921), British
(1881–1955), English social Hispanicist and university policy leader
anthropologist 406 120
Riedl, Rupert (1925–2005), Austrian Small, Albion (1854–1926), American
zoologist 388 sociologist 375
Rips, Ilia (b. 1948), Latvian-born Israeli Smith, Adam (1723–90), British economist
mathematician 310–11 232
Robbins, Lionel Charles, Lord Snow, Charles Percy (1905–80), English
(1898–1984), British economist 13–14, physicist and novelist 538
97, 164, 165, 181, 228–30, 530–2, 533, Sorokin, Pitirim A. (1889–1968),
537, 541 Russian-American sociologist 376
Rokkan, Stein (1921–79), Norwegian Soros, George (b. 1930), American
political scientist 387, 388 university sponsor 560
Romanzi, Carmine Alfredo (1913–94), Speer, Albert (1905–81), German politician
Italian microbiologist and university and architect 74
policy leader 557 Speier, Hans (1905–90), American
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882–1945), sociologist 269
American statesman 77 Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903), English
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78), French philosopher, liberal political theorist and
philosopher 9–10 sociological theorist 376, 382
600
Name index
Spengler, Oswald (1880–1936), German Trow, Martin (1927–2007), American
historian 388 historian 58
Spranger, Eduard (1882–1963), German Truman, Harry S. (1884–1972), American
philosopher and psychologist 83 statesman 77
Springer, Axel (1912–85), German Truscot, Bruce (pseud. of E. Allison Peers)
journalist and publisher 290 (1891–1952), British professor of
Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich (1878–1953), Spanish 209
Soviet statesman 76, 77, 82, 101, 218,
243, 311 Ulbricht, Walter (1893–1973), German
Statera, Gianni (1941–97), Italian politician 83
sociologist 300
Staub, Rudolf (1890–1961), German Vadianus (Joachim von Watt)
geologist 479 (1484–1551), Swiss humanist and
Stein (Heinrich Friedrich) Karl professor, poet, reformer and rector of
(1757–1831), German statesman 17 the University of Vienna 9
Sternberger, Dolf (1907–89), German Varmus, Harold (b. 1939), American
philosopher 394 virologist 454
Stone, Lawrence (1919–99), British Veblen, Thorsten (1857–1929),
historian 412 Norwegian-American sociologist 376
Strassman, Fritz (1902–80), German Vierkandt, Alfred (1867–1953), German
chemist 546 sociologist 383
Strauss, Leo (1899–1973), American Vine, Fred (b. 1939), British marine
philosopher 389 geologist and geophysicist 477, 481
Suhr, Otto (1894–1957), German Virchow, Rudolf (1821–1902), German
statesman 394, 395 physician 17
Summer, Frank William (1840–1910), Voegelin, Eric (1901–85), German political
American sociologist 375 philosopher 394
Sutton, John (1919–92), British geologist Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet,
481 1697–1784), French writer and
Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745), Anglo-Irish philosopher 10
political writer 241
Sylvester-Bradley, P. C. (1913–78), British Waddington, C. H. (1819–1914), British
geologist 481 philosopher 388
Szilard, Leo (1898–1964), Hungarian-born Wandel, Paul (1905–95), German
American physicist 546 politician 83
Ward, Lester Frank (1841–1913),
Taylor, Laurie (Laurence John) (b. 1936), American sociologist 375
British sociologist 181 Watson, James Dewey (b. 1928), American
Thatcher, Margaret (b. 1925), British molecular biologist 453, 455
stateswoman 537 Weber, Max (1864–1920), German
Theodosius II (401–450), Byzantine economist, jurist and sociologist 52, 381,
emperor 4 383, 388
Thomas, William Isaac (1893–1947), Wegener, Alfred (1880–1930), German
American sociologist 375 scientist, geologist, and meteorologist
Thyssen, Fritz (1873–1951), German 476
businessman 96 Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich von (b. 1920),
Tinbergen, Jan (1903–94), Dutch German physicist and philosopher 546–7
economist 398, 400 White, Hayden (b. 1928), American
Tito, Josip Broz (1892–1980), Yugoslavian historian 413
revolutionary and statesman 309–10 White, Michael (1910–83), British
Tönnies, Ferdinand (1855–1936), German biologist and geneticist 466
sociologist 383 Wiese, Leopold von (1876–1969), German
Touraine, Alain (b. 1925), French sociologist 385
sociologist 381 Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Ulrich von
Trotsky, Leon (1879–1940), Bolshevik (1848–1931), German classicist 18
revolutionary and Marxist theorist Williams, Frederic Calland (1911–77),
297–9 British engineer 533
601
Name index
Williams, Gareth (b. 1935), British Wright, Quincy (1890–1970), American
economist 373 political scientist 388
Wilson, Edmund Beecher (1856–1939),
American zoologist and geneticist 457, Ziman, John Michael (1925–2005), British
466 physicist 193, 424
Wilson, J. Harold (1916–95), Zimmermann, Reinhard (b. 1952),
British statesman 481, 535 German jurist 421–2
Wilson, J. Tuzo (1908–93), Canadian Znaniecki, Florian (1882–1958), Polish
geophysicist 478 philosopher and sociologist
Wirz, Charles, museum curator 10 375
602
SUBJECT INDEX
Aarhus (Denmark), University 391 ageing population see third age

