ABSTRACT
Writing in 1968, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman said in a study of American higher education: “The American graduate school has become the envy of the world, a mecca for foreign students and a model for foreign institutions.”1 Jencks’s and Riesman’s statement echoes the sentiments of students, scholars, and policy makers in the United States and abroad. Like no other institution of higher education, the American university attracts scientific talent from all over the world. Like no other, it is a symbol of individual opportunity and the advancement of discovery. According to the eminent sociologist of science, Joseph Ben-David, the American university has succeeded the German university as the center of world science.2 Yet, the modern American university is only a little more than a hundred years old. And no other institution looms as large in its creation as does the German university. As Abraham Flexner, first director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, put it in an assessment of the role of the German university: “. . . from it [the German university] has sprung the graduate school of the new world; to it industry and health and every conceivable practical activity are infinitely indebted.”3
