The medieval university was a "community of scholars"
with the authority to confer degrees. The origins of the earliest
universities are obscure.
The University of Bologna seems to have evolved from an eleventh-century
center for the study of Roman law. Irnerius its most distinguished
teacher, attracted students from all over Europe. The University
of Paris grew out of the schools originally situated on the Ile
de la Cité, around the Cathedral of Notre Dame, but began
to achieve its independence when teachers and students withdrew
to the left bank of the Seine River, to the Street of Straw, in
the near vicinity of the Church of St. Genevieve. Oxford was allegedly
founded by a group of scholars who seceded from Paris. Cambridge,
in turn, by a group that seceded from Oxford. The first university
to be founded by a secular ruler was Naples. Frederick II, King
of Sicily and Germany and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, wanted
trained judges and other administrators. He organized the university
to provide the essential training.
At Bologna, student associations were the first to receive recognition
under the term universitas. They negotiated with the teachers.
gilds concerning fees and set up the rules for teaching. Many
of the southern universities followed the Bologna pattern of student
rule with respect to fees and classroom methods. Related to this
no doubt was the fact that they were, more than the northern universities,
centers for higher professional training: in law, in medicine,
in theology.
In the north the masters made the rules and the basic liberal
arts subjects were taught:
1. the trivium, consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and logic;
2. the quadrivium, consisting of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.
Satisfactory completion of study in these subjects, tested by
oral examination, entitled the student to become a master and,
if he chose to go on, to study for a doctoral degree in one of
the higher branches of learning. Paris was the great center for
theology. Control by the masters of the license to teach was not
won without a struggle in the emerging universities. In Paris,
when the schools had clustered around Notre Dame on the Ile de
la Cite, the chancellor of the cathedral controlled the licensing.
Then, as the result of a three-way struggle between city authorities,
the bishop and the masters and scholars, the university finally
won the power to regulate student life and to determine the criteria
for the degree. The king conferred a charter on the masters and
scholars in 1200 protecting them in relation to the townsmen.
The pope, by a bull of 1231, often called the Magna Charta of
the universities, insured their right to control examinations
and licensing of teachers.
"Colleges" (groups of students living together for protection
and convenience in getting food and lodging) were first founded
in Paris in the late twelfth century. The most famous college
in Paris was the Sorbonne, founded about 1257. By this time there
were minute rules regulating eating habits, dress and relationships
between the sexes. No women were allowed in private rooms.
It is not surprising that discipline was often a problem or that
there were conflicts with the inhabitants of towns. Students were
sent to university at a much younger age than is now customary-boys
at thirteen or fourteen. Girls did not attend. Nor will it be
a surprise to modern undergraduates that one of the chief problems
of medieval students was money. They were drawn from all walks
of life, but perhaps mainly from among the poorer families of
knights, or from among townspeople who were ambitious for their
children. They were perpetually short of cash, and their letters
beg piteously for more money from home to pay fees, to buy books
of course.
Peter Abelard taught at Paris before the university was fully
organized, when it was still possible for an irrepressible rebel
like him to set himself up as a rival to his teachers without
asking anyone's leave. His "calamities" both professional
and personal that he tells us about in an autobiographical History
of them, were tragic, the more so since he brought them on himself
through his intractability and passionate intensity". Twice
tried for heresies, he taught and wrote nothing against the doctrine
of the Church. His enemies were mainly men whom he had offended
with his contempt or the indifference of his superiority.
The exception was St. Bernard of Clairvaux. St. Bernard was his
implacable enemy because he recognized in Abelard a man who acknowledge
no power in Heaven or on earth That he would submit to except
the inexorable power of the mind. This to Bernard was dangerous
in a teacher, especially a rival teacher. But it must have been
exciting to students and probably accounted more than the dialectical
method he used or the substance of what he taught for the hordes
who gathered to hear his lectures in Paris and who followed him
into the wilderness when he tried to leave the world. It is worth
remembering that the Athenians put Socrates to death for leading
their youth astray in the fashion of Abelard. Peter Abelard was
only silenced by the authority of the Church on certain subjects
and never wholly effectively.