AAU see Association of American agriculture
Universities faculties of 245
Abitur see school-leaving examinations role in national economy 223
abstracting services 468 agriculture, graduate employment in 343–4
Academia Europaea 440 Airbus Industries 440
Academic Task Force 559 Albania 557
academies student numbers 324
Early Modern 10, 262 Albanians (in Kosovo) 310, 559
Soviet 39, 87, 133, 446, 529, 544 ALFA Programme 566
access (to higher education) 52 Algerian War, student organizations’
equality of, as objective 108, 209, 228, position on 287, 291
258, 271, 329, 481 Algiers, University of 22
increased 98, 112, 113, 331 allocation of funds
Soviet policies 39–40 fixed levels 152
see also mass higher education; persistent flexible 152
inequality alterity 412
accountability, calls for 136–7, 195 American Council of Education (ACE)
ACE see American Council of Education 570–1
administration American Journal of Sociology 376
head of see Registrar American Sociological Association 375,
usage of term 124–5 377–8
see also management Amiens (France), University of 265
admission Amsterdam
increasing flexibility 221 Free University 392
qualifications for 18, 45, 217–23 University of 294, 392–3, 400
see also class; school-leaving anaesthesia, advances in 485
examinations; social selection anaesthetics 183
adult education, university involvement in animal populations, ecological study 457
358–9 Ankara (Turkey), University of Haceteppe
see also lifelong learning 506, 513
advertising (of academic posts) 173–4 Annales school 410–11
AEG 543 anthropology 405–8
age (of academic staff) 165–7, 188 cultural 407
desirable structure 166 diffusion theory 405–6
distortion of structure 173 links with political science 391
increasing 134, 175 social 406–7
603
Subject index
anti-nuclear movement, student Ministry of Science and Research 35
involvement 289, 293, 536 Nazi educational policies 198
antibiotics, development of 485–6 non-university institutions 62, 63,
Antwerp (Belgium), University of 294 242
apartheid, protests against 288, 293 political science 395–6
APE see Asociaciones profesionales de rectors’ conference 90
estudiantes research council 98
Apollo missions 474–5 salaries 186
Arab–Israeli War (1967) 307 specialized universities 244
Arabic science 5 staff structure 170, 177, 178, 245,
architecture 18–19, 154 251–2
faculties of 245 student/graduate numbers 324, 325
Asia-Link 566 student migrations to 219
Asia/Pacific region, mobility programmes student movements 287, 296–7
566 AUT see Association of University Teachers
Asociaciones profesionales de estudiantes autogestion, as rallying principle of French
(APE) 304 movement 291
aspirantura (Soviet bloc qualification) 179 autonomy, university 28–9, 34–5, 115
assessment increasing 563–4
international standards 23 loss of: in former Yugoslavia 559; in
political legitimization of procedures 23 Soviet bloc 86
see also evaluation; examinations; staff, of management 137–40
academic (perceived) threats to 118
Association for the Study of Medical in post-1968 France 107–8
Education 499, 503 in post-war Germany 80
Association of American Universities relationship with management 131–2
(AAU) 27 in staff appointments 174
Association of Dutch Universities 159 Azerbaijan 311–12
Association of European Universities
(CRE) 43–4, 59, 100–1, 150, 158, ‘baby boom’ 162–3, 211, 227
563, 564, 569, 570 baccalauréat see school-leaving
Association of Universities and Colleges in examinations
Canada (AUCC) 570–1 bachelor’s degree 254–5, 335
Association of University Teachers (AUT) downgrading of value (in exact sciences)
196, 200–1 445
associations (of university staff) 199–201, equivalence 339–40, 366
210 in medieval universities 6–7
political role 201 non-university 338
social significance 200 status/employment value 255–6
astronomy 432 in US colleges 21
astrophysics 434, 443 Baden-Württemberg (Germany), University
Athens, University of 305–6 of 394
Atomic Energy Authority 544 Barcelona (Spain), University of 402
AUCC see Association of Universities and Basel (Switzerland), University of 396
Colleges in Canada behaviourism 390, 392, 393, 395, 397
Austria 46, 130, 330, 568 Belarus 117
accession to EU 559–60 Belfast, Queen’s University 253
accreditation body 254 Belgium 37
course structure 255, 257 admissions policy 218, 219
degrees 337 course structure 253
economics, teaching of 404–5 degree awards 254
faculty structure 245 economics, teaching of 401
funding system 258–9 graduate schools 259
graduate employment 342, 343; female history, teaching of 412
354 information policy 59–60
growth in student numbers 41, 61 linguistic/administrative divisions 37, 53,
management structure 144 55, 269, 503
604
Subject index
medical studies 505 Bologna (Italy), University of 4, 219, 492
ministries of higher education 35 1988 anniversary festival 557, 572
non-state sector 55–6 as medieval model 4, 20, 553
non-university education 55, 56–7 Bologna Declaration (1999) 560, 568–74
rectors’ conference 100 as catalyst for change 570–1
research council 98 criticisms 571
student movements 279, 288, 293–4, innovations 569
302, 303 objectives 570
student numbers 324; by subject 327 strengths 568–9
student/university expansion 41, 50, 262 Bologna Process 117, 120, 139, 262, 366,
teaching conditions 192 565, 567, 571–4
wartime resistance movement 32, 33 Bordeaux (France), University of 379
Belgrade (Serbia), University of 131, 558 Bosnia, political upheavals 558
Berkeley, Cal., student activism 14 BP 543
Berlin ‘brain drain’ 134, 448
Free University 44, 84, 289, 395 Bretton Woods Treaty (1944) 399
School of Engineering 242 Brigate Rosse (Red Brigade) 298–9
University of see Humboldt University, Bristol (UK), University of 428
Berlin ‘British disease’ 234
Wall, fall of 553, 557–8 (see also Soviet British Journal of Medical Education 499
bloc, impact of collapse) British Medical Association 515
Bern (Switzerland), University of 396 British Transport Commission 544
‘Big Science’ institutions (EU) 438–9, Brno (Czech Republic), Masaryk
538–41 University 565
Bilbao (Spain), University of 402 Brussels, Free University of 55, 294, 401
biological sciences Brussels Pact (1948) 24, 94
availability of training 459 Buckingham (UK), University of 240–1
challenges facing 457–8 Budapest (Hungary) 7
cost–benefit analysis 464 University of Sciences 244
costs of research 464 Bulgaria 46–7, 103, 208
divisions 451–2 rectors’ conference 100
early retirements of academics 463 restrictions on university curriculum 38
educational resources 465–7 screening bodies 87
graduate employment 470–1 student/university expansion 50
historical development 451–2 business administration, schools of 55
impact of environmental movement business studies, as university subject 404
452
new subdivisions 451–2 Cadarache (France) 539
new techniques/approaches 451–3, 465, California Institute of Technology
467–8 (CalTech) 532
publications 459–60, 464 Cambridge University 188
reasons for study 464–5 admissions policy 219
review journals 467 collegiate system 16, 214
role of Internet 468–9 earth sciences 477
role of university 459–64; limited extent exact sciences 428
of 460–4 faculty structure 243, 244
speed/scale of advance 457, 464 migrations to 270
teaching methods 467–8 political science 392
textbooks 466–7 radio telescope 541
undergraduate study 464–8 science park 547
see also molecular biology social sciences 383
BIOMED (research programme) 525 staff traditions/background 174, 175
birth rates, fluctuations in 210–11, 227, teaching methods 248, 257; innovations
229 249–50
see also ‘baby boom’ Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
blood transfusions 485 (CND) 536
Bochum (Germany), University of 104 ‘campus’ layout 257
605
Subject index
Canada 566 and resistance to expansion 210
cancer and university entrance 211–13, 223–32
biological research 454–5, 457 (see also social selection)
screening 490 climate change/research 474, 478–80, 482,
Capenhurst (UK) 539 483–4
car travel/parking, provision for 154 Club of Rome 536
Carlsbad see Karlsbad Cluj (Romania), King Ferdinand I
Carnegie Foundation Survey 191 University 85
Catholic Church, as organizing power 62 CNAA see Council for National Academic
Catholic universities, support for New Left Awards
302–3 CND see Campaign for Nuclear
CCC see Council for Cultural Cooperation Disarmament
CEA see Commissariat à l’énergie atomique CNRS see Centre national de la recherche
CEC see Commission of the European scientifique
Communities cognitive science 432
Central Electricity Generating Board 544 cold war, mirrored in student
Central European University (CEU) 560 organizations 283
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), funding College of Dutch University Rectors 90
of student organizations 281, 282, colleges of advanced technology 165
293 collegiate universities 9, 214
Centre européen pour l’enseignement Cologne University 244, 384, 407
supérieur (CEPES) 103, 150, 567 Cologne School (sociology) 385
Centre for Educational Research and colonies, universities in 22
Innovation (CERI) 149–50 see also North America
Centre national de la recherche scientifique Columbia University, New York 377–8
(CNRS) 107, 175, 180, 187, 193–4, Columbus Programme 566
265, 380, 446, 543 Comecon see Council for Mutual
centrifugation 453 Economic Assistance
CEPES see Centre européen pour Comenius programme for school education
l’enseignement supérieur 121
CERI see Centre for Educational Research Comett see Community Programme for
and Innovation Education and Training for
CERN see Conseil européen pour la Technology
recherche nucléaire Comité national d’évaluation (France) 159
CEU see Central European University command economy, impact on higher
chairs see professors education 36–40, 46, 49–50
chemistry 193, 424, 436 commerce, schools of 55
curricular design 445 Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA)
decline in numbers 536 265
inorganic 429 Commission of the European Communities
interaction with other sciences 433, (CEC) 29, 118–19, 122, 139, 158,
441–2 421, 525, 539, 542–3, 556, 562–3,
theoretical 428 564, 569
chemotherapy 486 Committee for Higher Education and
CHER see Committee for Higher Research (CHER) 24, 100–1, 150
Education and Research; Council of Committee of Vice-Chancellors and
Europe Principals (CVCP) 15, 90–1, 114
Chicago, University of 27, 375 communications techniques 157
‘Children’s University’ 20 Communist Youth Association (KISZ) 215
‘chiliastic utopianism’ 300–1 Community Programme for Education and
China 22 Training for Technology (Comett;
chromatography 452–3 later Leonardo da Vinci) 26, 120, 271,
chromosome research 454–5 556, 564
CIA see Central Intelligence Agency competence
class (social) fostering of, as universities’ mission
diminishing connection with academic 319–20
achievement 213 qualification for employment 320
606
Subject index
competition handling by national consortia 149
for employment opportunities 233 cooperation, inter-university 89–95
government incentives 114–16 within Eastern Europe 102–3
relationship with expansion 235 across EU 93–4, 120–1
for staff 171 scientific 98–101
for students 248 Soviet restrictions on 94–5
Compiègne (France), Université de Copenhagen
technologie 543 Roskilde University 249
comprehensive schools 216 University of 295, 391
comprehensive universities 330 Corpus iuris, as qualification 7
computers/computerization 533–5 correspondence (between scholars), as
cost 534 academic forum 9
EU research projects 541 Cosenza (Italy), University of 52–3
resource management 156 cosmology 434, 443
role in medical studies 521 cost–benefit analysis 157
role in science teaching 469 council(s) see governing body
role in scientific research 434–5 Council for Cultural Cooperation (CCC)
students’ skills, curricular incorporation 24
of 249–50 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
timetabling 157 (Comecon) 95, 556
see also information technology; Council for National Academic Awards
Internet; personal computers (CNAA) 254, 337
condensed matter physics 434 Council of Europe 24, 93–4, 99, 117, 339,
Confederation of European Union Rectors’ 399, 569
Conferences 26, 118–19, 121–2, 563, see also Committee for Higher Education
569 and Research; Council for Cultural
Conférence des recteurs des universités Cooperation
suisses 90 Cracow (Poland) 7
Conference of Baltic University Rectors CRE see Association of European
560 Universities; Conference of European
Conference of Danubian Rectors 560 Rectors
Conference of European Rectors (CRE) 24, credits, course system based on 168, 253,
25, 26, 94, 118, 121–2, 361, 550–2, 270, 271, 336, 560
556, 557, 559, 561, 562–3, 567, 569 crime rates 487
Conference of Ministers of Higher crisis management 152–3
Education of Socialist Countries 103 critical path analysis 157
Conference of University Administrators Critical Theory 386
(CUS) 150 ‘critical universities’, establishment of 290,
conscription 88 294
Conseil européen pour la recherche Croatia 100
nucléaire (CERN) 98, 438–9, 440, political upheavals 558
441, 540 ‘Croatian Spring’ (1971) 310
consortia, formation of 149 Cuba 103
consultancies 547 cultural capital theory 212
‘consumer’ side of education 266 cultural change, impact of 267–9
continental drift 476, 478 cultural studies, departments of 247–8
Continental Europe (distinguished from Curie Institute 265
UK) curricula
attitudes to students 257–9 ‘baroque’ features 240
completion rates 257–8 debates on 241
technology, study/research 531–2 design 157
undergraduate/postgraduate division developments in organization 132–3
256 diversification 263, 264
contract law 421 Eastern vs Western models 213–14,
contracts 246–7
first academic appointments 172 evolution 238–42, 272–3
growth in role/scale 145 extent of regulation 335–6
607
Subject index
curricula (cont.) title designations 337
impact of changes in staff structure see also bachelor’s; doctorates;
246–7 Habilitation; master’s degree;
impact of governmental policies 273 ‘terminal’ degrees
impact of research 263–6 democracy/ies, university systems under
medical 520 21
overloading 88 democratization (of universities) 108–9,
post-war reform 529 126
professional relevance 338, 356, 359–61, dual meanings 108–9
444–5; reforms in line with 360–1, in Eastern Europe 142
366–7 flaws in process 110–12
reorganization 571 impact on law faculties 416
responsibility for 243–53 legal enforcement 188
social influences 274 of staff structures 188, 245–6
specialization 239–40, 255, 263 student movements’ calls for 312–13,
standardization 336 314–15
student role 266–9 demographics see birth rates
CUS see Conference of University Denmark 50
Administrators admission controls 258
customers, demands of 135 degrees 335, 337, 338
CVCP see Committee of Vice-Chancellors enrolment rates 227
and Principals life expectancy 487
Cyprus 100 medical studies 494, 501
Czech Republic 61, 100, 565 non-university institutions 62, 63
Czechoslovakia 103, 212 political science 391–2
admissions policy 219 postgraduate studies 261
division of students by subject 327 rectors’ conference 100
non-university education 57, 63, 64 research council 98
political division 269 student movements 279–80, 295
post-1956 reforms 101–2 student numbers 324; by subject 327
post-war reconstruction 46, 208–9 technical university 154
rectors’ role in administrative structure university management 139
142 dentistry 486, 490, 520, 521
religious foundations 55 postgraduate training 522
screening bodies 87 departments see faculties
Soviet occupation (1948) 279 deregulation 137–8
staffing levels 164 devolution, tendency towards 149, 152
student movements 109, 266, 284, dinosaurs, extinction of 480
307–8, 309 Diploma of Advanced Studies (DEA,
university curriculum 38 France) 259–60
diplomas see degrees
Dartmouth College (USA) 28 discipline see security
DEA see Diploma of Advanced Studies discipline(s), academic see faculties
degrees disease, incidence/treatment of 487–8, 511
attempts at standardization 339–41 impact on medical studies 493–4
(see also European Union); limited distance learning 135, 190–1, 238, 535
success 340–1 diversification (of university education)
certification 336–8 112–13, 238–9, 357–8
course structure 254–5 positive impact 113
impact on social selection 320 see also curricula
levels of 335 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) 429
occupation-specific 255 discovery 453
respective value, debates on 340 fingerprinting 457
right to grant 253–4, 337–8 importance 453–4
stages of study 336 role in later research 454–7, 458–9
status/employment value 255–6 docent, rank of 245
structural reforms 338–41 doctorates 335, 340
608
Subject index
‘defence’ of thesis, requirement of 260, national identities, resurgence of 562
261 post-cold war reconstruction 59,
and definition of university 43–4 116–17; common trends 116–17
downgrading of value (in exact sciences) technological institutes 544, 548
445 technological limitations 426, 430, 437,
honorary 557 447–8; structural reforms required
as requirement for university teaching 448
259–60 university management 132
in sociology 372, 377 wartime devastation 3
from Soviet academies 39 see also Soviet bloc
university monopoly on 193 ecology 456–9
see also Habilitation; postdoctoral modern approaches 456
research/training economic constraint theory 212–13
doctors (medical) economic crisis, global (1970s) 299,
compulsory retraining 496 312–13, 330–1
contracts with UK Department of Health economic enterprises, partnerships with
515 universities 133
contribution to health education 488 economics 398–405
migrations to/from UK 499–500, 501 changing parameters 398–9
professional requirements 489–90, 495 international treaties/agreements 399
protests by 497–8 Leuven faculty 313
public attitudes to 488 specialization of courses 400
see also health care; medical students; specialized institutes 400–1, 404
medicine ECTS see European Course Credit Transfer
dropout rates 224, 258–9 System
in medicine 519 Edinburgh
dual institutional model (of higher Heriot-Watt University 547
education) 357–8 University of 492
Dubrovnik, Croatia 558 Edinburgh Declaration (1988) 512
duration of courses 226, 469–70 Education Act (UK 1944) 75
concerns expressed about 338 education policy/ies
extension 340 debates on viability 331–2
as indicator of achievement 340 incoherence 240–1
Durham Assembly (1989) 557 EFMD see European Foundation for
Management Development
EAIA (association dealing with Egypt, Anglo-French invasion of (1956)
international relations) 150 293
Early Modern universities EHESS see under Paris
curriculum 8 ELDO see European Space Vehicle
role in European society 8–10 Launcher Organization
study perspective (horizontal vs vertical) electron microscopy 453
8–9 electrophoresis 453
earth science see earth system science; ‘employability’ 367
geology employment, graduate
earth system science 474, 480–3 analysed by profession 346–7
East Berlin see Berlin areas of change 365–8
East Germany see German Democratic in biological sciences 470–1
Republic career rewards 331
Eastern Europe changing opportunity structure 343–5
academic relations with West 117 cross-border 335
admissions systems 116 ‘displacement’ 331
delayed response to Western trends 142 diversity of prospects 333
educational legislation 117 earnings 347, 349
graduate employment 334 easing of problems/attitudes (1970s/80s)
involvement in EU integrative 332–5, 363–4, 365
programmes 565 educational level appropriate to 348
low academic salaries 186 employers’ expectations 355–6, 470–1
609
Subject index
employment, graduate (cont.) Erfurt (Germany) 7, 113
fixed-term contracts 343 ESF see European Science Foundation
impact of post-war expansion 321 ESIB see European Student Information
increasing flexibility 220–1, 332–3, Bureau
350 ESMU see European Centre for the
pessimism regarding 330–2, 363, 470 Strategic Management of Universities
in physical sciences 444–5 ESPRIT see European Strategic Programme
preparation for 319–20 for Information Technology
pressure on universities 362–3, 366–7 Essex (UK), University of 392
recruitment criteria 334 estate management 153–5
relationship with field of study 348, changing priorities 154
350–3 increasing professionalism 154–5
responsibility for 364 proportion of annual budget 154
role of professional bodies 341, 353 social implications 154
selection criteria 349, 354–5 technical services 154
student expectations 320, 470–1 ‘wiring’ of buildings 155
suitability to qualifications 347–50 Estonia 61, 311–12
in technology 545–6 rectors’ conference 100
transition to, duration/complexity ETA see Euskadi ta askatasuna
341–2, 343, 470 ethnic conflict, impact on university life
universities’ adaptation to changing 269, 558–9
conditions 320, 327–35, 356–62; ethnology 381, 405, 407–8
debates/problems 332, 356–7, 364; links with political science 391
range of options 328–9, 332–5; EUA see European University Association
structural reforms 329–30, 357–9, EUCEN (association dealing with
366 continuing education) 150
value of planning 331–2, 333, 364 EURASHE see European Association of
‘vertical’ shift 345 Institutions in Higher Education
vocational qualifications 355–6 (see also Euratom Treaty (Treaty establishing the
vocationalism) European Atomic Energy Community,
widening of debate on 334–5 Rome 1957) 99–100, 119, 399, 539,
see also unemployment 542
energy systems, biology of 455–6 EURECA see European Research Common
engineering 242 Action
decline in numbers 536 Europe
degree titles 337 contributions to biological research
distinguished from ‘pure’ science 424–5, 459–60
441 educational/cultural model 572–4
graduate employment 353 fragmentation 558
England, collegiate university system 9, 214 management associations 149–50
see also United Kingdom ‘moral reconstruction’ (post-war) 32–5
Enlightenment era/ideology 10–11 pan-European ideology 9–10, 118–22
entrepreneurial management, transition to (see also ‘Europeanization’)
19–20, 28, 114–16, 202, 364, 563 staff structures 171
see also economic enterprises university management 131–2; general
environmental movement trends 138; transfer of experience 158
concerns about technology 536 university model, decline in influence of
impact on curricula 536 3–4, 21–2
impact on estate management 154 see also Continental Europe; European
interaction with biological sciences Union
452 European Action Scheme for the Mobility
interaction with geological sciences of University Students (Erasmus) 26,
483 29, 120–1, 180, 271, 272, 273, 335,
EQUIS programme 158–9 339, 519, 556, 560, 564–6, 571
Erasmus see European Action Scheme for participation levels 271–2
the Mobility of University Students European Association of Institutions in
Erasmus-Mindus programme 573 Higher Education (EURASHE) 569
610
Subject index
European Centre for the Strategic funding agencies 542–3
Management of Universities (ESMU) harmonization 239; of degrees 30,
150 99–100, 118, 339–41, 366, 420; of
European Coal and Steel Community 399, medical accreditation 505–6, 514;
542 opposition to 121, 563; problems of
European Commission see Commission of 271–2; of undergraduate studies 120
the European Communities integrative strategies 559–60, 561–2,
European Conference of Ministers of 572–4 (see also ‘Europeanization’)
Education 116–17, 118, 119 inter-university cooperation 93–4
European Congress 93 law: convergence of systems/studies
European Convention on the Equivalence 420–2; establishment of general
of Certificates of Secondary Education principles 421; European Law School,
1953 99 calls for 420–1; historical research
European Convention on the Equivalence 421–2; rules on contract law 421
of the Time of Study at University management initiatives 159
1956 99 medical research programmes 525
European Convention on the Recognition mobility programmes 26, 115–16,
of Academic Degrees and Diplomas 120–1, 180, 187–8, 271–2, 367–8,
1959 99 555–6, 564–6, 569; popularity/
European Council of Economic Ministers imitation outside EU 565, 566–7,
118 571–2
European Course Credit Transfer System moves towards 93
(ECTS) 121, 271, 560, 564–5, 569, national variations 330, 563–4
572 opposition to pan-European institutions
European Foundation for Management 24–6, 118–19
Development (EFMD) 158–9 relations with university leaders 121–2
European Graduate College, Florence 25 retention of national systems 239
European Higher Education Area 64–5 scientific initiatives 438–41, 482,
European Molecular Biology Organization 539–41; collaboration of research
525 groups 439
European Research Common Action European University, proposals for 24,
(EURECA) 26, 120 99–100, 118
European Roundtable of Industrialists 361 academic opposition to 119
European Science Foundation (ESF) 26, see also European Graduate College;
120, 440, 482, 525 European University Institute
European Space Agency 440, 540–1 European University Association (EUA) 26,
European Space Research Organization 29, 59, 94, 570, 571
(ESRO) 98, 540 European University Institute, Florence
European Space Vehicle Launcher 119
Organization (ELDO) 540 ‘Europeanization’ 29–30, 119–20, 555–8
European Strategic Programme for Euskadi ta askatasuna (ETA, ‘Basque
Information Technology (ESPRIT) 26, Fatherland and Freedom’) 305
120 evaluation 195–6, 562
European Student Information Bureau ‘anthropological’ approach 249
(ESIB) 569 see also assessment; management;
European Union/Community 24–6, 135–6, self-assessment; staff
202 exact (mathematical) sciences
application of qualitative criteria 122 collaboration of research groups 439
categorization of diplomas 339–40 collective research 435–7
Common Educational Policy 29 common culture 429
conference of education ministers 25–6, curricula/course structure 444–6
30 defined 424
definition of university 554 divisions between 426–8; erosion/
development of university systems 60–1 rearrangement 429
directives on academic recognition 339 equipment, increasing cost/sophistication
enlargement 235–6 436–7
establishment of guidelines 25 ethical debates 443–4, 448
611
Subject index
exact (mathematical) sciences (cont.) impact on staff structure/numbers
European role in global developments 163–5, 245–6
425–6, 447 newsworthiness 233
expansion in resources/personnel patterns of development 231–3
(1960–75) 426, 447 resistances 209–10
focus on research 425 socio-economic objectives 328–9
future challenges 447–9 statistics 44, 46–52, 60–1
global collaboration 441
hybrid subdisciplines 431–2 Fachhochschulen (FRG) 226–7, 329, 358,
increasing cosmopolitanism 440–1 361
industrial involvement 435, 437, faculties/departments
440; in research 442–4 as basis of university structure 130–1,
interdisciplinarity 428, 429–35, 239, 243; weakening 131, 168–9
436 distribution of student numbers 325–7
international exchanges/collaborations diversity of organization 244–5
429, 437–41 divisions between 130–1, 427–8
‘levelling off’ period (1975–95) 426 financial responsibilities 152
major research centres 428–9 fragmentation 168–9
multi-author papers 435–6 loss of role in curricular development
new research technologies 430–1 248
overlap with other sciences 432 in medieval university 4, 9, 16, 243
post-war reconstruction period ordering by subject matter 169–70
(1945–60) 425–6, 429, 437 over-subscription 45
staff requirements 437 ranking order 241
subdivisions 428 rearrangements 243, 247–8
summary of post-war developments resource management 151–2, 153
446–7 strengthening 247
textbooks 429 see also heads of department
examinations Faculty of Workers and Peasants,
administration 197 Greifswald 40
national (for university admission) Falangists see Franco (index of names);
218–19 Sindicato español universitario
role in degree structure 252–3; FAST see Forecasting and Assessment in
diminishing 250 the field of Science and Technology
students’ selection of date 257–8 Federación universitaria democrática
see also school-leaving examinations española (FUDE) 304
exchanges, academic 89–90 Federal Republic of Germany 46, 212, 544
decrease 115–16 academic exchanges 89–90
East–West 117 access routes/figures 226–8
see also mobility; names of subjects age structure 167
expansion, in university/student numbers birth rates 227
3, 12, 40, 41–6, 104, 133–4, 201, career structures 251–2
207–9, 426 course structure 254–5, 257–60, 336,
arguments for 232–5 361
continuation/renewal (1980s) 233–4, curricular reform 360
235–6 degrees 337, 338
desirability 232–3 distance learning 535
driving forces 133–4, 209, 214 division of students by subject 327
economic impact 136–7 geography, teaching of 409
(fears of) decline in standards 165, graduate employment 333, 343–4,
229–30 354–6; female 354
funding 236 history, teaching of 412
impact on age structures 166–7 Institute for Talent Research 96
impact on class distinctions 212 as international model 97–8
impact on curricula 262 medical studies 491–2, 503–4, 505, 514,
impact on graduate employment 321, 519
364–5, 470 migration of rejected students 219
612
Subject index
Ministry of Education and Science 35 Fontenay (France) 539
new foundations 52 Ford Foundation 387
non-university education 57, 64, 113, Forecasting and Assessment in the field of
226–7, 329–30 (see also Science and Technology (FAST) 120
Fachhochschulen) ‘fortress Europe’ 573–4
political science 393–5 fossil fuels, burning of 480
professional qualifications 341 founders/foundation dates, fabrication of 4
research council 80, 98, 180, 394–5, 503 France 46, 130, 571
resource management 152 admission controls 45, 218, 219–20
science council 96–7, 104, 114 age structure 166
scientific training/research 96–7 anthropology 407–8
social selectivity 223, 224–5 assessment system 114, 159, 562
sociology 384–6 attendance levels 58
staffing 176–7, 362; data 163; numbers biological research 458
164 career structures 171, 172, 251–2
student movements 105, 266, 287, course structure 254–5, 336
289–91, 301, 302, 307 (see also cultural theory, developments in 248
Berlin); collapse 298; governmental/ curricula 239; responsibility for
social response 110, 111, 267, 290–1, determining 248
302 degrees 253, 335
student/university expansion 41–2, 44, economics, teaching of 398, 401–2
48, 50, 104; growth rates 262 educational ideology 356
support staff 181 educational system 7, 31, 239
teaching posts/course structure 169 foreign teachers 109
university management 137–8; role of funding system 258–9
Kanzler 143, 144; separation of roles geography, teaching of 409
of officers 151 graduate employment 343, 345, 347,
upgrading of establishments 43 348–9, 351, 355
women students 222, 228 history, teaching of 410–12
FEDORA (association dealing with student law studies 417
orientation) 150 mature students 211
feminist theory 264 medical studies 492, 502–3, 517; costs
FernUniversität Hagen (Germany) 535 508; postgraduate 502–3
finalization, theory of 433–5, 436 Ministry of Universities 35
finance 117 Nazi occupation 74
administration 129 new universities 20, 48
crisis (1980s) 15–16, 113–14, 124 non-university education 32, 42–3, 55,
techniques 157–8 57, 58, 59, 113, 234, 242, 329, 358,
Finland 46, 568 543–4, 545
accession to EU 559–60 nuclear projects/capability 539
course structure 336 policy in occupied Germany 78–9
degree awards 254 political science 390–1
ethnic divisions 269 post-revolutionary university model 11
graduate employment 350 post-war reforms 13–14, 75
management structure 142–3 professional qualifications 341
medical studies 501 professorial appointments 173
non-university institutions 62, 63 public lectures 17
postgraduate studies 261 rectors’ conference 100
rectors’ conference 100 regionalization 53
research council 98 research organizations 98, 180, 193–4,
staff structure 178 265, 266, 446
staffing levels 164 Revolution 10, 572
student movements 110, 288, 296 salaries 185, 186
student/university expansion 41, 48, 50 scientific training/research 95–6
teaching conditions 193 secondary education 210
university locations 53 secularization of education 214
Florence University 292, 381 social sciences 371–2
613
Subject index
France (cont.) future requirements 483
social selectivity 223–6 interaction with other sciences 441–2
sociology 379–81 local nature of studies 473–4, 482–3
specialized training institutions major topics 473, 474, 483–4
(Revolutionary/Napoleonic era) marine 482–3
