Keywords

Introduction

When engaging in interdisciplinary research, conceptual encounters may occur for different reasons and emerge in different phases of a given project. In the case discussed here, a project on which I worked in the late 1980s, unforeseen conceptual encounters and even conflicts presented themselves in the course of my investigations and, in particular, in the project’s results. When I now reflect on research I did as a young, inexperienced scholar, I realize that a number of conditions were in place that can explain the unexpected results. These conditions are often connected to interdisciplinary work. This kind of work tends to start from a real-life problem, involving stakeholders with different perspectives on the topic of investigation. Furthermore, one will often find a collaborative spirit between scholars from various backgrounds, while their interests and focus may overlap. Another relevant factor in this kind of work is ample room for experiment in combination with the availability of exemplary studies that can guide the way. These features defined the circumstances that gave rise to conceptual conflicts at the end of my project. In this chapter, I will reconstruct how these conceptual encounters came about, as well as how they became productive and how eventually they were resolved.

Many readers of this chapter will have an academic background, and they may even work in academia or perform research in other contexts. Most academics are familiar with the lofty ideals that in the past were attributed to academic life, as regards both research and education. As of the early nineteenth century, the concept of Bildung, as well as Wilhelm von Humboldt’s notions of Einheit von Forschung und Lehre and Lehr- und Lernfreiheit, became increasingly part of how universities defined their teaching and research tasks. If many academics today will respect the era to which these notions belong, they will also consider it a bygone period—a past that is definitely over. At the same time, there has been a steady increase in complaints about the directions of and developments in today’s academic life. Managers and administrators of universities tend to concentrate their efforts on steering their institutions into new directions by formulating a never-ending train of mission statements, strategies, and policies. More often than not, however, their effectiveness and desirability instantly meet with skepticism from faculty staff, often referring to the need for Bildung again.

As a young scholar I studied the relevance of academic ideals, missions, and strategies in Dutch higher education in the nineteenth century. Below, I will first introduce the real-life issue that made me embark on this interdisciplinary research project, without realizing its intricacies. Next, I will introduce the theoretical framework that guided my research, and I reflect on the different motivations underlying the decisions involved, one of which pertained to the interdisciplinary team in which I was embedded. For my analysis of educational debates and educational philosophies in nineteenth-century Dutch higher education, I used the sociological theory of Niklas Luhmann as a frame. Another important study I relied on was Rudolf Stichweh’s 1984 book on the emergence of the system of disciplines in Germany, entitled Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen: Physik in Deutschland 1740–1890. Subsequently, I will consider my findings, as well as observations that—in retrospect—were surprisingly absent in my study, which pertains in particular to Humboldt’s idea of a university in nineteenth-century debates about Dutch higher education. Further reflections on these discrepancies will feed into the conclusion, where I demonstrate that starting from a research question that engages stakeholders and is based in actual practices may give rise to unexpected results precisely because one does not start from canonized disciplinary knowledge. My closing argument will be that an interdisciplinary approach is not necessarily more encompassing or comprehensive than a disciplinary one.

A Contested Mission Statement Feeding into a Research Project

Maastricht University (UM) is a fairly young, state-funded university, established in 1976 (Klijn, 2001, 2016; Knegtmans, 1992). A major reason for the Dutch government to grant the Province of Limburg a new Rijksuniversiteit was tied to the region’s dire economic situation after the closure of the region’s state-operated coal mines. The intention to implement a fresh approach to university education further motivated the government’s decision to establish a new academic facility. From its inception, State University Limburg, as used to be the name of the UM until 1996, embraced the principles of Problem-Based Learning (PBL), as developed by McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario). Because the UM started out as a medical school, this educational philosophy was a perfect fit, as McMaster first introduced this PBL approach at its medical school in 1969 as well. Next to this educational philosophy, the UM’s mission statement entailed an alternative approach to medical care, prioritizing primary healthcare rather than state-of-the-art medical interventions in an academic hospital. This last aspect actually became an issue when the Medical Faculty grew rapidly and its high-tech departments started to flourish and sprawl. The didactic principles of PBL grew more contested after the founding of new faculties, such as the Faculties of Law and Economics. The UM’s Executive Board wanted the new faculties to embrace the educational principles of PBL as well. But critics voiced concerns about its usefulness outside the pragmatic, hands-on domain of medicine. And even staff within the Medical Faculty had reservations about PBL because of its explicitly student-centered approach, which required staff first and foremost to assume a service-oriented role that might go at the expense of goals linked to research and theoretical knowledge development.

