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An essential history of the modern research university
When universities began in the Middle Ages, Pope Gregory IX described them as "wisdom's special workshop." He could not have foreseen how far these institutions would travel and develop. Tracing the eight-hundred-year evolution of the elite research university from its roots in medieval Europe to its remarkable incarnation today, Wisdom's Workshop places this durable institution in sweeping historical perspective. In particular, James Axtell focuses on the ways that the best American universities took on Continental influences, developing into the finest expressions of the modern university and enviable models for kindred institutions worldwide. Despite hand-wringing reports to the contrary, the venerable university continues to renew itself, becoming ever more indispensable to society in the United States and beyond.
Born in Europe, the university did not mature in America until the late nineteenth century. Once its heirs proliferated from coast to coast, their national role expanded greatly during World War II and the Cold War. Axtell links the legacies of European universities and Tudor-Stuart Oxbridge to nine colonial and hundreds of pre–Civil War colleges, and delves into how U.S. universities were shaped by Americans who studied in German universities and adapted their discoveries to domestic conditions and goals. The graduate school, the PhD, and the research imperative became and remain the hallmarks of the American university system and higher education institutions around the globe.
A rich exploration of the historical lineage of today's research universities, Wisdom's Workshop explains the reasons for their ascendancy in America and their continued international preeminence.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400880423 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2016 |
| Series: | The William G. Bowen Series , #89 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Wisdom's Workshop
The Rise of the Modern University
By James Axtell
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-8042-3
CHAPTER 1
Foundings
The institutions which the Middle Age has bequeathed to us are of greater and more imperishable value even than its cathedrals.
HASTINGS RASHDALL
Universities, like cathedrals and parliaments, were unique creations of Western Europe and the Middle Ages. They arose in the twelfth century in the midst of propitious change. The "barbarian" and "infidel" invasions from the north, south, and east had finally been thwarted, and the Crusades had even begun to direct Europe's martial energies outward. The resulting political stability, increased agricultural productivity, and new and improved roads fostered the growth of population, towns, trade, and the Roman Catholic Church.
As the Papacy extended its reach, it became clear that the inward-looking monasteries and even the newer cathedral schools could not provide the advanced training needed by the Church's growing ranks of priests, missionaries, and administrators. Nor could the rudimentary town schools prepare the personnel required by the burgeoning civil bureaucracies, particularly royal and imperial, that sought to preserve the fragile peace and to promote the social welfare. Those schools taught only the Seven Liberal Arts of antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and not the influx of "new" Greco-Roman and Arabic learning — in philosophy, mathematics, science, medicine, and law — that arrived after 1100 through Italy and Sicily but chiefly via Arab scholars and translators in Spain. These conditions stimulated the advent of the university, one of the very few European institutions that have preserved their fundamental patterns and basic social roles and functions over the course of history.
The earliest universities and even a few later ones have no firm birthdates. This causes no end of trouble when their older selves wish to celebrate major milestones. Cambridge has it easy in the ninth year of every new century because it was established — and well documented — in 1209 by professors and scholars fleeing Oxford after a legal and literal battle with the city and king over the discipline of the university's members. But the earliest bona fide universities have had to be more arbitrary in selecting commemorative dates. In the latest and most comprehensive history of European universities, Bologna's founding is located sometime at the "end of the twelfth century," while Paris, Oxford, and Montpellier secured their corporate existence in the "beginning of the thirteenth century."
The earliest founding dates are hard to pin down because those institutions were not created by royal, papal, or imperial decree but instead grew slowly and incrementally, leaving thin paper or parchment trails. Like most twelfth- and thirteenth-century universities, they began as schools belonging to monasteries, towns, or cathedral chapters. Some schools featured only a single charismatic teacher, such as Peter Abelard, who attracted clerics and the occasional layman interested in education higher than they could find locally. But the gathering of critical numbers soon led to the need for physical enlargement, faculty specialization, and new organization. These nascent universities only later received legal sanction, often piecemeal, from the powers-that-were, whereas later institutions largely did so in full at their starts.
