The financial and political repercussions of Basel’s cantonal separation led to shifts in the disciplinary balance of the faculty in the 1830s. The radical call to abolish the university in 1851 was followed by a phase of expansion whose scale would remain unparalleled in the nineteenth century.

The separation of Basel-City and Basel-Countryside in 1833 divided the state treasury, exerting immense pressure to economize in the city-state of Basel. Since a federal arbitration decision included the university’s assets within the division, the city was forced to compensate the rural canton for their value, existentially threatening the institution. Voices among the city’s patriciate advocating for the university’s preservation, however, soon achieved a majority. The advisory opinion presented to the Education Committee, or Erziehungskollegium, in March 1835 found it “urgently” necessary to secure the city’s “future well-being” through “well-established institutions of science and scholarship.”

But this was not to be achieved without reductions. The Education Committee stressed that the new institution should be a “civic academy” and that the disciplines its members pursued should increasingly prove “popular and useful.” By this, though, they did not primarily mean fields that offered direct benefits to civic professional life or the urban community. Preserving the university could not be justified based on utility, in any case, given its small scale; public or trade schools could much more effectively fulfill such educational functions.

Asymmetrical reductions
The rallying cry of a “civic academy” referred to an educational mandate in cultural and religious terms. Although the new law provided Basel’s Lesser Council with the option of appointing teaching staff for subjects such as economics, technology, and statistics, the reorganization disproportionately affected law and medicine. Both faculties were downgraded to preparatory institutions where only basic knowledge could be acquired, without the power to award degrees. Among the jurists were Wilhelm Snell and Emil Remigius Frey, both supporters of radicalism who relocated to Zurich and Liestal, respectively, in the wake of political upheavals. Apart from them and Friedrich Kortüm, a professor of history, all other faculty members remained in the city.

The Faculty of Theology, by contrast, remained intact. The council authorities of the Protestant city-republic explicitly defended the significance of an uninterrupted theological curriculum. They argued that this generally promoted “true and deep faith” and assisted both clergy and future teachers in correctly fulfilling their duties.

The asymmetry of the reductions was further amplified by the selective expansion of the humanities. The law expanded the Faculty of Liberal Arts by adding a chair for French language and literature. Additionally, the Lesser Council was authorized to appoint additional teaching staff for English and Italian. These “new” philologies had been established at many universities in the context of German Romanticism and Idealism. They not only complemented oriental and classical philologies but were also important elements of the neohumanist educational ideal and the bourgeois “culture of language” (Angelika Linke), which served the bourgeoisie in its attempts to distinguish itself from the aristocracy’s courtly culture of the body.

The “peculiar isolation of our situation”
This reorganization, which redistributed the relative significance and limited resources within the disciplinary spectrum, can be understood as a reaction to the separation of the cantons and the period of political reform and renewal in Switzerland during the 1830s, known as the Regeneration. The new university, with its emphasized Protestant and neohumanist profile, provided a religious and cultural counterbalance to the defeat the city-republic had faced in the contested process of political modernization.

The loss of prestige that the “conservative” and “pious” elements of Basel suffered in the upheavals during the Regeneration was significant. The radicals ridiculed Basel as an amputated city-state and condemned it as a stronghold of “aristocrats.” Notably, the advisory opinion of the Lessor Council from 1835 referred to the “peculiar isolation of our situation” and observed a “need for intellectual activity and competence,” which had become “all the more palpable” due to the turbulence caused by the cantonal separation. Wilhelm De Wette made a similar assessment of politics and education in a pamphlet from 1834: “Especially now, when Basel is so weakened, it should rise to a higher perspective and nobler aspiration.”

This logic of compensation was not new. Even before the separation of the cantons, the city’s elites assigned the university the role of balancing the “materialism” of trade, banking, and industry with intellectual achievements. Now, under the success of political liberalism, this role became more important and took on specific significance in the context of party and local politics. If conservatives felt it was impossible to slow the unstoppable progress of modernity, then culture and Christianity presented themselves as the only forces capable of at least rendering it somewhat less unbearable. The increased enthusiasm for education among Basel’s citizens was reflected in notably active social engagement. After the founding of the Voluntary Academic Society (Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft) in 1835, several scientific societies were quickly established: the Law Society and the Historical Society in 1836, the Art Society in 1839, and the Society for Patriotic Antiquities in 1842.

An “elite institution” or “education for the people”?
In 1851, a radical member of the Grand Council suddenly proposed abolishing the university. This proposal, surprising from today’s point of view, was modeled after the French revolutionaries who had abolished universities amid the general upheavals of 1790, seeing them as symbols and supports for the ancien régime. During the Basel council debate, participants repeatedly point to gaps in the course catalog and faculty. The university’s radical opponents of criticized it as an “elite” patrician institution that produced no educational benefit for trade and industry, which was ultimately the concern of the economically minded council members. The radical Karl Brenner furthermore argued that a university offering only preparatory courses in the Faculties of Law and Medicine, rather than complete degrees, could not justify its expenditure of state funds. His position was that the money would be more wisely invested in the expansion of publicly funded primary schools and secondary schools, Volkschulen and Realschulen, open to all.

This demand resonated beyond Basel. Prioritizing “real” vocational training over the “ideal” intellectual education advocated by neohumanism had been a focus of university policy in many German-speaking regions since the 1840s. Ironically, this new prioritization gained ground relatively early at Berlin’s Humboldt University, which would later be idolized as a model neohumanist university.

The university critics decisively lost in the Grand Council: the motion to abolish the university was rejected by eighty-one votes to eleven. The “radical” criticism left a mark, however. In the subsequent phase of reform during the mid-1850s, which resulted in the partial revision of the University Act in 1855, the council partially adopted some of these critics’ views. In a 1854 brochure, several professors, including Johannes Schnell, strongly promoted the advancement of “technology” – “its weaving is bound up with our silken bands” – as well as “population studies,” statistics, and political economy. Faced with widespread poverty, mass emigration, and the “socialist doctrines” spreading at the time, the authors deemed these subjects especially relevant.

Incremental expansion
The government’s 1854 proposal fundamentally supported this direction. Nonetheless, the draft of the revised University Act followed a principle of parity in funding one additional chair for each faculty. In legal terms, the preparatory character imposed on the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Medicine in 1835 remained unchanged. Seen in this light, university historiography has largely regarded the 1855 revision as relatively minor.

In statistical terms, however, the records of teaching faculty employment provide a more detailed picture. Between 1851 and 1856, there was a marked expansion from around twenty-one to twenty-nine full professors. Although these figures should not be taken literally – the growth rate (nearly 40 percent) is a significant aspect of the numerical development of the Basel faculty in the nineteenth century. Of the few specific moments of growth characteristic of the university’s discontinuous trajectory until the reform of 1866, that of the 1850s is the most notable. The new resources primarily benefited law, philosophy, and medicine, but not theology. This expansion and its distribution among the faculties blunted the radical criticism of the university as inadequate and lacking utility for the needs of the day.