Wilhelm von Humboldt

Wilhelm von Humboldt - the elder brother, not Alexander the naturalist - designed the modern university in a year and a half and then left government. He was a Prussian aristocrat of independent means, a friend of Schiller and Goethe, and spent his twenties writing on aesthetics and the limits of state action, arguing that government should do almost nothing beyond security because interference stunts individual development. He was put in charge of education in 1809, in a Prussia that had been destroyed by Napoleon at Jena and was rebuilding itself deliberately through its institutions. He held the post for sixteen months and reorganised the whole system: a classical Gymnasium with a state examination, teacher qualification, and at the top the University of Berlin, founded in 1810. The principle was that teaching and research belong in the same hands and that professors and students should be free to pursue enquiry wherever it leads, funded by the state and not directed by it. It was copied across Germany, then by the United States, and it is the model almost every research university still runs on. He resigned when the reforms were resisted, and worked as a diplomat at Vienna and at the peace settlement. He left politics for good in 1819 over the Carlsbad Decrees, which imposed exactly the censorship of universities he had spent his life arguing against. His last years went into comparative linguistics - the study of Basque, and of Kawi in Java - and the argument that a language carries a particular way of seeing the world. That claim was taken up a century later as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and is still contested.

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