The development of universities and public research institutions: a historical overview of its role in technological and economic catch up Roberto Mazzoleni∗ Department of Economics and Geography Hofstra University Hempstead, NY 11549 - USA 1. Introduction Gerschenkron (1962) popularized a characterization of the economic development of countries behind the technological frontier as a process of “catching up” with the leading economies. According to this view, the transformation of physical and social technologies in a developing economy is facilitated by the absorption of technological, scientific, and institutional knowledge originating from more advanced economies. A critical concern is the extent to which such knowledge can be absorbed and acted upon, an outcome influenced by what Abramovitz (1986) has termed social capability. A central focus of research on economic development should be therefore an investigation of the institutions and processes that have played a significant role in enabling the flow of knowledge from advanced to developing regions. Among them, there are strong reasons to believe that universities (or more generally, higher education institutions) and public research institutes have been particularly important. The possibility that universities and other educational and research institutions could play an important role in promoting economic development was not lost on nineteenth century policy makers. So common was this belief that it has to be one of the key explanatory factors for the international diffusion of higher education institutions since the nineteenth century. Indeed, the organization of a national system of higher education and public research is arguably an important, though often neglected, aspect of the diffusion of social technologies underlying the catch up process. But to use the word diffusion in this context is a particularly precarious rhetorical exercise in light of the existing differences among national academic institutions. Far from being the result of a process of mere imitation, the historical development of these ∗ E-mail: [email protected], Tel: (516)-463-5593. 1 institutions is characterized by a considerable amount of trial-and-error adaptation in response to a variety of influences, only part of which were common to all countries. On the basis of the research conducted so far, it can be argued that local influences go a long way toward explaining the variety in the patterns of organization of the university systems and research infrastructure that have emerged in different countries. Such variety and the processes that brought it about do appear to be important phenomena, that ought to be kept in sight while evaluating the contributions made by the emerging systems of higher education and research to the diffusion of technological knowledge (through inward transfer or otherwise), and hence to the economic catch up of the home country. These contributions are primarily dependent on the relationship between the knowledge provided to students and others through educational programs and extension services, and the knowledge and skills that are relevant to the implementation of physical and social technologies associated with economic development. Today, a broad range of technologies can be said to have a base in scientific knowledge. However, recent surveys of science-technology interactions indicate that they vary considerably across fields of technology and tend to be distinctively stronger in the applied sciences and engineering than in the pure sciences (Klevorick et al., 1995; Cohen et al., 2002). These contemporary findings have a historical counterpart in the different degree to which the evolution of nineteenth century industrial technologies benefited from scientific results and methods. Thus, while the production of organic chemicals, refrigeration and electrical equipment have been held to represent the earliest science-based industries, important developments in the mechanical engineering industries and the iron and steel industry occurred quite independently of significant advances in the relevant scientific knowledge. The emerging pattern of linkages between science and technology during the nineteenth century will be an important background to this paper’s discussion of the development of universities and research institutions. While the two are related, the latter cannot be exclusively understood in light of the former. Indeed, the idea that universities ought to be concerned with the application of science to practical problems, or with the nature of technology, was a matter of debate for a 2 long time. Likewise, important characteristics of professional school programs at the level comparable to universities, including the balance between practical work and classroom lectures or the depth and range of the education in the sciences and humanities built into the curriculum, were debated and decided upon in different ways in different places and at different times. An important purpose of the discussion to follow is to illustrate the emergence of national patterns and the pathways of cross-country influences in the nineteenth century development of the academic systems in Germany, France, the U.S. and Japan. 2. School learning and national absorptive capacity: perspectives from the nineteenth century Contemporary discussions of the nature of firms’ technological knowledge highlight the differences among technologies with respect to the importance of tacit elements that make its transfer a costly and uncertain activity and the degree to which their advance relies upon knowledge associated with fields of science and engineering. An important implication of these empirical facts is that there are significant differences among technologies in the extent to which it is possible to learn about them in a school environment. While the nineteenth century technologies differ considerably in terms of the two characteristics highlighted above, similar propositions about the empirical facts and the implication drawn above could be formulated legitimately. Thus, the important historical question is: how much did the development of educational institutions contribute to the ability of individuals and firms in catch-up economies to learn about existing technology and to acquire the competence necessary to its implementation? Recent historical research has been rather bearish on the role played by universities and other educational institutions in the industrialization of continental Europe (Wengenroth, 2000). However, this broad characterization ought to be qualified in a couple of ways. First, adequate answers to the question must reflect the heterogeneous characteristics of different industrial technologies. Thus, what appears to have been true of chemical industry need not be true of the sewing machine industry, and so on. While general assessments are not necessarily without value, they should not obfuscate the importance of inter-industry differences. Second, it is not clear whether or not the weak support provided by higher education institutions to 3 industrial development is the result of poor institutions or of an insurmountable gap between school-based learning and technological practice. These qualifications acquire greater significance when we observe that the nineteenth century witnessed significant changes in the nature of the school environment within which knowledge about technologies was putatively imparted. Understanding the motives for these changes and the reasons for the cross-country variation in the design of the relevant institutions appears to be a useful undertaking if we are to understand what characteristics of such institutions may contribute to a developing country’s absorptive capacity vis-à-vis foreign technology. In this regard, it appears that restricting the analysis to the contribution that scientific knowledge originating from universities and similar institutions has made to industrial development may overlook the variety of forms of knowledge that were relevant to industrial practice and potential subject for higher level educational programs. In his recent book, The Gifts of Athena (2002), Joel Mokyr argues that the rapid increase in prescriptive knowledge (knowledge about techniques) during the last three centuries was aided considerably by the concurrent growth in the stock of propositional knowledge (a body of knowledge about natural phenomena and regularities including but not limited to scientific knowledge), and the growing diffusion of propositional knowledge among individuals. Mokyr’s proposed distinction between propositional knowledge and scientific knowledge can be complemented with the distinction between generic knowledge and localized body of practice as components of technology in Nelson (1990). By reference to these concepts, it could be argued that the higher education systems of different countries differed in terms of the extent to which they contributed to the diffusion of propositional knowledge other than purely scientific knowledge, and the extent to which they communicated prescriptive knowledge and practical knowledge to their students. These characteristics of the system were not settled once and for all. It is perhaps useful to remark upon the fact that the natural sciences became a generally accepted area of teaching and research at universities only after the reform of the German universities begun in 1810 in Berlin according to the vision of Alexander von Humboldt, then Education 4