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I want to start this with a hangover of historical proportions.

In 1229, a band of Parisian students found, in Charles Homer Haskins’ dry phrasing, “wine that was good and sweet to drink,” and proceeded to beat up the tavern keeper and his friends (Haskins 1957, 15). The town’s provost retaliated. Students died. The university, meaning at this point still an unchartered, semi-organized federation of masters and their pupils clustered on the Île de la Cité, responded the only way it structurally could: it stopped. Lectures ceased for two years.

And out of that two-year work stoppage came Pope Gregory IX’s 1231 bull Parens scientiarum, the document that confirmed the exemptions of masters and students from lay jurisdiction and formally recognized their right “to make constitutions and ordinances regulating the manner and time of lectures and disputations” (Haskins 1957, 15). Historians treat this as one of the founding charters of the University of Paris. It began with a bar fight.

I tell you this not to be cute, though I will admit to some pleasure in it, but because it is exactly the kind of founding story we need if we are going to think clearly about what a university actually is, as opposed to what its later origin mythology insists it must have been. The medieval university was not founded by anyone in particular, on any particular day, for any particularly noble reason but evolved by a process of accretion. And understanding what it accumulated into, and under whose authority, is the necessary first move before I can show you, over the next six entries, exactly what the American college would later throw away.

What a university actually is

Haskins opens his 1923 Colver Lectures with a claim that still unsettles many a room of academics when said out loud: the Greeks and Romans, for all their achievements in law, rhetoric, and philosophy, had no universities (Haskins 1957, 1). Socrates gave no diplomas. What Athens and Alexandria had was higher education. What Paris and Bologna invented, starting in the twelfth century, was something structurally new: “…those features of organized education with which we are most familiar, all that machinery of instruction represented by faculties and colleges and courses of study, examinations and commencements and academic degrees” (Haskins 1957, 1). We are, in the most literal sense, heirs not of Athens but of two French and Italian cities. Stephen Turner, writing more recently, pushes the genealogy back one step further than Haskins allows: the earliest form of the differentiated-faculty model, with recognized courses of study and patron funding, most likely originated in the Islamic world before Europe adapted it (Turner 2017). I want that correction on the record early, because the story I am about to tell you is a specifically Roman Catholic European one, and it is worth remembering it was not the only one, nor even necessarily the first.

The precondition for all of this was what historians call the twelfth-century renaissance, a flood of newly recovered material, Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, the Roman law texts that had lain dormant since the Digest nearly vanished in the early Middle Ages, arriving in western Europe largely through Italy, Sicily, and the Arab scholarship of Spain (Haskins 1957, 4f). Before this influx, there was simply nothing to organize a university around. The trivium and quadrivium of the early medieval schools, grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, music, were, in Haskins’ own assessment, barely sufficient to constitute a curriculum at all (Haskins 1957, 4). José Ortega y Gasset, writing seven centuries later and about an entirely different crisis, gives me language for what happened next that I think applies here with real precision. Culture, in Ortega’s technical sense, is not ornament. It is “the vital system of ideas of a period,” the working intellectual map a person needs simply to move through the world without becoming, in his word, a barbarian (Ortega y Gasset 1946, 44). What the twelfth century experienced was a culture in Ortega’s sense suddenly and violently outgrowing its containers. The cathedral school could teach the old seven liberal arts. It had no institutional form capable of metabolizing Aristotle’s entire physical and metaphysical corpus, the whole of Roman civil law, and Greek medicine all at once. Something new had to be built to hold it.

The cathedral schools before the universities

That something did not appear out of nowhere. Before Paris was a university it was, quite specifically, a cluster of cathedral and monastic schools: Notre-Dame on the Île de la Cité, the school of Sainte-Geneviève, and, further afield, the great cathedral schools of Liège, Rheims, Laon, Orleans, and Chartres (Haskins 1957, 12f). Chartres in particular deserves a moment, because it shows you a cathedral school operating near the height of its intellectual power and still not becoming a university. Haskins traces a Rheims monk named Richer making the arduous journey to Chartres as early as 991 specifically to study Hippocrates’ Aphorisms under its masters, and cites teachers there, the canonist Saint Ives, the philosophers Bernard and Thierry, of genuine international reputation (Haskins 1957,, 13). And yet, overshadowed by Paris fifty miles away, Chartres never made the transition. It stayed a cathedral school. This matters more than it might seem to do: institutional continuity was never guaranteed by intellectual brilliance alone. Something else had to happen, and that something was governmental, not scholarly.

