Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
students in Germany and the United States. German students, after a
lengthy apprenticeship and the publication of a topic, received permis-
sion to begin offering lectures, for which they were compensated only
by the fees of those students who attended their lectures. While provid-
ing limited monetary resources, this system left the student a good deal
of freedom of thought and time to conduct research. In the United
States, an academic career began with a regular faculty position;
hence, the young person joined a bureaucratic system and was assured
of being paid, often, Weber observes dryly, the equivalent wages of a
semiskilled laborer. Only football coaches were well paid in U.S. uni-
versities, Weber noted. In return for this money and position, the young
scientist was required to do a great deal of teaching, although ultimately
a person's career would be judged on one's research. Whatever else it
might be, for Weber, Wissenschaft required labor and institutional
resources.
With a certain regret he sought to contain, Weber observed that the
old humanist university in Germany was on its last legs:
In very important respects German university life is being Americanized, as is
German life in general. The large institutes of medicine or natural science are
“state capitalist” enterprises, which can not be managed without considerable
funds. [As in all such enterprises, there is a separation] of the worker from his
means of production. The worker, that is, the assistant, is dependent upon the
implements the state puts at his disposal; hence he is just as dependent . . . as is
the employee in a factory upon the management ...[A]s with all capitalist, and
at the same time bureaucratized enterprises, there are indubitable advantages in
all this.
20
And Disadvantages
Not only was science operating under capitalist and bureaucratic con-
straints, but it further labored, like the Vatican, under conditions of con-
sensus formation that rarely rewarded exceptional people. Weber paints
a stern, stinging, and remarkably contemporary portrait of the role
played by chance, arbitrariness, and consensus formation in academic
life: “It would be unfair to hold the personal inferiority of faculty
members or educational ministries responsible for the fact that so many
mediocrities play an eminent role at the universities. The predominance
of mediocrity is rather due to the laws of human co-operation.” Conse-
quently, he admonished his audience, a young person contemplating a