To guide these discussions—and/or to appease the most radical promoters of both positions—the UM’s executive board, supported by the faculty deans, decided to open up a position for someone to organize an ongoing intellectual debate on UM’s educational philosophy. In combination with historical research on the role of educational philosophies and innovations in nineteenth-century Dutch higher education, this project was meant to create some common ground. Discussions would keep the potential relevance of educational philosophies alive, regardless of the outcomes. I seized the opportunity to devote my research project to educational debates in nineteenth-century Dutch universities. At the same time, I was quite aware of the highly normative positions and fierce debates frequently triggered by educational missions and philosophies.

The engagement of stakeholders affected my research project. The educational debates going on at Maastricht University in the 1980s determined both the leading question and the unit of analysis of my historical research. Interdisciplinary research is often promoted by arguing that real-life problems transcend disciplinary boundaries. Yet, real-life problems are not a given; stakeholders need to articulate them. For the type of interdisciplinary research I performed, the engagement of stakeholders in delineating the central research interest was key. Meanwhile, new concepts such as transdisciplinary research and community-engaged research have been introduced, to highlight the benefits of engaging stakeholders in research, not just in articulating the research question but throughout the research trajectory.

An Interdisciplinary Research Environment

My research project grew almost naturally into an interdisciplinary affair. In the project, I addressed the educational discussions going on in Maastricht University’s Faculties of Medicine, Public Health, Law, and Economics. At the time, the Humanities faculty was under development, meaning that it was not yet formally established. In this context, a group of young scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds shared offices in a provisional setting, including theoretical sociologists, sociologists of law, philosophers, philosophers of science, historians, and science and technology studies (STS) scholars. As there was no narrowly defined institutional frame yet, their interactions were intellectually open and diverse. Moreover, the supervisors of my research project, Louis Boon and Jeroen Dekker, gave me a lot of freedom to explore relevant issues, while also protecting me from getting lost along the way. Louis Boon was trained as a psychologist to become a philosopher with an interest in evolutionary models of science (Boon, 1983). Jeroen Dekker, a historian of pedagogics and education, had an interest in long-term cultural changes (Amsing et al., 2018) and taught me, trained as a theoretical physicist, the finesses of historical source analysis.

The design, theoretical framework, and methodology of my research were highly affected by the social environment sketched above (Wachelder, 1992). Given my focus on nineteenth-century educational debates, I relied on publicly available sources, such as inaugural lectures and political debates. I decided to compare and contrast debates about the character and legislation of higher education in general, with educational debates in the faculties of Medicine and Law mirroring the contemporary situation at Maastricht University. My theoretical framing was inspired by the interactions and disputes within a close circle of colleagues, and these efforts concentrated on bridging the actor/structure divide in sociology and the role of contingency in social and natural processes. Tannelie Blom, the late Werner Callebaut, Ton Nijhuis, Nico Roos, and I met frequently in a reading group to discuss a variety of texts and books from different disciplines. Among other things, we made a meticulous study of Niklas Luhmann’s Soziale Systeme (1984), which would affect the intellectual career of all of us (Blom, 1997; Callebaut, 1993; Nijhuis, 1996; Wachelder, 1992), even though we would, later, hive off into different directions.

Three aspects of Luhmann’s approach of self-organizing social systems seemed apt in particular for analyzing educational debates on modernizing Dutch universities in the nineteenth century. First, by considering communications as the basic elements of social systems and social structures as double contingent expectations of expectations expressed in discourse, Luhmann got rid of deterministic tendencies in systems theory. This offered a consistent and coherent perspective to bridge the actor/structure dilemma in theoretical sociology. Secondly, Luhmann’s theory of self-organizing social systems conceived modernization as an overall transition from static (hierarchical) organizational principles to focused (functional) process-oriented ones, which allows for an increase in social complexity. Third, these subsystems are considered to function rather independently from each other; the interactions among them are conceived as “interpenetration,” as “noise,” causing them to interact without determining each other or assuming a hierarchical relationship between different subsystems (Luhmann, 1984).

