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.
This Open Access book analyses the past, present and future of the technical university as a single faculty independent institution. The point of departure is a view of changing academic realities, through which the identity as a technical university is challenged and reconstituted. More specifically, the book connects the development of technical universities to changes in the structure and dimensioning of national higher education systems, to changes in the disciplinary basis of academic research and to changes in the governance of higher education institutions. Introduced in the age of industrialization, polytechnical schools rose to prominence in many national settings during the second half of the 19th century. Over time, new technologies have been developed and incorporated into the repertoire, and waves of academisation have swept over the former polytechnics, transforming them into technical universities. Their traditions and brands, however, prevail. Several technical universities are included among the most prestigious academic institutions of their nations and the training of engineers and engineering research still enjoys a high level of prestige and national priority, e.g. in the context of innovation and industrial policy. But the world keeps changing, and the higher education sector with it. Will technical universities have an equally attractive position within university systems in the decades to come? .--
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.
