levels: Königsberg in 1791 (the height of Kant’s fame) had only 47 students;
Erfurt in 1800 had only 43; Kiel in one year had 8. Jena, despite its intellectual
eminence, was closed for a time after the nearby battle in 1806. During the
crisis period of the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath (1792–1818), 22 of
the 42 German universities were abolished. The traditionalistic Catholic uni-
versities, about one third of the total, were hit particularly hard; only one
survived. In the early 1700s there had been about 9,000 students in the 28
universities then existing; in the 1790s, with more universities competing, the
total was down to 6,000 (Schelsky, 1963: 22–23; McClelland, 1980: 28,
63–64). Among “progressive” officials and thinkers, the opinion was wide-
spread that the entire system should be abolished.
It would have been feasible, as well as culturally fashionable, to abolish the
old religious universities entirely and replace then with a new system of “high
schools” for general cultural status, together with professional schools for
more specialized training. This did not occur, because an intellectual move-
ment, led by the status-squeezed aspirants of the philosophical faculty, revived
the prestige of the university as the center of creative thought; and that
movement, in turn, succeeded because it played on a structural trend under
way in the organization of the German educational system. Prussia had already
pioneered in state-mandated elementary schooling; bureaucratic centralization
also was moving toward formalizing credential requirements and hierarchizing
the competing segments of the older educational system. In 1770 an examina-
tion was established for employment in the Prussian bureaucracy, placing a
premium on university legal training. Nobles, however, were exempted at first,
and university degrees were not absolutely essential. In 1804 this regulation
was strengthened to require three years of study at a Prussian university for
all higher offices. With the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810 and
an accompanying series of official examinations, university legal study became
a rigorous requirement for government employment. Prussia thus became the
first society in the West to establish anything like the Chinese imperial exami-
nation system.
Together with another Prussian reform initiated in 1788, and strengthened
by 1810–1812, these regulations linked the entire educational system into a
credentialing sequence (Mueller, 1987: 18, 24–26). In an effort to limit the
number of university students, the government established the Abitur exami-
nation for admission to the universities. This put a premium on study at a
classical Gymnasium, prior to this point more of an alternative to university
education than a preparation for it. For instance, in 1800 the director of the
Berlin Gymnasium had proposed that the universities be abolished in favor of
his institution. Now it became part of the state-controlled sequence, but at a
preliminary level; conversely, after 1812–1820, to teach in a secondary school
642 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths