Elitist Babble Quotes

“In his essay on the hazards of historical consciousness, 'On the Use and Abuse of History,' one of the four 'untimely meditations' he published in 1874, Friedrich Nietzsche asserted that Europe was 'suffering from a debilitating historical fever.' Things would get worse before they got better. The machinery of academic scholarship was only beginning to bulk up in the 1870s. In the preceding decades the number of full professors (Ordinarien) in all disciplines, in all German universities, had risen only about 10 percent between 1796 and 1864, from 650 to 725. Then between 1864 and 1890 the sum increases by 50 percent; and then again by 50 percent between 1890 and 1920. The student population, meanwhile, reached 12,000 in 1835 and stayed at this level until the late 1860s. From this point on the number of students rose precipitously. By 1902 there 35,500 students; by the start of World War One 61,000. (Today the number of students enrolled in German universities is about two million; the population of Germany is only double what it was in the 1870s)”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History