Anal currents

 By midcentury, the culture of German universities looked a lot like that of modern academia. Professors split their time between research and teaching duties, but found research ever more relevant for their own professional advancement. They considered themselves members of distinct fields with their own practices and methods. They published in specialized journals. They wrote their own dissertations, which contained original contributions to human knowledge. Everyone agreed that there were way too many adjuncts. 

Every university in the world today has incorporated at least some element of this model. States like Russia and Greece, without strong university systems of their own, were quickest to adopt it. The French educational reformer Victor Cousin was an admirer of Kant and Fichte and pushed for some German-style reforms, if not the same institutional support for research. (As late as 1868, Louis Pasteur was doing experiments in his attic). Of course, nobody took to the German university ideal more eagerly than the Americans. The founders of Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago were explicitly built on German models. Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, was a committed Germanophile, and reformed Harvard’s graduate school along German lines. The whole institutional structure of American graduate education is German, from academic departments (an outgrowth of the seminar) to doctoral dissertations. It’s Humboldt’s world, and we’re just living in it.