ABSTRACT
Between about 1860 and the 1940s German and American higher education developed intensely and in highly symbiotic ways. The “research university” emerging in Germany in the late nineteenth century attracted American students and admirers seeking to go beyond the traditional limits of colonial “college” models, resulting in adaptations by both old and new American universities. By the eve of World War I, however, German universities had begun to lose their quasi-monopoly on higher education as well as scientific and scholarly research. Harshly diverging postwar economic, social and political experiences promoted the crystallization and expansion of a unique American model of the research university while Germany’s world leadership was largely lost. This chapter seeks to analyze the turn in mutual awareness and influence between an era of relative indifference in the early nineteenth century through a high point of American adaptation by its end, adumbrating a final turn in the 1960s toward American influence on the restructuring of German higher education (not included here).
