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[Middle English universite, from Old French, from Medieval Latin ūniversitās, from Latin, the whole, a corporate body, from ūniversus, whole. See universe.]
For more information on university, visit Britannica.com.
In 1725 Peter the Great founded the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, which, unlike its Western models, included a school of higher education known as the Academic University. The primary task of the university was to prepare selected young men to enter the challenging field of scientific scholarship. The university encountered difficulties in attracting and retaining students. Because all instructors - members of the Academy - were foreigners, there was also a serious language barrier. The general atmosphere did not favor the new teaching venture, and the university folded before the end of the century.
After a slow start, Moscow University, founded in 1755, ended the century as a dynamic enterprise with a promising future. The initial charter of the university guaranteed a high degree of academic autonomy but limited the enrollment to free estates, which excluded a vast majority of the population. In 1855, on the occasion of the centenary celebration of its existence, the university published an impressive volume on its scholarly achievements.
The beginning of the nineteenth century manifested a vibrant national interest in both utilitarian and humanistic sides of science. During the first decade of the century, the country acquired four new universities. Dorpat University, actually a reestablished Protestant institution, immediately began to serve as a link to Western universities and as an effective center for training future Russian professors. The universities at Kharkov, Kazan, and St. Petersburg benefited from an initial appointment of Western professors displaced by the Napoleonic wars. St. Petersburg University also benefited from the presence of the Academy of Sciences in the same city.
It was not unusual for the members of the Academy of Sciences to offer courses at the university. Kiev University was founded in 1833 with the aim of contributing to the creation of a new Polish nationality favorably disposed toward the spirit of Russia, a quixotic government plan that collapsed in a hurry allowing the university to follow the normal course of development.
The 1803 university charter adopted the Western idea of institutional independence and opened up higher education to all estates. Conservative administrators, however, continued to favor the upper levels of society. The liberalism and humanism of government management of higher education was a passing phenomenon. In the 1820s, the Ministry of Public Education, dominated by extreme conservatism, encouraged animosity toward foreign professors and undertook extensive measures to eliminate the influence of Western materialism on Russian science. Geology was eliminated from the university curriculum because it contradicted scriptural positions.
In a slightly modified form, extreme conservatism continued to dominate the policies of the Ministry of Public Education during the reign of Nicholas I (1825 - 1855). The 1833 university charter vested more authority in superintendents of school districts - subordinated directly to the Minister of Public Education - than in university rectors and academic councils. Professors' writings were subjected to a multilayered censorship system.
Russia's defeat in the Crimean War in 1855 - 1856 stimulated rising demands for structural changes in the nation's sociopolitical system; in fact, the Epoch of Great Reforms - as the 1860s were known - was remembered for the emergence of an ideology that extolled science as a most sublime and creative expression of critical thought, the most promising base for democratic reforms. As Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, the famed neurophysiologist, noted, the Nihilist praise for the spirit of science as an epitome of critical thought sent young men in droves to university natural-science departments.
Inspired by the waves of liberal thought and sentiment, the government treated the universities as major national assets. Budgetary allocations for the improvement of research facilities reached new heights, as did the official determination to send Russian students to Western universities for advanced studies. New universities were founded in Odessa and Warsaw. In 1863 the government enacted a new university charter with a solid emphasis on academic autonomy.
At the same time, the government abrogated the more crippling provisions of the censorship law inherited from the era of Nicholas I. This reform, however, had a short history: In response to the Nihilists' and related groups' growing criticism of the autocratic system, the government quickly restored a long list of previous restrictions. This development, in turn, intensified student unrest, making it a historical force of major proportions. The decades preceding the World War I were filled with student strikes and rebellions.
The 1884 university charter was the government's answer to continuing student unrest: It prohibited students from holding meetings on university premises, abolished all student organizations, and subjected student life to thorough regimentation. The professors not only lost their right to elect university administrators but were ordered to organize their lectures in accordance with mandatory specifications issued by the Ministry of Public Education.
Student unrest kept the professors out of classrooms but did not keep them out of the libraries and laboratories. The waning decades of the tsarist reign were marked by an abundance of university contributions to science. Particularly noted was the pioneering work in aerodynamics, virology, chromatography, neurophysiology, soil microbiology, probability theory in mathematics, mutation theory in biology, and non-Aristotelian logic.
World War I brought so much tranquility to universities that the Ministry of Public Education announced the beginning of work on a new charter promising a removal of the more drastic limitations on academic autonomy. The fall of the tsarist system in early 1917 brought a quick end to this particular project. During the preceding twenty years new universities were founded in Saratov and Tomsk.
