Eric Ashby

The future of the nineteenth century idea of a university

The university is a mechanism for the inheritance of the western style of civilisation. It preserves, transmits, and enriches learning, and it undergoes evolution as animals and plants do. Therefore one can say that the pattern of any particular university is a result, on the one hand of its heredity, and on the other hand of its environment. Let us carry this biological analogy one step further. Among communities of organisms, and among communities of universities, there are episodes of innovation and hybridisation, when new forms appear. For universities one of these episodes occurred in the nineteenth century. It was due largely to Wilhelm von Humboldt. The two hundredth anniversary of his birth fell on 22 June, 1967. Not only Germany, but the whole world of learning, is in his debt. Already during the eighteenth century there had been a reawakening of universities in Germany. But the moment of destiny for German higher education was 1810, when Humboldt founded a university in Berlin, dedicated to a fresh concept of humanism. In the generations which followed there were, of course, tensions in ideology : a severe intellectualism displaced the humanism of Humboldt and the idealism of Fichte. Also the German universities from time to time suffered infringements of their autonomy. Nevertheless they became the envy of the western world. Scholars from England and America returned from Berlin or Gottingen enchanted, eager to reform their own institutions of higher education. To pursue learning was to embark upon an adventure. In Liebigs laboratory in Giessen, for example, students came to work from all over Europe. Every student had to find his own way for himself. Liebig and his disciples were to be found in the laboratory from dawn until far into the night. There were no recreations or pleasures outside the institute. The only complaints came from the attendant who in the evenings, when he had to clean, could not get the workers out of the laboratory. This would be a familiar experience in 1967, but it was an exciting innovation in 1839.

The Bernal Lecture, 1971: Science and Antiscience

In his book Science in history Bernal (1954) recalls Robert Hooke’s draft preamble to the Statues of the Royal Society: ‘The business of the Royal Society is: To improve the knowledge of naturall things. . . (not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Morals, Politics, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logicks).’ Bernal’s generous gift to the Society, which we inaugurate this afternoon, is a direct challenge to this attitude. One cannot consider the social function of science without meddling in some of these subjects. The risks of doing so were evident to Bernal himself, for in this same book he sternly criticizes the social sciences; but his conclusion is that the risks must be run; the present condition of mankind requires some scientists to get outside the framework of their science and to influence its interactions with society. In common with thousands of my generation I was driven to think about these matters after reading an earlier book by Bernal (1939): The social function of science, published on the eve of World War II. The last two chapters of that book carried, in the idiom of twentieth-century science, the message of John Donne’s Devotions, written three and a half centuries earlier: ‘No man is an Hand, intire of itself; every man is a peece of the Continent. . . ’ It was not necessary to embrace Bernal’s political views in order to be moved by his concern for mankind.