A Brief History of Universities

John C. Moore

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783030013189
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030013196
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Education
• Index: History

In this book, John C. Moore surveys the history of universities, from their origin in the Middle Ages to the present.  Universities have survived the disruptive power of the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific, French, and Industrial Revolutions, and the turmoil of two world wars—and they have been exported to every continent through Western imperialism. Moore deftly tells this story in a series of chronological chapters, covering major developments such as the rise of literary humanism and the printing press, the "Berlin model" of universities as research institutions, the growing importance of science and technology, and the global wave of campus activism that rocked the twentieth century. Focusing on significant individuals and global contexts, he highlights how the university has absorbed influences without losing its central traditions. Today, Moore argues, as universities seek corporate solutions to twenty-first-century problems, we must renew our commitment to a higher education that produces not only technicians, but citizens.

© The Author(s) 2019

John C. MooreA Brief History of Universitieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01319-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

John C. Moore¹

(1)

Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, USA

John C. Moore

Abstract

John Moore’s “Introduction” presents his reasons for writing this book. He then reviews how the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome provided the building blocks for the later “Western University.” The author also presents the characteristic differences between earlier forms of higher education and the university. The Introduction concludes with a brief survey of the transition from the late Roman Empire through the early Middle Ages.

Keywords

GreeceRomeLiberal artsUniversity

End Abstract

Why write a brief history of universities? Mainly, as a remedy for my own ignorance. After I had retired from Hofstra University on Long Island, my wife and I moved to Bloomington, Indiana. Away from the daily demands on a professor, I had a growing awareness of my ignorance. I knew something about medieval universities, as well as a little about present-day universities, but I knew virtually nothing about what went on in between. For years, I had taught the history of Western Civilization , but universities did not have a large role in that history. After their origin in the Middle Ages, it seemed that most of the good stuff happened outside the universities: the “Renaissance ,” the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment , industrialization , and so forth. One of the textbooks I used had only one paragraph on universities after the Middle Ages, and it was about student activism in the 1960s.

I was especially embarrassed to recall that my doctorate in history was earned at Johns Hopkins University , the first to adopt the German model of the university as a research institution . I had been too preoccupied with my own studies to appreciate what a substantial change that was in the history of higher education.

The title I originally had in mind for this book was The Western University : A Short History, but I found that too many potential readers assumed its subject was the universities of the Western USA. The present title should better indicate the scope and perhaps the overly ambitious nature of this small volume.

Universities continue to evolve, and there are now worldwide discussions of what future universities should be. It would surely be useful, not only for me, but for the general reader, to have some understanding of the road traveled so far. The extraordinary importance of universities to civilized societies requires careful and informed consideration of their care and upkeep. The modern world, with its love of innovation, may be too inclined to undervalue institutions that have been centuries in the making. Just as personal habits developed over decades enable individuals to navigate the world they live in, so do institutions allow a society to reach maturity, to function on a “civilized” level.

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The great thinkers of the ancient world were not graduates of universities. We have no reason to believe that Confucius (d. 479 BCE) or Buddha (fl. 5th c. BCE) attended an educational institution, with professors and students organized into corporate bodies that gave certificates of accomplishment. Socrates (d. 399 BCE) and his student Plato (d. 347 BCE) no doubt had teachers for elementary education, but after that, they relied on their own reading and on the discussions that flourished in the Athens of their day. Plato’s student Aristotle (d. 322 BCE), perhaps the greatest human mind in all of history, pursued his intellectual interests at “Plato’s Academy, ” a center in Athens dedicated to informal study and discussion of many subjects. But no credentialed professors presided there, there was no basic curriculum, no degrees were given. There were no certificates guaranteeing that the holders were qualified to teach at all other similar institutions. The same can be said of centers of learning in other parts of the world before the advent of the European or Western University.

The common practice for higher education in ancient Greece was for outstanding thinkers to attract a circle of followers who then might attract followers of their own. As the young Roman Republic expanded from the Western Mediterranean to include the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean (something that had been completed by the time of Jesus of Nazareth ), the Romans absorbed Greek culture and adapted it to create their own Latin culture. It produced its own list of intellectuals and artists—especially Cicero and Virgil .

In the Roman Empire, the pattern of instruction changed little, except that it became more common for teachers to expect pay from their students (unless the teachers were slaves). Also, the knowledge of Greek began to fade in the later centuries. That was the case after the empire had become officially Christian in the fourth century CE. The North African Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine, d. 430) had acquired sufficient mastery of the Latin classics, especially Cicero and Virgil , that for a brief period he made a living as a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage , Rome, and Milan . He and other teachers might be hired by wealthy parents to teach their offspring, or they might act as private entrepreneurs, opening their own schools for those willing to pay.