The last decades of Imperial Russia showed a marked growth of institutions of higher education outside the framework of state universities. To bolster the industrialization of the national economy, the government both improved the existing technical schools and established new ones at a university level. The St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute was a major addition to higher education. There was also a successful effort to establish Higher Courses for Women financed by private endowments and treated as equal to universities. Shaniavsky University in Moscow, established by a private endowment, presented a major venture in higher education. In the admission of students, it was less restrictive than the state universities and was the first institution to offer such new courses as sociology.
In 1899 the total enrollment of students in state universities was 16,497. Forty percent of regular students sought law degrees, 28 percent chose medicine, 27 percent were in the natural sciences, and only 4 percent chose the social sciences and the humanities. Law was favored because it provided the best opportunity for government employment.
The February Revolution in 1917 placed the Russian nation on a track leading to a political life guided by democratic ideals. The writer Maxim Gorky greeted the beginning of a new era in national history in an article published in the popular journal Priroda (Nature) underscoring the interdependence of democracy and science. The new political regime wasted no time in abolishing censorship in all its multiple manifestations and granted professors the long-sought right to establish a national association for the protection of both science and the scientific community. A government decision confirmed the establishment of a university in Perm.
Immediately after the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolshevik authorities enacted a censorship law that in some respects was more comprehensive and penetrating than its tsarist predecessors. The new government began to expand the national network of institutions of higher education; in 1981, the country had 835 such institutions, including eighty-three universities. The primary task of universities was to train professional personnel; scholarly research was relegated to a secondary position. This policy, however, did not prevent the country's leading universities with research traditions from active scholarship in selected branches of science. The universities also concentrated on Marxist indoctrination. The curriculum normally included such Marxist sciences as historical materialism, dialectical materialism, dialectical logic, and Marxist ethics. To be admitted to postgraduate studies, candidates were expected to pass an examination in Marxist theory with the highest grade. Marxist theory was officially granted a status of science, and Marxist philosophers were considered members of the scientific community.
In their organization and administration, Soviet universities followed the rules set up by institutional charters, specific adaptations to a government promulgated model. Faculty councils elected high administrators, but, according to an unwritten law, the candidates for these positions needed approval by political authorities. Local Communist organizations conducted continuous ideological campaigns and tracked the political behavior of professors. In the post-Stalin era political control and ideological interference lost much of their intensity and effectiveness.
During the last two decades of the Soviet system the government encouraged a planned expansion of scientific research in all universities. Selected universities became pivotal components of the newly founded scientific centers, aggregates of provincial research bodies involved primarily in the study of acute problems of regional economic significance. Metropolitan universities expanded and intensified the work of traditional and newly established research institutes. Leading universities were involved in publishing activity, some on a large scale. In university publications there was more emphasis or theoretical than on experimental studies. Mathematical research, in no need of laboratory equipment, continued to blossom in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev universities.
Bibliography
Kassow, Samuel D. (1961). Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Vucinich, Alexander. (1963 - 1970). Science in Russian Culture. 2 vols. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
—ALEXANDER VUCINICH
Universities played a vital role in the intellectual life of Europe from 1500 to 1789. They educated the intellectual elite and professional classes of Europe. An enormous number of political and religious leaders obtained university degrees or studied in universities without taking degrees even though the percentage of the population attending universities was extremely low. Universities provided the institutional home in which scholars carried on advanced research and created most of the humanistic, medical, legal, and scientific advances. The period from 1500 to 1650 was an era of unprecedented achievement for universities. They remained important, but to a lesser degree, from 1650 through the end of the eighteenth century.
Characteristics
A university had several linked components. Professors conducted research and taught theology, canon law, civil law, medicine, and the arts subjects of grammar, rhetoric, the classics of ancient Rome and Greece, logic, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy, plus other subjects on occasion, such as medical botany and Hebrew. Written statutes told them which texts and disciplines to teach. A limited formal academic structure provided rules for instruction and student conduct. Students came, lived, studied, and obtained degrees. The university awarded degrees certifying that the recipient had a high level of expertise in a discipline with the approval of a supreme legal authority, such as emperor, pope, or the ruler of the state in which the university existed.
Europe had forty-seven universities in 1500, then added another twenty-eight new universities that survived by 1650. Thereafter the number of new university foundations slowed considerably, while some older ones were closed or merged. The net gain between 1651 and 1790 was ten, making a total of about eighty-five European universities in 1790. The lands that are now Germany, Italy, France, and Spain had, in that order, the largest number of universities, while another fifteen were to be found in the rest of Europe. Although any designation of the most important universities is open to disagreement, the list would include Bologna, Padua, Pavia, and Pisa in Italy; Paris in France; Cologne and Heidelberg in Germany; Vienna in Austria; Louvain in Belgium; Leiden in the Netherlands; Oxford and Cambridge in England; St. Andrews in Scotland; Alcalá de Henares and Salamanca in Spain; Coimbra in Portugal; and Cracow in Poland.
