190076 SE Bachelor's Paper II (2020W)

The central aim of this seminar is to investigate and discuss the development of the higher education landscape in Europe and beyond, in the course of the 19th and 20th century. The Napoleonic and Humboldtian reforms (c. 1800) in respectively France and Germany count as the starting point for an analysis of the crystallization and consequent diffusion of these so-called university ‘models’. More in particular, the focus will be on frictions and struggles that forced these models to adapt to meet changing social and political demands within the national context, but also to meet the specificity of the cultural context of other nations in Europe and on other continents. Even more specifically, attention will be paid to the challenge that technology, the ‘practical arts’, and manufacture posed to established conceptions of the university and how they acquired a place inside of or at least on the same level as the university within the higher education hierarchies (a place that nowadays seems to be taken for granted). These more ‘applied’ disciplines threatened the character of the university as an institution for the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake from within the national context. Established ideas of the university, however, were not only forced to adjust to changing social and cultural norms within a national context, also the implementation of specific university models in other – colonial and postcolonial – contexts produced moments of friction which necessitated specific adjustments or reforms (and which today still resonate in the call to decolonize the university). In that sense, students preparing their Bachelor’s thesis during this seminar could work on (1) the impact of science and technology on established conceptions of the university (e.g., the history of the laboratory as a site of higher education); (2) the implementation of European university models in (post-)colonial contexts (e.g., the French model and reform movement in South-America); or (3) a combination of both interests (e.g., the land-grant movement and the influence of the German research university in the US).