Many studia, or advanced schools, functioned effectively as universities before they received privileges or full recognition from the pope, or even before they drafted statutes by which to govern themselves. Bologna, Paris, and Oxford were operating as genuine studia generalia no later than 1215. That is, their guild-like organizations of masters and students exercised a high degree of legal autonomy, elected their own officers, controlled their own finances, attracted students from a wide area (generale), offered instruction in one or more of the higher faculties of law, medicine, or theology as well as the seven foundational liberal arts, and conferred degrees and teaching licenses that were, in theory at least, honored by other universities. Bologna's first statutes were not written until 1252, and its status as a studium generale was not confirmed until 1291, when the pope gave its graduates the privilege of ius ubique docendi, "the right to teach anywhere" papal power reached. Paris received the same privilege the following year, although it had statutes on the books in 1215 and 1231. For reasons unknown, Oxford — across the English Channel — never received the pope's confirmation as a studium generale, despite the pleas of two kings. Cambridge and Edward II were successful in 1318.
In addition to their urban settings, universities were characterized by their formal privileges, which distinguished them from other social institutions. These grants, rights, and immunities sprang from Roman precedents that protected teachers and scholars of the liberal arts, particularly grammar and rhetoric. The medieval Church extended this protection because the arts were necessary to read and interpret Scripture. Even lay scholars without the tonsure enjoyed clerical status, subject to ecclesiastical law, and were immune from the jurisdiction of feudal and local civil courts. In 1155 Emperor Frederick I (Frederick Barbarossa) issued the Authentic Habita to guarantee protection and safe conduct to all teachers and students traveling to and from seats of learning throughout the Holy Roman Empire.
As soon as faculty and students began to organize into their respective guilds and confraternities for academic effectiveness and self-protection, those in high authority gave them yet more written privilegia. These they carefully preserved in bound volumes and resorted to when local, church, or royal officials sought to ignore or deny them. Clergymen with church benefices, or "livings," were allowed to draw their salaries while they were absent pursuing university degrees or teaching. All students, faculty, and even university booksellers enjoyed deferment from military drafts and municipal obligations, such as night watch, guard duty, and roadwork. Scholars were not to be physically assaulted or their premises invaded. If they were arrested, they could choose their judges. Qualified M.A. and doctoral degree candidates were to be issued the licentia docendi (the license to teach) without fee, promise, or condition. Customs duties could not be laid on scholars' books, nor could those volumes be seized for debt. Rents were to be fair and premises clean; study-disturbing noise and noisome smells emanating from the work of neighbors were prohibited. The quality and price of food, drink, books, and writing parchment were regulated. In Paris at least, scholars' houses were tax exempt. Needless to say, the favoritism shown to the scholars often exacerbated town-gown tensions, which frequently burst into violence.
The most essential privileges were two. The first was the studium's right to incorporate as a legal entity and to run its own affairs, much like a craftsmen's guild. The second was the right, once so organized, to offer degrees and teaching licenses after examination and according to the faculty's sole judgment. The larger corporation of scholars (universitas magistrorum et scholarium) created its own sub-units, enacted and enforced statutes, designed seals, elected officers, and controlled modest coffers. The professors, or "masters" (magistri), were organized into disciplinary faculties — of arts or one of the three learned professions — each with its own dean, a rotating rector to administer the entire university, and often a chancellor to represent royal or papal as well as university interests. Particularly in the southern universities, the students, initially vulnerable strangers from many parts of Europe, formed themselves into "nations," congregations based roughly on natal regions and headed by elected proctors. Bologna had as many as sixteen nations in the dominant law faculty at one time. For convenience's sake, they soon coalesced into two larger configurations, cismontane and ultramontane, based on the students' origins south or north of the Alps.
Paris, where only the masters and senior scholars of the arts faculty formed nations, had four primary groups: French, Norman, Picard, and English. The latter enrolled scholars from the British Isles, Flanders, Holland, the Germanies, Scandinavia, Hungary, and Slavic lands. In less cosmopolitan Oxford, like Paris a faculty-dominant studium, the sovereign congregation of regent (teaching) masters in arts was divided into northern (boreales) and southern (australes) islanders. University governance was administered by a chancellor, two proctors (one from each nation), and a half-dozen bedels with bailiff-like powers.
