European universities date from the founding of theUniversity of Bologna in 1088 or theUniversity of Paris (c. 1150–70). The originalmedieval universities arose from theRoman Catholic Church schools. Their purposes included trainingprofessionals, scientific investigation, improving society, and teaching critical thinking and research. External influences, such asRenaissance humanism (c. mid-14th century), the discovery of theNew World (1492), theProtestant Reformation (1517), theAge of Enlightenment (18th century), and the recurrence of politicalrevolution, enhanced the importance ofhuman rights andinternational law in the universitycurricula.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, European universities concentrated uponscience andresearch, their structures and philosophies having shaped the contemporaryuniversity. The FrenchEcole Polytechnique was established in 1794 by the mathematicianGaspard Monge during theRevolution, and it became amilitary academy underNapoleon I in 1804. The German university — theHumboldtian model — established byWilhelm von Humboldt was based uponFriedrich Schleiermacher's liberal ideas about the importance offreedom,seminars, andlaboratories, which, like the French university model, involved strict discipline and control of every aspect of the university. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the universities concentrated upon science, but were not open to the general populace until after 1914. Moreover, until the end of the 19th century,religion exerted a significant, limiting influence uponacademic curricula andresearch, by when the German university model had become the world standard. Elsewhere, the British also had established universities world-wide, thus makinghigher education available to the world's populaces.
Historically, theBologna University, founded in 1088, is considered the "mother of European universities". However, the date of the University of Bologna's founding is uncertain. The university was granted a charter (Authentica habita) byHoly Roman EmperorFrederick I Barbarossa in 1158, but in the 19th century, a committee of historians led byGiosuè Carducci traced the founding of the university back to 1088, which would make it the oldest continuously operating university in the world.[1][2][3] However, the development of the institution at Bologna into a university was a gradual process. Paul Grendler writes that "it is not likely that enough instruction and organization existed to merit the termuniversity before the 1150s, and it might not have happened before the 1180s."[4]
The first significant colleges of the medieval, is theUniversity of Paris, founded in 1150-1170.[5][6] Its library was among the first to arrange items alphabetically according to title.[7]
The rediscovery of ancientGræco–Roman knowledge (e.g.Aristotle's works andRoman law), led to the development ofuniversitates (student guilds), and thus the establishment of the university in the contemporary sense.[8] In turn, the traditionalmedieval universities — evolved from Catholic church schools — then established specialized academic structures for properly educating greater numbers of students asprofessionals. Prof. Walter Rüegg, editor ofA History of the University in Europe, reports that universities then only trained students to become clerics, lawyers, civil servants, and physicians.[9] Yet rediscovery of Classical-era knowledge transformed the university from the practical arts to developing "knowledge for the sake of knowledge", which, by the 16th century, was considered integral to the civil community's practical requirements.[10] Hence, academic research was effected in furtherance of scientific investigation,[11] because science had become essential to university curricula via "openness to novelty" in the search for the means to control nature to benefit civil society.[12]
The European University proliferated in part because groups decided to secede from the original universities to promote their own ideals; theUniversity of Paris fostered many universities in Northern Europe, while the University of Bologna fostered many in the South.[13] Some leaders also created universities in order to use them to increase their political power and popularity. For example,Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor founded theUniversity of Naples in 1224 to train lawyers and administrators who could rival the University of Bologna's influence, which served the hostileLombard League.[14] And in 1218,King Alfonso IX founded theUniversity of Salamanca, the oldest university in theHispanic world and one of the oldest in the worldin continuous operation.
