Essay Review MARTIN BULMER KNOWLEDGE INSTITUTIONALIZED: HIGHER EDUCATION AND PHILANTHROPIC FOUNDATIONS Burton R. Clark, Places of Inquiry: Research and Advanced Education in Modern Universities (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), xiv + 285 pp., ISBN 0-520-08762-3. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (ed.), Philanthropic Foundations: New Scholar- ship, New Possibilities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), xviii + 420 pp., ISBN-0-253-33500-0. ‘What’, asked Robert Burden Haldane of Sidney Webb around 1897, ‘is your idea of a University?’ They were mounting a joint campaign to pass a bill through Parliament to establish the University of London. ‘I have’, replied Sidney, ‘no idea of a university, but here are the facts’. 1 Haldane had been educated at Edinburgh and Göttingen; Webb, at schools in Switzerland and Germany, followed by courses at the City of London College. Neither were in thrall to the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which held such powerful sway among the British upper and upper middle classes at the time. Fresh from his exertions in establishing, by means of the Hutchinson will, the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1896, Webb had no use for metaphysical ideas about higher educational institutions. For him, the establishment of institutions of higher education was part of the growing practice of public administration and his campaign was practical in origin and direction. It was not always so. Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt, in developing his ideas for the University of Berlin more than eighty years earlier, was clear that the university must have a mission: One unique feature of higher intellectual institutions is that they conceive of science and scholarship as dealing with ultimately inexhaustive tasks; this means that they are engaged 1 Royden J. Harrison, The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb: 1858–1905, The Formative Years (London: Macmillan, 2000), 292. On Webb’s ideas about higher education, see note 74, pp. 377–378. Minerva 40: 189–201, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.