Of course, one may have doubts about the benefits of this rather abstract social theory for the study of educational debates in Dutch universities, as is also testified by the argument in van Leeuwen’s chapter in this volume. However, not prioritizing one subsystem over others allows for studying their mutual interactions as concrete manifestations in space and time. The theoretical conceptualization of communications as the basic elements of social systems and discourses as structures offers a sound foundation for using discourse analysis to study changes in society. Luhmann authored many books and articles using discourse analysis to study the transition from traditional to modern societies for specific domains. His interpretation of modernization as a social transition from rather static, hierarchical organizational principles to process-oriented ones would serve me as a useful lens to study the nineteenth century.

Rudolf Stichweh’s study (1984) on the emergence of the system of disciplines, which also started from Luhmann’s social systems theory, provided a decisive push to use it as a framework for studying debates about and within nineteenth-century Dutch education. If interdisciplinary research will often be seen as an alternative for studies framed along disciplinary lines, historically informed readers will immediately acknowledge that the disciplinary organization of science only came about in the nineteenth century. Stichweh explains its emergence as involving a long-term transition from a hierarchical organization of knowledge or studies to a processual one. In this context, the notion of hierarchy refers to faculties or given methods. The disciplinary organization allowed more freedom in determining research interests and selecting appropriate methods. Its processual character was supported by the emergence of scientific journals, which fueled and speeded up scholarly exchanges on focused and thus more limited topics. At the time, I was impressed by Stichweh’s study (and I still regard it as one of the best accounts on discipline formation), and I said to myself: why not give Luhmann’s social systems theory a try as a frame for analyzing educational debates and interpreting changes in nineteenth-century Dutch higher education?

Identifying and Interpreting Debates in Nineteenth-Century Dutch Higher Education

A scholarly dive into nineteenth-century sources on higher education is likely to produce a compassionate smile on many a scholar’s face. At the time, as well as today, scholars and professors did not only debate endlessly—which is also a major task of their job, of course—but they also complained vehemently about the status quo of higher education. At first sight, many of the topics they covered are quite recognizable for us today, if not very much the same. Professors lamented each and every threat that might raise their workload, and they had concerns about courses that they were either expected to teach or not allowed to teach. Likewise, complaints about the lack of passion or motivation among students appear to be a recurring element in academia. Discussions about desirable measures, legislation, or the financing of universities by government show many similarities and continuities over 200 years as well. Although the king or government set up many special committees that would engage in lengthy debates on all sorts of issues, only a few proposals were turned into legislation. Many implemented measures were rapidly discontinued again because of the ill-considered or detrimental effects they produced. For instance, the introduction of an entrance exam for universities led to a sharp decline in student enrollments. Should we conclude, then, that there is always something to complain about and that professors are just ordinary human beings?

Despite recurring manifestations of academic displeasure and frustration, much has changed in their content, context, and connections, even when disregarding its media and ways of display. For one thing, nineteenth-century academics were largely grumpy old men. The first female student at a Dutch university, Aletta Jacobs, entered the Medical Faculty of the University of Groningen not until 1872, while the first female professor, Johanna Westerdijk, was inaugurated only in 1917 (Bosch, 1994, 2005). But among the exclusively masculine professoriate, there were also many who saw a need to leave the beaten track. The modernization perspective derived from Luhmann’s social systems theory was helpful to interpret what was at stake in different educational debates, compare and contrast educational debates in different faculties, and study links between as well as to explain connections between the manifold concerns and worries on minor or major educational issues, ranging from practicalities to educational philosophies.

