That knowledge shapes power, and vice versa, is perhaps a trite statement in a post-truth world. But the relationship between the pursuit and creation of knowledge on one hand, and the rise and fall of geopolitical eminence on the other, still remains a live question in both scholarly and public discourse. It’s a question that William Kirby confronts in his sprawling history of modern universities, which places the trials and tribulations of contemporary American universities in world-historical context.
Kirby begins his panorama with the emergence of the modern research institution in early nineteenth-century Germany. Before then, German education was a modest, esoteric endeavor that sought to relay knowledge from one generation to the next. Thinkers such as Leibniz thought Enlightenment-era higher education, like serfdom, was a stale relic of a medieval past. Though some bright spots dotted the educational landscape, the German model as we know it did not emerge until philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt oversaw the development of the University of Berlin in the early 1800s. Three principles anchored Humboldt’s plan for Berlin: the dual goals of both teaching and production of original research, the relative protection of academic autonomy from state intrusion, and a unified arts and sciences curriculum taught by a core faculty. Maintaining the virtues of liberal arts education would prove elusive from the start, and political imperatives often interfered with Humboldt’s vision of university life and free academic discourse. Nevertheless, by the dawn of the twentieth century, Berlin had become an international hub “for scholars and scientists and the center of a thriving academic community.” (p. 40).
This story comprises the bulk of the first third (chapters 1-3) of Empires of Ideas. The second part of Kirby’s book (chapters 4-7) turns toward universities in the United States during the so-called American century. Against the backdrop of mammoth transformations to political economy during the Gilded Age — industrialization, urbanization, and swelling state and economic institutions — private financiers and university leadership eyed the German model as a blueprint for developing higher education. First with Johns Hopkins University (1876) and later with the University of Chicago (1890) and Stanford (1885), higher education emulated the excellence of German institutions by prioritizing research, undergraduate and graduate education, and political autonomy. Meanwhile, Harvard under the leadership of President Charles Eliot transformed itself from a provincial academy for the New England elite into a world-class institution that attracted faculty, students, and funding from across the globe. During and immediately after the Second World War, American universities received both an influx of émigré talent from Germany as a result of fascist political pressures abroad and increased financial support from the U.S. state. By the start of the Cold War, American universities no longer looked abroad for exemplars.
In higher education, as in geopolitics, power ebbs and flows. The final third of the book (chapters 8-11) examines the recent rise of mass education in China and an accompanying uptick in the quality of Chinese institutions like Tsinghua, Peking, and Nanjing Universities. Higher education in China was originally an outgrowth of the civil service examination, which required study of “the classics of Chinese civilization that set out principles of human behavior that servants of the state were to follow” (p. 237). In China, as in Germany, education existed mainly to relay existing wisdom from one generation to the next. But in late Qing and Republican China (about 1901 to 1949), as higher education in Europe and the United States bloomed, China developed “a vibrant and diverse, if small, system of higher education on international standards,” with architecture and curricula that drew inspiration from abroad (p. 243). Although state repression from Mao Zedong’s “Cultural Revolution” threatened to crush China’s universities, the ensuing reforms of the 1980s granted postsecondary institutions a greater degree of insulation from political intervention. By the twenty-first century, Chinese institutions climbed to the top of every system for evaluating higher education — including U.S. News and World Report, the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Academic Ranking of World Universities, and the QS World University Rankings.
Kirby hangs this sweeping narrative onto eight case studies, each with their own unique revelations about the past, present, and future of higher education. His chapter on UC Berkeley offers a dire warning about ungovernability and resource privation in American public universities. Meanwhile, Duke University, where long-term strategic planning is more than just a rote “bureaucratic exercise” (p. 207), might provide useful clues for leadership in the United States. These longue durée institutional biographies function both as stand-alone narrative histories as well as pieces of a much larger puzzle. “In this book, each university,” notes Kirby, “is rooted in a larger system, but each has its own, distinctive narrative, its own character, and its own concerns.” (p. 5).
Despite the variety of each episode, several common themes emerge from the grand narrative. First, the ingredients of “world-class” universities have remained relatively stable. Excellent universities tend to prize general education (Bildung in Germany; tongshi jiaoyu in China). Second, they remain committed not to enforcing a sense of Kadavergehorsamkeit (corpse-like obedience) in students and faculty, but to Wissenschaft (the pursuit of knowledge). Third, although never fully autonomous, they enjoy a degree of relative insulation from political intrusion. Conversely, the quality of universities sharply declines in contexts of illiberal governance, as exemplified by University of Berlin during the Second World War and Tsinghua during the Cultural Revolution.
Empires of Ideas has two central goals. First, Kirby aims to provide a comparative history of eminent universities among three major world powers. While this narrative does not masquerade as geopolitical history, the author nevertheless reveals that these universities are enmeshed in networks of international cooperation and competition. For instance, tenure awards at Tsinghua privilege faculty with foreign PhDs and publications in international journals. As the United States experienced when it became a refuge for émigré intellectuals, so have international scholars improved Tsinghua’s standards and reputation. The careful reader will find other examples of parallel developments across the borders of space and time, but the tidy case-study model that Kirby uses to narrate the history of the modern research university occasionally disguises that history’s transnational sprawl and struggles to make such connections.
Kirby’s second goal is to offer an historically informed guide for administrators and university leadership to help improve the international standing of their institutions. Empires of Ideas may indeed contain many interesting nuggets of wisdom for this intended audience. But Kirby’s study raises more elemental questions about our current obsession with ranking systems and global reputation tables. Whether the prestige-focused ‘race to the top’ may do more harm than good is only occasionally considered in the book, but it’s a question worth keeping in mind as we confront resource privation in higher education.
These points notwithstanding, Kirby offers an excellent, thorough historical account of the modern research institution told through eight case studies. Its informative chapters successfully place the contemporary moment in higher education in the longue durée of postsecondary education – a story that, after two hundred years, is still unfolding.
