which prepared students for the university one needed a university degree. The
result of this formalization was simultaneously to cut the numbers of appli-
cants, especially the unemployed intellectuals, while improving the prospects
for wealthier students. The university became locked into the apex of the
credentialing sequence that, since the worldwide spread of the German model,
we have come to take for granted.
Is it not arbitrary which organizational form won out? If no university
reform had taken place, there would still have been general cultural education,
professional training, plus places where specialized scientists and scholars
would pursue their work. What contribution if any does the preservation of
the medieval university structure make to the role of modern intellectuals and
to the content of their work? The key is that the medieval university had
acquired a good deal of autonomy from lay society to create its own topics
and methods of argument. It was the medieval university as a self-governing
corporation which created the scholastic hierarchies and competitions mani-
fested in the style and content of the academic disciplines. The medieval
university was responsible for the field of philosophy as an abstract discipline,
conscious of the methods and contents which make up the various regions of
the intellectual field. It was the university structure, shaped by generations of
turf battles over the space for intellectual debate in the preliminaries to theol-
ogy and law, that crystallized the self-conscious enterprises of logic, metaphys-
ics, and epistemology. Without the university structure, the role of the general-
purpose intellectual—that is, the philosopher—de-differentiates back into the
lay conception of culture. The level of abstraction and of self-reflection is lost;
instead one has the literary or political intellectual, engaging sometimes in a
rapid play of ideas, but deterred by the lay audience from exploring anything
in depth. The development of philosophy in a technical sense depended on the
survival of the university.
The university reform revived another strength of the medieval system at
its height: its structural impetus to creativity. The German university revolution
created the modern research university, where professors were expected not
only to teach the best knowledge of the past but also to create new knowledge.
This impetus toward innovation came from the structure of competition insti-
tutionalized within the medieval university: the public disputation; the disser-
tation and its defense, which made one a full-fledged academic professional;
the competition with other professors and other universities to attract students.
It was these competitive, innovation-provoking structures which the uni-
versity’s Enlightenment rivals lacked. The eighteenth-century college or Gym-
nasium taught a finished culture to students who were not expected to go on
to become autonomous producers in their own right; in the same way the
professional school was in the business of transmitting a finished body of
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^643