10–11, 553–4 planetary 473, 474–6, 482, 483
staff associations 200–1 political transformations 480–3
staffing 175–6; control of appointments Georgia 311–12
174; data 163; numbers 164 German Democratic Republic 40, 103, 395
student movements 14, 105–6, 266–7, academics’ perks 186
279, 286, 287, 291, 307, 313, 314; adaptation to Soviet system 82–4
collapse 297–8; governmental assimilation after reunification 62, 177,
response 106–9 (see also Loi de 558
l’orientation . . . ) defections to West 83
student numbers 324 defence of German traditions 83
student/university expansion 41–2, 50, history, teaching of 412
61, 107, 335; growth rates 262 post-war reconstruction 46–7, 81–4
teaching conditions 192–3 sociology 386
teaching structure 249 staff structure 179
technology, study/research 532 student movements 284
university administration/management student/university expansion 50
131, 139, 140, 143 German Rectors’ Conference 90
wartime resistance movement 32 Germany
Frankfurt, University of 19, 80, 104, 384, admissions policy 219–20
398, 403, 407 anthropology 407
Frankfurt School 289–90, 385–6, 392 curricula, responsibility for 248
Fraunhofer Institutes 443, 529, 544 decline of legal system 415
freedom, intellectual, principle of 12, 170, degree awards 253–4
251, 524 diversity of Länder policies 177
Freiburg University 79 duelling fraternities 287
Freiburg School (economics) 395, 398, economics, teaching of 398, 403–4
403–4 educational ideology 356
Friends of the Earth 536 faculty structure 243, 244
FUDE see Federación universitaria foreign students 22
democrática española geological studies 482
functionalism 376–7, 380, 406, 408 graduate employment 345–50, 351, 367,
‘further’ education, use of term 229, 234 427
international/global influence 12–13,
Gas Board 544 26–7, 177–8, 214, 225, 372, 391, 550
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade junior academic staff 172
(GATT) 566 law studies 417
General Medical Council 498–9, 501, 514, mature students 211
516 military technology 540
general practitioners Nazi educational policies 198
independence of central system 501 non-university institutions 62, 63, 165,
numbers 505 242, 544
postgraduate training 500–2 political history 415
production, as aim of medical studies post-war exodus 415, 428–9
491, 510, 512–13, 515–16 post-war reconstruction 13–14, 76–84,
Geneva University 260, 396 91–3; academic societies 80–1; ‘Four
Ghent University 294 Ds’ programme 77–8; fundamental
gentleman see honnête homme reform plans 81; promotion of
Geo-Traverse Project 439 international contacts 79–80;
geography 249, 408–9 university autonomy 80
links with political science 391 professorial appointments 168, 169
geology 424, 428, 432 research institutes 180, 194, 265, 446
concentration of resources 481–3 retirement ages 178
614
Subject index
role of research 262–3 habitus, sociological concept of 381
salary structure 184–5 Hamburg (Germany), University 384,
science council 13 407
secondary education 210 Harvard University 27, 376–7, 413
social background of academics 174 Harwell (UK) 539
social sciences 371–2 heads of department, resource management
sociology 383–4 responsibilities 151, 153
staff appointments 174 health care
staff associations 201 assessment of quality 511
staff experience 362 costs 490
staff/research evaluation 195–6 demand for 488–9, 490
staff structure 171, 180, 188 as human right 488
student mobility 258, 270 international prioritization 491
teaching conditions 191, 192–3 patterns of delivery 489–90
teaching traditions 189, 190, 268–9 personal responsibility, diminishing
university administration 197 awareness of 488
wartime destruction of universities 528 professionals, increasing range/
women academics 183 specialization 487, 489 (see also
see also Federal Republic of Germany; doctors (medical); nursing)
German Democratic Republic; Heidelberg (Germany)
Nazis/Nazism; Prussia molecular biology laboratory 525
Germersheim (Germany), Higher School University 91
for Translators 79 Helsinki (Finland), University 295, 296,
GI Bill see Servicemen’s Readjustment Act 528
glaciation, geological investigations 478–80 Hessen (Germany), University 394
Glaxo 543 high energy accelerators 540
globalization 22–6, 202–3 high energy physics 434, 436, 440, 443,
Goodenough Report (1944) 498 444
Gothenburg, University of 122 Higher Attestation Commission (Soviet
Göttingen, University of 111, 384 bloc) 87
governance, university Higher Education Framework Law
adaptation to new requirements 145 (Hochschulrahmengesetz, FRG
structure 140–1 1976/1985) 177, 330, 360
see also management higher education institutes see
governing body, role in management non-university institutions
structure 140, 141 historical approach to study 371
government agencies, supra-national 542–3 displacement 374–5
government(s) see state(s) Historical Compendium of European
grandes écoles (France) 107–8, 175, 214, Universities (1984) 551–2
219, 235, 242, 265, 338, 401, 529, history of science and technology 413
543, 545, 548, 553–4 history, teaching of 249, 409–14
grants 19 career opportunities 414
research 541–4 heterodox nature 412–13
Graz University 244 links with geography 409
Greece 46, 503 post-war change of direction 410
growth in student/institution numbers History of the University in Europe
41, 47 (Vols. I–IV) 573
rectors’ conference 100 genesis 550–2
student migrations from 219 structure/volume divisions 552–5
student movement 305–6 honnête homme, as product of university
Greifswald, University of 40 system 8
Grenoble, Institut Laue-Langevin 439 honours see titles
Grenoble Charter 286 Hull (UK), University of 293
Groningen University 392, 400 human capital, education as investment in
232–3
Habilitation 167, 176–7, 179, 259–60, Human Genome Project 458–9
335, 340 benefits 458–9
615
Subject index
humanism 8–10 funding of medical research 524–5
degeneration 10 graduate employment in 343–5, 353
Humboldt University, Berlin 169, 284, infant mortality, decrease in 487
492 informality (in staff–student relations) 251,
1893/1900 public addresses 17–18 268–9
foundation/founding ideals 10–12, 28–9, information technology 133, 135, 430–1,
262–3 432, 533–5, 538
social sciences 384, 394 Innsbruck (Austria), University of 396
student unrest 14, 84, 233 INRA see Institut national de la recherche
Hungary 103, 212 agriculturelle
admissions policy 218, 219 INRP see Institut national de la recherche
ideological control 215 pédagogique
life expectancy 487 INSERM see Institut national de la santé et
post-1956 reforms 101–2 de la recherche médicale
post-war reconstruction 46, 85, 208 Institut français de recherche pour
rectors’ conference 100 l’exploitation de la mer (IFREMER)
restrictions on university curriculum 265
37–8 Institut national de la recherche
secularization of religious foundations agriculturelle (INRA) 265
214 Institut national de la recherche
social selectivity 224–5 pédagogique (INRP) 265
specialized universities 243–4 Institut national de la santé et de la
staff structure 171, 179 recherche médicale (INSERM) 265
student movements 266, 283–5 Institute of Physics 427
uprising against Soviet control (1956) Institutional Management of Higher
280, 284–5, 293 Education (IMHE) 149–50
women academics 182 ‘instructor class’ 251–2
hydrodynamics 434 Inter-University Cooperation Programmes
(ICPs) 271
IAU see International Association of interdisciplinarity 132–3, 360–1
Universities in exact sciences 428, 429–35, 436
IBM 194 Interdisciplinary Research Centres 443
Iceland International Association of Universities
geological studies 477 (IAU) 23–4, 59–60, 92, 100, 150
medical studies 501 International Council of Scientific Unions
rectors’ conference 100 480
research council 98 International Geosphere–Biosphere
ICI 543, 547 Programme 480
ICPs see Inter-University Cooperation International Movement of Catholic
Programmes Students (IMCS, Pax Romana) 281
idleness, social/philosophical attitudes to International Student Conference (ISC)
234 foundation 279–80
involuntary 235 growth 280–1
IFREMER see Institut français de recherche loss of credibility/downfall 282, 293
pour l’exploitation de la mer significance 282–3
IMCS see International Movement of International Union of Christian
Catholic Students Democrats (IUCD) 281
IMHE see Institutional Management of International Union of Socialist Youth
Higher Education (IUSY) 281
India 22 International Union of Students (IUS)
industry 278–9, 282
collaboration on scientific research 435, breakdown of relations within 279–80
441–4, 460–4, 543, 547; benefits departures from 279–80
463–4; ‘cultural divide’ 443–4; new opposition to ISC 280
institutions 443; R&D departments significance 282–3
442; threat to academic ideals 443–4, International Young Catholic Students
449 (IYCS) 281
616
Subject index
internationalization 367–8 tuition fees, importance to university
Internet economy 258–9
origins 440 IUCD see International Union of Christian
provision of access to 155 Democrats
role in science teaching 467, 468–9 IUS see International Union of Students
speed of communication 469 IUSY see International Union of Socialist
‘invisible university’ see ‘virtual university’ Youth
Ireland 46 ‘ivory tower’, university as
degrees 335, 337–8 criticism/demolition of concept 3, 15–21,
graduate employment 342–3, 351 158, 163, 360
information policy 59–60 evolution of image 16
medical studies 499 as nineteenth-century ideal 16–17
nineteenth-century institutions 550, IYCS see International Young Catholic
554 Students
non-university education 57
professional qualifications 341 Japan 22, 212, 216
rectors’ conference 100 European competition with 114
research council 98 private universities 214
support staff 181 Jena (Germany), battle of (1806) 31
ISC see International Student Conference JET see Joint European Torus
Italy 130, 212, 330, 568 Jewish teachers/students
age structure 166 Nazi expulsions 198, 384
class system 213 Soviet bloc campaign against 307
course structure 253 Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore 27
curricula 336, 571 Joint European Torus (JET) 438, 539–40
degrees 337 Joint Research Centres 443, 542–3
economics, teaching of 402 Joint Study Programme 555–6
geology 473 junior staff 172–3
graduate employment 344, 347, duration of appointments 172–3
348–9 progression within institution 173
history, teaching of 412 promotional opportunities 167, 251–2
medical studies 505 relations with undergraduates 268
Ministry of Higher Education and role in teaching structure 248–9
Research 35 Jussieu University 267
new foundations 52–3
non-state sector 55–6 Kaiserslautern, University of 52
non-university education 57 Kanzler see registrar
post-war policies 75 Karlsbad (Germany) agreement (1819) 12
professorial appointments 173 Kazakhstan 311–12
proportion of universities to other Keele (UK), University of 293, 392
institutions 222 Kharkov (Ukraine), University of 283
rectors’ conference 100 Kiel (Germany), University of 244, 384,
research council 98 404
salaries 185, 186 Kiev (Ukraine), University of 283, 397
sociology 381–2 KISZ see Communist Youth Association
staff appointments 174 Klagenfurt (Germany) 245
staff structure 178 University of Educational Sciences 244
staffing levels 164 knowledge, growth in 132–3, 167–8, 273,
student/graduate numbers 324, 325 366–7, 460, 537–8
student movements 109–10, 266, Köln see Cologne
291–2, 301, 302, 307; disintegration Kondratieff cycle 58
298–9; governmental/social response Königstein (Germany), Agreement (1949)
302 80–1, 393
student/university expansion 41, 44, 48, Kosovo 310, 559
61; growth rates 262
support for European University 99 La Palma (Canary Is.), Northern
teaching methods 250 Hemisphere Observatory 439
617
Subject index
labour market Leonardo da Vinci programme see
efficiency, as driving force for expansion Community Programme for Education
209 and Training for Technology
gender ratios, shift in 220 Leuven (Belgium), Catholic University 55,
relationship with educational systems 288, 293–4, 299, 302, 312–15
220–1, 273, 328–9 library usage, pre-/post-Internet 468–9
language teaching, new methods 249–50 licentiate’s degree 6–7, 340
laser technology 431 Liège (Belgium), University of 294
Latin America 22, 54, 566, 571–2 ‘life cycle’, of fields of study 434
Latvia 100, 310–12 life expectancy, increasing 487–8
Latvian Academy of Agriculture 37 lifelong learning 336, 359, 555, 570
Lausanne (Switzerland) see also ‘third age’
school of engineering 242 Limburg, University of 249
University 260 Lingua programme (for the promotion of
law 130–1, 244, 414–22 foreign language skills) 121, 271
case-study method 416 Linz (Austria), University 245
celebrated cases 420 Lisbon Recognition Convention (European
convergence of European systems Convention on the Recognition of
419–20 Qualifications concerning Higher
difficulty of courses 417–19 Education in the European Region
graduate employment 351–2 1997) 103, 567
links with economics 401, 402 Lisbon Summit (2000) 573
national character 414–16, 419–20, 422 Lithuania 100, 311–12
new fields 418 litigation
popularity with students 416–17 medical 488, 511
private, study of 418 settlement of internal disputes by 145–6
professional training 417 Liverpool (UK), University of 392
public, study of 418 Łódź (Poland), University of 308
rapidity of change 418–19 logit regressions 212
reduction of course options 417 Loi d’orientation de l’enseignement
specialization 419 supérieur (‘Loi Faure’) (France 1968)
teaching methods 249, 416 106–9, 110, 131, 140
teaching of, combined with legal practice achievement of objectives 107–9
414 implementation 106–7
underfunding of faculties 416 provisions 106
law and economics movement 419 Loi no. 84–52 sur l’enseignement supérieur
laws see legislation; litigation; management (France 1984) 140, 259–60
lecturer, rank of 245 London
lectures 190, 239 charity hospitals 498
optional attendance 257 Imperial College of Technology 254,
Leeds (UK), Metropolitan University 247–8 477
legislation medical schools 498, 500, 501, 518
compliance with 145 School of Economics (LSE) 293, 299,
health and safety 154 383, 392, 399, 406
proliferation, impact on law studies School of Engineering 242
418–19 ‘smog’, deaths from (1952) 452
rapid changes in 112 student congress (1945) 278
see also names of countries/laws University of 49, 55, 97, 233, 254;
Leicester (UK), University of 383 medical studies 492, 499
Leiden (Netherlands), University of 294, ‘weighting’ 185
392, 492 lottery, role in admissions 219, 518
Leipzig (Germany), University of 384 Louvain (Belgium), University of 401
Leningrad (Russia) Lublin (Poland)
Conference (1991) 561, 562 Catholic University 85, 87
University 283, 397, 561 Maria Curie-Skłodowska University 85
Leoben (Austria), University of Mining Lund (Sweden), University of 295, 409
244 Luxembourg 100
618
Subject index
Lyngby (Denmark), school of engineering support from specialized professions
242 128
techniques 155–9
Maastricht (Netherlands), University of traditional skills 155
506 usage of term 124
European Law School 420–1 see also estate management; resource
Maastricht Treaty 1992 121, 202, 399 management; systems approach
Macedonia 559 The Managerial Revolution in Higher
Madrid Education (Rourke/Brooks, 1956)
Autonomous University 154, 506 125
Complutense University 44, 402 ‘managerialism’ 125
Magna Charta Universitarium 557 Manchester (UK), University of 55, 160,
magnetometry 477 533, 547
Mainz (Germany), University 79 Manhattan Project 538–9
Malta, University of 154 Manila (Philippines), Conference (1980)
man, nature of 5 550–1
management, university 124–5 Marburg (Germany), University of 244
accountability 136–7 Discussions 91, 92–3
areas covered by 148–9 market, relationship of university with 20,
balance of power 141 59, 115, 216, 240–1, 537
changes in routine/equipment 128–30 Mars, geological investigation 475
competition with academic leaders Marxism see Soviet bloc; names index
150 mass higher education, drive towards
consortia/support networks 149–50 41–3, 329
degree of autonomy 137–40 see also access
evaluation standards 159 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
external parties’ involvement in 158 (MIT) 27, 532
