How universities die
It has happened before in centers of learning such as Berlin and Beijing. Is Boston next?
By William C. KirbyUpdated June 1, 2025
Globe Staff/Adobe
William
C. Kirby, a professor of business administration and China studies at
Harvard, is the author of “Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern
University From Germany to America to China.”
Berlin
In
1910, German universities were the envy of the world. They were the
world’s center of scientific research, not only in the natural sciences
but also in the study of history, politics, philosophy, and literature.
Our modern scholarly disciplines were all first defined in Germany.
The
University of Berlin, founded a century earlier, was the Harvard of its
day. Every serious American university, from Hopkins to Chicago, to
Harvard and Berkeley, was made or reformed according to the “Berlin
model.” Why else is Stanford’s motto
(“Die Luft der Freiheit weht” — “The winds of freedom are blowing”) in
German? Original research was prized over the mere transmission of
knowledge from one generation to the next. Faculty and students would
learn together in seminars and laboratories. Professors would have
“Lehrfreiheit,” or the freedom to teach, while students would enjoy
“Lernfreiheit,” the freedom to learn,
across multiple disciplines. Although supported entirely by the state,
universities themselves would decide who would teach and what would be
taught. If university rankings had existed in 1910, eight of the top 10
in the world probably would have been German — with only Oxford and
Cambridge joining them in that elite circle.
As
late as 1932, the University of Berlin remained the most famous of the
world’s universities. By 1934, it had been destroyed from without and
within.
Germany’s
descent from a nation of “poets and thinkers” (“Dichter und Denker”) to
one of “judges and hangmen” (“Richter und Henker”) ended its leadership
in higher education.
The
impact of the new National Socialist regime that came to power in
January 1933 became clear on May 10 of that year, when the members of
the German Student Union — among them many students from the University
of Berlin — piled and burned books from public libraries on the streets
of Berlin’s Opernplatz, the square opposite the university’s main
building. A crowd of 70,000, including students, professors, and members
of the SA and SS — the storm troopers for the National Socialist Party —
watched as thousands of volumes were torched.
The
Nazi regime quickly purged universities of non-Aryan students and
faculty and political dissidents. Leading scholars left Berlin in large
numbers in a historic academic migration to the United States, Britain,
and elsewhere. Universities lost any capacity for self-government. The
University of Berlin abandoned its own traditions of teaching and
research. Scholarship serving truth for truth’s sake was jettisoned for
scholarship in service of the “Volk.”
The
Nazi period would be followed by East German Communist orthodoxy and
finally, in 1990, by absorption into the German Federal Republic — with
each change accompanied by a new purge of faculty.
In
2010, at the celebration for the 200th anniversary of the university —
now named Humboldt University — its president welcomed guests by saying:
“Today, nobody anywhere in the world is prepared to take this
university as a model.” Indeed. No longer the leading university in the
world, Humboldt University today is not the best in Germany — and not
even the best in Berlin.
Beijing
In
the first half of the 20th century, China developed a remarkable set of
colleges and universities: a small system, but pound for pound one of
the best and most innovative in the world. Its institutions were Chinese
and foreign, public and private. The system was composed of leading
state universities — Peking University in Beijing and National Central
University (modeled on the University of Berlin) in Nanjing. Its private
institutions often had international partners. Peking Union Medical
College, with Rockefeller Foundation funding, had a global reputation.
Tsinghua
University in Beijing began in 1911 as a prep school for students
planning to enroll at universities in America. By the 1930s, it was
China’s leading research university, devoted to free and open inquiry.
When the Japanese occupied Beijing in 1937, Tsinghua led the effort to
relocate leading Chinese universities to China’s southwest. Some of
Tsinghua’s most famous and innovative alumni, such as physicists C.N.
Yang (Yang Zhenning) and C.T. Li (Li Zhengdao), who would become Nobel
laureates in 1957, completed their studies during this time. Tsinghua’s
president and the leader of National Southwest University,
Mei Yiqi, is still remembered today for his advocacy of liberal
education, institutional autonomy, and academic freedom even in the
darkest moments of the war. For that he is known as Tsinghua’s “eternal
president.” In short, Tsinghua survived eight years of exile and war,
and it stood firm by its academic values.
