University

• 1. Introduction

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  A university is an institution of tertiary education and research that awards academic degrees across several disciplines. The word itself carries a hidden meaning. It descends from the Latin phrase universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which roughly translates as a community of teachers and scholars. That original Latin word, universitas, meant something broader still. It described a number of persons associated into one body, a society, a company, a guild, a corporation. So before a university was a campus or a degree, it was a kind of brotherhood with legal rights. How did a word for a guild come to mean a place of learning? Why did the first of these institutions grow out of schools the Church maintained to train priests? And what made students in one Italian city so powerful that they dominated their own teachers? The answers run from a law school in Bologna to research journals in Germany, and they reshape how knowledge itself is made and passed on.

• 2. A Guild Of Scholars

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  Universitas, in its original sense, had nothing to do with classrooms. It referred to any body of persons associated together, a society, a company, a community, a guild, a corporation. As urban town life and medieval guilds developed, specialized associations of students and teachers gained collective legal rights. Those rights were usually guaranteed by charters issued by princes, prelates, or their towns. Like other guilds, these scholarly bodies were self-regulating and decided the qualifications of their members. The earlier emphasis on this corporate organization is no longer the primary feature by which a modern university is recognized. Today the word means an institution of higher education offering tuition in mainly non-vocational subjects and typically having the power to confer degrees. That guild structure proved unusually durable. According to historian Elliot Krause, the university and scholars guilds held onto their power over membership, training, and workplace because early capitalism was not interested in it. Other guilds stood in the way of developing commerce and were eventually abolished, but the scholars guild was not.

• 3. The Bologna Claim

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  The University of Bologna, founded in 1088, is regarded as the first university in the fullest sense of the term. It was a high degree-awarding institute, and the word universitas was coined at its foundation. It held a certain independence from ecclesiastical schools, and it issued both secular and non-secular degrees in grammar, rhetoric, logic, theology, canon law, and notarial law. Teaching was conducted by clergy and non-clergy alike. The conventional start of teaching, 1088, or 1087 according to some, records when Irnerius began teaching Emperor Justinian's sixth-century codification of Roman law, the Corpus Iuris Civilis, recently discovered at Pisa. Bologna began as a law school teaching the ius gentium, the Roman law of peoples, which was in demand across Europe for those defending the right of incipient nations against empire and church. Lay students arrived from many lands and entered into contracts to gain this knowledge. They organized themselves into Nationes, divided between the Cismontanes and the Ultramontanes. Remarkably, the students had all the power and dominated the masters. Known also as the Alma Mater Studiorum, Bologna is widely recognized as the oldest university independent of any direct authority, whether kings, emperors, or religious organizations. Its claim rests on its autonomy and its ability to grant degrees. Bologna also gave the world the first documentary evidence of academic freedom, an idea explored next.

• 4. The Right To Roam

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  The Constitutio Habita, an academic charter adopted at Bologna in 1155 or 1158, guaranteed a traveling scholar the right to unhindered passage in the interests of education. Today this is claimed as the origin of academic freedom. The idea proved lasting enough to be commemorated centuries later. On the 18th of September 1988, 430 university rectors signed the Magna Charta Universitatum, marking the 900th anniversary of Bologna's foundation. Academic freedom remains contested in its details. There is debate over the extent to which it at publicly funded universities is subject to accountability for the use of public resources. The question is whether academics research and teaching should support public goods such as social justice, or whether there is also a prerogative to pursue knowledge for its own sake. That tension between the scholar's independence and the public's claim on funded research carries forward into modern debates over how universities should be governed.

• 5. Before The First

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  The School of Alexandria was established during the second century A.D., teaching theology, Christian philosophy, and the Bible alongside science, mathematics, Greek and Roman literature, logic, and the arts. The question-and-answer method of commentary began there, and blind students used wood-carving techniques to read and write. Its first Church figures were scholars rather than bishops, directors of the Catechetical School such as Clement, who lived from 160 to 215, and Origen, who lived from 185 to 251. Nalanda mahavihara, established by emperor Kumaragupta I of the Gupta Empire around 427 CE, became a major Buddhist learning hub that drew scholars like Xuanzang. It was destroyed in 1202 CE by Bakhtiyar Khilji. Scholars have challenged calling Nalanda a university in the modern sense, arguing the comparison is historically imprecise even though it was undoubtedly a major center of learning. The University of al-Qarawiyyin, founded as a mosque by Fatima al-Fihri in 859 CE, is sometimes called a university out of scholarly convenience. Several scholars hold that it ran as a madrasa until its modern reorganization in 1963, and it was officially renamed two years later. George Makdisi argued that early medieval universities were influenced by madrasas in Al-Andalus, the Emirate of Sicily, and the Middle East during the Crusades, though Norman Daniel viewed that argument as overstated. In 2013, Roy Lowe and Yoshihito Yasuhara claimed that Islamic-world scholarship's influence on Western European universities demands a broader, global reconsideration of higher education's development.