and governance 144–50 master’s degree 335
handling of internal disorder 147–8 and definition of university 43–4
historical development 132–4, 137, equivalence 340, 366
159–60; national variations 139–40 as first degree 254
impact of technological change 134–5, in medieval universities 6–7
155 non-university 338
increased openness 146–7 in political science 391
increased size/complexity of operation in ‘university type’ establishments 43
148, 149 in US colleges 21
increasing influence/role 132, 137, 146, materials science 432–3, 442
157–8 subdisciplines 433
influence of law on 145–6 mathematical sciences see exact sciences
interaction with external environment mathematics 193, 424, 428
159 links with political science 391
internal forces for change 132–4 pure 428, 443, 446
internal leadership role 146–7 matriculation 217–23
internal quality management 159 evolution 220
isolation from academic community 146, mature students 220, 555
149 see also adult education; lifelong
levels of functioning 149 learning; ‘third age’
maintenance of old traditions 127 Max Planck Institutes see Planck, Max, in
new skills/techniques 144, 147, 156–9; names index
in 1980s 158; in 1990s/2000s 158–9 media
quadrilateral structure 140–4; shifting internal 146–7
roles within 141 managers’ dealings with 148
range of positions/activities 128, 160 medical students 518–19
role of rector/vice-chancellor 141–3 age of entry 518
separation of teaching and research background 518, 519
136–7 lifestyle/popular image 519
socio-political forces for change 135–6 motivations 519
619
Subject index
medical students (cont.) 525; national organizations 523;
selection 518 spread across departments/areas 524
unrest among 504–5 responsibility for funding 509–10
work experience 518, 519 sources of pressure for change 503–5
medicine, practice of specialized colleges/academies 37, 492,
advances 485–6, 489–90 496–7, 517
alternative 488, 490 specialized courses 495, 516; student
critiques 490–1 preference for 512–13
EU regulations 118 staff structure 245, 517
graduate employment 346, 351, strengthening of universities’ role 497–8
499–500 student–teacher relationships 517–18
public attitudes to 488–9 teaching methods 491–4, 517, 520–1
redefining of objectives 491 teaching staff: incomes outside university
specialization 486, 488, 489; young 186; numbers 516–17
doctors’ preference for 505 technological advances 507
universities’ contribution to 526 three-stage structure 496, 497
working conditions 486, 499, 500 see also medical students
see also doctors (medical); health care; medieval universities
nursing alternatives to 7
medicine, study of completion rates 7
aims/objectives, debates on 512 criticisms 7
breakdown of system (1950s) 493–5 curriculum 6–7
certification 505 degree structure 6–7
clinical facilities, selection of 510 guilds 200
costs 507–11, 515, 521 key values 5–6
course structure 492, 520 marketing 20
criticisms 512, 513–14 models for 4–6, 553
disillusionment among graduates openness 6
513–14, 516 prescribed texts, attitudes to 6
examinations system 494–5, 512 revival of ideals 271
‘experimental’ schools 506 social function 7, 16
faculty governance 517, 524 sources, attitudes to 5–6
funding criteria 508–9 student unrest 147
future challenges 526 study norms 5
graduation process 505 teaching posts/ideology 168
integrated teaching 506–7 see also faculties
internships 491–2, 493, 494, 496, 498, Memorandum on University Education in
521 the European Union (1991) 26
length of courses 492, 494, 514; national mental illness, incidence/treatment 486,
variations 505–6 487–8
limitation of entry 505 mergers 357
national associations 521 meritocracy 175, 188, 213, 223–4, 320
overcrowding of curriculum 514 metallurgy 428
postgraduate training 496, 499, 500–1, meteoric impacts, geological investigation
502–3, 505, 510–11, 521–3; extent of 475–6, 480
university’s role 522 meteorology 441, 541
practical experience 491–2, 493–4, Metropolitan-Vickers 547
505–6, 519, 522 Mexico 566
primary health care courses 512–13 Michigan, University of 26–7, 387
professional preparation 491, 492–3, microscopy 431
495–6, 510, 513 Middle Ages see medieval universities
public attitudes to 510–11, 518, 526 middle-level positions, graduate
reforms 95, 495–507; outcome 511–16; employment in 345
problems of implementation 514–16 migrations, impact of 269
research 523–6; concentration of Milan (Italy)
resources 525; evaluation 524; funding Bocconi University 402
523–5; international collaborations Catholic University of 292, 302
620
Subject index
ministers (of state), role/remit 35 National Union of Students (NUS) 267,
see also European Conference of 278, 279–80, 286, 287–8
Ministers of Education opposition to libertarian moves 293
Ministry of Defence (MoD, UK) 542 nationalism 562, 571
Mittelbau (German staff structure) 176–7 involvement of student movements
mobility (of academic staff/students) 310–12
187–8, 202, 270–2, 561, 564–6 NATO see North Atlantic Treaty
efforts to promote 338, 339–41, 367–8, Organization
570 (see also European Union) navigational colleges 7
opposition to 270 Nazis/Nazism 198–9
problems of (in science subjects) 427, execution of student protesters 278, 308
471 impact on education: in Germany 384; in
reductions in 187–8 occupied territories 32, 33–4, 74–5,
thematic networks 565–6 84, 117, 404–5
between university and industry/research impact on German legal system 415
institutes 187 impact on post-war consciousness
models, organizational 213–17 372–3
modules, course structure based on 270–1 see also resistance movements; Second
European adoption 271 World War
objections to 270–1 Netherlands 130, 212
molecular biology 431–2, 453–6 admission controls 45, 219, 258
EU research projects 525, 541 attendance levels 58
relationship with ecology 456–7 course structure 254–5, 336, 361
Mongolia 103 curricular divisions 114
Montan Union see European Coal and degrees 254, 337
Steel Community economics, teaching of 400–1
Morrill Act (US 1862) 31 evaluation procedures 562
Moscow exact sciences 446
Conference (1987) 556 faculty structure 248
University 283, 397 geology 473, 482
‘multiversities’ 239–40 graduate employment 331, 347;
Munich unemployment 342
School of Engineering 242 graduate schools 259
University 44 health care 489
Münster (Germany), University/School history, teaching of 412
385 information policy 59–60
medical studies 492, 501–2, 505, 506,
Nanterre (France), University 233, 267, 509, 518
291 Nazi occupation 74
Narodowy zwia˛zek studentów (NZS) non-state sector 55
308–9 non-university education 57, 241–2
narratives 553–5 political science 392–3
National Aeronautics and Space proportion of universities to other
Administration (NASA) 540–1 institutions 222
National Coal Board 544 rectors’ conference 90, 100
National Defense Education Act (US 1960) research council 98
38 sociology 375
National Health Service 486, 493 staff/research evaluation 195
creation of career opportunities staff structure 177–8, 249
499–501 staffing levels 164
planning 498 student movements 110–11, 279, 286–7,
relationship with medical education 498 294–5
National Insurance Act (UK 1911) 501 student numbers 324; by subject 327
National Physical Laboratory 533, 544 student–teacher relations 268
National Research Development student/university expansion 41, 50, 55;
Corporation 547 growth rates 262
national service, compulsory 220 teaching conditions 191
621
Subject index
Netherlands (cont.) ‘academic drift’ 357–8
university management 139, 143, 159 categorization 56–7
wartime resistance movement 32, 33 degrees, awarding/status 338
women academics 182, 183 dividing line from universities 42–3
network analysis 157 expanding range of types 41–2, 113,
New Left 283, 293, 296, 300–3 222–3
The New Scientist (periodical) 466 integration into multidisciplinary
New Social Movements 303 universities 357
‘new student movement’ (1958–69) 14, 97, prestige, superior/equal to universities’
105–6, 124, 233, 266–7, 288–97, 360, 242, 543–4, 548
363 rivalry with universities 87
affiliation with workers’ movements in Soviet bloc 36–7, 45, 86–7
292, 298–9, 304, 308–9 specialization 10–11, 20–1, 37–8, 43,
aims 108 86–7, 112–13, 353
anniversary celebrations 312 upgrading to university status 43, 48–52,
at Catholic universities 302–3 65, 165, 233–4, 329–30, 364–5
cultural element 301–2 see also dual institutional model;
disintegration 292, 297–9, 312–13, 315; polytechnics; short-cycle higher
causes 315–16 education
dress codes 302 Nordplus 519
fragmentation 297, 299 North America
governmental responses 106–13; colonial period 22, 28, 29
negative impact 113; positive impact integration/mobility programmes 566
113 North Atlantic Treaty Organization
impact on management 135 (NATO) 93–4, 98–9, 445, 559
impact on social sciences 378, 393, 395 North Korea 103
impact on teaching 198, 199, 256 North-West German University Conference
‘inheritors’ (1980s) 313, 314 91–3
key features 301 Northern Ireland 217
legacy 312–16 Norway
managerial responses 147–8 course structure 253
media attention 148 degrees 335, 338
medical students’ protests 502, 504–5 educational ideals 255–6
nature 299–303 geology 473
in non-democratic countries 303–12 graduate employment 344–5
occupation of university buildings medical studies 501, 508
291–2, 305–6, 308 non-university education 57, 113, 329
orientation 300–1 postgraduate studies 261
origins/development 288–9 rectors’ conference 100
public attitudes to 290–1, 292, 302, 536 regionalization 53
suicide protests 308, 310–11 research council 98
underlying psychology 301 staff structure 246
violence employed by 292, 298–9, 301, staffing levels 164
305 student/graduate numbers 324, 325; by
violent suppression 292, 305–12 subject 327
new universities (1960s/70s) 14, 20–1 student involvement in administration
architecture 154 267
social sciences 383 student/university expansion 41–2, 48
Newcastle Polytechnic 471 subsidy of studies abroad 219
‘Night of the Barricades’ (10–11 May teacher–student ratios 252
1968) 291 teaching conditions 192
Nijmegen (Netherlands), Catholic university management 139
University 294, 299, 392 Nottingham (UK), University of 383
non-state sector 54–6 nuclear physics
range of disciplines 55 development of technology 546–7
non-university institutions 12–13, 56–8, ethical debates 448
61–3 industrial involvement in research 444
622
Subject index
misguided application 447 World Conference on Higher Education
wartime/post-war developments 538–40 (1998) 567
see also anti-nuclear movement Paris University 553
nursing 486–7, 520 800th anniversary celebrations 567–8
postgraduate training 522–3 appeal to staff/students 188, 265–6
NUS see National Union of Students division into specialized institutions
NZS see Narodowy zwia˛zek studentów 112–13
foreign students 22
Odense (Denmark), University of 391 management 160
OECD see Organization for Economic medical faculties 492, 502, 508
Cooperation and Development as model for academic world 4, 12, 20
OEEC see Organization for European social sciences 379–80
Economic Cooperation student unrest 14, 105–6, 219, 233, 291,
office equipment 128–9 504
oil supply/crisis see economic crisis, global ‘party schools’ 86
open system, change to 146–7, 162 passive learning, challenges to 249,
Open University (UK) 19, 135, 190–1, 211, 250–1
228, 229, 234, 474, 480–1, 482, 535 Pasteur Institute 265
Open University of the Netherlands 535 patronage, role in academic appointments
Ordinarius, office of 168, 194, 245, 269 172
organization and methods techniques Pax Romana see International Movement
156–7 of Catholic Students
Organization for Economic Cooperation Pécs (Hungary), Medical University 506
and Development (OECD) 23, 99, performance indicators 153
117, 149, 156, 158, 209, 221–2, persistent inequality (of educational
321–3, 325–7, 328–9, 333, 353 opportunities) 211–13
Organization for European Economic historical background 212–13
Cooperation (OEEC) 23, 93–4, 399 personal computers, use of 534–5
over-qualification, and graduate Perugia (Italy), University of 292
employment 330–1, 334, 348–9 pharmaceutical industry, contribution to
overcrowding 258 medical research 486
protests against 266–7 pharmacy, study of 183
Oxford University 188 ‘Philadelphia chromosome’ 454
admissions policy 219 Philips 543
collegiate system 16, 214 philosophy, study of 130–1, 243, 244
computer equipment 534 in East Germany 83
faculty structure 243, 244 photocopiers, development/academic
foundation 4 importance 535
funding 542 photosynthesis 455
joint degrees 532 physical sciences 424–5
migrations to 270 Physical Society 427
political activism 293 physics 424, 428, 432
PPE degree 392 curricular design 445
social sciences 383, 406 decline in numbers 536
staff traditions/background 174, 175 interaction with other sciences 433
teaching methods 248, 257 new research technologies 430
technological studies/research 530, 536 subdivisions 434–5
theoretical 428
Paris see also names of subdivisions e.g. high
Académie royale des sciences 9 energy physics
Dauphine University 401–2 Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt
École des hautes études en sciences 544
sociales (EHESS) 380 PISA see Programme for International
École libre des sciences politiques 391 Student Assessment
École nationale d’administration 13, 32 Pisa (Italy), University of 292
École pratique des hautes études 380, planning, corporate
410 defined 151
623
Subject index
planning, corporate (cont.) politicization (of university staff/teaching)
increasing flexibility 152 197–9
integration of resource management with coinage of term 198
150–2, 158 polytechnics 104, 113, 165, 329
Planning and Management in Universities course structure 361
(Fielden/Lockwood, 1973) 126 curricula 58
plate tectonics 473, 474, 481, 482, 483 degree awards 337
birth of theory 478 dividing line from universities 42
precursors/evolution of theory 476–7 staff association 200
Poland 103, 212 student numbers 228–9
admissions policy 219 teaching conditions 193
control of student/staff activities 88 upgrading to university status 49, 63,
curriculum 247 174–5, 247–8, 254, 358, 482
faculty structure 244–5 Porto (Portugal), University of 122
graduate employment 348, 349 Portugal 7, 46
growth in student/institution numbers accession to EU 555
50, 61, 62 course structure 255
junior academic staff 172 degree awards 254
‘March Movement’ 306–7 growth in student/institution numbers
medical studies 518–19 47, 50, 61
non-university institutions 63 life expectancy 487
overloading of curricula 88 non-university education 57, 63
post-1956 reforms 101–2 post-war policies 75–6
post-war reconstruction 46, 84–5, 208–9 staff structure 178
rectors’ conference 100 staffing levels 164
religious foundations 55, 85, 87 student/graduate numbers 325
screening bodies 87 student movements 285, 305
social selectivity 223, 224–5 post-behaviourism 390, 393
staff structure 171, 179 post-structuralism 408
staffing levels 164 postdoctoral research/training 446, 470,
student movements 109, 280, 282, 284, 545
306–9 postgraduates
student numbers 324 changes in system 260–1
views on role of university 102 deferring of career choices/
wartime destruction 528 unemployment 343
wartime resistance movement 32, 33, 74 diplomas 340
women academics 182 staff/public attitudes to 257
working-class students 39 postmodernism 264, 316, 409
political economy, shift to right 316 Potsdam Agreement (1945) 34, 77–8
political science 244, 386–98 Poznań (Poland) 284
conceptual uncertainty 386–7 University 37
evolution as university subject 387–8, PPBS (Planning Programming and
391–7 Budgeting Systems) 156
key issues 388–90 Prague (Czech Republic)
left-wing tendencies 389 Charles University 243, 244
numbers of teachers 387–8 Coup (1948) 279
(perceived) need for study 387 IUS Congresses (1946/56) 278–9, 280
psychological approach 389–90 ‘Spring’ (1968) 307
political/social change 220–1, 263–5 University 278
impact on management 146 Prague Convention 1972 102–3, 339
impact on teaching/research 274; president see rector
negative 263–4; positive 264–5 press offices, introduction of 19
role of university in 135 printing, development of 7