To demonstrate the entanglement of a seemingly minor issue with other debates, the dispute about the freedom of students to determine their own order of study at universities offers a good example (Wachelder, 1991). Academics who were concerned about the performance of a large segment of the university student population came up with simple solutions, such as prescribing the order of studies and more serious exams. Both proposals regularly recurred in the nineteenth century, and they would frequently meet with fierce resistance. Students’ freedom to arrange the order of their study at a university predated the nineteenth century; it was not only considered a privilege, but it also served a specific educational aim. It would help them later in life, when holding a responsible position in society, which required an independent attitude and autonomous judgment. Moreover, from an institutional point of view, freedom of study distinguished Latin schools (called “gymnasia” later on) from universities.

To appreciate the distinguishing characteristic of freedom of learning, the fact that higher education comprised both Latin schools and universities is crucial. Latin served to connect the two educational institutions, and proficiency in Latin was considered a prerequisite for those in the upper classes. Compared to other countries, universities in the Netherlands held on to Latin as lingua franca rather long. Latin schools proceeded with annual, successive classes. Education at universities should be free. What else could serve as distinguishing characteristic in higher education? In particular, professors who taught the first propaedeutic part, such as Philip Willem van Heusde (1778–1839), defended the freedom of study at universities fervently. Moreover, not all academic courses required a final examination; for some a testimonial sufficed. That professors did not receive a set monthly salary, as their payment depended on the number of registered students for their course, made the matter all the more intricate.

The ongoing use of Latin in academia impacted the political debate as to how to improve the educational offerings in the Netherlands. The development of industry and commerce required more and new competences from citizens. But how to achieve this? Until 1865, there were only two kinds of facilities of higher education in the Netherlands: gymnasia and universities. Moreover, instead of referring to primary and secondary education, the Dutch used the adjectives “lower” and “middle.” In the nineteenth century, a huge debate emerged as to what this “mid-level” education, at that point still to be established, should entail. Some argued that gymnasia should devote more attention to the natural sciences. Yet, Latin schools held on to their mission: training the (administrative and scholarly) upper classes, for which classical languages were deemed essential. In 1865, new school types for secondary (“middle”) education were introduced, geared to jobs in commerce and industry rather than preparing young men for university. Yet, the level of teaching in the natural sciences at the newly established Hogere Burger School (HBS, or “civic high school”) set a standard that the gymnasia had trouble meeting. Within less than two decades, the gymnasia had to comply with the new standard set by the HBS in teaching the natural sciences.

In hindsight, one can interpret the debates and discussions in conjunction with the overall transition in education from an organization based on static principles, involving a privileged class and a fixed distribution of professional roles, to a meritocracy, with a focus on exams and the individual’s learning process. This kind of sociological perspective was lacking in the scholarly reflection on higher education at the time because its very establishment was part of the same transition. Moreover, the intricate relationships between many, seemingly disparate issues made it difficult to develop a comprehensive overview. Many contemporary diverging arguments made sense, at least on paper. At the same time, new educational institutions, such as the HBS system, would develop into directions different from the ones originally envisaged. The educational debates going on in medical and law faculties at the time partly tapped into the developments described above, showing an increasing orientation toward processes as well.

In contrast to the mostly implicit references to processes as alternative organizational principles in general debates about higher education, explicit references to processes were made in Dutch medical faculties. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of medical practitioners was active, aside from academically trained physicians. Controlled by government at the provincial level, there were different training trajectories for medical practice, leading to a variety of licenses for specific sectors of medical practice, whereby it was common to distinguish between medical practice in cities and in the countryside (Van Lieburg, 1983). In 1826, clinical schools were established, to replace practice training by masters, which used to complement medical education at universities. Pleas for a nationwide surveillance of medical practitioners were accompanied by arguments to abandon the many peculiar distinctions in what ought to be a unified profession. Diseases ought to be considered as processes that aren’t limited to specific parts of the body or types of intervention.

The emphasis on diseases as processes went along with underlining physiology, the study of processes of life, as the overarching basis of medical knowledge and practice, rather than nosological classifications and systems based on static hierarchies. The envisaged transition produced significant discursive misunderstandings, for instance, about the meaning of “experience.” Some started to distinguish new experience, as based on experiment, from old experience, as based on practice. The process- and science-based approach to medicine necessitated, according to its promoters, new educational formats, such as microscopy classes and chemical and physiological educational labs, to train the observational skills of medical students. Needless to say, no evidence-based educational research was available to support these claims. Essentially, the educational formats proposed were derived from changing preferences as regards their content.