An acquaintance with the Latin classics was a hallmark of the upper classes of the Roman Empire—and of those who hoped for entry into their company. But again, there were no corporations of professors or students following curricula aimed at providing specific degrees, degrees that in turn qualified their recipients for specific occupations. The content of Roman instruction then was the classical tradition of the Greeks and Romans, made up of dozens of extraordinary intellectuals and artists of many kinds: playwrights, poets, scientists, philosophers, historians, and so on.

But by the death of St. Augustine in 430, the Latin Western Empire was growing more distant from the Greek Eastern Empire. German -speaking invaders had descended into the Balkans south of the Danube and had proceeded to invade Italy, southern France , and Spain . They then crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into the Roman provinces in North Africa. When Augustine died in Hippo, in modern Algeria, the German Vandals were besieging his city.

By the death of Augustine , the empire was officially Christian, and Christian thinkers like Augustine had for some time been addressing the crucial question of how the Christian church was to deal with the pagan culture of Greece and Rome. Should it be rejected because of its pagan gods and lax morals, or could it somehow be adapted for Christian believers? Should Christians discard the pagan authors and rely entirely on the Christian Bible and its Christian commentators? Fortunately, Christian thinkers in both the Greek East and the Latin West chose to seek a reconciliation of the pagan and the Christian. Augustine argued that when Moses led the ancient Jews out of Egypt , they despoiled the Egyptians of what was needed for their journey to the promised land. So, he said, should the Christians of his day take what they needed from pagan culture for their journey into a new Christian culture. The same opinion was held by Augustine’s friend and mentor, St. Ambrose , bishop of Milan (d. 397), and by his less enthusiastic contemporary, St. Jerome (d. 420).

Jerome’s education in the pagan classics caused him an acute crisis of conscience, but it still enabled him to translate the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into the Latin of his day. By the time of Jerome , the Bible had acquired a normative status for all Christians in the West, so literacy became a requirement at least for Christian leaders, no matter how the general educational standards weakened within the empire. Jerome’s Latin Bible, the Vulgate , together with the writings of Augustine , Ambrose , and many other Roman writers , both pagan and Christian, would provide the basis of education in the centuries to follow.

In order to understand the pagan and Christian writers, people needed some preliminary education, and other Latin writers provided that foundation. Donatus (fl. 350), Lactantius (fl. 310), Martianus Capellus (fl. 420), Boethius (fl. 524), Cassiodorus (d. ca. 585), and others provided works that were to be basic for medieval people who sought learning, especially monks and other clergy. Donatus , who had been a tutor of St. Jerome , wrote Ars grammatica , a work that was to find its way into many a European library, first in manuscript form and later in print. He provided the grammatical tools for reading, writing, and understanding Latin.

Boethius was born about 480, part of an important family in northern Italy. The German conquerors had deposed the last Roman emperor in Italy, leaving only the Greek Roman emperor in Constantinople. Boethius held high positions in the Germanic Kingdom in Italy, but the Ostrogoth King Theodoric suspected him of plotting with the Greek emperor and imprisoned him and ultimately executed him.

Boethius had recognized that by his day, knowledge of Greek thought was fading and he set out to preserve it. He wrote treatises in Latin and made translations on many subjects, but especially important were his highly readable introduction to Greek philosophy, The Consolations of Philosophy , written in prison, and his translations of Aristotle’s works on logic . The Consolations was a dialogue between himself and “Philosophy,” portrayed as a woman visiting him in prison. The two of them discussed the meaning of life from the Greek philosophical perspective rather than from the Christian point of view. It was to be a “best-seller” throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, in manuscript and then in print.

Cassiodorus was a similar spirit, eager to preserve the best of the Greco-Roman civilization, especially its tradition of the seven liberal arts: grammar , rhetoric , logic , arithmetic, geometry , astronomy, and music . In the monastery he founded, he taught the monks to make copies of manuscripts for further distribution. His approach was to be emulated in many other monasteries in the centuries to follow .

From an entirely different area, another highly important building block for universities appeared from Constantinople by order of the Byzantine emperor Justinian (d. 565). The subject was law . The Roman state had been developing for about one thousand years when Justinian decided to synthesize the legal experience of that civilization. In the course of those centuries, basic legal principles and applications had been developing and undergoing constant revision. Former judges lent their wisdom in their writings, emperors added their legislation, and legal scholars (jurisprudentes) wrote learned commentaries on the evolution of Roman law . Justinian ordered a committee of experts to bring together all of this material into an organized, synthesized presentation of Roman law. The result is called the Corpus Iuris Civilis , the Body of Civil Law, and it was to prove an invaluable resource for Europe and the world.

The list of Greek and Latin writers who were to play a significant role in the history of universities is much longer than those mentioned in this brief introduction. And they all played their role in the development of the “Western University .”

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The weakening of the Roman Empire had begun before the German...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Middle Ages: 500–1500
• 3. The Early Modern Period: 1500–1789
• 4. The Nineteenth Century
• 5. The Twentieth Century
• Back Matter