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473 Pages·2014·7.98 MB·English

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ETH Zurich and the Construction of
Modern Switzerland 1855–2005
Cover.englDruck.indd 1 16.07.10 15:18
DaviD gugerli
Transforming
PaTrick kuPPer
Daniel sPeich The fuTure
Transforming the Future
David Gugerli
Patrick Kupper
Daniel Speich
Transforming The fuTure
ETH Zurich and the Construction
of Modern Switzerland 1855–2005
Published with the generous financial support of
Migros Kulturprozent, ETH Alumni, and the ETH’s
Executive Board.
Translation: Giselle Weiss
Design: Atelier für visuelle Gestaltung,
Thea Sautter, Zurich
www.chronos-verlag.ch
© 2010 Chronos Verlag, Zurich
ISBN 3-0340-1052-8
5
ConTenT
Introduction 8
1. a fundamental debate: anchoring the swiss vision post-1848 15
Between infrastructural policy and customs regulations 19
Statistical excursions into the educational landscape 22
Hunting for market niches 25
The public policy debate free-for-all 26
The parliamentary debate 29
From Bern to Zurich: nailing it down 33
2. nation, profession, middle class: educating nineteenth-century engineers 39
federal codes of behavior 42
Federal education policy 43
National visibility 45
On being a federal institution 48
A school for the nation 55
industrial standards 60
Technical training and industrial growth 61
Employment and educational credentials 65
Part university, part manufacturing plant 68
Toward an engineering curriculum 70
The laboratory as “idealized factory” 75
Launching into research 80
Collaborating with industry 84
Cultural norms 87
Climbing the bourgeois career ladder 88
Toeing the line 91
Socialization 94
Gender and the polytechnic 99
3. setting a new course: The polytechnic becomes a “real” university
after 1908 105
The polytechnic in crisis 108
Disentangling 111
Reorganizing the polytechnic 115
An unsuccessful debate over doctorates 118
Acquiring the character of a real university 121
The breakthrough of 1908 125
From the “Polytechnic” to the “Federal Institute of Technology” 126
Societal crisis and institutional change 128
“Noblesse oblige!” 132
4. Business, politics, and research: new alliances for a new century 137
Technology boom and bust 141
Materialism and the decline of the West 141
A technocratic humanism 144
The value of research 149
Meeting the promises 149
The world as a laboratory for agricultural policy 154
The “scientific transformation of the social” in the factory 159
The problem of basic research 164
Matching funds for applied research 169
The limits of the “national system of innovation” 175
state intervention 178
Getting the economy going again: savings and stimulus 179
The ETH as an institute for “Geistige Landesverteidigung” 182
Investing in research for jobs 188
The science policy “arms race” post-1945 191
Dealing with the military 196
swissness and science 200
Arthur Rohn’s “Jewish problem” 202
Promoting an all-Swiss faculty post-1933 205
The United States as a new center of science 211
International research collaboration 214
5. The social laboratory: Testing the bounds of higher education and
politics post-1968 219
“Educational requirements for the industrial world”? 221
Systemic disruption 226
The “student” element 233
The campaign against the ETH law, 1969 237
The revolt of the knowledge workers 244
The end of the experimental phase 248
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6. all about flexibility: managing science and technology
in the post-industrial world 255
ready for anything 258
Flexibility as a prescription 259
The permanence of reform 264
The art of the project-centered approach 267
A new research commission 271
A project-based curriculum? 274
Databases and resources 278
Betting on internationalization 284
The universals of science 285
Appointments and university policy 288
Deindustrialization and relative backwardness 290
The globalization of science 296
European-American compatibilities 299
Computerization strategies 301
Computers, centers, and interactivity 302
Differentiating services 305
Reintegration and networking 306
The WWW and customized IT 311
Consultants, restructuring, and management 315
The Hayek report 316
The creative chaos of the matrix 321
Management everywhere 329
Autonomy as a management mandate 335
The demise of disciplines 339
Summary 351
Acknowledgments 358
Notes 359
Illustration credits 401
Bibliography 404
Abbreviations 460
Index of names 463
inTroduCTion
david gugerli, Patrick Kupper, daniel speich
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, whose story unfolds in the following pages,
has always been about innovation, with an eye to the future. From the outset, the people
who were responsible for organizing, operating, and financing the school had a fond-
ness for the word “future” in reflecting on the meaning and purpose of their efforts. An
early example is a comment made in 1851 by the Swiss Federal Council regarding the
planned national university. The institution would “bear the future of its country,” the
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council said somewhat emotionally, three years after the federal state’s founding.
