Organizing Enlightenment

Organizing Enlightenment Organizing Enlightenment Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University CHAD WELLMON Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2015 Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218- 4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wellmon, Chad, 1976– Organizing Enlightenment : information overload and the invention of the modern research university / Chad Wellmon. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4214-1615-1 (hardback) — ISBN 1-4214-1615-8 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4214-1616-8 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-1616-6 (electronic) 1. Universities and colleges—Germany—History—18th century. 2. Universities and colleges—Curricula—Germany—History—18th century. 3. Education, Higher—Germany—History—18th century. 4. Research—Germany—History— 18th century. 5. Enlightenment—Germany. 6. Germany—Intellectual life— 19th century. 7. Education, Higher—Philosophy. I. Title. LA727.W45 2015 378.43—dc23 2014018366 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410- 516- 6936 or [email protected]. Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post- consumer waste, whenever possible. to brooks contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Science as Culture 20 2 The Fractured Empire of Erudition 45 3 Encyclopedia from Book to Practice 77 4 From Bibliography to Ethics 108 5 Kant’s Critical Technology 123 6 The Enlightenment University and Too Many Books 151 7 The University in the Age of Print 182 8 Berlin, Humboldt, and the Research University 210 9 The Disciplinary Self and the Virtues of the Philologist 234 Afterword: Too Many Links 262 Notes 277 Bibliography 317 Index 341 acknowledgments Although my name is on the cover, this book is the product of four years of conversations and collaboration with a whole host of people and insti- tutions. I would especially like to thank my friends and colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and the University of Virginia: Ben Bennett, Tal Brewer, Emily O. Gravett, Jeff Grossman, Bill Hasselberger, James Davison Hunter, Volker Kaiser, Philip Lorish, Lorna Martens, James Mumford, Matthew Puffer, Chuck Mathewes, Allan Megill, Trenton Mer- ricks, Bill McDonald, Jay Tolson, Joe Davis, Sophie Rosenfeld, Rita Felski, Brad Pasanek, Siva Vaidhyannathan, and Josh Yates. I would also like to thank the group of scholars and now friends organized by Tom Mole and Andrew Piper at McGill University as part of the Interacting with Print mul- tigraph project. You all gave me a deep appreciation for the history of the book and print. Ned O’Gorman made this a better book. I would also like to thank my editor Matt McAdam for making me a better thinker and writer. This book would not have been possible were it not for the generosity of an ACLS Charles S. Ryskamp Fellowship. And, finally, I thank Brooks, who remains my best and most loving reader. ix Organizing Enlightenment Introduction n Sunday, June 10, 2012, Helen Dragas, rector of the University of OVirginia’s Board of Visitors, announced that President Teresa Sullivan and the board had “mutually agreed” that Sullivan would resign. Citing a “rapidly changing” higher education environment, Dragas insisted that the university had to change, and fast. In the ensuing weeks, Dragas alluded to unspecified “philosophical differences” as the grounds for Sullivan’s ouster and enumerated a litany of challenges facing U.Va., including the long-term decline in public funding, rising tuition costs, and—crucially—the changing role of technology. I say “crucially” because, as a later Freedom of Information request was to reveal, these “philosophical differences” were actually anxieties about the potentially disruptive effects of digital technologies on the university.1 In a series of e- mails, Dragas exchanged articles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal with fellow board members and well-placed alumni, all touting the revolutionary potential of MOOCs (massive open online courses).2 New digital technologies posed an existential threat to the university. If the University of Virginia did not immediately adapt to the emerging online learning environment, then it would become irrelevant. Just as digital technologies had disrupted and remade the book, music, newspaper, and magazine businesses, so too would they remake the university. But it was not just a cabal of University of Virginia trustees who insisted so breathlessly that the university had to reinvent itself in the image of new digital technologies. The president of Stanford University, John Hennessy, has also declared that “a tsunami is coming” that will wipe away any institution that does not adapt to the new digital reality,3 and former Princeton University president William G. Bowen has predicted that such technologies will transform higher education by controlling costs and increasing pro- ductivity, all while preserving quality and other “core university” values.4 A revolution is upon us: broad access to new digital technologies, argues media 1 scholar Cathy Davidson, has “flattened” how knowledge is disseminated and has made it less a proprietary good of a “credentialed elite” and more the result of an increasingly democratic, collaborative endeavor.5 Changes in digital technologies are not merely tinkering with the tools for distributing knowledge. The very authority structure of the university is at stake. Disci- plinary distinctions, the way scholars are credentialized, how research- based knowledge is carried out—all these may become obsolete.6 These portentous predications belong to an ongoing debate about the raison d’être of the modern research university. Many have chronicled and diagnosed a “crisis” in higher education.7 On the one side are the broad sociological critiques of the contemporary university. Exemplified most re- cently by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift, they cast a pall on the university by focusing on particular problems: low graduation rates, skewed admission policies, indifferent faculty, disengaged students, and uncontrollable costs.8 On the other side are the utopian voices warning that universities face existential threats and calling for intrepid entrepre- neurs to offer bold, salvific solutions. Digital technologies can reinvent the university for the twenty- first century, say these voices.A nd in contradistinc- tion to both these groups are those who defend a tradition of collegiate, resi- dential learning and its celebration of humanist education over the endless accretion of research.9 Finally, there are the democratic arguments. Follow- ing a tradition that extends from Thomas Jefferson’s Rockfish Gap Report through William Harper Rainey’s The University and Democracy to Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit, these authors claim that the university should form democratic citizens.10 The college model extends out to the formation of students for citizenship and civic responsibility by cultivating democratic virtues of sympathy, leadership, a work ethic, and respect for one’s fellow citizens. At their best, this array of arguments offers either incisive, sobering snap- shots of contemporary universities or rousing exhortations about what universities could be, or could return to being. But few of them address a more basic question: What are we talking about when we talk about the modern research university? One of the few books that do address that question is Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. His arguments are now regularly invoked by critics insisting that the university change now. Christensen applies his theory of “disruptive innovation”— innovations that threaten established providers by offering more affordable 2 organizing enlightenment alternatives—to higher education. For the first time since the introduction of the printed textbook, he writes, “there is a new, much less expensive technology for educating students: online learning.”11 In order to survive, universities will have to come to grips with new technologies or risk obsolescence. They will simply work themselves out of a job. But Christensen, unlike some who embrace his theories of disruption, rec- ognizes that the university is not simply another business for which scale and efficiency are paramount. Higher education should not be conflated with other media businesses that distribute information. The research university is not simply a content delivery device; it is an institution unique in its ca- pacity to produce and transmit a knowledge that is distinct and carries with it the stamp of authority. The research university has its own cultural logic and normative structure that allow it to generate and transmit a certain type of authoritative knowledge. It has, as Christensen puts it, a “DNA” that, in the United States at least, has organized it since the late nineteenth century. Since Johns Hopkins was founded in 1871, the American research university has been committed to extricating meaning from knowledge. Daniel Coit Gilman,

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