rivals (and in fact the age range of the students tended to be similar in each;
Ariès, 1962: 219–229). The “secondary” schools taught a largely secularized
curriculum, appealing to the cultural aspirations of its clientele. This made
them much more popular than the universities, whose curricula and creden-
tialing sequence had been built up during the Middle Ages in connection with
theology and careers in the church.
In Germany, the growing sense of crisis in the late 1700s was based on a
career problem for university graduates. The church, deprived of its property
in the Reformation, was no longer a lucrative career. Parsons had low status
and pay, and served as minor functionaries of the state, keeping local records
and reading decrees from the pulpit. Theology and its preparatory subject,
philosophy, attracted mainly sons of peasants, petty shopkeepers, and clergy.
The upper part of the middle class, the sons of urban patricians, the wealthier
merchants, and the civil servants, studied law, a much more costly course of
study. Although the number of nobles in the legal faculties was quite low, the
group as a whole adopted a belligerently knightly style of behavior, emphasiz-
ing drinking and carousing, centered on dueling fraternities, which offended
both the moralists and the modernists in the larger population.
At the same time, there was a structural attraction based on the new
involvement of the bureaucratic state in education (Rosenberg, 1958; Mueller,
1983). Enrollments in the leading universities rose after 1740, fueled by pros-
pects of government employment at several levels. The bureaucratic admini-
stration of the numerous absolutist states of Germany, both large and small,
was expanding; in the late 1700s the proportion of officials to population was
twice as high as it would be 100 years later. Educational requirements became
increasingly important for these posts; in Hanover (where Göttingen was
located), the proportion of government appointees who had some university
education rose from 33 percent to 75 percent during the 1700s. At a lower
level, new employment possibilities were held out by the establishment of
compulsory state-supported elementary schools, first by a Prussian decree of
1717, which was largely unenforced, then by a stronger decree in 1763, which
specified schools teaching in the German language rather than the old medieval
Latin schools run by the church.
The numbers of university students increased sharply by the 1770s but
unevenly, provoking equally rapid declines in some places. Competition in the
expanding educational market produced both winners and losers. A population
of the educated underemployed accumulated, building a sense of alienation
and status hunger which resonated with Sturm und Drang. The venerable
University of Cologne, one of the biggest in the early 1700s, had lost half its
students by the late 1770s; Jena dropped from 1,500 to 400. With the political
crisis of the 1790s, the university crisis came to a head. Numbers fell to tiny
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^641