How Prussia Invented Academic Freedom
Freedom was one of the founding principles of the modern research university that originated in the early nineteenth century in Germany. Coming on the heels of the French Revolution it celebrated the individual that had freed itself from the dictate of worldly and otherworldly leaders — kings, priests, and popes — and remained deeply suspicious of authority. Personal autonomy was the ultimate learning outcome. And as the era of Romanticism was in full swing, “learning what’s known” was replaced in the curriculum by “longing for the unknown,” which meant everybody had to become their own explorer. Students embarked on this self-guided formative journey in Einsamkeit und Freiheit (solitude and freedom) undisturbed by cohort, classroom, and counseling experiences. Funny that this anarchical, leaderless model of higher education was invented in Berlin, the capital of the Prussian kingdom, which is more remembered for its merciless military discipline than anti-authoritarian impulses. Academic freedom also meant that although the king was the namesake of the new Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, His Majesty wasn’t allowed to mess with its faculty or students and had to stay out of the university’s business.
This thrill of freedom is what I remember most vividly from my first days as Doktorand (doctoral candidate) at Heinrich Heine University in Germany. Classes, lectures, and mandatory seminars were suddenly a thing of the past. Instead, my future advisor had given me three possible thesis topics, suggested to pick one and then see him again in three years. Or so went the conversation because he didn’t have much time and a plane to catch. Each one of these topics seemed alarmingly far from this professor’s own work and expertise — that part was more daunting than thrilling. I knew I could probably write a decent thesis, but to get there I had to design and carry out experiments with my own hands, which were clearly better at holding a pen than a pipette or any other lab equipment. And I mean “pen” because that was the most widely used word processor in 1982. Clearly, I needed some training, but how, when, and where I would get that, was completely up to me. Since university attendance was free and students weren’t charged tuition, making me sit in a classroom wouldn’t have increased the university’s bottom line. So, it didn’t matter to the institution if I went to a seminar, read a book, or had a one-on-one tutorial with my advisor (when he happened to not be in the air) or any other faculty member. Or if I went to another lab at another university in another country to learn how to put those delicate enzymes into a test tube without killing them. And going to another lab was what I ended up doing after running into someone from Graz, Austria, at my first conference who had much more experience with muscle proteins than I did — and no, it wasn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger. But it might as well have been because my time as Doktorand was full of surprises and unexpected turns. Degree plans didn’t exist, because at the time nobody thought that discoveries were plannable. I was told to follow my curiosity, not the graduate school handbook because there was none — not even a graduate school. There was only old school. Learning goals? Autonomy and independence — nothing had really changed since the days of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the mastermind and government administrator (!) behind Prussia’s education reform in the early 1800s. Instead of having to take classes at my own university I was supposed to build my own cohort of fellow researchers who struggled with similar questions or worked in a related field, no matter where in the academic universe. With communication tools that had already been around when Germany’s Max Planck Institutes were still named after Kaiser Wilhelm: mail (the kind with stamps), telephone and the occasional in-person chat at conferences. What’s so hard to believe in hindsight is that it worked beautifully, probably because people weren’t distracted from meaningful communication by having to comb through their daily deluge of emails.
Who came up with the idea of squeezing into a “PhD program” what used to be a highly individual journey to one’s doctorate? Probably an administrator with a major in education theory and a minor in economics. To me applying for a “program” sounds like signing up for a guided tour through academia rather than independent research. And I find it heavily ironic that for making original, novel, and hopefully publishable contributions, young and aspiring scholars must join a “program,” which translates from Greek as “prewritten.” Corralling PhD students into structured programs that lay out required (i.e., tuition generating) courses is obviously good for business. To many students however, particularly those who are more advanced or already have a master’s degree, it feels more like busy work and a boring waste of time. At least that was the impression I got during my tenure as graduate dean. When asked about research opportunities in their programs, most PhD students would answer, “Too little, too late.” They would point out to me how much time they had to spend in their first year(s) on “getting requirements out of the way” and how this prevented them from getting a taste of independent research early on. What they got instead had the flavor of managed care.
Today, academic freedom in the United States is not just under assault by political forces outside the academy that try to restrict the independence of faculty and suppress their voice as most recently seen at the University of Florida (an institution hat seems to live in pre-Prussian times). Academic freedom, as I understand it, also includes the freedom for students, PhD and otherwise, to freely choose their path whether it creates revenue for the university or not. And that’s the kind of freedom that neither thrills our mushrooming university bureaucracies nor education theory majors with a minor in economics.
Henning Schroeder is a former vice provost and dean of graduate education at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.
