ABSTRACT
The German higher educational system was widely admired and praised by foreigners and Germans alike under the Empire. Some critics, impressed with the struggles over university reform in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, have also sought the roots of elitist, anti-democratic, and rigidly conservative attitudes toward educational change in the traditions formed in the German universities under the Empire. Many observers looking back on the German Empire from the vantage point of the later twentieth century, and especially after the rise and fall of the National Socialist tyranny, have found many darker strains in the higher educational system. Germany was about on a par with republican France in the percentage of male age cohorts attending institutions of higher learning and was far ahead of England. Beginning with the high standards of scholarship and teaching, one must admit that the foundations of what existed under the Empire had already been built quietly before it.