Thomas Aquinas taught at Paris in its most distinguished period.
He was a Dominican in the period when the Dominicans and Franciscans
dominated the thought of Europe. He had his conflicts with authority
too, but he did not allow them to inferfere with his work. Just
before his death he completed his Summa Theologica, the definitive
reconciliation of Christian and Greek thought and the most complete
synthesis of the learning of his age---however, not the final
one. His work was assailed not only in his own lifetime but continually
throughout the last medieval centuries.
Well that is a brief summary of the origin of medieval universities.
Now let us take a look at the nature of student power in the medieval
universities, particularly Bologna and Paris. Bologna shows the
internal relationships and Paris the day-to-day workings of student
power.
In both universities the idea was participation, what our own
Students for a Democratic Society call participatory democracy.
Authority lay with the general assembly. There was no distinct
central organization, but a loose collection of units. The universitas
or corporation was the name of this grouping, which implied nothing
academic at all. At Bologna, the students soon seized control,
thereby expressing the burgher's control of the city. The sons
dictated to the professors, and the city fathers backed up the
youthful will by law.
For example, professors and doctors could not leave the university,
under penalty of death, or even go out of town without permission.
They had to swear absolute obedience to the student-elected student
rector, who at the behest of the general assembly could pass or
change any rule. The students collected the fees, paid the salaries,
and issued the working rules; if the teacher cut a class, he was
fined; likewise, if be could not draw five students, if he skipped
a chapter or a difficulty, of if he kept on talking after the
ringing of the bell. At any time the lecturer could be interrupted
by a beadle summoning him to appear before the rector and learn
of his misdeeds.
As the great historian of universities, Rashdall, puts it: "By
means of the terrible power of boycotting which they could bring
into play against an offending professor, the student clubs were
masters of the situation". Not until Bonaparte conquered
Italy five centuries later was a professor again considered fit
to be rector of a university.
Rashdall's reference to student clubs brings us to the situation
at Paris. Medieval students were divided into "nations,"
just as the teachers were divided into subject-matter faculties.
But the nation soon ceased to denote birthplace and became an
arbitrary aggregate. The French nation at Paris included Spaniards,
Italians, Grendis, and Levantines; the English took in Flemings,
Scandinavians, Finns, Hungarians, Dutch, and Slavs.
These clubs were further divided into cliques, usually based on
parish allegiance. Here was no compact group of bourgeois father's
sons, but an international and vagrant crowd of large proportions.
The results for university governance were to be expected-incessant
quarrels, shaky alliances, jealous betrayals.
For each nation had to vote as one unit in the assembly ad elect
a new rector each month. They voted also on proctors, beadles,
financial officers, examiners, and deans. They also had to choose
one ad hoc committee after another to look into endless charges
and abuses. In the great year 1266, the papal legate Simon de
Brie tried in vain to get the rector's term extended to six weeks,
in hopes of reducing the number of contested elections and student
defiance of the rectors and the rules. At one time two rectors
claimed authority. Simon finally got them both to resign in exchange
for a stature permitting a nation to secede and thus escape disputed
rules. This feud of 1266 lasted a good fifteen years.
The suggestive point in this truly flexible system is that it
went on all fours with the prevailing theory of government-"what
affects all must be by the consent of all." It was democacy
to the full. A representative body was not supposed to express
the collective will of its constituents but to give every individual
will a chance. Three students (out of several thousand) could
ask for a change of statutes, and officers were elected who specialized
in statute-changing.
The frequent elections fitted in with the reigning philosophy
of government. Aristotle had said that no one should be entrusted
with any but the briefest tenure of office and that the whole
assembly must not only legislate but administer. And student control
obviously meant a deal of administering-collecting fees, paying
salaries, renting or buying school buildings, watching the financial
officers, approving student lodgings, supervising book publishers,
issuing summonses, levying fines, and seeing to the taking of
oaths on an unprecedented scale.
