The period around 1800 has been described as the one in which the ideological underpinnings of the modern research university were established. Important impulses emanated from Germany, where W. v. Humboldt established the University of Berlin in 1810. The publications and lectures in which the university question had been raised during the preceding decades have subsequently attracted great interest among historians. However it has rarely been taken into account that many of those advocating university reform did so with reference to the rapidly expanding book trade.

The project's aim was to analyse how the challenge presented by books was conceptualised in the debate about university policy around 1800. For a long time the prevailing form of academic teaching had consisted of lectures - teachers reading out to students. Towards the end of the 18th century increasing numbers were claiming that the breakthrough of printed books had rendered this practice obsolete. This raised the question of how teaching should be organised instead. The project's most important hypothesis has been that several of the principles that we associate today with the "Humboldt model" were indeed once proposed because they seemed to offer a solution to the problem created by the advent of mass-produced books.

The scope of the research has been extended to some extent during the course of the project, as I have also become interested in the rising status of academic writers from the mid-18th century onwards. There had admittedly been university teachers who viewed themselves as writers earlier: the universities have always attracted individuals who wanted to write. But apart from the manuscripts for their lectures and their theses professors had rarely written anything in their official roles. During the second half of the 18th century this changes. Since then university teachers have not only been expected to write but also to write a great deal. What caused this change? To modern observers 18th century German universities may seem inhospitable settings for writers: their libraries were often in a deplorable state; publications were censored; teachers often had to teach from morning to night. Even so, one should be cautious about depicting these factors in terms of "obstacles". The problem about using this word is that it helps to naturalise incentives that have to be understood with reference to their historical genesis. It is as if it can be assumed that academics in every era have nursed an unwavering desire to write and external circumstances have been all that has kept them from doing so at certain times. Instead of taking this desire for granted, I have wanted to study how it was once inspired.

My original thesis was, as pointed out, that several of the ideas that we associate with the Humboldt model were once voiced partly in order to counter the threat offered by printed books. This hypothesis is confirmed in the essays "Böcker eller universitet?" and "Universitetet, den lärde och den självlärde". In late 18th-century sources we find complaints that students often fail to attend classes because they prefer to study on their own. To counter this development, which was considered to threaten the continued existence of the universities, many wanted to reform teaching so that it could offer students something that they could not find in books.

Two demands were made:

- the first was that teaching should be designed on the model of the British tutorial system and take Socratic dialogue as its example. It was claimed that the advantages of these two alternatives were that they allow teachers to communicate the objective embodiment of scholarship while taking the students' subjectivity into account, which was central for what Humboldt and others described as "Bildung".

- secondly that only new knowledge should be offered in the lecture halls, in the words of Johann Gottlieb Fichte: "never to teach orally what could be found in books". Instead the teachers had to be researchers: universities that had previously been pure teaching institutions also had to be research establishments. My claim is that this constitutes a previously ignored background to the emergence of the modern research university.

In addition to these two findings, in "Skriftfabriken" and "The publication mill" I have also shown what regulatory techniques were adopted by governments and university administrators from the end of the 18th century onwards to induce professors to write more books. These articles also demonstrate how new media such as directories of writers, scholarly reviews and what I refer to as student guides (books with advice for families considering what universities they should choose for their sons) supported this change in enabling ambitious teachers to compare their qualifications with those of their colleagues.

In addition to the results themselves the project has generated several new research questions. There is no room here to account for all the new avenues it has opened. One idea to which I attach great hopes deals with the status of the writer as an academic qualification. During the 18th century, when new demands were being made that university teachers should write more books, the motive was primarily an economic one. Governments employed productive writers as teachers not least because they wanted to attract students from neighbouring German states and so increase the revenues of their exchequers. Today when university teachers are being appointed, as we know, a different criterion applies. Significance is ascribed to publications in this process as they are assumed to testify to the contributions made by candidates to the development of knowledge. Important steps in this direction were first taken after the period I have been studying. Attention has rarely been paid to this process in earlier research. A study of its evolution would need to focus not only on how the concept of Wissenschaft changed during the remainder of the 19th century but also take into account the rise of peer-review systems in both the universities themselves and in academic publishing. What justifications were once given, for example, for innovations such as peer-review and referees?

