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Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Wellmon, Chad, 1976-

Title Organizing Enlightenment : information overload and the invention of the modern research university / Chad Wellmon.

Publication Info. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press , 2015.
©2015

Item Status

Description 1 online resource
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Summary "Since its inception, the research university has been the central institution of knowledge in the West. Today, however, its intellectual authority is being challenged on many fronts, above all by radical technological change. Organizing Enlightenment tells the story of how the university emerged in the early nineteenth century at a similarly fraught moment of cultural anxiety about revolutionary technologies and their disruptive effects on established institutions of knowledge. Late eighteenth-century Germans, troubled by a massive increase in the publication and availability of printed material, felt threatened by a veritable "plague" of books that circulated "contagiously" among the reading public. But deep concerns about what counted as authoritative knowledge, not to mention the fear of information overload, also made them uneasy, as they watched universities come under increasing pressure to offer more practical training and to justify their existence in the age of print. German intellectuals were the first to settle on the research university, and its organizing system of intellectual specialization, as the solution to these related problems. Drawing on the history of science, the university, and print, as well as media theory and philosophy, Chad Wellmon explains how the research university and the ethic of disciplinarity it created emerged as the final and most lasting technology of the Enlightenment. Organizing Enlightenment reveals higher education's story as one not only of the production of knowledge but also of the formation of a particular type of person: the disciplinary self. In order to survive, the university would have to institutionalize a new order of knowledge, one that was self-organizing, internally coherent, and embodied in the very character of the modern, critical scholar"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents Science as culture -- The fractured empire of erudition -- Encyclopedia from book to practice -- From bibliography to ethics -- Kant's critical technology -- The Enlightenment university and too many books -- The university in the age of print -- Berlin, Humboldt, and the research university -- The disciplinary self and the virtues of the philologist -- Afterword : too many links.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Universities and colleges -- Germany -- History -- 18th century.
Universities and colleges.
Germany.
History.
Chronological Term 18th century
Subject Universities and colleges -- Curricula -- Germany -- History -- 18th century.
Universities and colleges -- Curricula.
Education, Higher -- Germany -- History -- 18th century.
Education, Higher.
Research -- Germany -- History -- 18th century.
Research.
Enlightenment -- Germany.
Enlightenment.
Germany -- Intellectual life -- 19th century.
Intellectual life.
Chronological Term 19th century
Subject Education, Higher -- Philosophy.
Education, Higher -- Philosophy.
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Electronic books.
Other Form: Print version: Wellmon, Chad, 1976- Organizing Enlightenment 9781421416151 (DLC) 2014018366 (OCoLC)894935825
ISBN 9781421416168 electronic book
1421416166 electronic book
9781421416151
1421416158