Universities. Though analogous institutions may be found in classical times, universities to all intents and purposes may be regarded as the distinctive product of the Christian civilisation. As institutions that grew naturally out of the needs of society, indeed, they date from no special moment, and in their earliest developments are without the domain of history. Even when they had assumed a more or less definite form in the different countries where they sprang up, the fluctuating terms by which they were designated prove the gradual and tentative nature of their growth. Even the best-known designation, university (universitas), itself varied in meaning, though in prevailing usage it implied simply a corporation of students and teachers. Other terms, such as 'the schools' (scholæ), studium, studium generale, showed a similar tendency to fluctuate in meaning. Thus studium generale was variously used to mean a great central school, a school open to all the world, and a school of all knowledge. As was the case with every important institution of the middle ages, the universities looked to the pope as their great head. The right of founding universities, however, was equally claimed by the emperor; and within their own dominions kings enjoyed the same privilege, though royal foundations did not possess all the advantages of such as held papal or imperial charters. Still, the essential distinction between the mediæval and the modern university is that the former was essentially an ecclesiastical institution, whose aims, studies, and privileges were regulated in strict accordance with the temporal and spiritual interests of the church.
At every period of their existence it may be said that universities have fulfilled a double function in the social order. They have been the great training-schools for the different learned professions, and they have been the custodiers and exponents of the ideal elements on which society ultimately rests. As the condition of their being, therefore, is to respond to the needs and aspirations of society, the history of universities has of necessity been determined by the revolutions of the human spirit and the changing ideals which men have set themselves to follow. With the Renaissance and the Reformation began a new period in their history; and from the developments of modern science and the increasing complexity of modern life a third period began when a fresh adjustment was needed to meet the ends for which they exist. In these three distinct stages of their development they may be conveniently treated in the following survey.
Though the statement has to be made with certain reserves, it may be said that Italy was the birthplace of the mediæval university. At Salerno in the 9th century there grew up a school whose origin is totally unknown, but which as early as the 11th century was famed throughout Europe for the teaching of medical science. In the 12th century a school of law at Bologna drew crowds of students from every country in Christendom. In the case of both of these schools it would appear that teachers and students drew together solely on the principle of supply and demand; and it remained a distinctive characteristic of the Italian universities that they followed professional as opposed to purely scientific ends. Through certain privileges granted by Frederick Barbarossa in 1158, however, Bologna acquired a definite existence which greatly favoured its prosperous development. In the early middle ages its only rival was the university of Paris; and not even Paris had a greater influence in determining the character of subsequent schools. In aims, studies, organisation, indeed, Paris and Bologna present two distinct types of the mediæval university. Though other disciplines gradually defined themselves into faculties at Bologna, its specialty always remained the teaching of the canon and the civil law, while Paris, as we shall see, was identified with another subject, equally one of the great concerns of the middle ages. At Bologna the prevailing aim of the students was to acquire the technicalities of a profession which through the complex municipal life of the Italian cities assured to them both riches and honour. The students who came to Bologna were for the most part men in mature life, and the organisation of the university was largely determined by this circumstance. Coming from all parts of Europe, they in time formed themselves into unions, which eventually became the governing element in the university. By the end of the 12th century these unions may be distinctly traced; and by the middle of the 13th they formed two corporations, known as the ultramontani and the citramontani, with rectors chosen from among themselves and by themselves as their representative heads. As definitively arranged, the external administration of the university was in the hands of the corporations, while the professors directed all matters relating to actual study. In Bologna, as at Paris and Oxford, colleges do not make their appearance till the 14th century, by the later half of which, however, they were already in full bloom. Here we may specially mention the great Spanish college (1364) at Bologna, as being the single specimen of a mediæval college now existing on the Continent. Throughout the middle ages, as has been said, Bologna was one of the two great models which determined the character of later universities. In France, with the exception of Paris, Montpellier, and Perpignan, all the universities (eight in number) were fashioned after the type of Bologna. In the pope's bull which founded it the university of
Glasgow is expressly said to be modelled on Bologna; and in Germany, though Paris was mainly kept in view, the Italian university had also its imitators. Before the close of the middle ages Italy possessed as many as twenty-one universities, the majority of which had their origin as late as the 14th century. Modelled on Bologna for the most part, none of them, except perhaps Padua, attained the European reputation of their prototype. As Italy had been the birthplace of the mediæval universities, it was from Italy that the forces came which sapped the foundations on which they had arisen. Out of the Renaissance movement generated in Italy sprang the modern spirit with other aims and needs than mediævalism could meet. During the 14th and 15th centuries, accordingly, the intellectual life of Italy was mainly outside its universities.
