``To carry the mind in writing back into the past, and bring it into sympathy with antiquity ...is a task of great labour and judgment - the rather because in ancient transactions the truth is difficult to ascertain, and in modern it is dangerous to tell.''These words of Sir Francis Bacon's are worth bearing in mind here today, for we often carry with us an image of the university's past that may be more ideal than real. History shows, I believe, that universities have always faced significant change imposed from outside. An important challenge has always been to properly balance nurturing the ideal against relating relevantly to society. The former requires stability, the latter adaptability.
Bacon's words come to us from about 400 years ago when his alma mater, Cambridge, was itself about 400 years old. Bacon was a harsh critic of universities and their `schoolmen'. His time was one of much change and significant challenge to the university. It seems an appropriate place to start, although other times and other places would serve as well.
Long charged with the preservation, refinement, and promotion of existing knowledge, the universities became well suited to this role but research into the unknown was a different matter. Bacon argued that a new institution be created, separate from the universities, with the mandate to provide scholars the leisure and the facilities to advance the existing body of knowledge through novel research. So did others, including Sir Humphrey Gilbert.
Sir Henry Savile instead challenged the universities, Oxford in particular, to become the centres for new research. He arranged financial support, but it came with strings attached. As expected, Savile's professor in astronomy would teach Ptolemy, but he would be required to interpret Ptolemy in light of Copernicus.
Ties between society and the universities grew stronger. Generous benefactors built new colleges at Oxford and Cambridge which in turn provided lodging for the sons of their patrons. Colleges began to teach their own courses supplementary to those of the university and so became more responsive to students' and society's needs. The colleges became elevated in power within the universities and college heads were elected by aid of royal `letters mandate'. Government's influence increased and solidified.
Student enrolment and demographics changed as more of the upper class expected university education for all their young men rather than only those destined for the clergy or other professions.
In the New World, new colleges were founded to educate the future leaders of the colonies. Here the tradition would begin not with guilds of learned masters who were pooling their resources for they didn't exist. Rather, from the beginning universities would be founded directly by local authority.
After the War of Independence, before even leaving New York, loyalists urged the founding of colleges in English Canada for fear that Canadian youth be ``sent to the states of this continent where they will soon imbibe principles that are unfavourable to the British tradition.''1 Universities helped define the nation.
As society changed so too did the universities. With the industrial revolution, western society demanded greater access and different courses of study. Germany led the way in the early to mid-nineteenth century devoting considerable resources toward research aimed at national development and industrialization. Germany was also the first to establish graduate programmes and the doctoral degree which clearly marked research as integral to the university and of value to the nation.
Other countries soon followed suit and technical institutes were established throughout the western world. In the United States, direct links were encouraged between the university and industry, agriculture, and government service.
In 1869 Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard, argued that practical science and technology provided as sound a course of study for a university education as that of a classical college education. Eliot challenged the professoriate to develop new methods of teaching accordingly.
By the turn of the century, programmes in engineering, science and technology were well established. In North America student populations grew. U.S. figures show the average number of students at college roughly doubling every 20 years from 1870 to 1910. The ten largest American universities averaged 2,000 students apiece in 1895, doubled a short 15 years later, and increased to an average of 5,000 students in 1915. In short, the challenges of the past sound familiar to the modern ear. Although the details differ, few of our modern concerns seem new in kind. The future would seem to be more of the same; the challenge is to think about what might be fundamentally different?
But first a brief interlude.