At Paris, that something was Notre-Dame’s chancellor, who alone held the authority to license teaching within the diocese, and who therefore controlled, from the very beginning, the granting of what would become university degrees (Haskins 1957, 14). This detail is the whole ballgame. Before moving forward, take a beat to consider it because everything that follows in this series depends on your seeing it clearly. The license to teach, the licentia docendi, began life as an act of ecclesiastical control, a single clergyman’s personal grant of permission. The university, as an institution, emerged from a specific historical process by which the community of masters and students clustered around that license gradually wrested a share of governing authority away from the man who originally held all of it. By 1200, King Philip Augustus had issued a formal charter exempting Parisian students and their servants from lay jurisdiction, provoked, as these things so often are, by students being killed in a town and gown altercation (Haskins 1957, 15). By 1231, Parens scientiarum confirmed that exemption and recognized the corporate right of masters and students to govern their own internal affairs (Haskins 1957, 15). Somewhere in this process, not on a single date anyone can name, Paris stopped being a cathedral school and became, in Haskins’ phrase, “a university of masters” (Haskins 1957, 16).

Two models, one word

I got wrong in my own head for years a term, and I suspect most people carry around the same folk etymology of this notion; only in examining it rigorously enough did I find correction. The word university has nothing whatsoever to do with the universe, or with universal knowledge, or with any totalizing intellectual ambition. These are how I thought about it until over a decade ago. Haskins is blunt about this: universitas denoted, in ordinary medieval usage, simply the totality of any organized group, “whether of barbers, carpenters, or students” (Haskins 1957, 8f). That makes it a guild word.

Bologna’s students, mostly older, wealthy, and far from home, first organized as a universitas for the most unglamorous of reasons: rent. Landlords in a university town could and did price-gouge a captive population, and the students had one real weapon: the threat of collective withdrawal, since a medieval university, having no buildings of its own, was entirely mobile (Haskins 1957, 9). Having won that fight, the Bolognese students turned the same collective leverage on their own professors, putting individual masters under a genuinely enforceable bond: a professor could not be absent without leave, could not lecture to fewer than five students without being fined as though absent, could not skip a difficult passage in his commentary, and had to cover his material at a fixed pace across the term (Haskins 1957, 9f). Bologna, in other words, was a student university, full stop, complete with its own internal “nations” and an elected rector. Italian students, Haskins notes with evident amusement from personal experience, are still quite prepared to demand a voice in university affairs (Haskins 1957, 10). A brief review of the history since the late 1950’s definitely proves the truth of the claim.

Paris ran the opposite direction. Excluded from the students’ guilds, the masters formed their own, controlling entry through examination so that “no student could enter save by the gild’s [sic] consent” (Haskins 1957, 11). By 1231, this had crystallized into four faculties, each under its own dean: arts, canon law, medicine, and theology, with the arts students further sorted into four “nations,” French, Norman, Picard, and English, who together elected a rector serving what eventually became a three-month term (Haskins 1957, 16). I do not want to romanticize this. Haskins’ own account of the nations spending most of their organizational energy “drinking up the surplus” of membership fees at named taverns around the Petit-Pont should keep anyone from imagining a solemn faculty senate (Haskins 1957, 16). But the structural point stands regardless of how much wine was involved: Bologna and Paris, the two founding models of the entire university tradition, were self-governing corporations, one of students, one of masters, answerable in their internal affairs to no external board of any kind.

What a Socratic education is not

Karl Jaspers, writing in the wreckage of a German university system that had utterly failed its own idea in living memory, gives me the vocabulary to be honest about what the medieval university actually was pedagogically, as distinct from what its institutional form later came to represent.

Jaspers distinguishes three forms education can take.

1. Scholastic instruction transmits a fixed, authoritative tradition.
2. Apprenticeship binds a student to reverence for a master’s personality.
3. Socratic education alone puts teacher and student “on the same level,” both genuinely free, with “no hard and fast educational system,” only “endless questioning and ultimate ignorance in the face of the absolute” (Jaspers 1960, 49f).

