Read the text on the right and then review the Documents below:

•	The new German nation state pioneered the development of the modern university in the late nineteenth century. German universities combined both teaching and research and produced path breaking scholarship. They also stressed modern subjects such as social sciences, history, modern languages, and chemistry and physics. German universities thus served the needs of an industrializing and expanding nation. They also helped to foster a common identity in the fledgling nation. Read Document 1. How did life at the University promote a common culture and national identity? To who in particular did the new universities assimilate?
•	The German university system had strong influence abroad and also reflected similar developments in other countries.. Read Document 2 and Document 3. How were developments in American higher education similar and different from those in Germany? Did American universities serve the same role as their counterparts in Germany?
•	Changing forms and goals of higher education in the West also led to changes in higher education in non-Western societies. For a history of al-Azhar, the Islamic world's leading center of learning, see Document 4 and Document 5. How had al-Azhar evolved over time? How did its goals and mission change in the twentieth century?
•	Cairo University, formerly, the Egyptian University, was founded by Egyptian reformers in 1908. For further information on the university's history, see Document 6. How are the goals and mission of this university different from al-Azhar's? How are they similar.
•	For images of al-Azhar, go to Image 1. For images of Cairo University go to Image 2. (Click on the various links.) How does the architecture and the aesthetics of each institution reflect its history, and it mission and goals?

German and Egyptian Universities

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sweeping reforms transformed the universities of German speaking Europe. No longer polishing schools for aristocrats, these centers for higher learning became the preeminent institutions for the collection and dissemination of knowledge. Taking the place of salons, courts, and royal societies (see Chapter 5), the universities now determined which subjects were worthy of study and which were not. The ideal of the German universities was to combine research with teaching in such a way that each complemented the other; and both would be protected from the interference of the state or the market. The new German universities were so successful in producing path breaking scholarship that other Europeans and Americans looked to them as models for organizing higher learning and promoting scholarship.

These new institutions were places where researchers, students, and teachers exchanged ideas and information, supposedly on an equal basis (though in practice, one still had to be male, and middle class or above, to be able to attend courses there). For most of the nineteenth century, they were dominated by humanists, those who studied languages (especially classical languages), history, philosophy, and religion. Proficiency in Latin and ancient Greek was particularly prized, for educated Europeans still looked to classical antiquity for the origins of their advanced "civilization," as opposed to what was seen as the non-culture of the Americas and Africa and the decadent culture of Asia. This focus on the classics produced a wealth of important studies and insights-but it was extremely narrow. And by the century’s end, these institutions were under siege, both from within and from without.

From within, the natural scientists and specialists in modern subjects (such as the social sciences, modern European history and languages) claimed a greater share of the university’s budget and curriculum. Their demands suited Germany’s modernizing aims, and by the end of the century a recognizably "modern" set of laboratories, lecture courses, and scholarly institutes had become central to the mission of the university. The universities were more reluctant to attend to the demands of women and workers, who insisted that they, too, should be allowed to attend courses. Ultimately, some accommodations were made, but not until the 1920s did these outsiders really make their presence felt. Increasingly, too, it was argued that the universities should increase their attention to non-European subjects, especially in order to prepare businessmen and state officials for service in the colonies. In 1910, the Hamburgisches Kolonialinstitut was founded for this purpose, which it should be noted, departed radically from the universities’ aim to exclude the state and the marketplace from the domain of pure knowledge. In 1919, when Germany was forced to give up its colonies, the Kolonialinstitut was closed, to be replaced by a new institution on the old model: the University of Hamburg.

As the university became the hallmark of modern learning, the colonial and semi-colonial areas of the world struggled to adapt their traditional scholarly institutions to it. In Egypt the approach to higher learning followed two pathways. On the one hand, a group of Egyptian reformers sought to create afresh a university that replicated the institutions of higher learning in Europe. They agitated in favor of a purely secular and modern Egyptian University, finally overcoming the opposition of British officials, who had argued that Egypt was not yet ready for a full-scale university. In 1908, the Egyptian University came into being. It proved an immediate success, attracting the cream of Egypt’s student population, and it was staffed in its early days by top European academics. Its curriculum was hardly different from the curriculum found in the European and North American universities, on which it was so carefully modeled.

The second pathway proved more difficult. Egypt’s religiously trained elite, not wishing to be left behind, adapted Egypt’s, and indeed the Islamic world’s, leading center of higher religious learning, al-Azhar, to modern purposes. Founded in the tenth century during the Fatimid conquest of Egypt, the mosque of al-Azhar had become by the Ottoman era in the sixteenth century the leading center of learning throughout the Islamic world as well as a venerable place of worship, attracting Islamic scholars from all over the world. But the secular and westernizing tendencies that swept through Egypt in the nineteenth century threatened to render it irrelevant. In response, its advocates sought to bring it up to date. Al-Azhar’s most energetic reformer, the noted Islamic modernist Muhammad Abduh, who had studied there as a youth, introduced modern and secular subjects alongside traditional religious subjects. The reformers altered the curriculum, improved the training of the faculty, regularized the course work, instituted regular examination procedures, and expanded the library. In short, they introduced many of the features of the modern Western university while retaining the traditional training in Islamic learning. Indeed, they gave al-Azhar a new breath of life, enabling it to retain an important place in the hierarchy of Egyptian schools in the twentieth century.