Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This volume analyzes the history and character of the modern university from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, with particular emphasis on the constitutive significance of geography as a factor shaping the internal and external dynamics of universities and the national and international systems of higher education in which they have operated.

Using material on a famous scholar from the University of Heidelberg, this chapter presents the Repertorium Academicum Germanicum (RAG, ), a prosopographic database providing CVs for the estimated 60,000 scholars active in knowledge-based societies within the territory of the Holy Roman Empire between 1250 and 1550. “Academics” are defined as persons who earned at least either the degree of magister artium from the Arts Faculty of any university in Europe or the bachelor’s, licentiate, or doctor’s degrees from one of the higher faculties (law, medicine, or theology). The concept includes persons such as noblemen who completed a course of study in one of the higher faculties without graduating. The chapter also presents a web-based geographical who’s who of scholars—the —an emerging information system for analyzing and cartographically mapping the mobility of academics in and around the catchment areas of their universities and the areas of their subsequent professional development.

For centuries Heidelberg belonged to those German universities with the highest share of foreign students in their student body. Hungary lends itself to the topic of student mobility because its students have been among Europe’s most mobile academic populations since the Middle Ages. This chapter focuses on the reasons for Heidelberg University’s fluctuating attractiveness, the range and intensity of student mobility from Hungary, and the scientific and cultural relations between the Palatinate and Hungary. It addresses the questions of which political, social, religious, intellectual, and economic influences helped or hindered student migration from Hungary and Transylvania to Heidelberg; which regions and social strata the students from Hungary and Transylvania came from; and which leadership functions these Hungarian students later assumed in their home country. The authors not only analyze these questions at the structural level but also delve into the biographies and networks of outstanding individual protagonists.

This paper examines the densest concentration of universities in early modern Europe at the most tumultuous moment in their history: namely, the universities of the Holy Roman Empire in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War (1618−1648). After situating the topic on a broad geographical and chronological canvass (in Part I), the body of the papers shows how the systematic study of fluctuating matriculation rates reveals how the war transformed the academic geography both of the Empire itself (in Part II) and of the huge catchment area which surrounded it (in Part III). After summarizing some basic historiographical and methodological results, the paper concludes (in Part IV) by outlining a few of the prospects for a richer and more detailed intellectual geography of Europe in this period.

Through a study of universities within the territorial claims of the Danish monarchy, this chapter explores the political geography of university-founding and nation-building. Since the early Middle Ages, when the Danish monarchy was a composite state like other European states, the duchies Schleswig and Holstein have been surrendered to Prussia. Norway and Iceland have become independent nation-states, and the Faeroe Islands and Greenland have gained home-rule within the Kingdom of Denmark. The authors show how the founding of universities has been used in these processes toward independence. They first analyze the geopolitics of university founding in three selected and contested regions from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. The second part of the analysis is a study of the relationship between university-founding and nation-building. Taking a geohistorical perspective, the authors show how geography can contribute to the understanding of university history.

The 1960s are generally regarded as a decisive decade for the postwar expansion of British universities, the process widely associated with the publication of the Robbins Report on Higher Education in October 1963. This period saw significant increases in the number of full-time university students and in the level of public expenditure devoted to higher education. This chapter analyses the debates triggered by the Robbins committee’s recommendation to establish a new university in Scotland, eventually located in the county town of Stirling. Based on previously unexamined documents in the UK National Archives, we argue that the decision to create the new university in Stirling rather than the alternative locations of Ayr, Cumbernauld, Dumfries, Falkirk, Inverness, and Perth arose from the interplay of three somewhat contradictory pressures: the preference of the Robbins committee for new universities in or near to large cities; the prejudices of the academics charged with making this decision for environments that reproduced the perceived creative advantages of the ancient universities where they were educated or employed, specifically Oxford; and the highly successful lobbying campaign in support of Stirling.

Until the early 1980s most research on scientific creativity had focused on personal attributes of scholars. Few authors found it necessary to include the social, cultural, and scientific environment in their considerations. However, science has not only a history but a geography as well. Creativity is never the result of individual action alone. A stimulating environment and a talented individual must come together and interact before a creative process can occur. A number of milieu factors can promote or hinder both scientific creativity and academic careers. The chapter focuses on five questions: What do we mean by knowledge environment? Which components make up a local knowledge environment? In what way can a local knowledge environment affect goals, decisions, learning, research processes, and careers of academics? How can one verify the consequences of a knowledge environment? Which theoretical concepts can contribute to the understanding of the interaction between the knowledge environment and the individual scholar?

A triple helix of university-industry-government relations, as the basis of innovation policy, is identified in both statist and laissez-faire regimes. Direct links in the United States among university, industry, and government formed during World War II were dismantled immediately after the war but have since been revived in a looser format. A triple helix innovation system comprising bottom-up, top-down, and lateral initiatives among university, industry, and government translates research into use. Ideological opposition to government-industry relationships is reduced by an indirect format of running such links through the university. This has had the consequence of increasing the university’s salience as an innovation actor. That government is strongly involved in U.S. innovation policy is increasingly accepted. But why was this policy regime established and how did resistance to its emplacement paradoxically strengthen implementation, transforming a public/private double helix into a university-industry-government triple helix?

Quality assurance and quality management are central challenges in the governance of higher education institutions. In this context, the importance of promoting an institution-specific quality culture has drawn increasing attention. The concept of quality culture expands traditional approaches to quality assurance by focusing on aspects of organizational psychology, such as shared attitudes and commitment to quality. Despite growing discussion of quality culture, sound empirical approaches that capture this key construct have not been developed systematically. This chapter summarizes the theoretical background and selected results of the heiQUALITY Cultures project, which aimed at creating an empirical instrument that operationalizes quality culture within institutions of higher education. Extensive research resulted in the development of the Quality Culture Inventory (QCI), the first approach to allow institutions of higher education to assess their current state of quality culture empirically. The results of the QCI constitute a solid basis for reflecting on quality culture and developing focused measures for improving it.

The study of ignorance, or agnotology, has many similarities with studies of absence. This chapter outlines a framework for agnotology which is shaped by interdisciplinary studies of both ignorance and absence, and identifies properties such as chronicity, granularity, scale, intentionality, and ontology in relation to epistemology as useful for studying ignorance. These properties can be used to compare various case studies. While not all problems of ignorance are problems of absent knowledge, those that are can gain by an examination of the literatures on absence and the concept of the privative. The lack of symmetry in explanation and representation are methodological challenges to studying ignorances and absences. Space, geography, and landscape have both metaphoric and literal engagements with the production and distribution of knowledge and non-knowledges.