Universities were not the same across Europe. Universities in northern Europe and Italy differed greatly in the importance given to different disciplines, the level of instruction, and the age of students. Paris and Oxford, the prototypical northern universities, emphasized instruction in arts and theology. Most northern European universities had a majority of young students fourteen to eighteen or nineteen years of age studying for the bachelor's degree in arts, plus a smaller number of advanced students, often future clergymen seeking master's and doctoral degrees in theology. They had a handful of students studying for doctorates in law and medicine. Most northern European universities, especially those in German-speaking lands, had only one or two professors each for medicine and law.
Italian universities emphasized law and medicine at an advanced level and had many professors for these subjects. For example, the University of Bologna had an average of forty professors of law and twenty to twenty-five professors of medicine in the sixteenth century. They taught arts subjects such as logic and philosophy as well as preparation for medicine and law. But they taught little theology and did not award bachelor's degrees. The greatest number of students obtained doctorates in law, the next largest number doctorates of medicine, followed distantly by students winning doctorates of arts or theology. The master's degree with the right to teach was awarded with the doctoral degree without a separate examination. Students at Italian universities were typically eighteen to twenty-five years of age. Because of the emphasis on law and medicine at the doctoral level, many northern Europeans, especially Germans, obtained bachelor's degrees in the north, then came to Italy to obtain doctoral degrees in these disciplines.
The size of universities varied greatly, partly because the age of students differed. Paris, with an estimated 12,000 to 20,000 students, most of them young, was undoubtedly the largest university. Up to 500 teachers, the vast majority in arts instructing younger students while studying for advanced degrees, taught at Paris. Salamanca also had several thousand mostly younger students. The University of Bologna, the largest Italian university, had about ninety professors and 1,500 to 2,000 students, all studying for doctorates, in the sixteenth century. But the vast majority of universities were smaller: thirty to forty professors taught 300 to 800 students. Some universities had only ten to twenty professors teaching 100 to 300 students. Student enrollment fluctuated from decade to decade as war, disease, and the presence or absence of a famous professor caused students to move from one university to another. Students frequently began at one university and took a degree at a second or third. They could do this easily because the texts studied were the same from university to university, and all lectures, texts, disputations, and examinations were in Latin.
A course met five days a week, typically Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, with the professor lecturing for an hour or longer. In a typical lecture, the professor began by reading a section from a standard authority, such as a scientific work of Aristotle, a medical text of Galen (c. 130–c. 200), a legal passage from the Corpus iuris civilis, the collection of ancient Roman law, or the New Testament for theology. The students sitting on benches normally had copies of the text or passages. The professor next delivered a detailed analysis of the text, explaining how it should be interpreted, rejecting some interpretations, reconciling others, bringing to bear other texts, and explaining its larger meaning. He might range far beyond the original text. This was the heart of university instruction. In due time the professor published these detailed analyses of authoritative texts. Other professors used them in their own research and teaching or published contrary interpretations. Students taking notes and annotating the passage in their own copies had useful professional information, such as a full explanation of a legal text and guidance about how it might be used in cases. The lecture concluded with questions and answers between students and professors. They sometimes moved into the piazza or atrium for this less formal part of teaching.
Another important academic exercise was the disputation. A student or professor posted a notice announcing that he would defend a series of positions in his discipline at a certain time and place. Anyone was free to come and argue. Disputations offered practice in learned argument, which was considered a valuable skill in all disciplines and professions. For medical students, the annual public anatomy was also essential. Students stood in tightly packed rows to watch as a dissector cut open a body as a professor explained the organs. Public anatomies were scheduled for the coldest time of the year and went on without stop until the body putrefied days and weeks later.
After three or four years of study, the student presented himself before a committee of examining professors as a candidate for the bachelor's degree. Examinations for the doctoral degree were more complex. After four to seven years of additional study, the candidate presented himself to an examining committee, appointed by a college of doctors of law, medicine, arts, or theology. Colleges of doctors consisted of professors and other local men holding doctoral degrees in a subject. A typical examination required the student to explain several passages (called puncta or points) chosen at random from the required texts in the discipline, followed by wide-ranging questions from the examiners. A candidate for a medical degree might also be required to give his opinion on a medical case proposed to him. Students who satisfied the examiners of their competence were awarded doctoral degrees recognizing them to be experts in a subject and authorized to teach it. The degree was conferred in public ceremonies marked by much rejoicing and considerable expense.
