Classroom as Crucible in the Humboldtian University: Reply to Collin

Finn Collin (2024) has written, per usual, a very perceptive critical review of my latest book, which is about reviving the Humboldtian university (Fuller 2023). Consider three issues that he poses as dialectical tensions in my work:

(1) the relationship between the development of the individual human (Bildung) and the development of humanity as possible missions of the Humboldtian university;

They are more interconnected than might be supposed, especially if we focus on the instructor-student relationship in the Humboldtian classroom. And make no mistake, the classroom is the crucible in which Humboldtian knowledge is forged. Humboldt famously defended an ideal of “academic freedom” that consists in the freedom to teach (Lehrfreiheit) and the freedom to learn (Lernfreiheit). The most natural way to understand these two freedoms is as pertaining to the instructor and the student, respectively. It certainly helps to explain Max Weber’s concerns that lecturers conduct themselves to provide students the space to question received wisdom and pursue their own lines of inquiry. It also conforms to the idea of education as personal development, or Bildung, which Humboldt certainly did not deny. However, he also meant something deeper: Humboldt effectively equated research and learning. Research is about placing yourself in an open relationship to the world to be able to see new things about it. St. Augustine regarded this as the path to understanding God, and 1500 years later his French follower Louis Pasteur adapted it to characterize the process of scientific discovery. (The French word recherche captures this sense well.) It amounts to teachers casting themselves as learners by presenting their field of research as an open horizon with many unexplored possibilities awaiting fellow travelers. The German idealist philosophers who led the early Humboldtian university were “teacher-learners” in that sense, and it contributed to the mystique of “Romanticism” surrounding them.

However, in many respects, all this goes against the tenor of what research meant before Humboldt’s institutional innovation and has come to mean in more recent times. Of course, we nowadays easily—and of course, rightly—bemoan the dissolution of the Humboldtian academic settlement, as research and teaching have become mutually alienated activities done by increasingly different people. Since the advent of what visionary University of California President Clark Kerr called “multiversity” in the early 1960s, the idea that a “good researcher” and a “good teacher” require different skill sets has become more widely accepted (Kerr 1963). However, this idea is intuitive only if research is seen as an intrinsically esoteric activity that is pursued by a few specially trained people. In that case, even when teachers are active researchers, they “vulgarize” their knowledge in the classroom when they do not require students to retrace the steps of their own inquiry or express what they have learned in the technical language of the original research; hence the love-hate relationship that academics have always had with textbooks. In effect, despite its seeming novelty, Kerr’s multiversity—and the “knowledge economy” discourse of the following generation—returns to the pre-Humboldtian presumption that teaching is mainly about societal reproduction, which is dictated by the needs of the day, while research is the privileged domain of those sufficiently brave and competent to pursue a form of knowledge whose “depth” is oriented to a longer time frame than what can be afforded by “mere” credentials. While we are likely now to think about the technical achievements of the natural sciences in this context, it is also the worldview that joined Plato, Averroes, Diderot, and Leo Strauss in an underground double-coded conversation that crossed generations, continents, and disciplines (Melzer 2014).

But it is worth stressing just how much Humboldt opposed research esotericism, regardless of whether scientists or humanists practiced it. The modern sites of university instruction—the laboratory and the seminar—were products of the Humboldtian turn in higher education. In both cases, knowledge is simultaneously imparted and discovered, as teachers and students work together to make sense of new phenomena—say, a new manuscript unearthed from the archives, or a new species recovered from the field. In these contexts, the teacher leads the way but does not necessarily make the crucial discoveries. Often a student, less encumbered by the teacher’s preconceptions, sees through to the heart of matter. To be sure, this process—including the student contribution—has been increasingly occluded by the various linguistic transformations that are required by the academic publication system to translate the context of discovery into something “justified” on which others can reliably build. Indeed, the famed laboratory ethnographies that founded Science and Technology Studies were initially so controversial simply because they decoded this process for all to see (Knorr-Cetina 1981; Latour and Woolgar 1979).

It turns out that a half-century earlier, no less than H. G. Wells (1928) called on scientifically literate and politically informed peoples of the world to form an “open conspiracy” to overturn the default settings in the world’s socio-economic arrangements that prevent humanity from fully exploiting the fruits of their collectively hard-won knowledge. Wells, who is nowadays often seen as an intellectual godfather of the internet because of his proposal of a “world-brain” (basically a technologically enhanced way of interconnecting all the world’s libraries and data bases), thought of this conspiracy as a self-organizing mass propaganda campaign. While one might wonder whether he would recognize our post-truth condition as the spawn of his dreams, at the time he was clearly offering a riposte to the Leninist view that revolutions need to be led by a vanguard elite who gestate in secrecy. Wells was trying to make good on the young Marx’s famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, “Philosophers have so far only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” It amounts to taking the Humboldtian academic manner from the classroom to the streets, which of course Marx, like other products of Humboldtian education, did. And while the student revolt movements of the 1960s mimicked some of the tactics of organized labor in ways that would have been beneath Wells, they retained many signature Humboldtian student practices, including pamphleteering and teach-ins as expressions of Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit.

But can the university as such—that is, not simply as self-organizing groups of faculty and students—regain its cutting edge as a revolutionary institution; or is its best hope a continuation of Clark Kerr’s long march to the multiversity, whereby the university becomes an ever more complex, functionally differentiated organization that aims to do all things for all people? In earlier work, I discussed how the ancient English universities Oxford and Cambridge, which never had a proper “Humboldtian” moment, reinvented themselves after the Industrial Revolution by effectively adopting a “second order” position of certifying the “scientific” status of knowledge gained by technological and other practical means (Fuller 2016, chap. 1). So, even if academics do not provide the bulk of the game-changing inventions, they are nevertheless needed to explain and delimit their workings. This served to recast academics as honest brokers of new knowledge claims and reliable guides to future innovations. However, the charm of this strategy has worn off in our post-truth time. After all, if nothing else, post-truth is about leveling the sort of epistemic hierarchy that Oxbridge had managed to re-establish for itself by the end of the nineteenth century. In this context, “Humboldt 2.0” suggests a twofold prospectus for the university: One aspect is already familiar from Max Weber’s self-critical approach to lecturing, which allowed students to draw different conclusions from the same premises. However, another aspect—which Fuller (2023) stresses—involves the reverse motion of teaching how the same conclusions can be reached by alternative means. The point here would be to break the academically maintained monopoly enjoyed by expertise in the wider society that is associated with learning things in a “properly disciplined” way. It is, as Collin rightly notes, what I have long decried as the intellectual equivalent of what both Ricardo and Marx decried as rentiership (Fuller 2016, chap. 1; 2023, chap. 5). And this requires nothing less than a sea change in the manner of academic self-presentation in the classroom. For students to learn to speak for themselves, their lecturers must first speak in a way that provides a model for them.