see also ‘new student movement’ Pristina (Kosovo), (unofficial) University of
political theory/ies, development/ 559
implications 264, 273 private academic circles 7, 10
see also under Soviet bloc see also academies
624
Subject index
private sector, funding of universities/ public undertaking, education as 54
colleges 236, 266 publications, role in academic careers 175
see also research
private universities 214 quality, as integrative factor 561–4
privatization 54–5, 59, 60–1, 240–1 cooperation initiatives 562–3, 572–3
problem-based learning 249 criteria 562
professors relationship with national interests 562,
abolition 170 563–4
administrative duties 196–7 quantum theory 445
age of appointment 188
appointment 173–4; from within Radical Student Alliance (RSA) 293
university (Hausberufung) 173–4 radioisotope technology 453
division from junior staff 172 reader, rank of 245
dress code 268 reconstruction, processes of 64–5, 74–95,
of economics 404 162, 201, 327–8
extraordinary 245 expectations 73
female 182–3 national policies 75–6
financial/social position (in East) 186 phases 74
guarantees 170–1 speed 74–5
honorary 180 rector (vice-chancellor/president)
of medicine 517–18 appointment 142, 143, 315
multiple salary scales 177, 188 new requirements 146–7
national variations 174–9 recognition as managerial head 142–3
‘one per subject’, dissolution of theory role in management structure 140,
168 141–3, 151
‘parallel chairs’ 169 see also rectors’ conferences
part-time 178, 185, 245 rectors’ conferences 90–4, 100–1, 118–19,
professional experience outside academia 121–2
362 in Eastern Europe 560
proliferation 186 international 93–4
proportion of teaching staff 175, 176, see also names of specific bodies
177 Red Army Faction see Rote Armee Fraktion
qualifications 259 ‘red brick’ universities 214
retirement age 178 Red Brigade see Brigate Rosse
role in academic structure 239, 246, reformatio in melius, medieval concept of
265 4–5
social status 202 reforms 3, 30
of sociology 384–5 administrative 14
visiting (from abroad) 180 Early Modern 8–9
working hours 192–3 nineteenth-century modernizations
see also Ordinarius 11–13
Programme for International Student post-war 13–14, 32–3
Assessment (PISA) 23 see also reconstruction; reformatio in
provincialization, processes of 3–4, 21, melius
52–4 Regensburg (Germany), University of 104
deciding factors 53 Reggio Emilia, Italy 553
Prussia 17–18 regionalization see provincialization
academic salaries 184–5 registrar (head of administration), role in
modernization programmes 10–12, management structure 140–1, 143–4,
18–19 151
rectors’ conference 90 broadening of role 144
university administration 140–1 convergence across Europe 143–4
see also Germany registration fees, increases in 312–13, 314
public relations, managerial experience/ religion/religious studies
requirements 147–8 dwindling influence 214–15
public service professions, graduate international student organizations 281
employment in 351–2, 353 modern institutions 55, 65, 87, 214
625
Subject index
religion/religious studies (cont.) new skills required 152
partitioning of universities by 243 separation of roles of officers 151
relationship with medieval scholastic transparency 153
ethos 5–6 see also crisis management
separation from universities 87 resources, decline in 235
see also Catholic Church; Catholic restriction enzymes 454
universities Revolutionary Socialist Students
research Federation (RSSF) 293
as basis of reputation 193, 459 Riga (Latvia), University of 37, 310
challenges to universities’ supremacy in right to education 45
133 right-wing politics see under student
collective 435–7 movements
costs 464 Roman law 5, 417
evaluation 195, 524 Romania 86, 103, 116, 557
full-time employment in 180–1 division of students by subject 327
funding 426, 523–5, 541–3 life expectancy 487
government-funded establishments 544 post-war reconstruction 46–7, 85,
impact on curricula 263–6 208
international centres 438–9 rectors’ conference 100
international programmes 23, 120–1 screening bodies 87
medical 523–6 staff structure 171, 179
movement of frontiers 444–5 staffing levels 164
multinational teams 441 student/university expansion 50
originality, need for 264 teaching hours 192
personal nature 193 women academics 182
place in universities’ mission 262; shift in Rome
emphasis 262–5 La Sapienza University 44
preparation for careers in 425 University of 160, 292, 382
private sector funding 194 Rome Treaty (Treaty Establishing the EEC
pure vs applied 194, 241, 442–3, 524–5, 1957) 24, 25, 99, 118–19, 399
545 Rote Armee Fraktion 298
relationship with teaching 169–70, Rotterdam (Netherlands), University of
194–5, 444, 446 501
role in academic careers 173, 180–1, Royal Aeronautical Establishment 544
189, 193–4, 246, 256 Royal Society 9
separation from teaching 170, 193–4, RSA see Radical Student Alliance
265–6, 446 RSSF see Revolutionary Socialist Students
small units, optimal use of 437–8 Federation
Soviet policy 38–9 Russia (post-Soviet) 560–1
‘strategic’ 443 Russia (pre-revolutionary) 554
techniques 157 dissident movements 266
technological requirements 134–5 Russian (language), teaching of 247
in technology 529
undergraduate participation 264–5 Saarbrücken (Germany), University of 79
see also exact sciences sabbaticals 186
research centres/institutes 131, 133 for student leaders 267
research councils 98 Saclay (France) 539
resistance movements, relationship of Saint-Étienne (France), University of 267
universities with 32, 33, 74 salaries (of academic staff) 153, 184–7
resource management 150–5 compared with other careers 185–6
buildings/estates 153–5 decrease in inequality 184–5
departmental 151–2 income additional to 184, 186
increased unpredictability/flexibility regularization 184
152–3, 158–9 Salzburg (Austria)
increasing numbers involved in 151 Seminars 560–1
integration with corporate planning University 245, 396
150–2 ‘sandwich’ courses 361
626
Subject index
Scandinavia interruption of studies 133–4
degrees 335 loss of staff/students to 162
mature students/curricular flexibility336 management techniques 155
medical studies 492, 522 military/technological research 436,
postgraduate studies 261 528–9, 533, 544, 547
student movements 279 secondary schools
student–teacher relations 268 educational function 255
see also names of individual countries poor quality, remedying of 267
school-leaving examination(s), as productivity 229
qualification for university reforms, influence on university curricula
alternatives to 220, 226 261–2
automatic/traditional entry route 18, 45, see also school-leaving examinations
210, 217, 219–20, 226–7, 267 secretarial posts 181
diminishing importance 216–17 secretariat, role/skills 147
science secularization, exaggerated impact on
demarcation of fields of study 424–5 teaching 264
graduate employment 351, 352–3 security, internal 147–8
importance in post-war world 163, staffing levels 147–8
167–8, 372, 425–6, 530–2, 538 self-assessment
income outside teaching 186 by employed graduates 347–50
interdisciplinarity 264 by students 249
international cooperation 98–101, by universities 334
202 semiconductor physics 434, 435, 447
new fields 432 seminars 190
organization of faculty structure Senate, role in management structure 140,
244–5 141
public attitudes to 163 senior staff 173
pure vs applied 241, 424–5, 427, 433–5, see also professors
441–2 Serbia
staff contracts 153 political upheavals 558–9
state intervention in training 95–102 student movements 310
study in Soviet bloc 86–7 service classes see working classes
support staff 181–2 service industries, graduate employment in
teaching 190 343–5, 353
see also biological sciences; exact Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (GI Bill, US
sciences; physical sciences 1944) 207
science parks 443, 547 SEU see Sindicato español universitario
science research councils 98 SFS see Sveriges forenander studentkårer
Scotland 254, 270, 335 Shell 440, 543
medical studies 492 short-cycle higher education 56–7, 58, 226,
SDE see Sindicato democrático de 234, 329–30
estudiantes complementarity to university system
SDS see Sozialistische deutsche 57
Studentenbund relationship with labour market 57–8
second route see working classes Siemens 440
Second World War Siena (Italy), Conference (1991) 139
aftermath 3, 13, 22–3, 29, 31–5, 73, Sindicato democrático de estudiantes (SDE)
74–9, 84–9, 162–3, 201, 319–20, 304–5
528–9; Allied territorial arrangements Sindicato español universitario (SEU) 285
34, 76–84; and earth sciences 476–7; abolition 304
and exact sciences 425–6; and social democratization 304
sciences 372–4, 387, 409, 415 Single European Act (1992) 553, 555
destruction of buildings/resources 528 SKS see Studenckie komitety solidarności
impact on medical knowledge/education Slovakia 61
485, 491 rectors’ conference 100
increase in women students/academics Slovenia 310
182 political upheavals 558
627
Subject index
Social Science Research Council (SSRC) labour force planning 209, 328
392 life expectancy 487
social sciences 95–6, 186, 235, 244 limitation of university’s role 86
decline in popularity (1970s) 378–9 medical studies 491, 519
evolution into academic subjects 371–5 non-university education 57 (see also
historical approach 371; supersession academies)
374–5 policy shifts: post-1948 86–8; post-1956
leading role of USA 372–4, 379, 384, 101–2
387, 390–415; exceptions 402, 415–16 politicization of academic system 87–8
progress to scholastic pre-eminence post-war reconstruction 46–7, 84–9, 162
374–5 reconstruction, 1980s 216
social selection relations between academia and
after 1970 226–32 authority 88, 101–2
patterns of development 232–6 research institutions 180, 446
prior to 1970 223–6 restricted entry policy 45
sociology 193, 244, 371–2, 375–86 role of university in social system 36–7,
career opportunities 414 38–9, 102
developments in 1960s 378 secondary education, need to
focus of study 375, 376, 379–80, 382 compensate for quality of 267
movements/counter-movements 376–9, separation of church and state 214
380–1, 385–6 shortage of data 163
as professional discipline 377–8 specialized universities 243–4
research institutes 380 staff structures 178–9
US influence in Europe 379, 380–1 staffing levels 164
Socrates programme 29, 121, 180, 271, stagnation in growth rates 41, 44–5,
554, 564–6 208–9, 321–2, 324
Sorbonne see Paris University State Planning Commissions 39
Sorbonne Declaration (1998) 560, 567–8, student funding 207
569 student movements 283–4, 306–12
South Africa 508 student numbers 45–6
see also apartheid university management 138
South German Rectors’ Conference 91–2 see also Eastern Europe; Soviet Union;
Soviet bloc 35–40 state control of universities
academic cooperation 102–3 Soviet Union 103
academic interchanges with West 40; attitudes to European unity 92, 556–7
restrictions on 40, 94–5 degree awards 253
academics’ perks 186 dissolution 269
adherence to traditional structures 85–6 division of students by subject 327
admissions policy 215–16, 218, 219; employment policy 328
effectiveness 215–16 enrolment levels 36–7
age structure 165–6 European competition with 14
career structures 171 growth rates 208
comparisons with West 49–52, 63–5, health care 489
212, 213–14 international relations, impact on
curricular restrictions 246–7, 359–60 student movement 279
de-Stalinization 101 junior academic staff 172
degree structure 262 medical studies 496–7, 509, 518
educational model 213–16; break from non-university institutions 36–7, 38
tradition 36, 201 policy in occupied Germany 76, 81–4
graduate employment 363 political science 397–8
graduation procedures 87–8 post-war academic reorganization 13
impact of collapse 64, 115, 116–17, 198, rectors’ role in administrative structure
199, 201, 215, 220, 241, 263, 334, 142
557–61, 572 role in international student movement
imposition of Marxist-Leninist ideology 278, 282
35–6, 38, 82, 83–4, 86, 198, 215, 273, staff structure 171, 178–9
359–60 staff training 196
628
Subject index
student movements 310–12 numbers 175, 207–8
teaching conditions 193 part-time 180, 362
Sozialistische deutsche Studentenbund personality, impact on learning process
(SDS) 289–91, 298 252
space exploration 436, 447, 473, 474–5, political influence on appointments
540–1 174
scientific benefits 475–6 political stance/activities 148–9, 197–9
Spain 7, 46, 130, 214, 239, 247 professional experience outside academia
accession to EU 555 362
admissions policy 45, 219 ‘proletarianization’ 185
course structure 253, 254–5, 257 public perceptions of 192
criticisms of educational system 272 ratio to students 191, 252, 469–70
curricula 336 representation on governing bodies
degree structure 259 109–12, 116
economics, teaching of 402–3 Residenzpflicht (duty to reside in
legal system 422 university town) 187
non-state sector 55–6 safeguards against wrong decisions
non-university education 55 170–1
political reforms 53 social background 174
post-war policies 75–6 social lives 200, 201
professorial appointments 173 social status 186, 202–3, 536
regional independence movements 269 specialization 167–70
staff structure 178 teaching techniques 157
student movements 285, 304–5 work outside university 197
student numbers 324; by subject 327 working hours 192–3; flexibility 186–7
student/university expansion 41, 44, 47, see also age; junior staff; mobility;
50, 61 professors; salaries; senior staff; staff
teaching methods 248–9 structure; teaching; tenure
university administration 131 staff, administrative/managerial
Speyer (Germany), Academy for commercial experience 147
Administrative Sciences 79 daily routine 129–30
spin-off companies, creation of 147 explosion of numbers 112
Sputnik 38, 328, 474 length of appointments 128
SSRC see Social Science Research Council tension with academics 127
St Gallen (Switzerland), University 396 staff structure 170–9, 245–6
St Petersburg (Russia) see Leningrad changes in 171–2, 180–2, 188–9
staff, academic division between senior and junior staff
associations 199–201 172; diminishing 246
attitudes to management 126 guiding principles 170
attraction into management side 158 impact of expansion 245–6
attraction of chosen career 186–7 regulation 172, 188–9
career structure 171–3 Stamokap School 392
changes affecting 162, 163 standardization see curricula; degrees;
decline in prestige 163 European Union
dismissal 170; for political reasons Standing Conference of Rectors and
198–9, 215, 559 Vice-Chancellors of the European
evaluation/development 173, 195–6 Universities see Conference of
expansion in numbers 163–5, 516–17; European Rectors (CRE)
relationship with political systems state(s)
164–5 attitudes of representatives to
future, discovery among students 190, universities 126
319–20 bureaucracy 112
internal debates 135 changing relationship with universities
international associations 150 334
multiple affiliations 200 funding: of medical research 523–4;
non-academic duties 196–7 reluctance to provide 210; of students
non-teaching 181–2 207, 234–5; of universities 113–14
629
Subject index
state(s) (cont.) student unrest (1960s) see ‘new student
increased cooperation with universities movement’
104 students
investment in scientific research 460–4 accommodation 257
professional use of university resources (anticipated) reduction in numbers 233
130 approach to management 126
representation in university attitudes in aftermath of war 529
administration 140–1 career choices, confusion over 268
role in scientific training 95–102 choice of subject 351, 354, 464–5, 504
state control of universities 4, 11, 135 counselling 197, 362
admissions 218–19 decreasing numbers at succeeding stages
decreasing 137–40, 240–1, 334 224
retention/increase in wake of 1968 degree of autonomy 27–8, 108, 132–3,
protests 109, 112 251, 257–8, 268
retention within EU 239 distribution by field of study 325–7
in Soviet bloc 35–6, 39, 86, 215–16 evaluation of teaching staff 196
(supposed) calls for 433 former, proportion of population 323
statutes, medieval 4, 5 gender ratios see women
Stockholm (Sweden) growth in numbers 41–8, 104, 156,
school of engineering 242 162–3, 165, 168–9, 191, 207–8,
