One of the interesting benefits of reading Louis Menand's Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Metaphyisical Club: The Story of Ideas in America is understanding how important German universities were in creating America's academic institutions in post-Civil War United States. Strictly speaking, there were no graduate studies in America before the Civil War. The first graduate school was established at Johns Hopkins University and was modeled after the University of Heidelberg. Nearly every serious scholar in America made a pilgrimage to the great universities at Heidelberg, Berlin, Leipzig and Goettingen. Of Stanford University's original 30 professors, 15 had received degrees in Germany and the school's unofficial motto which appears on its official seal is Die Luft der Freiheit weht ("the wind of freedom blows") - a quote from Ulrich von Hutten, a 16th-century humanist. The founder of scientific studies at Harvard University - Louis Agassiz - was a Swiss scholar who studied at the feet of the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humbolt. and came to America on a grant from the king of Prussia. Germany stood for quality scientific inquiry and academic freedom - virtually unknown in America up to then.
The great German academic institutions were destroyed by the Nazis, and, with some notable exceptions, never really regained their status after the war. Chronically underfunded and overcrowded, the German universities acquired a reputation of mediocrity, and many of the talented scholars and research scientists made their way to the US to study at the elite universities here.
The New York Times reports on a new German government initiative to create three new elite universities with target funding of $100 million apiece:
"With German universities — once the envy of the academic world — in decline for decades, Mr. Hommelhoff said most Germans accepted that radical measures were needed to propel them back into competition with their rivals in Britain, Switzerland and especially the United States.
To start with, Germans are abandoning a notion that all universities are basically equal — an ideal that dates from the 1970’s when university admissions were opened up and that has served to mask vast disparities in quality among the country’s 102 universities."
"Universities hope to address these shortcomings by becoming more like their elite American counterparts. Starting next year, they will be allowed to charge tuition of 500 euros, or $630, per semester. Karlsruhe has begun to practice selective admissions for its smaller humanities programs."
Karlsruhe has a long way to go before it can match the $26 billion endowment of Harvard or the lab facilities of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but at least Germany is finally doing something to keep its most talented students in the country.