Technology's Dilemma: Agricultural Colleges between Science and Practice in Germany, 1860–1934 (review)

Agricultural scientific institutions in the United States have been extensively studied by historians interested by their dual role in knowledge growth and technological development. Jonathan Harwood contributes to the historiography in another national context by focusing on agricultural higher education in Germany between 1860 and 1934. He seeks to understand the process whereby educational institutions either emphasize the scientific or the practical dimensions of their curriculum and research. This is, for Harwood, "technology's dilemma."

The core of the book consists of three solid case studies that are used to build a model of the dynamics of agricultural higher education in Germany. Informed by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Harwood's case studies compare institutions of diverse characteristics according to their geographical location, formal organization, curriculum, research and extension activities and facilities, background of their students and professors, and local and regional administration as well as economic and political constituents. Three factors are singled out to account for the drift toward science-based research and teaching in agriculture, a process that this reviewer has also analyzed and conceptualized as the "fundamentalization" of agricultural sciences in Protection des Cultures, Construction de la Nature (2004). These factors are the geographical circumstances as well as the academic and politico-economic fields, respectively composed of educational institutions and governmental and agricultural patrons. Together, they form the context within which an institution operates. The strategies that an institution and its staff adopt and pursue to obtain credentials and budgets in either of these fields determine its scientific or practical orientation.

In his third chapter, Harwood discusses the ideology of the curriculum of educational institutions in agriculture from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s. Despite recurrent public controversies about the relative merits of a practical education and all-around learning, schools with a more practical orientation and those with a more scientific bent had been given equal consideration prior to World War I. This educational diversity gave way to controversy about the orientation of agricultural higher education in the aftermath of the war, and economic pressure as well as changing political priorities resulted in unifying the institutional landscape. The fourth chapter offers a thorough comparison of five institutions of different scientific/practical orientation from 1890 to 1914: the agricultural colleges at Berlin, Bonn, and Hohenheim, as well as the agricultural institutes at the Universities of Halle and Breslau. Harwood supplements this comparison with a study of five plant-breeding research institutions. His analysis reveals the role of institution-builders such as Kurt von Rümker at Breslau or Julius Kühn at Halle who were able to tap into their local economic, scientific, or political resources and imprint a practical or scientific orientation.

In the final chapter, Harwood's comparison rests on a longer time period, sixty-two years, and juxtaposes two Bavarian institutions of different bent and fate: the successful practice-oriented Academy Weihenstephan, and the science-oriented and hard-pressed University Institute of Munich. Harwood links the success of Weihenstephan to its geographical location, the political and economic structure of Bavaria, and its lower position within the academic hierarchical structure, which enabled the academy to benefit from the support of small peasants while feeling no pressure to attract highly qualified scientists.

In his conclusion, Harwood discusses the relevance of his model for understanding and framing the current development of educational institutions concerned with engineering, medicine, and management. Here, one wishes that the author had been more critical in his use of Bourdieu's theory by resorting to both concepts of the academic and scientific fields, as the former does not function independently of the latter. Having done so, he might have demonstrated a better appreciation for the differential role of industrial- and state-research institutions in celebrating the theoretical or practical content of academic institutions and, in Bourdieu's terminology, facilitating the conversion of economic capital into scientific capital (or vice versa). Given the multiplicity of...