What
it could not so easily survive was the Communist conquest of China in
1949. Tsinghua’s longstanding ties with the United States were severed,
not to be joined again for three decades. Chinese universities were
reordered along Stalinist lines and were rapidly Sovietized. A new
Tsinghua campus arose next to the original one. Its 13-story main
building, a brutal Stalinist complex of three structures, now dominated
the campus. In 1952 Tsinghua became a polytechnic university to train
engineers according to rigid state plans. The schools of sciences and
humanities, agriculture, and law were all abolished, and their faculty
members were scattered to other institutions. Faculty who would not or
could not work under the new regime either fled abroad or were fired at
home.
While
Tsinghua began to train China’s Communist technocracy, the relentless
politicization of universities under Mao Zedong first weakened and then
nearly destroyed the university. During the Cultural Revolution of the
1960s, the university became the site of bloody clashes and eventually
shut down completely. The Cultural Revolution even destroyed Tsinghua’s
iconic gate, replaced for a time by a huge statue of Mao. Tsinghua
resumed operations, but on a skeletal basis, only in 1978. It would take
until the centenary of the university, in 2011, for Tsinghua to reclaim
its position as a leading comprehensive research university.
Boston
Harvard
University began life in 1636 as a public institution. Its founder was
not John Harvard but the General Court of Massachusetts. It was
supported in the 17th century by taxes and other “contributions” from as
far south as New Haven, at times levied in corn, and by the revenues of
the Charlestown ferry that connected Cambridge to Boston, paid in
wampumpeag (the currency of the Massachusetts Bay Colony).
Founded
140 years before the United States, Harvard was nonetheless central to
the creation of our nation. After the battles of Lexington and Concord
in April 1775, the college’s Cambridge campus was given over to the Revolution.
General George Washington set up his first headquarters in Wadsworth
House, in Harvard Yard. On July 3, 1775, he rode out to Cambridge Common
to take command of the Continental Army. Sixteen hundred colonial
troops were quartered in Harvard’s buildings. On April 3, 1776, after
Washington had driven the British from Boston, Harvard conferred upon
him its first doctorate of law.
Harvard
and the United States have been closely connected ever since. During
World War II, the university once again devoted itself to the war
effort. Soldiers were housed on Harvard’s campus. Harvard faculty
developed advanced torpedoes for submarine warfare and the napalm used
in the firebombing of enemy cities, and they assisted in creating the
first atom bomb. They also provided intelligence. Numerous Harvard
scholars joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to
the Central Intelligence Agency. Their collective work at OSS,
organized in regional departments, formed the foundation of postwar
“area studies” at Harvard and across the United States, supported by the
Department of Defense. In the aftermath of the war, Harvard created a
curriculum focused on “General Education for a Free Society” to give
students “a common understanding of the society which they will possess
in common,” a concept that would be adopted nationwide.
The
Vietnam War led, in contrast, to a Harvard sharply divided over the
justness of that cause. But even so, in its wake, Harvard created the
Kennedy School of Government to prepare students for careers in public
service — a leading center for the study and practice of government.
For
nearly four centuries, the decisions and actions of Harvard have set
the tone for American higher education. Today Harvard has become the
leading research university in the world, with a reputation equal to, if
not greater than, that of the University of Berlin in the 19th century.
As it rose to national prominence in the 20th century, universities
across the United States vied to be the “Harvard of the South” (Duke,
Vanderbilt, Rice), the “Harvard of the Midwest” (Michigan, Northwestern,
Chicago, Washington University), and the “Harvard of the West”
(Stanford).
Yet
today Harvard is an institution that may be more admired abroad than at
home, in an era of public (and politicized) critique of American higher
education. At least 43 US states have cut back on their investments in
higher education since 2008, according to research I gathered for my
book “Empires of Ideas.” Leading public and private universities,
including Harvard, have become lightning rods in the political and
culture wars of the day.
Although
the Trump administration’s multifront assault on Harvard may be less
violent (for now, at least) than the authoritarian takeovers of the
University of Berlin and Tsinghua University, it is no less dangerous.
It is an attempt to destroy the academic freedoms and institutional
autonomy that have been hallmarks of every great modern university.
Fortunately,
the United States is not (yet) Berlin in 1933 or Beijing in 1950. It
retains an independent judiciary and rule of law, and it has, in
Harvard, a university with the history, will, and resources to resist.
In its resistance, Harvard has reaffirmed its leadership in American
higher education as nothing else could. Should it fail, we shall witness
the destruction of the one industry, higher education, in which this
country is still the global leader. We
shall destroy our capacity to recruit talent from all shores. We will
decline. For history shows that universities can die, and nations will
decay.
If American universities remain the envy of the world in 2025, the question must be: for how long?