Abstract
‘This War’, wrote the British historian and politician H. A. L. Fisher in 1917, ‘in a degree far higher than any conflict in the whole course of history, has been a battle of brains.’1 A battle of brains may seem a peculiar way to describe the conflict of 1914–18; after all, the war is synonymous with the death and disablement of millions of soldiers as well as battlefield deadlock which meant that the main theatre of war, Europe’s Western Front, saw little movement from late 1914 until the middle of 1918.2 What Fisher was describing was a much greater phenomenon by which intellect — in its many guises — became subsumed by and engaged in the war. The mobilization of knowledge in wartime became most apparent at universities and that process forms the subject of this book. Fisher’s ‘battle of brains’ will be interpreted in its broadest sense to show how intellect, the institutions that nurtured it, and the individuals who practiced intellectual endeavours became combatants in the First World War.
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Notes
H. A. L Fisher, Preface to British Universities and the War (New York and Boston, 1917), p. xiii.
Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London, 2005), pp. xi–xii.
The list of institutional histories is a long one. Relevant to this study are Christopher N. L. Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge. Vol.4, 1870–1990 (Cambridge, 1993);
Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven, 1974);
Robert McCaughey, Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754–2004 (New York, 2003);
Michael Moss, et al., University, City and State: The University of Glasgow since 1870 (Edinburgh, 2000);
Eric Vincent and Percival Hinton, The University of Birmingham: Its History and Significance (Birmingham, 1947);
R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College Dublin: An Academic History 1592–1952 (Cambridge, 1982);
Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard 1636–1936 (Cambridge, MA, 1936, new ed., 2001);
Alain Peyrefitte ed., Rue d’Ulm: chroniques de la vie normalienne (Paris, 1994).
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, 2007), pp. 63–86.
Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks, and the British Academic World 1850–1939 (Manchester, 2013), p. 8.
See Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (London, 1996);
Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics 1914–1918 (Edinburgh, 1988);
Carol Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge, LA, 1975);
Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community 1890–1933 (Cambridge, MA, 1969).
R. D. Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914 (Oxford, 2004)
and Fritz Ringer, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective 1890–1920 (Cambridge, 1992) are notable exceptions to this trend.
An exception to this is the excellent collected volume, Brian Harrison ed., The History of the University of Oxford Vol. 8 (Oxford, 1992).
Pietsch, Empire of Scholars; Thomas Weber, Our Friend ‘The Enemy’: Elite Education in Britain and Germany Before World War I (Stanford, 2008);
Elisabeth Fordham, ‘Universities’, in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert eds., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 235–79.
Paul Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience 1850–1920 (Bloomington, In., 2005);
Sonja Levsen, ‘Constructing Elite Identities: University Students, Military Masculinity and the Consequences of the Great War in Britain and Germany’, Past and Present, 198 (2008), pp. 147–83;
Christine D. Myers, University Coeducation in the Victorian Era: Inclusion in the United States and the United Kingdom (Basingstoke, 2010);
Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven, 1990).
David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (Oxford, 1980).
Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914; Walter Ruegg ed., A History of the University in Europe, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, 2004).
Emily Rosenberg ed., A World Connecting (Cambridge, MA, 2012), pp. 888–918;
Sebastian Conrad, Globalization and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 1–25;
Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (London, 2012), pp. 31–64;
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: Global Connections and Comparisons 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 451–87;
Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, 1997).
George Weisz, The Emergence of Modern Universities in France, 1863–1914 (Princeton, 1983), pp. 134–61.
Antoine Prost, L’Enseignement en France, 1800–1967 (Paris, 1968), p. 224.
Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (London, 2011), pp. 135–68.
Pierre Lasserre, La Doctrine officielle de l’université: Critique de haut enseignement de l’état. Défense et théorie des humanités classiques (Paris, 1913), pp. 474–80.
Agathon, L’Esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne: La crise de la culture classique. La crise du français (Paris, 1911), pp. 165–72.
R. D. Anderson, ‘Universities and Elites in Modern Britain’, in History of Universities X (Amersham, 1991), p. 235.
R. D. Anderson, Universities and Elites in Britain since 1800 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 13.
John Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore, 2011), p. 110.
Roger L. Geiger, ‘Research, Graduate Education, and the Ecology of American Universities: an Interpretive History’, in Lester Goodchild and Harold Wechsler (eds.), The History of Higher Education (Needham Heights, MA, 1997), p. 278.
Prost, L’enseignement en France, p. 70; Christophe Charle, La République des Universitaires: 1870–1940 (Paris, 1994).
Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006);
Jean-François Sirinelli and Pascal Ory, Les intellectuels en France, de l’affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris, 1986);
Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises: manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (Paris, 1990);
Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York and London, 1965).
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© 2015 Tomás Irish
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Irish, T. (2015). Introduction. In: The University at War, 1914–25. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137409461_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137409461_1
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