This volume takes a look at the past – at the last 50 years in particular – and a look at the present, painting a picture of how the Imperial Royal Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1815, became the Technische Universität Wien – the "TU Wien" – with the launch of the 1975 University Organisation Act, and has increasingly developed into a research university ever since. Contemporaries from the years when the TU Wien was still the TH in Vienna have a place to tell their stories in this volume, alongside articles on interfaculty research facilities and service centres that support research activities and transfer of research results in accordance with the TU Wien's motto, “Technology for people”. One of the main goals of this book is to not only inform readers, but also to amuse them a bit as they peruse the pages of the volume.
This work is the first major reexamination in English of the rise of the world’s pioneer modern research university. It presents an authoritative history of science, scholarship, and education, offering readers a background platform from which to confront looming issues about the future of higher education systems everywhere, but especially in the United States. The innovations of the new-model University of Berlin reached their highest point of development and influence on foreign adopters of “technology transfer” under the new German Empire before World War I. These innovations were grafted onto and shaped American higher research, teaching, and professionalization like no other influence in the twentieth century. No previous book in English has described this impressive conscious creation of an institution promoting cutting-edge research—in fields from physics and medicine to law and theology—combined with the highest standards of active, self-involved student learning for the higher professions. Yet even at the moment its astonishing institutional achievements became the inspiration for the brilliant rise of the American research university over the last century, its own contradictions and limitations were already beginning to appear in the 1920s. Indeed, since the University of Berlin was originally little more than a new reformed German university before 1860 and subsequently faced the disadvantages of financial ruin of the 1920s and the imposed wreckage of the Nazi and East German Communist regimes from 1933 to 1990, the period 1860–1918 is the one of greatest interest for the development of what came to be a world-wide “model” for emulation. Today, when the entire concept of the elite “research university” is under attack, revisiting its origins in Germany should provide stimulus to the debates about the future of the university, not only in North America and Europe but in all countries with higher education systems modeled on or influences by the German or American ones (e.g., Australia, India). The question of whether future innovative science and scholarship should remain coupled with teaching institutions as in the “Berlin model” can best be explored against the background of the emergence of that model.
Considers legislation to expand and extend various educational programs, including student loans, teacher education, and school and library construction.
This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of technology assessment (TA) practices, theories, methods and cultures across the globe. Highlighting the significant influence of rapidly changing technology on human life and development, it examines diverse perspectives on how TA can be developed to better meet the challenges of the future. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.
This innovative book comprehensively sheds light on the theory and practice of technological policies by employing modern analytical tools and economic techniques. The New Economics of Technology Policy focuses on all public interventions intended to influence the intensity, composition and direction of technological innovations within a given entity such as a region, country or group of countries. Dominique Foray has gathered together many of the leading scholars in the field to comprehensively explore numerous avenues and pathways of research. Bringing together a collection of policy-oriented papers, this book will strongly appeal to policy-makers, academic researchers and graduate students with an interest in economics, public policy, science, technology and society.