Humanism
The introduction of humanism was the most important curricular change in the sixteenth century, and it involved much more than teaching the literary and historical classics of ancient Rome and Greece in their original languages. Humanists and professors with humanistic training transformed the study of several disciplines because they used their linguistic and historical skills and critical outlook of humanism in their research and teaching. The use of the Greek text of Aristotle and ancient commentaries in place of medieval commentaries offered new insights in philosophy. The rediscovery of ancient mathematical texts aided mathematicians, including Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), a professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa (1589–1592) and the University of Padua (1592–1610). Applying the techniques of humanistic textual criticism to the Corpus iuris civilis led to a better understanding of the historical context of Roman law. Called humanistic jurisprudence, this new approach had great influence in French and German universities but little in Italian universities.
Humanism had the greatest impact in medicine through a series of developments sometimes called "medical humanism." Professors of medicine used humanistic skills to examine the medical texts of Galen and other ancients in the original Greek. They found the medieval Latin translations of Galen wanting, so they produced better Latin translations for classroom use. Their enhanced understanding of the texts soon led them to find fault with Galen himself. The medical humanists also placed greater emphasis on anatomical study achieved through more frequent and more knowledgeable dissections of human bodies. Italian universities added professorships of medical botany in order to improve the study of the medicinal properties of plants. The universities of Padua and Pisa simultaneously founded the first university botanical gardens in 1543. Henceforward, students came to the garden in springtime to examine plants and learn about their medicinal properties. Clinical medicine began in the 1540s when a Paduan professor took students to hospitals in order to lecture on a disease at the bedside of the ill patient. Even though universities remained dedicated to lecturing on authoritative texts, these innovations gave greater emphasis to hands-on study, a tendency that continued in the following centuries. Universities in Italy, especially Padua, pioneered the changes in teaching and research, while universities elsewhere quickly followed.
In many northern European universities, especially in Germany, the introduction of humanists and humanistic studies into universities at the beginning of the sixteenth century produced bitter conflict with theologians. The fundamental issue was, how should the sacred texts of Christianity be studied and interpreted? The theologians answered by traditional medieval Scholastic methods, using the tools of logic, the philosophical framework of Aristotle, and guidance from Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and other great medieval theologians. Only in this way could God's truth be uncovered and error avoided. The humanists answered, not through Scholasticism and medieval commentaries, but through careful linguistic, grammatical, and rhetorical analysis of the texts in their original language, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. This enabled man to understand God's personal message and to be persuaded to follow him. The two sides fought bitterly. The humanists heaped scorn on university theologians for confusing the word of God with man's interpretations, while the Scholastic theologians dismissed the humanists as grammarians lacking the theological training to understand what they read. The differences were great, because the stakes were university positions in this life and salvation in the next. The advent of the Protestant Reformation exacerbated the conflict as many, but not all, younger German humanists joined Luther while older humanists and most Scholastic theologians remained Catholic. In Italian universities, by contrast, humanists and the few theologians who taught in universities there mostly ignored each other.
The sixteenth was a century of enormous achievement for universities. It is difficult to name another century in which university professors produced so much important scholarship. Numerous major religious leaders also held university professorships. Martin Luther (1483–1546), professor of theology at the modest, newly founded (1502), and geographically isolated University of Wittenberg, began a religious revolution. His chief lieutenant, Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), was a professor of Greek at Wittenberg. And many of their Catholic opponents were professors. Leaders with university training from other areas of life were equally important.
The eruption of the Protestant Reformation had both negative and positive impact on universities. Enrollment initially dropped sharply in German universities, especially those in lands that became Lutheran. But enrollment recovered by the end of the sixteenth century, and a few new universities, both Catholic and Protestant, were established. Despite their differences, students continued to move from university to university across religious boundaries. For example, German Protestant students continued to study and to get degrees in law from the Italian universities in Bologna, Padua, Pavia, and Perugia because the most famous professors of law taught there and because Italian civil governments protected them from prosecution for their religious beliefs.
Decline: 1650 to 1790
Universities continued to lead Europe in research and training leaders into the seventeenth century. But then new and different institutions of higher education rose to challenge them.
Protestants needed schools to train their clergymen in the new doctrines. Catholic universities obviously would not do this, and establishing new Protestant universities was difficult and expensive. Hence, small schools for theology and arts sprang up in the Protestant world. The Calvinist Genevan Academy (founded in 1559) was a famous example. It had seven or eight teachers for theology, Greek, Hebrew, arts, and law. The majority of the graduates became ministers. Some of these new schools sought to become universities teaching a broad range of subjects, but few succeeded.