The first four major universities — Bologna and Montpellier in southern Europe, Paris and Oxford in the north — soon found imitators in large towns and cities seeking intellectual prestige, trained personnel, and, not least, income from student populations. Eighteen universities that got their start in the twelfth century survive today. By 1400 the number of viable universities nearly doubled, due in part to several established in Central Europe after the Great Papal Schism in the Church began in 1378. The total grew to at least sixty-three by 1500, covering the continent from Catania (1444) in Sicily to Uppsala (1477) in eastern Sweden, from Lisbon (1290) in coastal Portugal to Cracow (1364) in southern Poland.
* * *
The sequence of studium-founding was much the same, but the process was often compressed and speeded up. Heidelberg, for one, received full university status in 1386 after a trio of Bavarian dukes pleaded with Pope Urban VI to grant the city permission to establish a university "with all faculties included on the model of the studium of Paris and with all the privileges granted to this latter." Eight months later, after conveying to the pope an honorarium for his bull, the dukes and their council completed the foundation by promising to "endow and protect it with privileges." Good to their word, a new rector hired away from a church in Cologne and two other Paris masters were immediately given "a large stipend" to hire faculty in the arts and theology. In less than a year, the university was legally founded on a solid basis and lectures began on logic, the Bible, and Aristotle's Physics.
Despite their juridical presence, the earliest universities were not easy to identify or to locate. For many decades, they were "disembodied," largely anonymous except to near neighbors, because they operated out of rented quarters and were conspicuously lacking in signage. A prospective student coming to town in search of "the university" would not find what a modern American student would — highway exit signs, a central administration building, an office of admissions, a big library, or a landmark clock or bell tower, much less an imposing sports stadium or gymnasium. In a crowded urban setting, he would find no "campus" at all. He would have better luck seeking out a well-known, sartorially identifiable faculty member or master, who not only might explain the institution's hows if not whys but also would likely probe the lad's academic qualifications: was he born male and free, a baptized Christian, at least fourteen years of age, able to read and understand spoken Latin and, preferably, to write it as well? If he passed, the master might have him sign a parchment matricula and take him under his wing as a member of his academic familia and supervised inmate of his rented multiroom quarters. An oath before the rector to obey the university's statutes and the payment of a fee adjusted to his social status completed his admission and earned him clerical status and its legal protections, although he might have to treat his new master and a few friends to food and drink as the first of several costly rites of academic passage.
A century or so later, new students would have discovered the beginnings of an identifiably academic landscape. A number of residential halls, hostels, and colleges sprang up to house, feed, protect, and govern students, initially only a privileged minority of older graduate students but later younger arts students and even preparatory students as well. From the early fourteenth century, the halls of Oxford and hostels of Cambridge were rented houseseach overseen by a mature faculty domus, or principal. The principal assumed not only the regent master's disciplinary duties — confiscating weapons, seeing that lectures were attended and fees paid, keeping women at bay — but also some of the university's pedagogical functions as well. By the early fifteenth century, all Oxbridge scholars were required to reside in approved university residences. A major reason was to root out licentious "chamberdeacons" who rented cheap rooms from local landlords, "sleeping by day and haunting taverns and brothels by night, intent on robbery and homicide."
In the major universities of England and France, the search for order began in the late thirteenth century with the construction and endowment of residential colleges, largely for advanced students in the professional faculties. These facilities were often enclosed quadrangles that were accessed by defensible gated entrances to protect their scholars and faculty fellows from aggrieved townsmen. They also featured amenities such as chapels, libraries, dining halls, and classrooms in addition to living quarters. Numerous though scattered, they gave universities more recognizable shapes and faces until the universities began in the next century to raise a variety of distinctive buildings for communal purposes. In 1320 Oxford completed the stone Congregation House to house its embryonic library and to host faculty meetings. Later, the, two-story, Divinity School and contiguous quarters for other faculties were erected, which eventually morphed into the Bodleian Library. In Bologna, the Collegio di Spagna (1365–67) surrounded an arcaded courtyard, establishing a model for enlarged palazzos in other Italian universities. By 1500 most universities could be recognized by their specialized buildings and distinctive architecture. In becoming so heavily "embodied," however, they lost their early bargaining power in which both students and faculty could simply threaten to move to a rival city, as Oxford scholars did to Cambridge and many of Bologna's lawyers did to Vicenza and Padua. For all their advantages, endowed lectureships for faculty in the colleges later had the same result.
