HN Reader

Great thought provoking article, a lot of starting points for wikipedia deep dives. It's really surprising to me that most of the big name intellectuals from before the 19th century were indeed not doing their work in the university system. I guess it's in nobody's interest to highlight this. Academia wants to present itself as the obvious deposit and trailblazer of knowledge and that it always has been. There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis of good science.

I find it curious and bad that people can go through the academic pipeline without ever being presented with any deep explanation of what this thing even is, where it came from, what else it could be, what historical opposition there was or what debate there was around what it should be, what it is in ideal theory and what it is in real practice and what cynics see it as. People just enroll because that's obviously the thing to do. Then they may stick around for grad school and get comfy in the system but reflection and meta is rare.

> The students were menaces, given to drunkenness, gambling, dueling, and chronically skipping class.

I came across this awhile ago and thought it pretty incredible and interesting:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scholastica_Day_riot

I am so unimpressed with research universities in the US. Most just accept and neglect undergrad students. They use them as a steady income and have very little intention of providing them with a quality education.

I happen to be very close with the dean of arts and science of a major state university. He told me that all of his professional goals given to him by the president and provost had to do with research impact, while 100% of the money he was allocated came from student tuition. The incentives are completely out of line and the students are the ones who pay the price.

> It had a modern academic research library, the largest in the world, which featured brand-new innovations like organizing books on shelves by subjects with reference to a catalogue

the tone is light-hearted overall, but really think about how foolish this insufficiently rigorous statement is!

> It hardly mattered if a professor of oriental languages could read Hebrew or Arabic, so long as he had adequate seniority, and a poetry professor who wanted a raise might well be handed an additional chair in mathematics.

this is a glib treatment of seniority

> As we’ll see, they mostly failed. The rights of traditional university faculties were protected by ancient laws (and ancient lawyers)

but some genuinely funny lines too!

> Promising young scholars had to burnish their resumes with useless publications long before anyone thought of asking them to do real research.

insightful

> before any kind of institutional academic specialization

it feels a bit unsettling to read so many detailed and insightful bits of this story but then get these sort of bombastic over-summary lines that sink credibility IMHO

The Mouseion of Alexandria (the larger institution around the more famous library) was arguably the origin of the research university. Scholars there published scholarship in the humanities and sciences — and it lasted hundreds of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouseion

A former MIT Lincoln Lab researcher dedicated years of his life to demonstrating, (in purely technical terms) the contributions of mid-19th-c-to-prewar German technologists to science & history. Underpinned by archive citations & scans throughout, it makes for good reading (and requires no purchase to read). Being 4000+ pages, I’ve found it works well as a reference to sci-technical topics of interest to me rather than a front-to-back readthrough.

https://riderinstitute.org/revolutionary-innovation/

It really is a strange system we have. I wish we could separate education from academia.

Those Trailblazing Teutons…