ABSTRACT
This chapter studies the period between 1750 and 1800 when universities in the German territories were no longer conceived of as historically grown corporations, but instead depicted more and more often as public institutions. Yet it was not a focus on original research that dominated this language of university reform in the age of enlightenment. The call for efficient instruction of future jurists, pastors, physicians and teachers prevailed, concerning not only the time/quality-ratio of the individual intellectual training, but also the cost/benefit-ratio for society. Some authors even demanded the abolition of the existing universities. The creation of new specialized colleges for each discipline appeared to be easier than to deal with the age-old Hohe Schulen. To gain the upper hand in this process pro-reform authors developed their own language, i.e. a new vocabulary to describe the universities and new sets of arguments on what the purpose of a university should be. It was this language of reform – subordinating the institutional structure and the subjects taught at the universities to the unquestioned aim of usefulness – that became so predominant around 1800 that it eventually triggered a discursive counterattack: the birth of the ideology of Wissenschaft and Bildung by German philosophers.