In the Catholic world the new religious orders of the Catholic Reformation, led by the Jesuits, did the same on a much larger scale. The Society of Jesus, founded in 1540, originally established schools to train boys aged ten to sixteen in the humanities. A handful of Jesuit schools began to add upper-level classes in philosophy and theology in order to train members of the society. These schools, which were open to lay students, proved to be very popular because the Jesuits were excellent scholars and teachers and because the schools were free. Thus, a growing number of Jesuit schools with classes in logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, mathematics, and theology appeared. Occasionally a Jesuit school also offered an introductory law course. Other religious orders of the Catholic Reformation followed the lead of the Jesuits.
Prodded by princes, the Jesuits also established boarding schools for noble boys and youths from about the ages of ten to twenty. These schools added classes in French, dancing, and horsemanship, all necessary skills for sons of the ruling classes, to the humanities, philosophy, and religion classes. Schools for nobles offering the opportunity to mix with peers attracted students who would otherwise have attended universities. They were expensive, but so were universities. Other Catholic Reformation religious orders again imitated the Jesuits.
Religious order schools offered a structured education in a morally upright and safe environment. By contrast, universities had loosely organized curricula, a licentious life style, and brawling students. Most university students carried swords, and many carried firearms. It is small wonder that many parents preferred religious schools, especially the boarding schools, for their sons. For example, the school for nobles at Parma, founded in 1601, rose from 550 students in 1605 to 905 in 1660, and a minority of the students were non-Italian. Approximately one-third of the students attended the higher classes, which duplicated the first year or two of university studies. Every young male from the ages of eighteen to twenty who attended a religious order school was a possible enrollment loss for universities. Protestant lands also established numerous highly regarded and socially selective schools that taught part of the arts curriculum of universities.
Learned societies offered intellectual and financial competition to universities needing scholars. A famous example was the Royal Society of London for the Advancement of Natural Knowledge, founded in 1662. Financially underwritten by member subscriptions, it supported scientific research, provided opportunities for contacts with other scholars, and published the results of research. Learned societies proliferated. Most Continental societies received funding from governments; some offered salaries to members who carried on studies in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and other subjects. And they did not have to teach. Overall, scientific societies offered attractive nonuniversity alternatives to scholars needing support. Scientific societies created an international network enabling scholars in a discipline to communicate their research.
The philosophes of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment attacked universities as not useful to society. They judged the traditional university curriculum to be incapable of training citizens to contribute knowledge to improve the state. So they persuaded rulers to create new, specialized institutions of higher learning to teach practical subjects, such as agricultural technology, engineering, military tactics, surgery, even the fine arts. These highly specialized and practically oriented schools competed with universities for students.
Some of the criticism of the philosophes was justified, but much was not. Universities had kept up with innovations in learning. Although Latin remained the common language of instruction and writing, and universities continued to teach traditional subjects, they had added professorships in new subjects such as history and geography. They had discarded Aristotelian science in favor of Galileo's mathematical physics and had then adopted experimental science, all in the course of a century. And university research in medicine continued to lead the way, as university professors produced all of the important medical advances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Professors in traditional subjects produced nontraditional works of scholarship. For example, Adam Smith (1723–1790), who taught logic and moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1751 to 1764, produced An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. Universities continued to award degrees certifying that the lawyer, judge, physician, clergyman, teacher, and civil servant were qualified to practice their professions. Learned societies, religious schools, and specialized schools could not do this. Overall, universities played essential intellectual and social leadership roles in European life that no other institution could replace.
Bibliography
Brockliss, L. W. B. French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History. Oxford, 1987. Comprehensive study.
Curtis, Mark H. Oxford and Cambridge in Transition 1558– 1642: An Essay on Changing Relations between the English Universities and English Society. Oxford, 1959.
De Ridder-Symoens, Hilde, ed. A History of the University in Europe. Vol. 2, Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800). Cambridge, U.K., 1996. Information on all aspects of universities with emphasis on general patterns and the university in society. Good on northern universities.
Farge, James K. Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543. Leiden, 1985. A detailed study of the personnel and activities of the major Catholic theological faculty.
Grendler, Paul F. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore and London, 2002. Comprehensive study of Italy's sixteen universities, 1400–1625, with extensive bibliography.
History of Universities. Avebury and Oxford, 1981–. Annual volume founded by the late Charles B. Schmitt. Includes articles, bibliographical surveys of recent research, and reviews.
Jurriaanse, M. W. The Founding of Leyden University. Leiden, 1965.