The university of Paris sprang up as spontaneously as that of Bologna. As Bologna owed its existence to the study of law, Paris was born of the movement known as Scholasticism (q.v.), which in the 12th century was the absorbing pursuit of the best minds of France. In the opening years of that century the lectures of Abelard, the most famous teacher of his generation, drew to Paris such crowds of hearers that men came naturally to associate that city with the study in which they were most deeply interested. The school attached to the cathedral of Notre Dame appears to have been the nucleus round which the university grew up. It was the chancellor of the cathedral who granted the license to teach, and who remained head of the university till the close of the 13th century, when he was displaced by the rector, chosen by a section of the university itself. In contrast to Bologna, the university of Paris was essentially the union of the professors of the different subjects that came to have a place in its studies. In time these disciplines gradually defined themselves into the four faculties of law (1213), medicine (1213), arts, and theology—the last being by far the most important of the four, while for two centuries (the 13th and 14th) canon law had no place in the university. The Nations of the university also came to make part of its organisation. Originally held together simply by common ties of birth and language, by the middle of the 13th century the students of arts formed four legally constituted bodies known as the nations of France, Normandy, Picardy, and England (afterwards Germany). These four nations, together with the three higher faculties (law theology, medicine), formed what were known as the seven 'companies' of the university; and it was the procurators of the nations and the deans of the faculties with the rector as their president who constituted the university tribunal. As in Bologna, it was not till the 13th century that the system of colleges grew up in Paris. The earliest, as it was by far the most famous, was the Sorbonne (q.v.), founded in 1253. By the end of the 14th century as many as forty colleges, more or less fully equipped, had been founded; and by 1500 there were as many as fifty. The fame of Paris rested on its scholastic theology; with the decay of that study, therefore, it gradually lost its place as the first school in Europe. By the middle of the 14th century it was already noted that she no longer produced the most famous thinkers, or published the most famous books; and when in the opening years of the 16th she rejected the new studies of the Renaissance she alienated all the men with whom the future lay. In the great schism, also, by giving her support to the popes at Avignon, she eventually forfeited the favour of Rome, which thenceforward did its best to encourage rivals even in France itself. There were other mediæval universities hardly inferior in repute to Paris and Bologna. Sala- manca, founded in 1243, was the glory of Spain for nearly five hundred years, though in the peninsula itself it had several competitors, such as Seville, Alcala, Madrid, and Coimbra (or Lisbon). The university of Oxford, however, was the most formidable rival of Paris, and in that very branch of study to which Paris owed its fame. Like the great French and Italian universities, Oxford was a spontaneous growth, whose beginnings cannot be determined with precision, for the story of its foundation by Alfred the Great is now set aside as a legend. In the 12th century, however, Oxford certainly possessed a school, which by the middle of the 13th disputed the palm with Paris both in reputation and in the number of its students. Though to a certain extent standing outside the line of development of the two great continental universities, in its aims, the character of its studies, and its organisation it was essentially formed on the type of Paris. In the same century as they grew up in the French university colleges also arose in Oxford, University College being founded in 1249, Merton in 1264, and Balliol about 1268. Though of later date as a school than Oxford, Cambridge had all the characters of a university as early as 1233. Unfortunate in its earlier developments, however, it was not till a later date that it held its own with its sister university. As was the case with the other universities, the prosperity of Cambridge was materially increased by the growth of colleges, of which the first, that of Peterhouse, was founded by 1286. According to Döllinger, it is an illustration of the practical talent and the political freedom of England that she did not squander her resources in founding other universities besides these two, thus avoiding the needless multiplication of schools which we find in the various continental countries. During the middle ages three Scottish universities, and an abortive one in Ireland, complete the list of schools in the British Islands. The attempt to found a university in Dublin in 1312 came to nothing, for the modern university dates only from 1592. Of the three Scottish universities, St Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, founded respectively in 1411, 1450, and 1494, St Andrews and Aberdeen attained a prosperity fully proportioned to the resources of the country; Glasgow, on the other hand, was a failure for fully the first century of its existence. Germany, whose universities have held the first place during the 19th century, played only a subordinate part in the development of studies during the middle ages. The oldest university within the empire, that of Prague, founded in 1348 on the model of Paris, at first gave promise of a brilliant history; but the religious wars of Bohemia in the first half of the 15th century proved disastrous to its continued efficiency. Next in date comes Vienna, but, bound as it was to the old ways of scholasticism, at too late a period (1365) to attain the vigour of the earlier universities. Before 1500 there were as many as fourteen German universities, but mostly organised on the model of Paris, which by the 14th century, as we have seen, was already an outgrown institution. The university of Cracow in Poland (1364) grew to such fame during the 15th century that it may be fairly classed among the greater mediæval institutions. Louvain (1426) and Cologne (1388) were also schools of high importance, the former especially from the fact that it was one of the first institutions north of the Alps where the new studies of the revival of learning found a home.
