SOLAPADO (OVERLAP)

A.M.Tuchman, ‘Experimental Physiology, Medical Reform and the Politics of Education at the University of Heidelberg: A Case Study’, Bulletin of the Historv of Medicine. 61 (1987), 203-15, p.204.

D.Cahan, ‘The Institutional Revolution in German Physics, 1865-1914’, Historical Studies in the Phvsical and Biological Sciences. 15 (1985), 1-65, pp.38-44.

Clark. Research Foundations, p. 10. Geioer. To Advance Knowledge, p.2. Clark. Research Foundations, p.227.

to stress that the changes instituted in the organisation of teaching and research in Britain and America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and early 1900s ‘reflected the most advanced, and not the actual state of affairs', in the German

universities/^^ The Humboldtian ideal was therefore further refined (and distorted) as universities throughout Britain and North America tried to emulate the achievements of their German counterparts and colleagues. But the concept of a dual commitment to teaching and research sur\A\/edi, and achieved a new significance in the United States. As Burton Clark explains, Johns Hopkins is widely regarded as being the ‘prototype and propagator of research as a major university function’,^^® but Michael Dennis insists that ‘the University’s primary role was pedagogical’.^^® Its first

president, Daniel Coit Gilman, was insistent that ‘teaching remained the university’s first task’, and Owen Hathaway and Larry Owens have observed that Gilman

(merely) replaced the traditional forms of College discipline with the ‘discipline’ of the laboratory and seminar, while retaining the goal of making ‘worthy citizens’:

The Laboratory and seminar prepared individuals to work and live as members of organized groups in the developing national society. Laboratories and seminars were pedagogical innovations emphasizing cooperation. Through their work with each other and their teachers, students experienced a model of ‘social harmony’. The value of science lay in the methods of producing scientific knowledge, not the content of such knowledge . . . . Exposed to the methods of science through their laboratory experiences the college student emerged prepared for life in a dynamic and turbulent worid.’^°

Michael Dennis therefore concludes: ‘Research and teaching were bound together, the latter more important than the former, even at the University where historians most want to locate the origins of the research spirit’.^^^

As Joseph Ben-David explains. Advanced students visiting Germany in great numbers starting from the 1860s usually chose the most famous teachers and the best institutes, and were treated with special consideration. Thus they returned home with an image of research and training practice that was far superior to and far more liberal than what generally prevailed in Germany’. Joseph Ben-David. Fundamental Research and the Universities: Some Comments on

International Differences (Paris: OECD, 1968), p.36. Clark. Research Foundations, p.227.

Dennis, "Accounting for Research’, p.494.

Owen Hathaway, ‘The German Model of Chemical Education in America: Ira Remsen at Johns Hopkins (1876-1913)’, Ambix. 23 (1976), 145-64; Larry Owen, “‘Pure and Sound Government” Laboratories, Gymnasia and Playing Fields in Nineteenth Century America’, J§is, 76 (1985), 182- 94; D.Holiinger, Inquiry and Uplift: Late Nineteenth-Century Academics and the Moral Efficacy of Scientific Practice’, in T.Haskeii, ed.. The Authoritv of Experts (Bioominaton: Indiana University Press, 1984).

Aims and Objectives

The extensive secondary literature on Germany and the United States further highlights the inadequacy of the existing material on the emergence of the research university in this country. Historians have quite simply failed to explain the origins and development of the modern conception of the British university as a place of teaching and research. Generations of declinist historians have been over-critical and ahistorical in condemning Britain's universities as failures as centres of research in the late nineteenth century; but few anti-declinists have addressed this question in any sort of detail, and the authors of the various celebratory volumes that chart the illustrious histories of particular universities and colleges, have been similarly over- zealous in suggesting that a great deal of important research was being conducted within the walls of most of Britain’s leading universities by the end of the nineteenth century. Most problematically, none of these accounts fully grasp the significance of the close - almost symbiotic - relationship that exists between the pedagogical and research functions of the modern British university. However, the growing body of literature on the history of university education in Germany and North America, and on the emergence of research schools in certain British universities and colleges, does suggest a possible strategy for investigating the origins and development of the research university in Britain, based on local studies of particular universities, colleges, departments and laboratories. The principal aim of this thesis is therefore to put the speculation and generalisations of other historians to one side, and attempt to explain precisely how and why one particular university institution began to reinvent itself as a centre for teaching and research in the late 1890s and early years of the twentieth century.

