Universities are really fond of birthday parties, especially theirs: in this strange tribe of institutions, status comes mainly with age. Anniversary celebrations can therefore be sumptuous, almost akin to potlatch: when the University of Cambridge blew out its eight-hundredth birthday candle in 2009, no one could ignore it – especially its little sister Harvard University, who decided ‘coincidentally’ to celebrate a rather curious three-hundred-and-seventy-fifth birthday two years later. But why should historians get involved? Or even feel concerned? Is there more to expect from those celebrations than magnificent but Whiggish volumes, full of idealized remembrances and clever branding? Such are the issues at stake in this original and enlightening collection of essays edited by Pieter Dhondt.

First and foremost, historians can see their involvement in those jubilees as part of their professional duties: researching and writing its own history has always been one of the tasks of the university, and professional historians are in the best position to provide a reassessment of its ‘glorious past’ in a critical way. In his brilliant historiographical introduction, Pieter Dhondt shows how the traditional jubilee history became more than a weapon of propaganda, with the emergence of university history as a scientific field in its own right, broadening its geographical, thematic and chronological horizons – even if this emancipation is still largely in statu nascendi.

The first part of the book intends to reinforce such an emancipation by reflexively focusing on the history of the relationship between university jubilees and history writing: in order to do so, it explores the many political interpretations of such celebrations through four case studies. Marek Ďurčanský and Pieter Dhondt show in an enlightening first chapter how the outcome of the jubilees of Charles University in Prague in 1848 and 1948 have been deeply troubled and instrumentalized by unexpected external political events – namely the Spring of Nations and the communist coup d’état respectively. By contrast, the centenary of the Royal Frederik University in Oslo in 1911, analysed by Jorunn Sem Fure, saw serious political strife arise inside academia, as competitive narratives describe this university either as an institution for the education of the people or as a research institution. The debate was nourished by a second dilemma on the role of university as a major nation-building institution or as primarily contributing to the international scientific community. Although she doesn't deal with university jubilees as such, Trude Maurer describes precisely how history writing can be used to enforce the general message intended by political authorities through a comparative study of commemorations of the anti-Napoleonic wars and celebrations of dynastic jubilees in 1913 in Russian and German universities. In the last chapter of Part I, Ana-Maria Stan compares Cluj Romanian University's numerous jubilees from 1919 to 2009: she underlines how celebrations shaped the university's specific and fragmented institutional identity, outlining continuities and fractures, often determined by successive political regimes.

Part II goes further and discusses two recent experiences of university history writing on a jubilee occasion. In this regard the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), celebrating its centenary in 2010, functions as a typical example of an institution struggling over which parts of the history ought to be treated and which period to be focused on, as is shown finely by Thomas Brandt: the NTNU results from the 1995 merger of a former regional university and the Norwegian Institute of Technology and is still searching for its own identity between two competing traditions. The experiences in Leipzig, on the occasion of its six-hundredth anniversary in 2009, analysed by Jonas Flöter, emphasize the kind of glorious rhetoric that seems to be embedded within this type of jubilee history writing. Up to that point, the historiographical prospects seem rather bleak: university history writing as part of the jubilee appears to be by nature limited to a monographic scope and a celebratory tone – even if it benefits from strong institutional support and may be factually and scientifically sound.

But university history can – and should – counterattack: Part III aims to offer three ways of emancipation. In his very fine and synthetic essay, Johan Östling shows how German universities dealt with the Humboldtian heritage between 1810 and 1945, bound up with the jubilee tradition, and insists on the development of a salutary academic self-understanding. Johan Östling questions, for example, the originality of Wilhelm von Humboldt's idea of a university and underlines the fundamental role of the rediscovery of his theoretical work in 1910, during the first centenary of the university of Berlin – a typical case of mostly invented tradition. The case of French universities, analysed in Emmanuelle Picard's brilliant chapter, is most specific: their jubilee history tradition is especially weak, due to several ruptures from the French Revolution up to the events of 1968, and to the national structure of the teaching profession; as a consequence, the history of French universities remains largely unwritten. As an alternative she describes the collaborative large-scale prosopographic project on the academic teaching profession that started in 2011, in order to foster a genuine social history of academia between 1800 and 1940. In the closing chapter, Pieter Dhondt explains what university history as a sub-discipline could gain by discussing more often the methodological and conceptual approaches of the institutionally stronger field of history of education – such as a larger variety of visual and material sources, and conceptual frameworks like classroom history, segmentation and grammar of schooling. Yet two historical disciplines can play at that game: universities are seats of education and science. Sadly, it seems that Dhondt and his contributors forget a major potential ally in their quest for an emancipated university history: our beloved history of science. Nevertheless, their book is rewarding and useful: let us hope it paves the way to an even more independent but fully integrated university history.