ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the emergence of the modern research university at the Fin De Siecle and the central place held in it from its origins by the human sciences – especially sociology, anthropology and history, but with ancillary places for geography, political economy and psychology. The modern research university is commonly held to date from 1810 when the Prussian educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt founded the University of Berlin. The financial and intellectual success of the experiment led to the endowment of a series of world-class research universities that laid the foundation for the United States’ twentieth-century domination of global higher education, notably Stanford in 1891 and Chicago in 1892. Human scientists tended to see themselves as a special kind of scientist: ones who despite their specialization had a new entitlement to speak to wider publics. ‘Culture’ offered the new discipline a chance to break away from anatomy and to refound itself on a discrete basis.
