Allies and Rivals is one of the most important books on the history of the research university to appear in many years. In this work, Emily Levine shows, on a transatlantic scale, how the growth of universities affected larger economic, political, and social developments of the 1870s through 1930s, including “the emergence of nation-states . . . and growing global economic and cultural interconnectedness” (2). Challenging the typical story of a one-way flow of German research university ideas to the United States, she argues that “exchanges across the Atlantic” were “determinants of the ongoing evolution of higher education in both America and Germany” (3).
Although Levine has used some archival sources, the book is not a monograph primarily based on archival work. Instead, it is a reinterpretation of the history of the research university, drawing on printed primary sources and secondary literature. Levine has compiled these sources into an ultra-impressive eighty-two-page bibliography, which is available on the book's website. In addition to using these historical methods, the book draws on “various sociological frameworks, including the diffusion of knowledge, status as a currency in interinstitutional relationships, and institutional hybridization” (9). Beyond these scholarly approaches, Allies and Rivals is enjoyable to read—it flows well, and has actors who the reader can follow across several chapters. They include Prussian Education Ministry leader Friedrich Althoff, famed liberal theologian Adolf von Harnack, and even Kaiser Wilhelm II, who appears in a more sympathetic light here than in many treatments of World War I.
Allies and Rivals shows how, even at the dawn of the American research university, American and German academic leaders were wrestling with the conflict between those who promoted science for its own sake, and those who promoted science because it promised the development of technology that could generate wealth and power. She quotes Werner von Siemens saying in 1883, “Research in the natural sciences always secures the base for technical progress. . . . Never will a national industry arrive at an internationally leading position, if the same country does not lead in the sciences” (126). Although the Germans invented the research university, Levine reveals that by the turn of the twentieth century, they became concerned that the Americans were outstripping them in scientific research. For German leaders, national pride was outweighing the cosmopolitanism associated with the research university. What was the Americans’ secret? The Germans perceived that it was private philanthropic funding, which provided more money for research than the German tradition of state-supported research did. Levine shows how German leaders were reading Andrew Carnegie's publications about philanthropy.
Inspired by American philanthropy, Althoff and Harnack led the creation of a system of research institutes separate from universities, funded partially by the German state but mostly by private philanthropy. Compared to the organized research units that proliferated in American universities after 1945, more of these German institutes remained focused on academic disciplines or subdisciplines. Further, the revised German arrangement of institutes and universities meant that German universities did not become “instruments of national purpose” as so many American universities did after World War II (the phrase came from a 1963 book by Clark Kerr, the leading figure of the postwar American university). One effect of creating the German research institutes was to draw many top scientists away from the universities to the institutes, where they could be freed from teaching. In the United States, by contrast, academic leaders cherished the combination of teaching and research in the universities. The long-term result, in Levine's description, is that “the German-born modern university model would be best preserved in the United States, providing the foundation for the Americans to solidify their lead in the global knowledge economy” (128). One missing element here is what German university leadership thought of the institutes.
Even this extremely impressive book contains some spots of concern. A couple of topics, such as the founding of the Association of American Universities (AAU) in 1900, are covered in odd locations. The big issue for the AAU, in Levine's telling, is its members’ desire to have their graduates recognized by German universities as having done real university work that met a specific standard. It seems that this material would belong in chapter 5, which deals with professionalization and standards, but it appears in chapter 6, on philanthropic support of research. Compounding the confusion is the placement of the 1910 Flexner report on medical education, which Levine primarily discusses in chapter 5. Yet in chapter 6, when introducing the AAU, she says that it was part of a “reckoning . . . jump-started” (128) by Flexner and others. The problem is that Flexner's report came ten years after the creation of the AAU, so its creation could not have responded to the report.
In chapter 4, “Reluctant Innovators,” Levine traces how M. Carey Thomas and W. E. B. Du Bois interacted with the German university world, and how that interaction shaped their advocacy of higher education for women and African Americans, respectively, in the United States. Levine states that Thomas and Du Bois “establish[ed] separate systems of higher education that mirrored the elitist principles of the top universities while remaining inferior to them.” She goes on to mention that “the German model required a particular high school education and the mastery of Latin and Greek,” which “threw up additional barriers” (103). Nineteenth-century American colleges routinely required Latin and Greek for entrance, so it is not clear that Thomas and Du Bois endorsing such a requirement represented a particularly German influence. They were following an American model as much as a German one in emphasizing Latin and Greek.
One of the most interesting issues raised by Allies and Rivals is the role of religious belief in the development of the research university. The topic appears sporadically in the book. Harnack was one of the major religious thinkers of his era. Levine describes how many German scholars believed only Protestants could achieve scientific objectivity. There are numerous mentions of issues involving Jews. Religious controversy swirled around the opening of Johns Hopkins University despite the Christian commitment of founding president Daniel Coit Gilman, who later served as president of the American Bible Society.
Despite these inclusions, the book leaves room for other scholars to finish the picture of religion's role in transatlantic exchange connected to the research university. For many American religious thinkers, Germany and its universities were synonymous with doctrinal infidelity during this period. Many of the first American research universities had some kind of religious commitment, even if they were moving away from it. Even state universities like Michigan and Wisconsin required students to attend chapel services until around the turn of the twentieth century. Levine shows that German academic leaders were closely monitoring the American university during this era, but what did they think about its religious landscape?
In Levine's extensive treatment of Andrew Carnegie's German-inspired efforts to standardize American higher education, she mentions that Carnegie and Henry Pritchett, who ran the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching at its 1905 inception, created a pension program for American professors, based on a German model (113). Yet she does not address perhaps the most important aspect of it—Carnegie's insistence that only so-called nonsectarian universities could participate in the pension program. It was in response to this demand that Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson got the trustees to declare that Princeton was no longer a Presbyterian institution. Other universities, too, dropped their church affiliations in order to take Carnegie's money. It was a landmark moment for American higher education's relationship to religion. Levine notes that Wilson overtly resisted the German model by insisting on an English-style graduate college because he wanted Princeton to be “distinctive.” But Wilson's commitment was halfhearted—if he really wanted to be distinctive in the emerging landscape of the research university, he could have preserved Princeton's connection with a specific religious tradition at the cost of Carnegie pension money.
Another intriguing religious angle comes when Levine frames the 1915 creation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as emerging out of a campaign to challenge the power of the Carnegie Foundation, “which they thought was in thrall to industry” (159). Here we see two groups of ardent secularizers fighting with each other. The AAUP founders, like Carnegie, were attempting to push certain kinds of religious belief out of the university.
Despite Wilson's official designation of Princeton University as nonsectarian, it continued to have Presbyterian presidents who played a role in weekly Sunday worship at the university chapel up until 1972. One of those presidents, Harold Dodds (1933–1957), was concerned on religious grounds that Princeton should not become a “multiversity.” In Levine's conclusion, she says that people have coined terms like “multiversity” (made famous by Clark Kerr in 1963) or my own “instrumental university” to describe the post-1945 university, and that they “miss . . . the longue durée history of the university's relations to external interests” (250-51). About the multiversity, Levine is in a way more right than she knows, because the term actually originated before World War II, and possibly in Europe. A conversation about the drawbacks of the “multiversity” began at least as early as a 1938 article from a University of Geneva student in the journal Student World, a publication of the World Christian Student Federation, and migrated across the Atlantic. By 1952, Dodds picked up this line of thinking. Following this story is a next step in the kind of transatlantic inquiry about the history of the research university that Levine has done so well in Allies and Rivals.