It is from the middle ages that all those terms come—bachelor, master, doctor, rector, chancellor, &c.—which still form part of the academic vocabulary. The origin of the terms rector and chancellor has already been explained; the import of the others may here be briefly noted. Entering first the faculty of Arts, the student after a three years' curriculum took his diploma of bachelor, and after continuing his course was at the age of twenty-one in a position to take the degree of master, which entitled him to the privilege of teaching in the university. The period of study for license in the other faculties varied at different times and in different universities, the longest curriculum of all being that of the doctorate in theology, which could not be taken before the candidate's thirty-fifth year.
With the 16th century begins a new epoch in the history of the human spirit. The end of feudalism, the revival of classical antiquity, the breaking away from Rome of a large section of the Christian society were events that went so deeply into the life of Europe that the ancient universities could not be left untouched by the revolution. But great historical institutions do not readily respond to new aspirations or adapt themselves to novel conditions. To change their subjects of study and reorganise their constitutions meant for the universities the transformation of their very being. As it happened, few of them consented to the transformation, while others made such partial concessions as utterly failed to meet the new conditions. Thenceforward the universities no longer filled their former place in the mind of Europe. Through the rending of the peoples that came of the Protestant revolution they could no longer be metropolitan schools such as Bologna and Paris had been in the middle ages. But even in their respective countries the universities were no longer the exclusive homes of serious intellectual effort. In certain countries, indeed, their course of study remained what it had been from the beginning, and the most important work was done outside their walls. A brief sketch of the history of the universities since the close of the middle ages will bring this very clearly before us.
In Italy the religious revolution was never a serious menace to the authority of Rome. On the other hand, by the beginning of the 16th century the movement of the Renaissance threatened her with moral disintegration and the substitution of the pagan for the Christian spirit. In the second half of the century, however, came the Catholic reaction; the spirit of humanism was sternly repressed; the universities passed completely under the control of the church, and till the last years of the 19th century have remained institutions without any real life, unstirred by any breath of enthusiasm, and powerless to influence the development of the people. A similar history has to be told of the university of Paris. In the first half of the 16th century it rejected the new studies of the Renaissance, and thus fell behind at the very opening of the new era. In the second half the wars of religion brought such disaster to its schools as could never again be wholly repaired. During the following centuries the successive kings of France dictated her studies, controlled her administration, and brought her to such a pass that the Revolution swept her away with other effete institutions.
The universities of England gave a better welcome to the new studies; but to both of them the Reformation, and specially the religious changes under Edward VI., brought such loss of prestige and efficiency as affected their standing throughout all their subsequent history. With the exception of Sir Thomas More, England had no scholar of European importance throughout the 16th century. In the century that followed it was as political rather than educational centres that the universities influenced the movement of things in England; and to what estate they had come in the 18th century the testimony of Gibbon as to Oxford, and the poet Gray as to Cambridge, leave us in no manner of doubt. Throughout the same period the universities of Scotland, in proportion to their humbler scale, served far more efficiently their purpose as national institutions. The Scottish reformers set about the work of organising public instruction in a more serious spirit than their contemporaries in England. Many of their schemes miscarried; but they left a stamp upon the universities which for good and evil they have retained ever since. Under Andrew Melville during the later half of the 16th century Glasgow attained a reputation which drew students in considerable numbers from different parts of the Continent. The college of Edinburgh, founded by James VI. in 1582, steadily grew in importance through all the following century. In the first half of that century, however, the university of Aberdeen produced a succession of scholars, 'the Aberdeen doctors,' who for the time made it the first of the four institutions which Scotland now possessed. During the 18th century the lustre of her mathematical school under the Gregories, and her medical school under the Monros, won the precedence for Edinburgh, and made her known wherever intellectual interests flourished. But the special service of the universities of Scotland has been to supply the want of those secondary schools which the reformers sought to make part of their national system of education, but failed to achieve through the poverty of the country and the selfishness of the leading nobility. Under the existing circumstances this was the highest service the Scottish universities could have done to the country; but with the growth of knowledge during the 19th century this function has gradually disabled them from adequately meeting the modern conception of a fully equipped university.