• 6. Cathedral To Campus

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  European higher education took place for hundreds of years in cathedral schools or monastic schools, where monks and nuns taught classes, with evidence of these forerunners dating back to the sixth century. Cathedral schools rose during and after St Augustine's mission to England, as new dioceses were created at Canterbury in 597, Rochester in 604, and York in 627. They appeared in cities such as Chartres, Orleans, Paris, Laon, Reims, and Rouen in France, and Cologne, Speyer, Würzburg, and Magdeburg in Germany. Speyer was renowned for supplying the Holy Roman Empire with diplomats. In seventh-century Spain, students at the monastery of Saints Cosmas and Damian, at Agali near Toledo, learned medicine and the rudiments of astronomy. Young men proceeded to university once they completed the trivium, the preparatory arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Pope Gregory VII proved crucial, as his 1079 Papal Decree ordered the regulated establishment of cathedral schools that transformed into the first European universities. The earliest were developed under the Latin Church by papal bull as studia generalia. The first universities with a corporate or guild structure were Bologna, around 1180 to 1190, Paris, around 1208 to 1210, and Oxford, around 1200 to 1214. The recovery of Aristotle's works, more than 3000 pages eventually translated, fueled a spirit of inquiry. Richard Dales calls that discovery a turning point in the history of Western thought, and it gave rise to the practice of scholasticism.

• 7. North And South

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  Latin was the language of the university, used for all texts, lectures, disputations, and examinations. Professors lectured on the books of Aristotle for logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, while Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna were used for medicine. Beyond these shared elements, great differences separated north and south. Italian universities focused on law and medicine, while the northern universities, primarily in Germany, France, and Great Britain, focused on the arts and theology. The degrees differed too. English, French, and German universities usually awarded bachelor's degrees, except in theology, where the doctorate was more common, while Italian universities awarded primarily doctorates. This traced to intent after graduation, with the north tending toward teaching positions and the south toward professional ones. Northern universities were modeled after the faculty governance system developed at Paris, where student members are controlled by faculty masters. Southern universities followed the student-controlled model begun at Bologna. Among southern universities, those of northern Italy were self-regulating, independent corporations of scholars, while those of southern Italy and Iberia were founded by royal and imperial charter to serve the needs of government. That Paris faculty model would grow more prominent as universities came under state control.

• 8. Growth And The Modern Form

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  At the end of the Middle Ages, about 400 years after the first European university, there were 29 universities spread across Europe. The fifteenth century added 28 more, with another 18 between 1500 and 1625, reaching roughly 143 by the end of the eighteenth century. The highest concentrations sat in the Holy Roman Empire with 34, the Italian countries with 26, France with 25, and Spain with 23, close to a 500 percent increase over the medieval figure. Growth was not steady. The Thirty Years War, alongside plague, famine, and student brawling, destabilized institutions. Humanism reshaped the curriculum as professors transformed grammar and rhetoric through the studia humanitatis. Andreas Vesalius, trained in humanist fashion, produced a translation of Galen whose ideas he verified through his own dissections. Galileo Galilei taught at Pisa and Padua, and Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon taught at Wittenberg. More than 80 percent of European scientists between 1450 and 1650 in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography were university trained, and about 45 percent held university posts. By the nineteenth century the German, or Humboldtian, model, conceived by Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the French model had arisen. Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876, was the first American school to adopt the German research model, when nearly the entire faculty had studied in Germany. In 1963, the Robbins Report concluded that universities should pursue four objectives, including instruction in skills and the maintenance of research in balance with teaching, a balance still negotiated as critics warn of corporate universities where power shifts from faculty to managers.