Blurbs
[flap copy]
“This magisterial book offers a compelling new account of the origins of the research-based university. Drawing on an
astonishing wealth of sources, it explores in fascinating detail the transformations of university life from the Reformation
to the Romantic era. This will be required reading for historians of European culture and for all academics curious
about their origins.”—Nick Jardine, University of Cambridge
[back cover]
“Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University should be one of the most immediately controversial
and ultimately influential books on the history of academia to appear, certainly in its own generation and probably for
several generations. All who work in modern research universities ought to be interested in what Clark has to say, and
all who work on them will find it compelling.”—Adrian Johns, University of Chicago
“Though a venerable branch of the human race, Homo academicus heretofore lacked a family tree and life history.
William Clark fills the gap brilliantly with a minutely detailed genealogy and a large-scale investigation of the social
habits, values, and rituals of the agents of learning and scholarship. From medieval colleges to nineteenth-century
universities, from England and Italy to France and Germany, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research
University sheds new light on the last exotic tribe of the Western world, a group that played a key part in the advent of
modernity.”—Christian Jacob, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
“William Clark is an incredibly original traveler through the history of German academia. The book is a marvel in its
combination of stupendous scholarship and enjoyable reading. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research
University is like a mirror that shows us academics numerous characteristics of ourselves and our institutions, details
we usually ignore.” —Michael Hagner, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich
“We are used to thinking of academic structures and pomp as ‘traditional,’ a throwback to an unspecified earlier time—
maybe antiquity, maybe more recent. By contrast, William Clark gives the material and sociological bricks of the ivory
tower historical specificity and by doing so takes the university apart. How do the category and comportment of the
modern professor come into being? Are researchers heroes? Are they gentlemen? Are they bureaucrats? Robes and
disputations, exams, and architecture: all grist for Clark’s mill. In this historical dissection of the university, Clark has
created a world that is at once very erudite and immensely funny, an imaginative and beautifully researched step
beyond the schematics of Bourdieu’s classic Homo Academicus. Anyone who wants to understand how universities got
to be the way they are should grab this book off the shelf.”—Peter Galison, Harvard University