* * *
The prospective students who came looking for a higher education, if not always a degree, were a socially mixed lot and changed composition over the university's formative three centuries. Initially, many were mature or novice priests, friars, and monks sent by their superiors to upgrade their skills and usefulness to the Church. Like most medieval students, they had pronounced vocational goals, only more so. Their careers had begun in the Church, and they wanted them to end there, on higher rungs of the preferment ladder, of course. Yet the majority of students were middling-class urbanites, possessed of the scholastic backgrounds to take advantage of university offerings and the resources, familial or sponsored, to stay and pay for the relatively expensive course: room and board; matriculation, lecture, disputation, and commencement fees; fees for membership in student "nations;" socially and academically appropriate clothing; books, parchment, and entertainment. Earlier, the sons of noblemen and upper gentry had been conspicuous by their paucity except in Italy, but gradually they were attracted to the universities at least for cultural polish and social connections and younger sons for training for careers in the church or the law.
Matriculants from the poorer classes, pauperes often without surnames or connections, made up between 15 and 25 percent of the best-documented universities, most in northern Europe, especially Germany. In the absence of a concerted social commitment to improve the lot of poor students, most universities simply allowed them to forgo matriculation fees and to pay discounted lecture fees, but often only "until the onset of better fortune," when they were expected to pay their debts. Several Paris and a few Oxbridge colleges were endowed with provisions for poor students, particularly in the arts and theology. True paupers were given the license to beg (in the spirit of mendicant friars). Many students, not only the poor, worked their way through college by serving faculty and rich classmates, toiling in dining halls and kitchens, singing in local church choirs, tutoring younger students, gardening, laboring in college construction, and copying manuscript books for stationers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wisdom's Workshop by James Axtell. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Illustrations xiPrologue xiii
Acknowledgments xix
1 Foundings 1
2 Oxbridge 43
3 The Collegiate Way Abroad 106
4 A Land of Colleges 147
5 The German Impress 221
6 Coming of Age 276
7 Multiversities and Beyond 316
Epilogue 363
Suggested Reading 375
Index 387
What People are Saying About This
"In Wisdom's Workshop, James Axtell takes us on a fascinating journey from the Oxford and Cambridge colleges through the German universities to the early development of American colleges to the preeminent research universities of today. This is a wonderful history: beautifully written and compelling. If you think current colleges and universities face challenges, wait until Axtell tells you about their predecessors."—Jonathan R. Cole, author of The Great American University"This major work examines the evolution of the American research university, judiciously placing it into an international perspective. Axtell's research is solid, comprehensive, felicitous, and inspired."—W. Bruce Leslie, State University of New York, Brockport"With both a bird's-eye view and ground-level perspective, Wisdom's Workshop offers a broad look at the university. This book surveys eight hundred years of university evolution, from medieval Paris to elite American research universities, while also providing telling vignettes of life within these institutions. With masterful scholarship and delightful prose, James Axtell recounts a history, little known beyond specialists, of an establishment central to contemporary culture."—Roger L. Geiger, author of The History of American Higher Education"James Axtell begins Wisdom's Workshop by noting that some books beg to be written. Yes, indeed, and we readers should be grateful that Axtell answered the call. We have needed an updated history of the American research university and this work fills the void superbly. Following the institution's development from the Middle Ages to the present, Axtell's narrative is lucid, insightful, concise, and comprehensive. This will be the go-to book for people seeking to understand elite universities."—Julie Reuben, Harvard Graduate School of Education"Axtell's book stands alone as the only work that traces the historical genealogy of America's elite research universities. The scholarship is deep and solid, and Axtell's distinctive voice comes through. His important, learned, and entertaining book is not simply a clear and coherent history but also a love letter to universities and the life of the teacher-scholar."—James Turner, University of Notre Dame