Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University by Chad Wellmon (review)

This ambitious book begins and ends its argument with reflections on the nature of the contemporary research university in the US. With a focus on the nimbleness (or lack thereof) of the research university to react to rapid changes in the higher education environment, Wellmon reflects on the cultural logic of its unique "capacity to produce and transmit a knowledge that is distinct and carries with it the stamp of authority" (3). He sees this capability as the legacy of the ethos of the German university as it took shape around 1800 in Berlin, which then influenced the American university in the nineteenth century. While the study's focus is on the developments that led to the establishment of the German research university, it clearly invites comparison with our current moment and seeks to stimulate reflection on what the role of the university is in the twentyfirst century. As free or low-cost courses (e.g., MOOCs) enabled by the technology of the internet flood the education market, Wellmon is skeptical of the unbridled celebration of these forms of outsourcing education, primarily because their model lacks the "formative practices and intellectual virtues that constitute the core of the research university" (272). The historical study of the emergence of the research university can play a vital role, Wellmon hopes, in interrogating the epistemic norms and infrastructures of the current research university and its ability to ground a particular form of scientific authority and its underlying ethic, its "most central features: a set of norms, practices, and virtues central to modern knowledge" (274–76).

Wellmon argues that the experiment of the Berlin university was prompted by the information overload as result of the Enlightenment's popularization of knowledge evidenced in the proliferation of printed texts and the concern over its "focus on the technical and practical utility of all knowledge" (5). He points to critics like J. G. Fichte, who called for the German university to distinguish itself from this broad cultural trend. Wellmon traces the long arc of the organization of knowledge, starting with Aristotle's episteme involving logical necessity and truth, the medieval focus on the written word, discipline and doctrine describing the process of instruction and its results, and the humanist development of textual practices in light of new print technologies and the early modern conception of "new science" (Francis Bacon). The latter included books as well as other scientific instruments and exceeded the earlier understanding of books as repositories of knowledge, regarding them instead as "tools for [scientific] advancement" (29). This constituted a departure from the authoritative textual tradition to one that was grounded instead in the mind's faculties, memory, reason, and imagination, which represented an important step toward the modern university.

The Enlightenment and its concept of the university, leading up to the modern university, occupies the bulk of the book's analysis. The Enlightenment began to see the humanist collections "as little more than printed curiosity cabinets" and the "humanist polymath" as a pedant, who has little to do with "actual thinking" itself (33). Furthermore, Wellmon points to a divergence of knowledge in the form of the educated reader envisioned by the popular Enlightenment and the "specialized scientist—the botanist, philosopher, philologist, and theologian" (70).

By the last decades of the eighteenth century, the proliferation and fragmentation of knowledge began to exceed individual capacities and required the shift to an "institutional-dependent" form of knowledge (38). With the proposal for a university in Berlin, Fichte and Schleiermacher offered a new metaphor for the organization of knowledge: the "social unity of knowledge embodied in the university" as a new figure of epistemic authority. Given that the legitimacy of scientific knowledge was tied to the character of the scholar and the scholar's capacity to discern, "they tied the legitimacy of a uniquely scientific knowledge to the character and virtue of the scholar, whose distinguishing feature was a capacity to discern unity...