Maag, Karin. Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560–1620. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt., 1995. Important for Calvinist influence plus the universities of Heidelberg and Leiden.
Mc Conica, James K., ed. The History of the University of Oxford. Vol. 3, The Collegiate University. Oxford, 1986. Excellent study of all aspects of Oxford between 1485 and 1603.
Rummel, Erika. The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1995. Study of the battles between humanists and Scholastics, mostly in Germany.
Schmitt, Charles B. Aristotle and the Renaissance. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1983. Short survey describing how Renaissance university scholars approached Aristotle in innovative ways.
Tyacke, Nicholas, ed. The History of the University of Oxford. Vol. 4, Seventeenth-Century Oxford. Oxford, 1997.
Wear, A., R. K. French, and I. M. Lonie, eds. The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1985. Excellent collection of studies on medical humanism, anatomy, and other aspects of the medical Renaissance.
—PAUL F. GRENDLER
In many works on the occult sciences, allusions are made to schools and universities and the instruction of those who were drawn to them. The idea for such schools derived from the philosophical schools and academies of the ancient Greek teachers. In the early Christian era, Gnosticism was taught in such schools. Since that discipline was centered upon gnosis or knowledge, a school (rather than a temple or church) was the natural form that its group life assumed.
While a few similar schools might have existed in the Dark Ages, the idea of such institutions was largely a myth used to credential otherwise informally and self-taught occultists or to refer to the places where alchemists and occultists quietly gathered to consult with each other. It was the practice of those on the faculties of the universities and those who operated independently to draw students around them, and professors of the occult sciences were no different.
There is no doubt that during the Middle Ages many lecturers taught alchemy and kindred subjects at great universities. Thus Paracelsus lectured on alchemy at the University of Basel, and he was preceded and followed there and elsewhere by others who taught that and other occult arts.
Louis Figuier, in his book L'alchimie et les alchimistes (1854), alluded to a school in Paris frequented by alchemists that he himself attended in the middle of the nineteenth century. The school—an ordinary chemical laboratory during the day— became in the evening a center of the most elaborate alchemical study, where Figuier met alchemical students, visionary and practical.
The novelist Balzac alludes to an occult school in the story "The Secret of Ruggier," which he placed at the time of Catherine de Medici. He stated: "At this epoch the occult sciences were cultivated with an ardour which put to shame the incredulous spirit of our century…. The universal protection accorded to these sciences by the ruling sovereigns of the times was quite remarkable."
He goes on to say that at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Ruggier was a member of a secret university for the study of the occult sciences, where astrologers, alchemists, and others studied several branches of hidden knowledge. Balzac gives no details as to its locality, or as to the exact nature of its curriculum.
The College of Augurs in Rome and the Calmecac of ancient Mexico are distinct examples of institutions for the study of divination, and in this connection, the House of Wisdom of the Ismaelite sect at Cairo, Egypt, may be mentioned.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky insisted that a great "school" of illuminated occult adepts flourished in Tibet, but nobody except herself and her immediate friends ever saw them or had any dealings with them. Prior to 1959, Tibet was the home of a large number of monasteries that were also the schools of Tibetan Buddhism and its esoteric practices.
Instructional centers for people who studied the occultism integral to Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Asian systems did exist (and continue to exist) across Asia. These centers, remote and mysterious prior to the transportation and communications revolution of the twentieth century, took on a mythical character in the occult literature of the nineteenth century. Those associated with these Asian schools were rumored to have extraordinary occult prowess.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attempts have been made to recreate these ancient occult schools. For example, the School for the Discovery of the Lost Secrets of Antiquity flourished for a generation in San Diego, California. It was founded by Katherine Tingley late in the nineteenth century and taught Theosophy. A decade earlier, Blavatsky founded the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, an organization carried on by Theosophists associated with the Theosophical Society.
One modern equivalent of ancient occult universities are the secret magical orders, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where occult and mystical subjects are taught to students, with grades of advancement. Many such orders, based in part on a format adopted from Freemasonry, exist.
One outstanding attempt to recreate the ancient Gnostic schools, with an intense course in esoteric training, is Ramtha's School of Enlightenment in Yelm, Washington, opened in 1988 by JZ Knight. Ramtha, a channeled entity, instructs students through the entranced Knight.
The true university of these days is a collection of books.
— Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881).
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A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees at all levels (bachelor, master, and doctorate) in a variety of subjects. A university provides both tertiary and quaternary education. The word university is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning "community of teachers and scholars".