In the 1860s, pleas in the medical faculties promoting more and different education in the natural sciences to improve physicians’ observational skills began to interfere with proposals for educational change on a more general level. Experts saw more and stricter exams, organized on a national scale, as a crucial element. In 1865, state exams in both the natural sciences and medical practice were introduced. This led to the almost immediate discontinuation of clinical schools, which could not keep up with the high level of training required for the natural sciences. The introduction of a new Law on Higher Education, in 1876, triggered a debate on whether graduates from the newly established HBS could have access to the study of medicine, even though this was not part of the original reason for setting up the HBS system. After fierce debates in the House of Representatives, HBS graduates were considered admissible if they passed an additional entrance exam for Latin and Greek. Only two years later this requirement was abandoned again. The increased relevance of the natural sciences for medicine turned out to be the decisive factor.

Where change-minded medical professors highlighted the process-character of disease, to motivate national government officials to intervene in the training and surveillance of medical practitioners, as of 1838 law faculties had to address the new Civil Code, in the wake of several tumultuous decades in which the French Civil Code was upheld. Some feared that the new codes of law would make legal study obsolete due to the increased accessibility of the new law books. Although legal study hardly became a superfluous field of study, the new Civil Code stirred debates about the curriculum. Of old, many students of law opted for administrative positions. Law was a type of general-career study also at that time, be it mostly for the elites only. Law professors had turned their field into a highly theoretical endeavor, however. Before the Codification, Roman Law served as subsidiary law, it being taught as the nec plus ultra. Roman Law provided a systematic organization of legal sources, including definitions that could be logically dissected and applied. In the eighteenth century, natural law, with its focus on legal principles, challenged this central position of Roman law in the curriculum. Both competing legal systems, however, shared a focus on formal logic, consistency, and coherency.

With the new Civil Code, the orientation on fixed legal sources or principles seemed to lose its relevance. The position of Roman Law in the curriculum came under debate. Wouldn’t an introduction in current law be a more suitable beginning of the curriculum? In the ensuing discussion, the arguments highlighting educational merits of Roman Law came with some remarkable twists, showing the versatility of didactic arguments. A closed, complete, consistent, and coherent law book was unattainable because all sorts of arrangements, such as fiscal ones, were prone to changes. For some, this was an argument to maintain a central role for Roman Law in the curriculum, given the completeness of its sources and its logical, systematical interpretation. Others argued, however, that the development of law, and its changing social context, deserved more attention. New topics such as politics and statistics were introduced into the curriculum. Yet, the focus on the dynamics of law in its concrete social context did not make Roman Law superfluous. New, historical approaches and interpretations of Roman Law emerged that made it an eminent subject to understand the development of law in general. As in medical faculties, the new focus on processes prompted debates and confusion about what practical education could and should entail. Equating theory with systematics and logical analysis did not work any longer; nor did equating practice with experience.

Nineteenth-century educational missions and principles referred, implicitly or explicitly, to a wide variety of social, educational, and scientific aspects that were intricately connected. Few of the positions were backed up with compelling arguments or irrefutable evidence. Some were based on traditions and established knowledge. Others were more forward-looking, pointing to an uncertain future. Some of the traditional arguments given for specific educational methods or content could be easily tinkered with to suit new, changed circumstances.

To identify nodes in the myriad of ongoing debates and to interpret their connections, Luhmann’s perspective on modernization proved highly useful in guiding my historical research. In the course of my project, I contacted many senior colleagues, in specialized fields: historians of education; historians of universities; and historians and sociologists of science, medicine, or law; philosophers of education; philosophers of science; even scholars working in public or business administration. I was surprised by the willingness of many of them to share insights or to elucidate subtleties of their research. Conversely, collaboration requires an open, inquisitive mind on the part of the researcher and gratefulness to those who share knowledge and insights. Only occasionally, I encountered mechanisms of exclusion in relation to my decision to ground my research in a sociological theory or publicly accessible sources (rather than archival sources), as exemplified by the rejection of a paper for a historical conference. If disciplinary boundaries can be transcended, they can also be defended as a way to maintain settled assumptions.