This historiographical review has also demonstrated that the University of London is largely absent from the existing secondary literature on Britain’s

universities and the rise of research, particularly from the declinist account. However, there is some evidence to suggest that the experience of the London colleges was unique in Britain in this period, and it has been argued that the University of London played a pioneering role in the introduction of the research university in this country.'^

Thompson, Universitv of London, pp.xiv-ix. See also Sanderson, 'University of London and Industrial Progress’, and Simpson, Ph.D.. pp.90-2.

It is therefore hoped that the present study of the organisation, ethos and work of one of the leading London colleges will go some way towards making good this gap in the historiography.

This investigation will take the form of a detailed re-examination of the

development of government policy towards Britain's universities and colleges in this period, based on the analysis of the government papers relating to the

Parliamentary Grant-in-Aid to University Colleges in Great Britain; a brief review of the administrative history of UCL and the University of London, focussing in particular on the College Council and its changing conception of the role and function of the College; and a more detailed investigation of the work of three individual departments of the College, based on extensive research in the College archives and Record Office, looking not for isolated examples of particularly significant or prestigious experiments, innovations and discoveries, but for evidence of the emergence of a genuine culture of teaching and research in the libraries and laboratories of UCL in this period. It will be argued that the origins of the modern conception of University College London as a place of teaching and research are to be found in the efforts of certain (key) professors in certain (key) departments of the College - men like Karl Pearson, Sir William Ramsay and Albert Frederick Pollard - who managed to pursue successful research careers in this period, while training their students in the proper methods of research and encouraging them to conduct their own experiments and investigations. Through their efforts to secure the necessary financial and institutional support for their work, and their involvement in the politics and administration of the College and the battle to reform the University of London, they also played a central role in shaping the College Council and University authorities’ changing conception of the aims and objectives of the College in this period.

However, Part One of this thesis - which is loosely focussed on the role of society and the state, and the revolution in the official conception of the role and function of the College - begins with a detailed re-examination of the existing secondary literature on Britain’s universities and the rise of research, and an attempt to piece together a general account of the origins and development of the ‘research university’ in this country based on the best available sources, in order to establish some sort of context in which to place this analysis of developments at UCL in the period 1890-1914. As we have already seen, most of the historians who have dealt with this question in any sort of detail have done so in the context of a more

general discussion about the development of public and government attitudes towards science and the promotion of research in the period 1870-1920. Implicit within most of these accounts is the assumption that government money and initiatives played a decisive role in persuading Britain’s universities and university colleges to reconstitute themselves as research institutions during the early years of the twentieth century. The origins and development of the research university in this country can only really be understood in the context of the monumental change that took place in the relationship between the universities and the state, and in the government’s conception of its proper role in the promotion and organisation of original research, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. But there has been no sustained analysis of the development of government policy towards the

universities and university colleges in this period, and the existing literature on the subject is confusing and contradictory.

Chapter Three therefore examines the impact of the most significant state- sponsored initiative of the period - the Parliamentary Grant-in-Aid to University Colleges in Great Britain - through a close analysis of the government papers relating to the grant in the Treasury, Board of Education and University Grants

Committee files at the Public Record Office, and also in the archives of UCL and the University of London. These papers - especially the reports of the inspectors appointed by the Treasury to investigate the progress made by the colleges participating in the scheme - are an invaluable resource for the historian of higher education in this period, providing a relatively impartial, comparative account of the work of Britain’s leading universities and colleges. They have been used

extensively by Christine Shinn in the course of her work on the history of the UGC, but have largely been ignored by the protagonists in the debate over the causes of Britain’s relative economic and industrial decline, and also by the historians of

individual universities and colleges. Moreover, there has been no attempt to examine the significance of the grant in the context of the story of the origins and development of the research university in this country. There is some evidence to suggest that it acted as an ‘indirect endowment of research’, but there is little proof that the state’s intention was to stimulate research in the Treasury and Board of Education papers relating to the grant. The individual colleges retained a great deal of autonomy in deciding how to distribute the money that they received from the