It is my hope that I will be given the opportunity for further work on questions that relate to this problem area within the framework of the project for which I and Professor Ylva Hasselberg (Economic History, Uppsala University) are now applying for funding.

The project has also had an explicit impact on the text book Historia som kunskapsform that I have written together with Associate Professor Frans Lundgren (History of Ideas, Uppsala University), in which many examples and arguments have been taken either from my own research or from the secondary texts that have been relevant in the project.

In addition to the articles in Swedish and English, the results of the project have continually been presented at research seminars and international conferences. At an early stage in the project I presented a paper entitled Books, Autodidacticism, and University Reform at the Published Words, Public Pages Conference arranged by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing in Copenhagen in 2008. Other conferences and workshops I have taken part in include Participatory Media in Historical Perspective (Uppsala, 2007), Dilettantkulturer og dilettantisme i Norden (Tromsö, 2008) and The Humboldtian Tradition - Origin and Legacy (Uppsala, 2010).

I was one of the organisers of the conference on the Humboldtian Tradition". To celebrate the bicentenary of the foundation of the University of Berlin, I and my to fellow organisers, Associate Professor Thomas Karlsohn and Dr Johan Östling, had invited 16 lecturers from a total of seven countries to discuss the emergence and development of the modern research university. On this occasion my own presentation was entitled Publish and/or Perish. University Policy Debate and Bureaucratic Practice in Germany 1770-1810.
The main contributions to the conference now form part of the anthology The Humboldtian Tradition: Origins and Legacies, which also involved the participation of other invited researchers. A number of internationally highly qualified scholars, including the two keynote speakers at the conference, Professor Mitchell G. Ash and Professor Susan Wright, are represented by papers specially written for this anthology. My own contribution is the article "The publication mill" as well as to an introductory survey of the research and history of its reception written in collaboration with my two fellow-editors.

The project's two most important publications are "The publication mill" and "Universitetet, den lärde och den självlärde". The main merits of these works are that each in its own way sheds new light on the emergence of the modern university and the origin of a new academic self-perception. International research in this field may seem extensive. These two works stand out from earlier works, however, not only through their conclusions but also because of their analytical premises. Like the project in its entirety, both are characterised by the ambition to allow a topic of research such as university history that is usually theoretically conservative to be enriched by perspectives from sub-disciplines like media history and the history of science, with their more innovative analytical approaches.

Funding was granted for this project before the new open-access policy had been adopted. The first article generated in the project can, nevertheless, be downloaded from the Internet and was published in Lychnos, which today is partly digitalised. Otherwise it is my ambition to arrange for a translation of the article in Lychnos as well as "Universitetet, den lärde och den självlärde" to English for publication in international journals.

Publications

1. The Humboldtian Tradition: Origin and Legacy (redaktörsskap tillsammans med Thomas Karlsohn & Johan Östling), (kommande: manus inskickat till internationellt förlag för bedömning).
 
2. ”Universitetet, den lärde och den självlärde. Lärd identitetsbildning och pedagogiska reformdiskussioner i Tyskland, 1768-1810”, Uppsala Papers in History of Ideas, 16, 2013. (Översätts nu i en lätt redigerad version till engelska för framtida publicering i internationell tidskrift.)
 
3. "The publication mill: the beginnings of publication history as an academic merit in German universities, 1750–1810", i Peter Josephson, Thomas Karlsohn & Johan Östling (red.), The Humboldtian Tradition: Origin and Legacy (kommande: se punkt 1 ovan).
 
4. "The Humboldtian Tradition and its transformations" (tillsammans med Thomas Karlsohn & Johan Östling), i Peter Josephson, Thomas Karlsohn & Johan Östling (red.), The Humboldtian Tradition: Origin and Legacy (kommande: se punkt 1 ovan).
 
5. ”Skriftfabriken. Om introduktionen av skriftställarskap som akademisk merit vid tyska universitet, 1770-1810”, Uppsala Papers in History of Ideas, 14, 2010.
 
6. "Böcker eller universitet? Om ett tema i tysk utbildningspolitisk debatt kring 1800", Lychnos, 2009.

7. Historia som kunskapsform. En introduktion (tillsammans med Frans Lundgren), (kommande: manus antaget av Studentlitteratur).