What are universities for? Should they prepare people for careers, or expand their minds by exposing them to a broad curriculum? This book reveals that this debate is not new, but was fought nearly 200 years ago in England and Germany. In both countries, the tendency towards pre-professionalism in education was countered by romantic writers who provided their own idea of a university. Examining the role of romantic thought at universities, this book tells the stories of such key figures as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Fichte.

By the late eighteenth century, universities in England and Germany had lost their sense of purpose. The romantics then presented them with a new one, a new Idea of a university. In Germany, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and others stressed that universities must teach more effectively; in England, Coleridge and Wordsworth attached to the German Idea a desire to keep the universities part of England's national church.