University 295 225–6, 228–32, 234, 251–2, 262, 316,
Strasbourg (France), University of 243 321–2, 357, 363, 470 (see also
Strathclyde (UK), University of 392 overcrowding)
structuralism 392, 407–8 increased involvement in teaching
Studenckie komitety solidarności (SKS) 308 process 248–51
student movements 276–8 international organizations 278–83
‘86’ surge in activism 314 migrations 258, 270
activists’ role 277 minimal supervision (in Continental
conflict between ‘student-as-such’ and system) 258
wider political involvement 278–9, national variations in numbers 324–5
280, 281–2, 285–6, 287–8, 313–15 personality, shaping of 356
defined 276 proportion of age group 220, 221–2,
in democratic West 285–8 229–30, 233, 234, 321–2, 334–5
dissatisfaction with national organs representation on governing bodies 106,
281–2 109–11, 116, 129, 293
enabling factors 276–7 role in curricula 266–9
European meetings 281–2 social position, changes in 315–16
in (ex-)Soviet bloc 116, 215–16 studium generale 81
formation of alternative unions 313–14 subsidiarity, principle of 121
international cooperation 278–83 Suez crisis (1956) 293
‘Leninist turn’ 297–9 suppliers, relations with 145
loss of faith in 297, 298–9 surgery 486
medieval 553 Sussex (UK), University of 131, 154, 247
mutual influence 277–8 Sverdlovsk (Russia), University of 283
myth of unity 283, 288–9 Sveriges forenander studentkårer (SFS)
opposition to anti-democratic regimes 286, 295
283–5, 304–6 Sweden 212
relationship with wider political accession to EU 559–60
movements 277–8 admissions policy 218–19
right-wing orientation 287, 296–7 course structure 336
shift in objectives (1970s) 299 curricula 114, 360
‘syndicalism’ 285–6 degrees 337
see also ‘new student movement’ departmental structures 243
‘student syndicalism’ see under student economics, teaching of 400
movements exact sciences 446
student–teacher ratios see under staff, faculty structure 244
academic geology 473
630
Subject index
graduate employment 331, 333, 342, Tbilisi (Georgia), University of 283
345, 346–7, 348 teacher training 341
growth rates 262 job opportunities 352
medical studies 494, 497–8, 501, 505, teaching and research units (France) 107
508, 517, 518 teaching (school), graduate employment in
National Board of Colleges and 352
Universities 35 teaching (university) 189–93
non-university education 57, 113, 330 as agent of growth 201
political science 396–7 conditions 191–2
postgraduate studies/degrees 260, 261 criticisms 192
post-war policies 75 debates on 189–90
rectors’ conference 100 ethos, difficulty of establishing 273–4
reforms/foundations, 1970s 52–3 evaluation 196
research council 98 interactive technologies 250
Royal Committee on Medical Education methods 190–1, 248–51
497–8 range of communication styles 252
Royal Institute of Technology 242 responsibility for 243–53
secondary education 216, 347 in teams 250
social selectivity 224–5 workload 192–3
staff associations 200–1 technical/technological colleges 424–5
staff experience 362 diversity 241–2
staff satisfaction 186 in France 42–3, 553–4
staff structure 178, 180 in Soviet bloc 38
staff training 196 upgrading to university status 49
student/graduate numbers 325, 335; by see also colleges of advanced technology;
subject 327 non-university institutions
student movements 276, 279–80, 286, technology, as field of study
288, 295 career prospects 545–6
teaching conditions 191 funding 536–7, 541–3
teaching methods 190, 249 graduate employment 545–6
unionization 246 joint degrees 532
university management 138–9 military backing/relevance 533, 542
women academics 182–3 negative attitudes to 536
Switzerland 46, 97–8, 212, 330, 565 new chairs/departments 533, 547
cantonal variations 272 participants’ role in society 546
degree structure 259 post-war growth 530–3
degree titles 337 postgraduate degrees 532
geology 473, 478–9, 482 practical component 533
graduate employment 342, 343, 348, process of development of ideas 546–8
350 proportion of student population 530–2
law studies 417 specialization 532–3
non-university education 57 student pressures 535–7
political science 396 technical infrastructure 533–5
research council 98 universities’ role in global developments
staff appointments 174 544–8
student migrations to 219 wartime priorities 529
student movements 279–80 technology, developments in 134–5
student numbers 324 impact on biological sciences 465
wartime/post-war developments 73, 75 impact on estate management 155
synchrotron radiation 431 impact on exact sciences 442
systems approach 155–6, 159 impact on medical studies 507, 522
application to university management impact on teaching conditions 191
156 role of non-university organizations
547–8
tabula rasa, theory/practice of 76 role of universities 544–8
Taiwan 212 see also computers; information
Tartu (Estonia), University of 311 technology
631
Subject index
Tempus (mobility programme) 271, 519, distinguished from postgraduates 256
559–60, 561 staff/public attitudes to 256
tenure 163, 178 terminology 248
abolition 174 see also students
impact on age structure 166, 188 ‘Underground Universities’ see resistance
impact on staff representation 111 movements
reduction in 153 Understanding the Earth (textbook) 481
‘terminal’ degrees 57 UNEF see Union national des étudiants
terrorism see ‘new student movement’, français
violence employed by unemployment
Test Acts (UK 1870) 215 graduate: compared with non-graduate
Tetovo (Macedonia), (unofficial) University 347; (feared) increases 316, 342–3,
of 559 347; relationship with field of study
theological colleges see religion 351
theology, study/graduate employment 352 in society at large 330–1, 334, 364
‘third age’, increased role in society/ UNESCO see under United Nations
education 211, 487–8 Union national des étudiants français
Tilburg (Netherlands), Catholic University (UNEF) 286, 287, 291
294, 302, 400 disintegration 298
Titan (moon of Jupiter), landing of unionization see trade unions
spacecraft on 475 United Kingdom 212, 334
titles (academic), (diminishing) social value admission controls 258
186 age structure 167
Torrey Canyon (oil tanker) 452 anthropology 406–7
Total Quality Management (TQM) 159 attendance levels 58
totalitarianism 34 attitudes to expansion 163
‘tourism, academic’ 187 attitudes to modular system 270–1
TQM see Total Quality Management biological research/teaching 458, 460–4,
trade unions 135–6, 163 469–70
formation amongst university staff career structures 171
148–9, 246 course structure 169–70, 253, 361
transparency, in resource management 153 degrees 335; awarding of 253–4, 337–8
Trento (Italy), University of 291–2, 382 distance learning 238 (see also Open
‘trickle-down theory’ 547 University)
Trier (Germany), University of 52, 154 doctorates 259
Tromsø (Norway) economics, teaching of 399
medical school 506 educational ideology 356
University of 154, 330 equality of access 228–32
Tübingen (Germany), University of 79, 83 evaluation procedures 562
tuition fees, increases in 299 exact sciences 426, 427
Tuning Project 565–6, 572 funding 15, 536–7, 541–2 (see also
Turkey 100 grants; Universities Funding Council;
migrations from 269 University Grants Committee)
student/graduate numbers 324, 325 geography, teaching of 409
tutorials 190, 248, 251, 268 geological studies/policies 480–3
government assessment strategies 250
UCCA see Universities Central Council on government-funded research
Admissions establishments 544
UFC see University Funding Council graduate employment 332–3, 344, 350,
UGC see University Grants Committee 351, 355, 367; female 354;
Ulm (Germany), University of 503–4 unemployment 342, 351
Ulster, New University of 253 health-care system 485–6, 489; contracts
UMAP (mobility programme) 566 515; costs 486, 490; doctors’ morale
Umeå (Sweden), University of 52 513–14; migrations of practitioners
under-qualification, and graduate 499–500, 501
employment 349 history, teaching of 412
undergraduates junior academic staff 172–3
632
Subject index
law studies 419, 422 university administration/management
life expectancy 487 127, 131, 138, 139, 140, 142;
mature students/curricular flexibility assessment procedures 159; role of
336 registrar 143–4; separation of roles of
medical studies 492, 493–5, 497–501, officers 151
505, 506, 511, 514, 516, 517, upgrading of non-university institutions
518–19, 520–1, 522; costs 507; 49, 63 (see also polytechnics)
rebuilding of medical schools 499, women academics 182, 183
508; responsibility for funding 509; see also Northern Ireland; Scotland
slow pace of reform 501 United Nations
non-university education 56–7, 58, 113, Educational, Scientific and Cultural
234, 241–2, 544 (see also Organization (UNESCO) 23–4, 92,
polytechnics) 103, 117, 158, 321–2, 324, 325–7,
nuclear projects/capability 539 353, 377, 387, 567 (see also CEPES)
policy in occupied Germany 76–7, 78, Institute for Educational Planning (Paris)
91, 92–3 23
political science 392 Institute for University Education
post-war reconstruction 75 (Bucharest) 23
postgraduate medical centres 500 United States 212, 216
postgraduate studies 260–1 adaptation of foreign university model
professional qualifications 341 27–8
reforms, 1960s 13–14 admissions policy 219
research councils 98, 180, 541–2, anthropology 407
544 attitudes to European unity 92
research institutes 180, 446 biological research 458
resource management 152 campus design 257
Royal Commission on Medical career structure 171
Education 500 Civil Rights movement 378
salary structure 184–5 Civil War 31
scientific training/research 97 comparisons with Europe 54, 548, 573
secondary education/university entrance course structure 168, 253, 336 (see also
216–18, 219 credits)
social sciences 371–2, 382–3 cultural studies 248
social selectivity 223–5 definition of higher education 229
sociology 382–3 degree of student autonomy 27–8
staff (academic) 174–5; administrative development of education system 31
duties 196–7; associations 200–1; European competition with 14, 114,
control of appointments 174; data 426, 441
163; evaluation 195–6; job exact sciences 425–6, 429, 430, 437,
satisfaction 186; non-academic 446
experience 362; numbers 164 exchange of ideas with Europe 156, 545
student grants 207 geology 483
student mobility, restrictions on 270 global primacy in post-war world 373–4
student movements 109, 267, 278, 279, graduate schools 260
286, 293, 313 (see also NUS) history, teaching of 412
student–teacher relations 268 as international model 3–4, 22, 26–9,
student/university expansion 41–2, 48, 81, 214, 238, 245–6, 248, 253, 429,
61, 97, 104, 108, 228–32, 335; 445, 554, 560
growth rates 262 international relations, impact on
support staff 181 student movement 279
teaching conditions 191, 192–3 land-grant colleges 550
teaching methods/traditions 189, 190–1, legal system/teaching 415–16, 419
251 library usage 468–9
technology, study/research 530–2 medical litigation 488
theological regulations (pre-1870) 215 medical research 525
undergraduate/postgraduate division medical studies 494, 513
256–7 migrations to 499, 546
633
Subject index
United States (cont.) funding 113–14
national law schools 420 geographical distribution 52–3
policy in occupied Germany 76–7, 78, growth in size 44, 134, 165
91–2, 373, 384 ideological/social criticisms 10, 14,
political science 387, 388 234–6, 360 (see also ‘new student
postdoctoral training 446 movement’; student movements)
PPBS programmes 156 increase in scale/complexity 132–3
private universities 28, 214 innovative function 319, 356, 554–5
provincial institutions 21 integrative function 554–5, 561–2
research evaluation 195 (limits of) public visibility 17
role in post-war reconstruction 33 nature of organization 125–8; differing
scholarships for foreign students 89, views of 126; as pluralistic/fragmented
180 126–7; shift over post-war period
secondary education, need to 130
compensate for quality of 267 outnumbered by non-university
separation of church and state 214 institutions 36–7, 61–3
social sciences 372, 375 scale of consumption of national
sociology 375–9; East Coast movements resources 136–7
376–7 separation from everyday life 16–17
state universities 28 social position/function 37, 38–9, 154,
student funding 207 232–3, 320–1, 364, 448, 550,
student mobility 270–1 554–5
student movements 14, 105, 279–80 social prestige 18–19, 130
teaching methods 249 structure 130–2
technology, study/research 531–2 see also autonomy; expansion;
undergraduate/postgraduate division governance; management
256–7 ‘university system’
university administration 28 creation in Soviet bloc 36, 88–9
university numbers 27 evolution of concept 35, 201–2
women academics 183 system-wide legislation 35
see also North America ‘university type’ establishments 43
Universities Administrative Reform Act Uppsala (Sweden), University of 18–19,
(Netherlands 1970) 110, 295 257, 295, 492
Universities Central Council on Admissions Uruguay Round (of trade negotiations)
(UCCA) 230 566–7
Universities Funding Council (UFC) 15, Utrecht (Netherlands)
114, 510, 537, 541 Conference (1991) 562–3
University Grants Committee (UGC) 15, University 122
75, 97, 498, 509, 536–7, 541–2
university/ies venture companies 443
abolition 10 Versailles, Treaty of (1919) 76
adaptability 160 Veto (Leuven student magazine) 313,
aims/principles 255–6, 319–20, 356, 314–15
443–4, 459, 460, 573; national vice-chancellor(s) see Committee of
variations 356–7 Vice-Chancellors and Principals; rector
alternatives to see non-university Vienna
institutions Institute of Advanced Studies 396
central role in planned economy 209 School of Engineering 242
creation/foundation, distinction between University 244
48–9 Vietnam war, protests against 103, 282,
critical function 319, 356 288, 289–90, 291–2, 293, 294, 296,
decline in attractions 235 378
definitions 16–17, 27, 43–4, 59, 86, 240, Vilnius (Lithuania), University of 283
241–2, 529–30, 554 Virginia, University of (Charlottesville)
destruction 3, 13 77
division into specialized units 37–8, 50, ‘virtual university’ 191, 240
104, 112–13, 243–4 vocationalism 362, 364
634
Subject index
Waldleiningen Conference (1949) 393 working classes
war political movements see under ‘new
continuation of scholastic friendships in student movement’
spite of 9 positive discrimination in favour of 39,
destruction of universities 3, 13, 528–9, 219
558–9 proportion of student population 223–4,
impact on development of university 227–8
31 special facilities 39–40, 218
Warsaw (Poland), University of 307 World Bank 117
Conference (1988) 556–7 World Federation of Liberal and Radical
Warwick (UK), University of 55 Youth (WFLRY) 281
websites 20 World Foundation for Medical Education
Wellcome Institute 194 512
West German Rectors’ Conference 91–2, World Health Organization (WHO)
93, 118 487–8, 491, 512
West Germany see Federal Republic of World Student Christian Federation
Germany (WSCF) 281
Western Reserve, University of 506 World Student News (periodical) 279
WFLRY see World Federation of Liberal World Trade Organization (WTO) 566–7
and Radical Youth World Union of Jewish Students 281
WHO see World Health Organization WSCF see World Student Christian
Windscale (UK) 539 Federation
Wingspread Declaration (1997) 566 WTO see World Trade Organization
Witten-Herdecke (Germany), University of
508 X-ray optics 431
women 182–4
changing social/academic role 163 Yakutsk (Georgia) 311
discrimination against 182; in student Young Men’s Christian Association
movement 292 (YMCA) 281
fields of study 183, 354 Yugoslavia 84
graduate employment 353–4; course structure 253
inequalities 347, 354 dissolution 269, 558–9
growth in staff/student numbers 182–3, mediation between East and West 558
208, 269 non-university education 57
married/with children 183 post-war reconstruction 46–7, 85,
medical students 518–19 208–9
mobility 272 rectors’ conference 100
proportion of student population 182, student movements 109, 309–10
222, 226, 227–8 student/university expansion 41, 50
word processing 534–5
work experience, integration with Zurich (Switzerland)
university courses 361 School of Engineering 242
in Soviet bloc 359–60 University 396
635