The structure of these early classes involved a master reading from texts and commenting on the readings, as well as students learning by teaching other students. Masters also offered disputed questions to their classes for discussion.[15] Moving into the 18th century, professors became less focused on simply training university teachers and more focused on "forming the minds of the elite" of a larger society.[16]
By the 16th century, the humanist ideas of theRenaissance (14th–16th century) were slowly accepted; France had propagated them first to Germany, then to England, during theProtestant Reformation (1517).[17] In that intellectual humanist mode, university education began including preparing the student for a civilized life — of culture and civility — and concern for society's public affairs.[18] To achieve that, the curriculum comprised the liberal artstrivium (grammar,rhetoric,logic), and thequadrivium (arithmetic,geometry,astronomy, music) meant to prepare students for further specialized education in eithertheology,law, ormedicine.[19] In 1492, the socio-political consequences of the discovery of the New World expanded European university curricula, ashuman rights andinternational law became contemporarily relevant matters.[20] The European enslavement of the native (aboriginal) populaces they conquered in the "New World" of the Americas eventually raised ethico-moral questions in Europe about the human rights of the American aboriginals — questions of cultural tolerance evinced byRenaissancehumanism, the Bible, and mediæval theories of natural law.[21] In analogy to the ancient world's works, Rüegg relates the "New World" idea to the idea of "new knowledge." It is worth pointing out, thatChristopher Columbus'sletter toQueen Isabella andKing Ferdinand ofSpain describing the nativeTaíno, he remarks that "They ought to make good and skilled servants"[22] and "these people are very simple in war-like matters... I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased".[23] TheCatholic Monarchs rejected Columbus' enthusiasm for the slave trade, issuing a decree in 1500 that specifically forbade the enslavement of indigenous people.[24] In the mid-16th century, scholarly andscientific journals made it feasible to "spread innovations among the learned"; by the 18th century, universities published their own research journals.[25] In the 18th century, theAge of Enlightenment also encouraged education's transition, from the "preservation and transmission of accepted knowledge" to the "discovery and advancement of new knowledge"; the newer universities effected that change more quickly, and adopted Enlightenment ideas about the harmfulness of monarchicabsolutism more readily than did the older universities.[26]
Moving into the 19th century, the objective of universities evolved from teaching the "regurgitation of knowledge" to "encourag[ing] productive thinking."[27] Two new university models, the German and the post-Revolutionary FrenchGrandes écoles, arose and made an impact on established models such as the Russian and British - especially the newer foundations ofUniversity College London andKing's College London. Both have been connected with the dawn of theAge of Enlightenment, the rise of thebourgeoisie during industrialization and the decline of classical medievalScholasticism but used rather different approaches. Such free thinking and experimentation had notably already begun in Britain's oldest universities beginning in the seventeenth century at Oxford with the fathers of British scientific methodologyRobert Hooke andRobert Boyle, and at Cambridge whereIsaac Newton wasLucasian Professor of Mathematics & Physics.
The situation in Germany, or rather the various German states, was different. The specific GermanBildungsbürgertum, which emerged starting in the mid-18th century with an educational ideal based on idealistic values andclassical antiquity,[28][29] had failed in gaining political power and in its aims for a nationalist movement. TheBildungsbürger turned to education as a means to construct a common national culture and strived for freedom against the nobility in power. Only when Prussia and its absolutist government had been utterly defeated by the Napoleonic armies in 1806 did the weakness of the defeated government allow for thePrussian reforms of the county's institutions.[30]Wilhelm von Humboldt was appointedGeheimer Staatsrat (not minister as intended) of education in 1809 and held office for just one year. He nevertheless succeeded in drafting a complete reform of the country's educational system,[31] including the primaryPrussian education system in thede:Königsberger Schulplan and establishing the newUniversity of Berlin. Based onFriedrich Schleiermacher's and his own liberal ideas, the goal was to demonstrate the process of the discovery of knowledge and to teach students to "take account of fundamental laws of science in all their thinking". Thus, seminars and laboratories started to evolve.[32] Humboldt envisioned the university education as a student-centered activity of research:
Just as primary instruction makes the teacher possible, so he renders himself dispensable through schooling at the secondary level. The university teacher is thus no longer a teacher and the student is no longer a pupil. Instead the student conducts research on his own behalf and the professor supervises his research and supports him in it.[33]
Early 19th-century American educators were also fascinated by German educational trends. The Prussian approach was used for example in theMichigan Constitution of 1835, which fully embraced the overall Prussian system by introducing a range of primary schools, secondary schools, and theUniversity of Michigan itself, all administered by the state and supported with tax-based funding. However, some of the concepts in the Prussian reforms of primordial education,Bildung and its close interaction of education, society and nation-building are in conflict with American state-sceptical libertarian thinking.[34]
Freedom was an important concept in the German university model, and the system of professors was based on competition and freedom: although professors served as state functionaries, they had the freedom to choose between several states, and their identity and prestige arose from the specialization of scientific disciplines.[35]
The French University model lacked the freedom of the German model, consisting of severe discipline and control over the curriculum, awarding of degrees, conformity of views, and personal habits (for example, there was a ban on beards in 1852).[36] French university professors trained at theÉcole Normale Supérieure, and much of their prestige depended on their schools' reputations.[37] By 1866, though, the German model had begun to influence the strict French model.[38] The École Polytechnique was established in 1794 by the mathematician Gaspard Monge during the French Revolution, and became a military academy under Napoleon I in 1804. Today, the institution still runs under the supervision of the French ministry of Defence.