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By the above definition, most of the following institutions of higher education do not meet the criteria of a university, since they were not known to grant academic degrees. The original Latin word "universitas", first used in time of renewed interest in Classical Greek and Roman tradition, tried to reflect this feature of the Academy of Plato. The choice for the oldest institution of higher learning is usually among Nalanda, Constantinople, Al Karaouine or Al-Azhar. Nalanda University, founded in Bihar, India around the 5th century BC conferred academic degree titles to its graduates, while also offering post-graduate courses. Another Indian university whose ruins were only recently excavated was Ratnagiri University in Orissa. Chinese institutions of higher learning were the semi-legendary Shang Hsiang, and later Taixue and Guozijian serve as the highest level of educational establishment while academies became very popular as non-governmental establishments teaching Confucianism and Chinese literature among other things. Also the acdemy of Gundishapour is one of the oldest universities in the world, made around 4 century AD in Iran.
Al-Azhar University, founded in Cairo, Egypt in the 10th century, offered a variety of post-graduate degrees, and is often regarded as the first full-fledged university. The University of Constantinople, founded in 849, by the regent Bardas of emperor Michael III, is generally considered the first institution of higher learning with the characteristics we associate today with a university (research and teaching, auto-administration, academic independence, et cetera). The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes the University of Al Karaouine in Fez, Morocco as the oldest university in the world with its founding in 859. For more on early universities see List of oldest universities in continuous operation.
The first European medieval university was the University of Magnaura in Constantinople in Byzantium, now Istanbul in Turkey, founded in 849 by the regent Bardas of emperor Michael III, followed by the Bulgarian University of Preslav and the Macedonian University of Ohrid (9th century) in the Bulgarian Empire, founded by Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria, University of Bologna (1088) in Bologna, Italy, the University of Paris (c. 1100) in Paris, France, later associated with the Sorbonne, and the University of Oxford (11th century) in England. Many of the medieval universities in Western Europe were born under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church, usually as cathedral schools or by papal bull as Studia Generali (NB: The development of cathedral schools into Universities actually appears to be quite rare, with the University of Paris being an exception - see Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities). In the early medieval period, most new universities were founded from pre-existing schools, usually when these schools were deemed to have become primarily sites of higher education. Many historians state that universities and cathedral schools were a continuation of the interest in learning promoted by monasteries.
In Europe, young men proceeded to university when they had completed their study of the trivium–the preparatory arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic–and the
quadrivium: arithmetic,
Outside of Europe, there were many notable institutions of learning throughout history. In China, there was the famous Hanlin Academy, established during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), and was once headed by the Chancellor Shen Kuo (1031-1095), a famous Chinese scientist, inventor, mathematician, and statesman.
The end of the medieval period marked the beginning of the transformation of universities that would eventually result in the
modern research university. Many external influences, such as eras of humanism,
Enlightenment, Reformation, and
revolution, shaped research universities during their development, and the discovery of the New
World in 1492 added human rights and international law to the university
By the 18th century, universities published their own research journals, and by the
19th century, the German and the French university models had arisen. The German, or Humboldtian model, was conceived by
Wilhelm von Humboldt and based on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s liberal ideas pertaining to the importance of
freedom, seminars, and laboratories in universities. The French university model involved strict discipline and control over every
aspect of the university.
Universities concentrated on science in the 19th and 20th centuries, and they started to become accessible to the masses after 1914. Until the 19th century, religion played a significant role in university curriculum; however, the role of religion in research universities decreased in the 19th century, and by the end of the 19th century, the German university model had spread around the world. The British also established universities worldwide, and higher education became available to the masses not only in Europe. In a general sense, the basic structure and aims of universities have remained constant over the years.
Although each institution is differently organized, nearly all universities have a board of trustees, a president, chancellor or rector, at least one vice president, vice-chancellor or vice-rector, and deans of various divisions. Universities are generally divided into a number of academic departments, schools or faculties. Public university systems are ruled over by government-run higher education boards. They review financial requests and budget proposals and then allocate funds for each university in the system. They also approve new programs of instruction and cancel or make changes in existing programs. In addition, they plan for the further coordinated growth and development of the various institutions of higher education in the state or country. However, many public universities in the world have a considerable degree of financial, research and pedagogical autonomy. Private universities are privately funded having generally a broader independence from state policies.
Despite the variable policies, or cultural and economic standards available in different geographical locations create a tremendous disparity between universities around the world and even inside a country, the universities are usually among the foremost research and advanced training providers in every society. Most universities not only offer courses in subjects ranging from the natural sciences, engineering, architecture or medicine, to sports sciences, social sciences, law or humanities, they also offer many amenities to their student population including a variety of places to eat, banks, bookshops, print shops, job centres, and bars. In addition, universities have a range of facilities like libraries, sports centers, students' unions, computer labs, and research laboratories. In a number of countries, major classic universities usually have their own botanical gardens, astronomical observatories, business incubators and university hospitals.