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government, and the fact that they used it to subsidise various research projects highlights the emergence of a growing belief among British academics and university administrators that the functions of the modern university should include both teaching and research. Furthermore, a detailed review of the accounts and other financial papers of the College Council highlights the significance of private money in underpinning the growth and expansion of the College in this period and the emergence of an institutional commitment to teaching and research. It therefore seems that the origins of the modern conception of the British university as a place of teaching and research are to be found in the individual universities and university colleges themselves, and that the role of the state was merely to consolidate the effects of various developments that were taking place within the university sector.

Chapter Four therefore focusses more closely on the emergence of an institutional commitment to teaching and research at UCL in the period 1890-1914, highlighting in particular the significance of the College Council and its changing conception of the role and function of the College, and also looking for evidence of the emergence of a genuine cu/Cure of teaching and research in some of the individual departments of the College. This account is based on the careful analysis of the Annual Reports and other papers of the College Council (and the various other committees and sub-committees responsible for the administration of the College and University in this period), which are housed in the Manuscripts Room in the College Library and the College Record Office. It also makes extensive use of material relating to the politics and administration of the College in the University of London Library, at the Public Record Office, and among the private papers of certain individual members of the academic and administrative staff of the College. It is hoped that the detailed investigation of these various sources will make it possible to put all speculation about what the College might - or should - have been like one- hundred years ago to one side, and answer certain basic questions about the growth of the academic staff and postgraduate population of the College, and their collective output of original papers and other publications. It is also hoped that it will be

possible to discover more about the structure, organisation and ethos of the

College, and the institutional and financial context of teaching and research at UCL in this period.

A systematic review of the Annual Reports of the Council reveals that the period 1870-1914 was marked by a growing commitment to the promotion of original research at UCL, alongside the more traditional pedagogical aims and objectives of the College, which culminated in the formal reconstitution of University College London as a place of teaching and research in 1905. This revolution in the official conception of the role and function of the College acted as a powerful stimulus to the work already going on at UCL, but it would take several decades for a genuine culture of teaching and research to emerge on a College-wide scale. In this period the ‘research revolution' was led by a handful of pioneering professors in certain individual departments of the College. Despite the unfavourable institutional circumstances of the late nineteenth century, these remarkable men managed to pursue successful research careers in the libraries and laboratories of University College, while simultaneously introducing the concept (and devising the methods) of research training for students. Moreover, through their involvement in the politics and administration of the College and the campaign to reform the University of London, they were also instrumental in persuading the College Council to adopt a much broader definition of the aims and objectives of the College in this period.

Part Two of this thesis therefore concentrates on the work of three of the most active ‘research departments’ at UCL in this period, using Jack Morrell’s model of the ‘ideal’ research school as a framework for examining the complex web of intellectual, institutional, technical, psychological and financial factors which underlay the

emergence of research schools in certain departments of the College, and also to investigate the impact and implications of these developments on the official conception of the role and function of the College. The Departments of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Chemistry and History were particularly active in the area of original research, together accounting for just under one-third of the postgraduate students who passed through the College between 1890 and 1914, and

approximately 30% of the original papers and other publications produced by the staff and students of the College during the first decade of the twentieth century. They are also representative of the main lines of research pursued in the arts, sciences and ‘social sciences’ at UCL in this period. Moreover, in each case the principal architect and director of the school - Karl Pearson, William Ramsay and A.F.

Pollard - was also involved in the politics and administration of the College and University, and played a prominent role in persuading the College Council and University authorities to accept a new conception of the aims and objectives of University College London in the period 1890-1914.

These departmental case studies therefore suggest that the origins of the modern conception of UCL as a centre for the advancement and dissemination of knowledge are to be found within the individual departments of the College - in the efforts of certain individual professors, in certain (key) departments, to conduct their own experiments and investigations, to train their pupils in the methods of research, and to secure the necessary financial and institutional support for their work.