Definition
The German university tradition formed in the early 19th century and internationally influential thereafter.
Introduction
The term “Humboldtian tradition” refers to the ideals and practices of German universities which developed in the nineteenth century and formed a highly influential international model down to 1914. Today it is often invoked as a criterion for judging, usually critically, contemporary university developments (Nybom 2003). More neutrally, but in some ways misleadingly, it is equated with the ethos of the modern research university. Wilhelm von Humboldt was the Prussian aristocrat who presided over the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810. But his writings on the subject (Humboldt 1970) were only rediscovered around 1900: the “Humboldt myth” projected modern concerns into the past and created an idealized model of what had in fact developed pragmatically over a century.
Historians have stressed that the foundation of Berlin University rested on...
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References
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Anderson, R.D. (2016). The German (Humboldtian) University Tradition. In: Shin, J., Teixeira, P. (eds) Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_4-1
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