In Search of Wilhelm von Humboldt

Luhmann’s perspective on modernization helped me to identify and interpret nineteenth-century educational debates in the Netherlands. Yet, I did not come across references to the neo-humanist scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) in nineteenth-century debates about Dutch higher education. Humboldt has gained worldwide acclaim for his ideas on Bildung, as associated with the establishment of Berlin University in 1810 and the overall German university model. His ideas of Einheit von Forschung und Lehre and Lehr- und Lernfreiheit have become canonized elements of how universities conceive of their identity, also in the Netherlands. The legislation of Dutch Higher Education in the Netherlands is marked by two major laws, the so-called Organiek Besluit from 1818, redressing the French occupation, and the Law on Higher Education from 1876. The last one is traditionally connected with the name of Humboldt because the law explicitly singles out research as one of the main tasks of universities (Wachelder, 2001). The introduction of research in nineteenth-century universities was, and partly still is, associated with the German university model, which aside from education defined research as a main task of universities, while also highlighting the interconnection of teaching and research. The German model of a university is said to have been imported to many other countries, including the Netherlands. Although I ran into the notion of “freedom of study” in my investigations at the time, I did not see it linked to Humboldt. Moreover, the meaning and connotations of Lernfreiheit in the early nineteenth century differed from the lofty academic ideals associated with Humboldt.

That I missed the link with Humboldt’s views forced me to reflect on my results. Did Luhmann’s lens of modernization perhaps make me focus so much on a transition from static hierarchies to processes that it blinded other relevant discussions? Did I overlook relevant sources? I started to systematically study the acts of the House of Representatives regarding the Law on Higher Education from 1876 and rather unknown sources, such as Robert Vorstman’s book on German universities and their histories (Vorstman, 1872). I found hardly any references to Humboldt (Wachelder, 2003). Increasingly, it became clear how my research (Wachelder, 1992) tapped into an ongoing international reassessment of Humboldt’s importance for the renewal of German universities in the nineteenth century. This reevaluation of Humboldt’s impact on nineteenth-century German universities or a German university model extended across many decades in which scholars successively addressed different aspects (Wachelder, 2003).

The dominant interpretation of Humboldt’s educational philosophy, championing individual scholarship, became challenged as of the late 1970s (Lechner, 2003). In the 1980s, historical studies placing Humboldt and German universities in their social context set the tone (Labrie, 1986; McClelland, 1980). Moraw (1984) concluded from his meticulous case study of the University of Gießen that Humboldt’s ideas of scholarly isolation—Einsamkeit und Freiheit—had less impact than his short stay at the Ministry of Inner Affairs. In that position, Humboldt advocated that the government should have the final say in the appointment of new professors. It effectively abolished the “family university,” where sons succeeded their father, without a serious assessment of their competences. As regards the idea of Lernfreiheit (freedom of study), Moraw (1984) came up with the telling observation that advocates of innovative teaching laboratories in the natural sciences often opposed the idea of freedom of study and favored an organized curriculum.

Schubring (1991) put the reception history of the “Humboldtian model” on the scholarly agenda. He observed that many of Humboldt’s ideas were not considered new at all by his contemporaries. Moreover, only in 1900, Humboldt’s key publication on the structure and organization of the university in Berlin—Über die innere und äußere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin—was published (Paletschek, 2001, p. 76). Adolf von Harnack’s history of Berlin University dates from 1910 and was published on the occasion of the university’s centenary. That year also saw the publication of Berlin University’s Gründungsschrifte, comprising contributions by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Henrik Steffens. As concluded by Sylvia Paletschek (2001, p. 77), the notion of a Humboldtian university model dates back to the 1920s, but this notion developed into a topos not until after the World War II, in particular, in the 1960s. In 1997, the German translation of Mitchell G. Ash’s edited volume reevaluating German universities in the past and future was entitled Mythos Humboldt: Vergangenheit und Zukunft der deutschen Universitäten (Ash, 1997).