As we should expect, public instruction was nowhere more radically influenced alike by Reformation and Renaissance than in Germany. The result of the Lutheran revolt was the establishment of a succession of universities, such as Wittenberg (1502), Marburg (1527), Königsberg (1544), Jena (1558), and Altorf (1578), where the new religion as well as the new studies should find a home, and form centres of instruction for the Protestant communities. But the religious controversies issuing in the Thirty Years' War proved fatal to Protestant and Catholic schools alike; and till the close of the 18th century the universities of Germany gave but little promise of the splendid future before them. Since the period of the Reformation the universities of Spain have shared the inanition of the people, and till recent years have pursued the methods and studies of mediævalism with a dogged obscurantism through which no ray of light could penetrate. A notable product of the Reformation was the university of Leyden, founded in 1575 by William of Orange to commemorate the successful defence of the town against the Spaniards. During the 17th and 18th centuries Leyden boasted a line of scholars without a parallel in any other country of Europe.
During the centuries that followed the Reformation the universities, even those that owed their birth to it, continued to retain the character originally impressed upon them. The essential difference between the typical mediæval university and the university formed by the Renaissance was that, while logic formed the educational staple of the one, the Latin and Greek classics took its place in the other. Through the comparative study of other civilisations men were trained to the bolder handling of tradition, and the scientific spirit gradually displaced that of docile submission to authority. With the growth of the new spirit begins a new epoch in the history of universities, which sooner or later must respond to the needs of the society for which they exist. The characteristics of the modern period are the subdivision of studies necessitated by the widened limits of knowledge, the extraordinary developments of physical science, and the increased complexity of the conditions of modern life. Though more gradual in its working, the modern revolution has affected men's aims and interests more powerfully than the religious revolution of the 16th century. If any proof of this were needed, it would be found in the transformations which the universities have undergone to meet the conditions of the modern time.
Germany, which in respect of its universities took the last place in the middle ages, has in the modern period led the way from the first—the conclusive attestation of its pre-eminence being that its schools alone can now be called cosmopolitan. With the foundation of Halle in 1694, and of Göttingen in 1737, their new start seems to have been made, as both of these schools initiated a movement which gradually made itself felt throughout the whole of Germany. Yet, as has been said, the German universities have no brilliant record for the greater part of the 18th century; and it was only towards its close that they decisively took the lead of those of other countries. From the settlement of Friedrich Wilhelm Wolf at Halle in 1783 dates the classical teaching which is one of Germany's special claims to honour. Kant at Königsberg, and Fichte and Schelling at Jena, at the close of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, revived that application of dialectics to abstract thinking which was the distinguishing characteristic of the middle ages. But above all the foundation of Berlin University (1810) by Wilhelm von Humboldt made an epoch in the history of universities, from which we may date the ideal of a national school organised to meet the highest aims of the modern spirit. At present Germany possesses 21 universities with an average attendance of nearly 1400 students. Of their expenditure 72 per cent. is contributed by the state, 9.3 by students' fees, the remainder being met by endowments. For every teacher in the German universities the average number of students is 11, while in Scotland the proportion is 1 to 40. The professors are appointed by government, and are of three grades, full professors, extra-ordinary professors, and privat-docents. It is in virtue of their splendid organisation, based as it is on an equally comprehensive system of secondary schools, that the universities of Germany have left all others behind in the fame of their teachers and their contributions to the sum of knowledge.
In France, from the abolition of the university of Paris at the Revolution till steps were taken in 1896 for its restoration, the organisation of higher education has been peculiar, and the term 'university' has been used as synonymous with the national system of higher education. Controlled by the minister of Public Instruction, this system includes the faculties of theology, law, medicine, science, and letters, for instruction in which twenty-seven académies, variously equipped, are established in the leading cities of the country. In Paris especially there is the most ample provision for all the higher departments of study at the Facultés libres, Collège de France, Ecole pratique des hautes Études, Ecole spéciale des Langues orientales vivantes. Of Spain it has only to be said that during the 19th century it has followed the example of France, and that its universities have played no part in the developments of modern thought. In connection with the universities of Italy, of which it is specially noteworthy that the mediæval system of colleges is completely extinct, it now holds good in modern times as of the middle ages, that the professional aim prevails over that of pure science. To complete this survey of the continental universities, it may be added that Holland and Russia follow the German model, and that the Russian universities have now decisively taken their place among the schools of Europe.
