The origins of research within universities

Universities have existed for over a thousands of years. What happened in 19th century Germany?

Excerpt: "If you were alive in 1800 and someone asked you about the future of research, it wouldn’t occur to you to mention the university. Real scholarship happened in new, modern, enlightened institutions like the British Royal Society or the French Académie des sciences.

Universities were a medieval relic. And nowhere was it more medieval, hidebound, and generally dysfunctional than in the German-speaking world. 

But something happened to German universities at the turn of the 19th century — they developed a new system that combined teaching with research. Within a few decades, everyone in Europe was trying to copy their model. German scientists dominated chemistry and revolutionized modern physics. They came up with cell theory, bacteriology, the whole laboratory-based model of scientific medicine, and I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that they invented the social sciences in almost full generality.

By the end of the century, they were the greatest engine of organized knowledge production the world had ever seen — and if they’ve since been surpassed by the American university system, that’s mostly because we copied them. 

I think we don't properly appreciate how surprising this is. It’s odd that the research university exists at all. Universities have been around for a thousand years, but for most of their history, they were not seen as institutions for producing new knowledge. It’s even stranger that it came to be in a land which was politically fragmented, lacked a strong scientific community, and had very limited interest in creating one."