ABSTRACT
The idea that research had to be an important part of higher education was the distinguishing characteristic of the nineteenth-century German university. Recent critics of the research university have drawn attention to the more intrinsic problem of potential incompatibility between excellence in teaching, especially of undergraduates, and excellence in research. The French experiment was discontinued in the later Napoleonic period. It is difficult to decide whether this failure was due to political conditions or whether the encyclopedist program was unrealizable. The original German idea of the unity of research and teaching was not so different from the French one. Even in the very beginning there were fields of professional study that did not lend themselves to such unification. All the universities considered their foremost task the effective training of students for their intended careers. In the provincial universities, this meant training for the old and new "learned" professions.