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A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY IN EUROPE

This is the final volume in a four-part series covering the development

Andris Barblan (Switzerland)

This four-volume series, prepared under the guidance of an editorial board,

Volumes in the series

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2011

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

isbn 978-0-521-36108-8 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

Contributors and editors page xi

PART I: THEMES AND PATTERNS

PART II: STRUCTURES

CHAPTER 3: RELATIONS WITH AUTHORITY 73

CHAPTER 4: MANAGEMENT AND RESOURCES 124

PART III: STUDENTS

CHAPTER 6: ADMISSION 207

CHAPTER 7: CURRICULUM, STUDENTS,

CHAPTER 8: STUDENT MOVEMENTS AND

CHAPTER 9: GRADUATION AND CAREERS 319

PART IV: LEARNING

CHAPTER 10: SOCIAL SCIENCES, HISTORY

CHAPTER 12: THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES 451

CHAPTER 13: THE EARTH SCIENCES 473

CHAPTER 14: MEDICINE 485

CHAPTER 15: TECHNOLOGY 528

EPILOGUE: FROM THE UNIVERSITY IN EUROPE

Appendix: Universities founded in Europe between 1945

a n d r i s b a r b l a n (Switzerland) was born in Orbe, Vaud, in 1943.

This series, although compiled by specialists, is destined for the general

Clark and Neave, Encyclopedia I

The preparatory work for A History of the University in Europe has

THEMES AND PATTERNS

1 Vol. I, 28–34 (Rüegg, ‘Themes’).

1. Belief in a world order accessible to human reason underwrote the

humanism and university reform

12 Vol. II, 6; 16 (Rüegg, ‘Themes’).

the liberal reform of the universities by

17 Vol. III, 33ff. (Charle, ‘Patterns’).

20 F. Schleiermacher, Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten im deutschen Sinn: Nebst

expansion and ‘democratic’ university

the introduction of entrepreneurial reforms and

26 R. Dahrendorf, ‘Die europäischen Universitäten in einem veränderten sozialökono-

29 R. Bergmann, ‘Der elfenbeinerne Turm in der deutschen Literatur’, Zeitschrift für

These peculiar conclusions, drawn from his famous principles of free-

31 Humboldt, ‘Innere und äußere Organisation’ (note 21), 191.

36 G. Brandes, ‘Tale i Upsala (1889)’, in G. Brandes, Samlede Skriften, vol. XV (Copen-

the universities and globalization

45 http://exchanges.state.gov/education/fulbrigh44t/ (16 April 2005); C. Jansen and

Wissenschaftsförderung und auswärtiger Kulturpolitik (1953–2003) (Cologne, 2004),

49 IAU World Higher Education DATABASE 2005/6.

the ‘americanization’ of european universities

55 Ibid., 11. 56 Ibid., 53.

the expansion of the soviet university model

16 L. Rybalko and E. Soloviev, Reflection on the Future: Educational Development and

18 Affanassiev, ‘Soviet Union’ (note 17), table 14, 657.

23 See vol. III, Annex.

31 Jı́lek, Historical Compendium, 162.

the drive to mass higher education

Country 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990∗

Austria 24.6 27.2 43.1 100.1 213.4