Julius Koschnick

Julius Koschnick, PhD Candidate from LSE will present his paper Breaking Tradition: Teacher-Student Effects at English Universities during the Scientific Revolution

Abstract:
While teacher student effects in conveying a fixed curriculum have been widely studied, the effect of teachers on the direction of research at the knowledge frontier has received less attention. This paper studies teacher effects on students’ future research at the time of the English Scientific Revolution. Specifically, it investigates how teachers passed on their interest in the Scientific Revolution which broke with traditional perspectives on explaining the natural world. The paper introduces a novel dataset on the universe of all 111,242 students at English universities in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. It then matches university students and university teachers to all publications in the seventeenth and eighteenth century as well as membership lists of the Royal Society. Using natural language processing techniques for students’ and teachers’ publication titles, the paper is able to quantify personal interest in different research topics. Based on student exposure to teachers at the college level, the paper finds that teachers strongly influenced the research of their students, both for traditional topics and topics associated with the Scientific Revolution. The paper further finds that adopting the new ideas of the Scientific Revolution was helped by students’ exposure to a greater degree of diversity in teachers’ research topics, independent of whether the research was on the Scientific Revolution or traditional topics.

The paper presents new microdata on the universe of all 111,242 students and teachers at English universities in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century and matches them to published titles of the English Short Title Catalogue. Through using dynamic topic modelling, the paper is able to identify different research topics associated with the published titles. It then shows that exposure to teachers publishing on topics of the Scientific Revolution increased a student’s likelihood to publish on topics of the Scientific Revolution as well. It further shows that a high diversity of teachers’ research topics, independent of whether they were part of the Scientific Revolution or not, increased students’likelihood to adopt topics of the Scientific Revolution. The paper argues that this is due to the weakening the perceived dominance of tradition. Lastly, it shows that exposure to topics of the Scientific Revolution made students more likely to be elected as a fellow of the Royal Society. Thus, exposure to new ideas of the Scientific Revolution during their studies at the English universities seems both to have contributed to students’ future research as well as their likelihood of becoming a part of the social movement that promoted the Scientific Revolution. To causally identify teacher-student effects, the paper relies on a natural experiment based on the parliamentary visitations of the University of Oxford after the Civil War: In 1648, victorious parliament expelled half of all old Oxford fellows and intruded new fellows from outside into the vacant places at the colleges. The quasi-random distribution of “scientific” fellows within the newly intruded fellows is then used for a difference-in-difference approach. Furthermore, the paper introduces a shift-share instrument that predicts students’ choice of colleges based on the historically strong local links between colleges and English regions.

Overall, the paper presents new evidence on the importance of personal teacher-student interaction and intellectual diversity at universities for the transmission of new ground-breaking ideas. It further presents new evidence on the importance of personal teacher-student interaction and intellectual diversity at universities for the transmission of the ideas of the Scientific Revolution. With this, the paper adds another dimension to the literature on the Great Divergence by highlighting the importance of higher learning institutions as a catalysator of knowledge exchange.