The German university model was also used in Russian universities, which hired lecturers trained in Germany and which dedicated themselves to science. At the same time, Russian universities were meant to train the bureaucracy in the same way as the Frenchgrandes écoles. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Russian universities underwent much variation in their degrees of strictness and control.[39]
British universities of this period adopted some approaches familiar to the German universities, but as they already enjoyed substantial freedoms andautonomy the changes there had begun with theAge of Enlightenment, the same influences that inspired Humboldt. The Universities ofOxford andCambridge emphasized the importance ofresearch, arguably more authentically implementing Humboldt's idea of a university than even German universities, which were subject to state authority.[40]
Overall, science became the focus of universities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Students could conduct research inseminars orlaboratories and began to produce doctoral theses with more scientific content.[41] According to Humboldt, the mission of theUniversity of Berlin was to pursue scientific knowledge.[42] The German university system fostered professional, bureaucratically regulated scientific research performed in well-equipped laboratories, instead of the kind of research done by private and individual scholars in Great Britain and France.[43] In fact, Rüegg asserts that the German system is responsible for the development of the modern research university because it focused on the idea of "freedom of scientific research, teaching and study."[44]
Schleiermacher posits thatprofessors, had to "reproduce [their] own realization[s]" so that students could observe the "act of creation" of knowledge.[45] That they serve as models of how to "intelligently produce knowledge".[46] Professorship was awarded to distinguished scholars, and was rescindable only if guilty of a serious crime.[47] From the perspective of James McCain, president emeritus of Kansas State University, professors in 20th-century Europe were more prestigious and well respected than university professors in the US, for having much academic freedom, whilst keeping to formal relationships with the students.[48] Moreover, the professors' professional role expanded from lecturing to investigating, thus research became "an integral part of the professor's task".[49]
Popular access tohigher education slowly began after 1914,[50] yet the principal remaining obstacle was its expense. For most of the 19th century, the UK continued affording a university education only toaristocrats, and not until the early 20th century, featuring new universities, such as theUniversity of London, was higher education available to the mass populace.[51] Moreover, it was not until the mid-19th century that universities admitted women students, who confronted incredibly great difficulties, such as having no civil rights and societal-institutionalsexism doubting their intellectual capacities and theirright to participate in a university education.[52] In the event, the entrance of common students to the universities challenged theideology of the German model, because their varied middle- and working-class backgrounds, hence different expectations, resulted in a less concretely Humboldtian university.[53]
In the 19th and 20th centuries, European university students were mostly responsible for their educations; they selected courses of study, professors did not register attendance, and only gaveexaminations at course's end.[54][55] Rüegg suggests that student propensity to developingstudent movements, based upon contemporary politics, parallels their attitudes of intellectual freedom and social responsibility.[56]
Progressive educational and political philosophies changedreligion’s role in the education imparted. During the 18th century, most universities were strongly connected to either a Catholic or a Protestant church, thus the professors’ and the students’ religion determined employment and matriculation.[57] In the 19th century, religion was deleted from the "compulsory curriculum"; in France,Napoleon'ssecularUniversité de France troubled Roman Catholics, because it threatened their educational monopoly. To wit, theLoi Falloux (Falloux Law) of 1850 attempted to reinstate some educational power to the Roman Catholic Church, but, by then, the Université de France hadde facto substantive control of French higher education.[58] Like-wise, in the UK, the newUniversity of London) was non-denominational, and theOxford University Act 1854 and theCambridge University Act 1856 removed religious requirements for students at the older universities with a concomitant decline in chapel attendance, and of religion as integral to a university education.[59][60]
Ultimately, European universities established the intellectual and academic traditions of university education worldwide; by the 19th century's end, the Humboldtian university model was established in Europe, the US, and Japan.[57] In the Americas, first the Spanish, then the British, and then the French founded universities in the lands they had conquered early in the 16th century,[61] meant to professionally educate theircolonists and propagatemonotheisticreligion, like christianity, to establish formal, administrative rule of their American colonies; like-wise, the British inCanada,Australia, and theCape Colony. Japan, theNear East, andAfrica all had universities based on European models in the 19th century. Those universities disseminated Western Europeanscience andtechnology and trained the local population (foremost the local elite) to develop their countries resources;[62] and, although most promoted the social, political, economic, and cultural aims of the imperial rulers, some promotedrevolutionary development of the colonial societies.[63] In the 20th century,urbanization andindustrialization made a university education available to the mass populace.[64] Throughout, the basic structure and research purposes of the universities have remained constant; per Clark Kerr, they "are among the least changed of institutions".[65]