The discourse quickly took hold and even became a rhetorical leitmotif. In 1930, in the

midst of the Depression, the ETH celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary. Serene in the
face of world events, and putting himself in the new freshmen’s shoes, President Arthur
Rohn again invoked the future: “The student who can devote the best of his early years
to deepening his knowledge and world view” must “cast his wholesome, unclouded gaze
to the future fully conscious of the responsibilities to the state and to his fellow citizens
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conferred on him by virtue of his mental strength.” Those educated at the ETH incurred
a duty of future service to the political community.
The comments of the Federal Council, and Rohn’s views need to be situated in their
historical context. So does the talk of the future – again with emotional overtones – that
took place at the one hundred and fiftieth jubilee celebrations of 2005, three quarters
of a century later. Students, teachers, researchers, and administrative employees were
encouraged to “welcome tomorrow” (the official motto) with an appropriate enthusiasm.
Ultimately, they were the ones who would shape the current and future society. “No
one can predict the future,” stated Meinrad Eberle, project manager for the jubilee in
explaining this official motto. “Yet it is up to us to deal with it. The right way to do that
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is to think in terms of scenarios.”
From the future of the nation, to the future as service to the community, to a future
imagined as a series of scenarios and challenges – the future was the stuff of which the
ETH was made and which it transformed repeatedly over the years into a tool first for
providing legitimacy, then confidence. Moreover, the “tomorrow” of 2005 was different
from that of 1855 and 1930, particularly as focusing on it no longer produced a clear
picture of what to expect but rather a confusing multitude of possibilities, a cornucopia
of opportunities and risks.
When the future is open-ended, the past takes on special meaning. But it isn’t only
in such times of heightened need for direction that the way forward and the way back
converge. Sometimes a simultaneous perspective is compelled by social pressures, for
example, those resulting from the modern university’s jubilee-oriented celebratory and
commemorative culture. For the ETH Zurich’s one hundred and fiftieth anniversary in
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2005, the school’s Executive Board asked its Corporate Communications Department to
come up with a forward-looking publicity strategy. At the same time, the Institute for
History was commissioned to explore the ETH’s past. Delving into archives is not partic-
ularly convenient for the everyday business of professional corporate communications.
No university jubilee is complete without its Festschrift, whose purpose is to document
past activities and preserve memories. In 2005, in keeping with this tradition, the ETH
took the novel step of creating a comprehensive and innovative hypertext Festschrift
(www.ethistory.ethz.ch) that provides a guided tour of the history of the university and
the evolution of individual departments, interviews with contemporary eyewitnesses,
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and extensive statistical documentation.
The present volume, however, is not a Festschrift but rather a problem-centered, critical
analysis of a highly complex and very interesting history. It was published in 2005 in
German, and has been gently revised for the English edition. It intends to provide an
interpretation that is both convincing and carefully documented. We do not consider the
past a series of unambiguous crossroads but assume that everything, or at least much
of the ETH’s history, could have turned out quite differently. Consequently, we focus
on what motivated people in the past, their perception of themselves and their environ-
ment, and the constraints under which they labored. We do not expect the past to dish
up simple prescriptions for the future. Rather we wish to show that a journey into the
past can serve as a useful detour along side roads, and with any luck provide a whole
new basis for (self-)reflection and understanding of the present. The irritating as well as
illuminating potential of historical thinking was articulated in 1985 by Martin Christoph
Rotach, ETH professor of transportation engineering: “In 1984,” he said, “our planning
commission tried to peer into the year 2001. Now, 17 years is not really that long a time
to forecast, and consequently many were unwilling to believe that fundamental changes
would take place or even any changes at all. But let us think back to the economic boom
and high-tech enthusiasm of 1967. Who at the time would seriously have believed that
the trend would be broken by an energy crisis, recession, debt, unemployment, and a
hiring freeze? Who at the time would have questioned the “feasibility of the future”
courtesy of modern science and technology? Who would really have considered that the
earth and its resources might be finite? And who would have thought that within half a
generation we would be contending with youth riots, dying forests, and polluted soil, but
also worldwide mobility, the proliferation of personal computers, the ubiquity of plastic,
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and mountains of rubbish?”
Taking this amazement into account in the historical analysis and turning the fascina-
tion of strangeness into reflection means temporarily suspending cherished conclu-
sions. The concept of progress – which for an entire era was based on history as a
future-oriented development – has to be rethought. This notion of an undetermined
future, which can and must be shaped in the present with an eye to the past, coincides
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with the eigteenth-century Enlightenment sense of the term. “Let us resolve that the