The funding and organization of universities is very different in different countries around the world. In some countries universities are predominantly funded by the state, while in others funding may come from donors or from fees which students attending the university must pay. In some countries the vast majority of students attend university in their local town, while in other countries universities attract students from all over the world, and may provide university accommodation for their students.
In the United States, there is no legal definition of the term "university." The usual practice in the United States today is to call an institution made up of undergraduate students a "college." This can be a two-year community college, which grants an AA or a four-year college, such as a liberal arts college, which grants a B.A. or B.S. An institution comprising both undergraduate and graduate students (and often several schools) is called a university. Some schools such as Boston College, Dartmouth College, and College of William and Mary, which offer a number of graduate programs, have retained the term "college" in their names for historical reasons. Similarly, some institutions granting few if any graduate degrees, such as Wesleyan University, may be called universities for historical reasons. Another criterion used to distinguish between a college and a university in the United States is the balance of teaching and research that occurs in the institution. Colleges have historically focused on teaching and universities on scholarship and research.
The Carnegie Basic Classification system distinguishes among institutions on the basis of the prevalence of degrees they grant. As the names of their categories indicate, the Carnegie Foundation considers the granting of master's degrees necessary, though not sufficient, for an institution to be classified as a university.[1]
University rankings give an indication of the quality of
Admission systems and university structures vary widely around the world (see college admissions). Differences are marked in countries where universities fulfill the role of community colleges in the United States and Europe.
Colloquially, the term university may be used to describe a phase in one's life: "when I was at university…" (in the United States and the Republic of Ireland, college is used instead: "when I was in college..."). See the college article for further discussion. In Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the German speaking countries "university" is often contracted to "uni". In New Zealand and in South Africa it is sometimes called "varsity", which was also common usage in the UK in the 19th century.
In his study of the American university since World War II, The Knowledge Factory, Stanley Aronowitz argues that the American university has been besieged by growing unemployment issues, the pressures of big business on the land grant university, as well as the political passivity and ivory tower naivete of American academics.
In a somewhat more theoretical vein, the late Bill Readings contends in his 1995 study The University in Ruins that the university around the world has been hopelessly commodified by globalization and the bureaucratic non-value of "excellence." His view is that the university will continue to linger on as an increasingly consumerist, ruined institution until or unless we are able to conceive of advanced education in transnational ways that can move beyond both the national subject and the corporate enterprise.
In some countries, in some political systems, universities are controlled by political and/or religious authorities, who forbid certain fields and/or impose certain other fields. Sometimes national or racial limitations exist - for students, staff, research.
Books from university libraries, written by anti-Nazi or Jewish authors, were burned in places (eg. in Berlin) in 1933, and the curricula were subsequently modified. Jewish professors and students were expelled according to the racial policy of Nazi Germany, see also the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Martin Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg University, where he delivered a number of Nazi speeches. On August 21, 1933 Heidegger established the Führer-principle at the university, later he was appointed Führer of Freiburg University. University of Poznań was closed by the Nazi Occupation in 1939. 1941–1944 a German university worked there. University of Strasbourg was transferred to Clermont-Ferrand and Reichsuniversität Straßburg existed 1941–1944.
Nazi universities ended in 1945.
Soviet type universities existed in the Soviet Union and in other countries of the Eastern Bloc. Medical, technical, economical, technological and arts faculties were frequently separated from universities (compare the List of institutions of higher learning in Russia). Soviet ideology was taught divided into three disciplines: Scientific Communism, Marxism-Leninism and Communist Political Economy) and was introduced as part of many courses, eg. teaching Karl Marx' or Vladimir Lenin's views on energy or history. Sciences were generally tolerated, but humanities curbed. In 1922, the Bolshevik government expelled some 160 prominent intellectuals on the Philosophers' ship, later some professors and students were killed or worked in Gulag camps. Communist economy was preferred, liberal ideas criticized or ignored. Genetics was degradated to Lysenkoism from the middle of the 1930s to the middle of the 1960s. Communist parties controlled or influenced universities. The leading university was the Moscow State University. After Joseph Stalin's death, universities in some Communist countries obtained more freedom. The Patrice Lumumba Peoples' Friendship University provided higher education as well as a KGB training ground for young communists from developing countries. Any communist country had a network of (para-)universities working for communist party, police, political police or armed forces.[citation needed] The system failed during the years 1989-1991. In some countries a number of communists and political police informers were expelled from universities, political universities resolved or reorganized. Universities in North Korea continue the Soviet tradition.