Jaspers is unambiguous about which of these three he thinks higher education properly is: “Education at a university is Socratic by its very nature” (Jaspers 1960, 52). Before you do it… do not compare what Jaspers said to the current situation because it will only make you all the more aware of how off track “higher education” has become.

On the other hand, the medieval university, I have to tell you plainly, was not that either. Its curriculum ran on lecture, meaning literally lectio, the reading and glossing of authoritative texts, and disputation, the formal defense of a thesis by syllogism, and its degrees certified mastery of a fixed body of law, theology, or medicine, not the kind of open-ended, two-person, no-one-wins exchange Jaspers calls genuine discussion, where “there are no set principles and standpoints firmly maintained until victory” and “nobody wins” (Jaspers 1960, 65). What the medieval university actually ran on, most of the time, was closer to what Jaspers calls debate, controversy governed by fixed premises, aimed at defeating an opponent, which “invariably leads to a final break-off of communication” once the premises themselves are questioned (Jaspers 1960, 64f). This is not a criticism I am leveling from some position of superiority. It is simply the truth about the institution as it actually operated, and it should complicate any temptation, mine included, to treat the medieval university as a lost Socratic paradise that the modern one betrayed. The paradise was never quite there. What was there, and what does survive intact, is something more modest and, I want to argue, more important: a form of self-government.

What form of government has lasted so long

Jaspers himself, seven centuries later, describes the four medieval faculties, “theology, jurisprudence and medicine” as the three upper faculties, with “a fourth or lower faculty,” the liberal arts, added beneath them, and notes that this structure is “still in use today,” even as the philosophical faculty has since split into natural sciences and humanities, including for him what we call “the social sciences” (Jaspers 1960, 84). He is equally clear that this expansion has not always gone well. The unchecked accumulation of new fields without any unifying principle produces what he calls, in a line I keep returning to, “a meaningless aggregate of totally unrelated fields,” where “astronomy and business administration, philosophy and hotel management find themselves equals in this intellectual ‘department store’” (Jaspers 1960, 88). His answer to this is not exclusion. It is that the university is “called upon to preserve the scientific spirit by transforming and assimilating the new materials and skills and integrating them in the light of a few leading ideas” (Jaspers 1960, 89). I will need to repeat that sentence again, more than once, later in this series.

But it is Haskins who gives me the line I actually want to end on, because he is not writing philosophically: he is simply looking, as a historian, at what did and did not survive the seven hundred years between Bologna’s first statutes and his own Cornell lecture hall. The buildings did not survive. Most of what people call “medieval” about Oxford, he points out with some irritation, is actually Tudor (Haskins 1957, 22). The costumes did not survive; Rashdall himself, whom Haskins quotes directly, doubted “that no gown now worn in Oxford has much resemblance to its mediaeval ancestor” (Haskins 1957, 23, quoting Rashdall). What survived, unbroken, was the corporate form itself: the name university, “as an association of masters and scholars leading the common life of learning,” the curriculum leading to a degree, the faculties, the deans, the rectors and chancellors (Haskins 1957, 24). And then Haskins asks the question I want sitting in your mind as you close this entry and before turning to the next one: “What form of government has lasted so long?” (Haskins 1957, 24).

Seven hundred years, more or less, of self-governing corporations, masters or students holding the reins of their own institution, answerable to no external board of businessmen and clergy appointed from outside. That is the inheritance. That is what crossed the Atlantic in the minds of a handful of Puritan ministers in the 1630s, carrying with them the idea, if not yet the reality, of Oxford and Cambridge. What happened to that inheritance on this side of the ocean, and how quickly, and for how small a reason, it was traded away, is where I am taking you next.

References

Haskins, Charles Homer. 1957. The Rise of Universities. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Originally delivered as the Colver Lectures, Brown University, 1923.

Jaspers, Karl. 1960. The Idea of the University. Edited by Karl W. Deutsch. Translated by H. A. T. Reiche and H. F. Vanderschmidt. Boston: Beacon Press.

Ortega y Gasset, José. 1946. Mission of the University. Edited and introduced by Howard Lee Nostrand. London: Routledge.

Turner, Stephen. 2017. “Knowledge Formations: An Analytic Framework.” In The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, 2nd ed., edited by Robert Frodeman, Julie Thompson Klein, and Roberto C. S. Pacheco. Oxford: Oxford University Press.