The Origin of the Research University
4 comments
·July 6, 2025bonoboTP
biofox
It's a somewhat selective history. Off the top of my head:
Kepler developed his ideas while at the University of Graz. [16th century]
Galileo built his first telescopes while a professor at the University of Padua. [16th - 17th century]
Newton did all of his work while at Cambridge (although, admittedly, it took the plague and a lockdown for him to have his annus mirabilis). [17th century]
William of Ockham (of Razor fame) did his work at Oxford. [14th century]
Giordano Bruno did the work that got him burnt at the stake while at the University of Paris (and briefly Oxford). [16th century]
Roger Bacon developed the scientific method while at Oxford. [13th century]
djoldman
> The students were menaces, given to drunkenness, gambling, dueling, and chronically skipping class.
I came across this awhile ago and thought it pretty incredible and interesting:
sebmellen
Those Trailblazing Teutons…
Great thought provoking article, a lot of starting points for wikipedia deep dives. It's really surprising to me that most of the big name intellectuals from before the 19th century were indeed not doing their work in the university system. I guess it's in nobody's interest to highlight this. Academia wants to present itself as the obvious deposit and trailblazer of knowledge and that it always has been. There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis or good science.
I find it curious and bad that people can go through the academic pipeline without ever being presented with any deep explanation of what this thing even is, where it came from, what else it could be, what historical opposition there was or what debate there was around what it should be, what it is in ideal theory and what it is in real practice and what cynics see it as. People just enroll because that's obviously the thing to do. Then they may stick around for grad school and get comfy in the system but reflection and meta is rare.