Networks of Modernity: Germany in the Age of the Telegraph, 1830-1880 By Jean-Michel Johnston. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii + 281. Cloth £75.00. ISBN: 978-0198856887.

Abstract

did not necessarily eliminate discrimination and led to new difficulties. The progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina welcomed Jews, but its efforts to create a truly democratic educational institution were diminished by racist and sexist policies. The New School in New York was a lifeline for many Jews and offered more opportunities for women as both faculty and students. But like Black Mountain, it began with an unrealistic business plan and almost ended in bankruptcy. Even separate research institutions created to compensate for inadequacies of the modern research university had limitations. Levine writes of the marginalization of women at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. More troubling is the question she raises about whether things might have unfolded differently if researchers at such institutions in Germany had been embedded in universities. Would their critical voices have helped the German universities resist Nazism? That hardly seems likely but is worth considering. In the brief concluding chapter, the reader is propelled forward into the post-World War II decades. Levine uses her sober analysis of the history of the modern research university and its alternatives to question the purpose and viability of current iterations of the research university and research institutions. She asks us to question much of what we have taken for granted about the structures of these institutions and lays down much fruitful ground for debate. As for technicalities, the book is thoroughly and extensively documented, although the vast comprehensive online bibliography still leaves out some of the sources used and quoted in the text and includes others that are never mentioned or cited. The copyeditors deserve high praise as there were very few errors and only one deserves mention. In the famous photo from Clark University on page 59, G. Stanley Hall is wrongly identified as Sigmund Freud. Freud is not “front row, center” but rather is sitting to Hall’s right!