Like that of other countries, university education in the British Islands has been powerfully influenced by the new forces of the 19th century. The two historic universities, Oxford and Cambridge, have responded to modern needs by such changes as the abolition of religious tests, the diversion of a certain proportion of their endowments to physical science, the system of local examinations, and university extension lectures. The foundation of colleges and universities in certain of the large towns of England are the result of the same tendencies. Durham University (1837), with its physical science college at Newcastle; Victoria University (comprising Owens College, Manchester; University College, Liverpool; Yorkshire College, Leeds); Mason's College, Birmingham; with the Welsh colleges of Cardiff, Bangor, and Aberystwith (organised in 1894 as the university of Wales), sufficiently prove how the pressure of modern life has created a new departure in the life of universities. Dundee has a University College. London University (separately dealt with) is mainly a degree-granting body. In the later history of the Scottish universities the Universities (Scotland) Act of 1858 is specially noteworthy as having assigned a common constitution to all of them. The result of the Commission on the Scottish Universities, however, will be the most drastic step yet taken to adapt them to the needs of the time. The multiplication of lecturers, as distinct from the professors, the recasting of the curriculum, the admission of women, the choice of subjects permitted to the student are among the most important changes that will give a new character to their future. In Ireland the wants of the country are met by the university of Dublin, the Royal University of Dublin (purely an examining and degree-giving body), and the colleges of Belfast, Cork, and Galway, a Catholic university endowed by the state being as yet only under discussion. Advocating a teaching university in London, in addition to the institutions the city already possesses, Professor Huxley has thus expressed the difference between the modern and the mediæval ideal of the university. 'The student to whose wants the mediæval university was adjusted looked to the past and sought book-learning, while the modern looks to the future and seeks knowledge of things.' The distinction here made is more trenchant than just, but it suffices to show the distance that has been travelled since Paris with its scholastic theology was the first school in Europe.
The university extension movement for providing the means of higher education for persons of all classes and of both sexes, engaged in the regular occupations of life, is conducted by lecturers giving courses in various populous centres, conducting examinations, and granting certificates. The movement began with Cambridge in 1872, and soon extended to other universities; Chautauqua (q.v.) maintains a somewhat similar system. For University Settlements, see TOYNBEE.
In the United States the titles university and college are used indifferently, the former occasionally even for a college where the course of study is not advanced, and either title for a university in the European sense, with several faculties. A considerable proportion, therefore, of the 415 'colleges' of the republic are universities, whilst a still larger number are simply high-schools. In the best uni- versities, it should be noted, the course of study will bear comparison with any British university at least; elective and post-graduate courses have been introduced in many of the larger colleges. A state university is part of the educational system of most states, and is generally, like most of the newer colleges, open to both sexes. Most of the American colleges, the state universities excepted, were founded as religious institutions, their chief purpose being to train men for the ministry; this applies not only to Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, and others founded before the 19th century, but also to many of the later western colleges.
Canada possesses sixteen degree-granting colleges and universities, one at least in every province of the Dominion except British Columbia. The chief are the university of Toronto; McGill College, Montreal; Dalhousie University, Halifax; and Laval University (Roman Catholic), at Quebec. There are universities in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide; the university of New Zealand has branches in various towns; since 1873 there is a university of the Cape of Good Hope. India has three principal and two lesser universities.
The more important universities have separate articles (OXFORD, CAMBRIDGE, HARVARD, DUBLIN, EDINBURGH, &c.), or sections in the articles on the towns where they are found; and the articles on the several countries deal with the university system of each.
See Denifle, Die Entstehung der Universitäten des Mittelalters bis 1400 (vol. i. 1885); for the university of Paris specially, the works of Du Boulay, Crevier, Thuoret, and Jourdain; J. Conrad, German Universities for the last Fifty Years (Eng. trans. 1885); Georg Kaufmann, Die Geschichte der Deutschen Universitäten (vol. i. 1888); S. S. Laurie, Lectures on the Rise and Early Constitution of Universities; for Oxford, Anthony Wood, Parker, Maxwell Lyte; for Cambridge, Dyer and Bass Mullinger; Grant, The Story of the University of Edinburgh; Monumenta Almeæ Universitatis Glasguensis; Spalding, Fasti Aberdeenenses; Lyon, History of St Andrews; Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of the Middle Ages (1892); Thwing, American Colleges (New York, 1878). Information regarding the teachers and faculties of all the universities in the world is given in the Minerva (Strasbourg, annual). Interesting general studies of the functions of universities will be found in Sir William Hamilton's Discussions, Mark Pattison's Suggestions on Academic Organisation, Matthew Arnold's Schools and Universities on the Continent, and Döllinger's Akademische Vorträge, vol. ii.