The modern university ideal was born amid severe academic repression.

Evidence

What, after all, was the real situation in the universities at the turn of the eighteenth century, what was the real fate even of the universities’ philosophical defenders? At the end of the century of Enlightenment, Kant was reprimanded and had his writings banned for offending against religious dogma; Fichte lost his professorship during the controversy over atheism; Hegel wrote his most daring works either before he joined the university or after he had left it during the confusion of the Napoleonic wars … Nevertheless, it was this phase of bourgeois development which was privileged to create the idea of the university. It was possible for this phase to achieve at least a reflection of what the university can and ought to be, partly through self-government for the academic body, the liberalness of its members, and the freedom of students to form associations; and partly through setting down as inalienable rights the principle of academic freedom, the principle that one should be free to learn what one chooses and the principle of self-education. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2324

Categorization

• XREF: This is Habermas’s argument in ‘The Chronic Sufferings of University Reform’ — connects to broader Frankfurt School critique of the idea of the university.
• SEED: Angle: the bureaucratic-rationalized university ideal was born in contradiction — the origin of academic freedom as a defense against, not celebration of, the state.