The Early University Foundations

I think many of the difficulties which now beset us can only be understood by studying the history of these great and ancient institutions. I shall try to show-that some of the most acute of the problems of today had perplexed the world several hundred years ago, and that traditions which had been forgotten before ever the Pilgrim Fathers set foot in New England disrupted American universities last year. It is an astonishing story.

The three pillars upon which society rested in the Middle Ages were the Empire, the Church, and the Universities. Universities were as important then as they are today.

The oldest universities in the world were established 800 years ago in Bologna and Paris. Every university in the world today has developed from these two. Both were professional schools which educated men for careers in the learned professions, but they differed in one quite fundamental respect. The University of Paris was organised and run by the masters and professors who admitted students to their fellowship and treated them much as members of a guild treated their apprentices. The students were relatively young—they often went to university at the age of 14 or 15—and their masters disciplined them as best they could—and beat them from time to time. We can all understand an organisation like this.

But the University of Bologna, which is a few years older than Paris, was very different. For one thing, it attracted mature wealthy students, many of whom were beneficed clergy who had been given leave to study law. But-most important of all—the whole university was run by the students who hired the faculty, paid them, are subjected them to an iron discipline.