In hindsight, then, it is obvious that the concept of a Humboldtian or German model was hardly useful for interpreting the development of Dutch universities in the nineteenth century (Wachelder, 2001). In 1992, my application of Luhmann’s modernization perspective on nineteenth-century Dutch educational debates challenged established historiography and the concept of a German university (Wachelder, 2001). Starting from a research interest in educational debates, comparing and contrasting those on different levels and in different faculties, while applying a theoretical framework based on theoretical sociology, turned out helpful to put aside twentieth-century topoi in university’s self-descriptions. Unintendedly, the results of my study questioned the concept of a German university model, fueling research-oriented universities.

Conclusion: Foregrounding and Backgrounding

As my case study reveals, conceptual encounters presented themselves mainly during the stage of reflection on the study’s findings rather than in the research process. These conceptual encounters, I argued, were produced in particular by starting from an authentic research question, informed by real-life issues, largely raised by stakeholders. Real-life challenges did not only inform my research question but also influenced its major unit of analysis and the sources studied. The above argument aligns with arguments often heard in promoting interdisciplinary research. Such research is needed, some argue, to analyze real-life problems and suggest practical solutions, given that both transcend disciplinary boundaries. Another argument frequently brought up for promoting interdisciplinary research is that multi- or interdisciplinary work leads to more comprehensive results than disciplinary research. I doubt whether this applies to the research project described above, however. For one thing, it is questionable whether completeness is an asset per se in an information-saturated world. My interdisciplinary work benefited in particular from an innovative research question, as well as an unconventional research design and method.

Over the last two decades, I focused my research no longer predominantly on education or the history of universities. Yet, I kept abreast of the field, among other things, by reading and reviewing many new publications. From which ones did I learn most? Rather than highlighting comprehensive histories of universities, I would like to highlight two books, which have in common that they adhere to a well-chosen and underexplored unit of analysis.

Remieg Aerts’s biography of Rudolph Thorbecke complements my project in two principal aspects (Aerts, 2018). Whereas I used the lens of modernization to focus on transitions from hierarchies to processes, Aerts zeroes in on the establishment and further development of a constitutional Kingdom in the Netherlands as of 1848. First and foremost, this directs his analysis to the spatial dimension, in particular the level of the national government, at the expense of the regulating power at the provincial level. Second, his approach reveals the political logics behind some awkward phenomena I came across. In my analysis, the 1863 Law on Secondary Education and the 1865 Law regulating the admission to the medical profession anticipated and highly determined the outcome of new legislation on higher education in 1876. Historians of universities tended to disregard this prior development and zoomed in on the 1876 Law on Higher Education. Aerts discusses, in great detail, Thorbecke’s contributions to three cabinets: 1849–1853, 1862–1866, and 1871–1872. From a political perspective, it made sense to propose new legislation for primary, secondary, and higher education in that particular, consecutive order.

The second publication that I would like to put in the spotlight complements my study in a different way. By concentrating on Dutch student periodicals from the nineteenth century, Annelies Noordhof-Hoorn (2016) gives students a voice, an element that is lacking in my 1992 study. Giving voice has a literal meaning in this context: in the eighteenth century, student periodicals still hardly existed. Metaphorically, giving voice here implies that in the nineteenth century, students at Dutch universities became increasingly critical, initially with regard to the specific education provided to them and, later on, concerning education in a wider social context. Noordhof-Hoorn’s analysis of the production of these student periodicals reveals the impact of infrastructural works, in particular bridges and railways, on student recruitment and student mobility. Rather than serving local, regional, or provincial interests, Dutch universities developed into national institutions in the course of the nineteenth century.

I address the merits of interdisciplinary work preferably in terms of foregrounding innovative research questions, research designs, and methodologies to which the engagement of stakeholders may contribute significantly. This comes at the price of backgrounding disciplinary assumptions and logics. In my experience, having the privilege of collaborating with inquisitive colleagues from whatever discipline not only broadens the scope but also deepens the analysis of a research project.