All this plus the fights of town and gown and the internal feuds
that, according to one authority, were "akin to later international
wars in their ferocity and destructiveness," must have made
the student life rich and exciting. Everything was an issue, including
the hiring of messengers, of which the several nations had from
twelve to 160 each. A touching detail of organization was that
the rector might bring to tue meetings of the assembly his bosom
friend as bodyguard.
This elaborate structure so far was all for administration. Not
a word yet about the studium, the classwork. The rector, students,
and elected deans looked after it very much as was done at Bologna,
that is, by supervising the professors. This arrangement called
for certain abilities in the rector, and since the freshmen, who
were eligible, often were under the entrance age of fourteen,
the Paris rules came to stipulate that the rector must be at least
twenty years old.
With these provisions in mind and knowing the ways of youth one
can get a sense of the student-run university of the middle ages.
One sees these eager, free-lamee, turn-and-turn-about administrators
as belonging to the somewhat older group of students and apprentice
teachers, the bold and daring, handsome and articulate, who glory
in the feeling of "we do what we like."
One can imagine them angry at the previous administration, impatient
with the snarls of bureaucracy that they could so quickly fix
by some further rules, exhilarated at the thought of the coming
meeting with a good fight in prospect, and ready always for the
actual bloodshed on tue narrow winding street, if townsmen or
a pang from the wrong parish or nation should debouch from the
next corner.
University administration by students is not to be sneezed at.
It is cheap and never monotonous. By controlling the faculty it
certainly prevents the flight from teaching, and it affords the
youth the pleasure of making their elders hop, skip and perform.
In fighting all of society and themselves, too, the medieval students
preserved minority rights to a degree otherwise unexampled. That
is, such rights were freely enjoyed il the victors of the scrimmage.
The rest-well, there is a price to pay for every good thing, and
the good achieved was the very appealing, youthful kind of life:
the free-for-all.
Besides, student power need not be as perpetually violent as it
was in the glorious thirteenth century. It can be had at the somewhat
lower price of a lack of continuity and a repetition of hopeful
errors, for in one student generation experience hardly has a
chance to accumulate and make a difference; and who cares in youth
about the confusion that comes of injecting practical and political
achon inha the rather different atmosphere of study? So let's
gaze fondly back at the happy days of student power.
The second mode of managing universities is illustrated by what
happened when the confusion became too great-or at least when
it seemed to the neighbors to have got out of hand. A historian
of the time who, as legal representative of the university, cannot
have been prejudiced against it says: "Studies were in chaos.
. .the rooms on one side were rented to students and on the other
to whores. Under the same roof was a house of learning and of
whoring." There was no reason in the nature of youth itself
why this boisterous exercise of self-government and selfindulgence
should stop. But by 1500 the scheme was swept away in the collapse
of the medieval theory and practice of government. In one short
generation--by 1530-- a new University of Paris was in being.
The force at work was the rise of the nation state, the movement
that pave "nation" its modern meaning. The One Hundred
Years' War had shown the country's need for an effective central
power to put down disorders and stop the waste. That power was
the king, and it was the king who put an end to student power
within the university. In 1450, he restrained their excessive
feasting. He then ordered the papal legate to reform the university
from top to bottom. By 1475 he was imposing a loyalty oath and,
soon after, threatening students with a kind of draft. Finally,
in 1499, he prohibited their boycotts and strikes.
From then on, whether under king or revolutionary government,
dictator or Parliament, continental universities have been ruled
by the central authority. The degree of control has varied widely
with time and place. Still, out of ancestral respect for learning,
the European university has always enjoyed certain privileges.
For example, even under the Russian tsars the police were forbidden
to enter the university, a tradition that curiously persisted
through the Russian repression at Prague in the summer of 1968.