Research university

19th century

The concept of the research university first arose in early 19th-century Prussia in Germany, where Wilhelm von Humboldt championed his vision of Einheit von Lehre und Forschung (the unity of teaching and research), as a means of producing an education that focused on the main areas of knowledge, including the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, rather than on the previous goals of the university education, which was to develop an understanding of truth, beauty, and goodness.^[10][11]

The concept was brought to Britain in the mid-19th century by Henry Enfield Roscoe, who had studied with Robert Wilhelm Bunsen at the University of Heidelberg. In 1857 he was appointed professor of chemistry at Owen's College, Manchester, and worked during the 1860s to develop the college following the German model.^{[12][13][14][15]} The emphasis on research from the German model was taken up by the other civic university colleges founded in England in the latter part of the 19th century.^[16] Research schools were founded by individual academics at some institutions from the 1870s, and from the 1890s research was pursued as a matter of institutional policy.^[17] British universities also set up research degrees in this period; however, these were higher doctorates, starting with the Doctor of Science at Durham in 1882 and Cambridge in 1883, aimed at a higher level than the PhD, or lower degrees such as Oxford's BPhil and BSc, Cambridge's BA by research, and the MA by dissertation at London and other newer universities.^[18][19]

Roger L. Geiger, "the leading historian of the American research university,"^[20] has argued that "the model for the American research university was established by five of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution (Harvard, Yale, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and King's); five state universities (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and California); and five private institutions conceived from their inception as research universities (MIT, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago)."^[21][22] The American research university first emerged in the late 19th century, when these fifteen institutions began to graft graduate programs derived from the German model onto undergraduate programs derived from the British model.^[21] At Johns Hopkins, president Daniel Coit Gilman led the development of the American research university^[9] by setting high standards for recruiting faculty and admitting students, and insisting that faculty members had to commit to both teaching and research.^[23]

20th century

In the early 20th century, the tension between research-led teaching after Humboldt's model in the English civic university colleges and the centrally set examinations of the Victoria University and the University of London was one of the factors that contributed to the university colleges becoming universities in their own right.^[25]

Research universities were essential to the establishment of American hegemony by the end of the 20th century.^[26] Columbia and Harvard were instrumental in the early development of the American film industry in Hollywood in the first half of the 20th century.^[27]

The first Congress of Universities of the (British) Empire in 1912 was urged by the Foreign Office to adopt the PhD in order to prevent students going to study in Germany and America. However, this was opposed at that time as diluting the standard of English doctorates. In 1917, a conference of the universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield decided to introduce the PhD, and this was followed by all British universities except Cambridge, which maintained its BA by research into the 1920s.^[18][28]

The development of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, culminating in the Manhattan Project, involved researchers from universities in the US (Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, and Princeton) and the UK (Birmingham and Cambridge).^[29][30]

MIT and Stanford were leaders in building the American military–industrial complex in the aftermath of World War II.^[31] and developing artificial intelligence,^[32]

The first electronic stored-program computer, the Manchester Baby, was developed at Manchester in the 1940s,^[33] while in the US Berkeley and Stanford played a central role in the development of Silicon Valley.^[34] The "most prestigious group of research universities" in the United States is the Association of American Universities.^[35]

In the second half of the 20th century, American research universities became the model for research universities around the world.^[2][36][37] Having one or more universities based on the American model (including the use of English as a lingua franca) thus became a marker of "social progress and modernity" for countries.^[38]

21st century

By the early 21st century it had become difficult for European universities to maintain research standards and resources at the level of the top US institutions.^[39]

Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) funded research universities to establish international branch campuses in those countries, and they and other Gulf states also started to build up their own research universities, such as Khalifa University (UAE), Hamad Bin Khalifa University (Qatar) and KAUST (Saudi Arabia), by recruiting Western-trained faculty and staff. By 2023, Qatar and the UAE had passed the US in number of papers published per 1000 population, although still behind Britain, Sweden and Singapore.^[40] As of April 2026, the UAE hosted 39 branch campuses, behind only China, with twelve institutions from the UK, seven from India, and three each from Australia, France, Russia and the US, while Qatar hosted twelve branch campuses, the majority from US institutions.^[41] The amount of funding given to US universities by Qatar led to concerns about Qatari involvement in US higher education.^[42]

Academic freedom – identified by Altbach as one of the key characteristics of successful research universities^[43] – declined globally from 2012, as measured by the Academic Freedom Index. The trend started in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and North Africa, but spread to established liberal democracies. The US, in particular, saw a decline from 2020. Jeremy Berg noted that the dependence of research universities in the US on federal research funding gave the government leverage to override international autonomy, and that while some universities, such as Harvard, had pushed back and won in court, many had not.^[44]