A brief history of the university

Here’s a scoping account of the university, including its contribution to Western values such as liberalism and democracy, and the changing nature of the university in response to demographic and economic trends.

The Big Picture

The tradition of the university — perhaps best though of as an idea rather than a place — is part and parcel with the development of ‘The West’ as both a physical history and a set of ideas that govern society. There were certainly institutions devoted to learning that came about before the university, such as Harran University (or more likely, the Madrasa of Harran), in modern-day southeastern Turkey. In fact, the idea of an institute dedicated to the pursuit of teaching and learning in the arts and sciences is largely a byproduct of the Islamic Golden Age, a period of literary, scientific, and cultural expansion across the Middle East and North Africa. Here is a simple breakdown of the history of the Islamic Golden Age, which influenced the later European Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. [1]

It is important to understand the impact of the university as a force for good across the globe through its longstanding relationship to broad ideas like individualism, liberalism, tolerance, and academic freedom. Importantly, the university divorced itself from religion, forming the bedrock of secular education as we know it today; this has resulted in positive learning outcomes being concentrated in the Western World (which have since proliferated across the rest of the world).

One example of this is the Harvard Charter of 1650, which chose to endorse the liberal arts over a religious curriculum:

And that all the aforesaid transactions shall tend to and for the use and behoof of the President Fellows scholars and officers of the said College and for all accommodations of buildings books and all other necessary provisions and furnitures as may be for the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature arts and sciences. (Harvard University Archives)

Further, the presence of universities in cities, nation-states, and eventual multi-ethnic empires has accompanied greater swaths of the population gaining access to tertiary education opportunities, which correlate to higher life expectancies and a whole host of other positive health and wellness outcomes. For instance, these data are illustrative of the change over time in access to higher education: [2]

Origins (1200 — 1500)

Like Harran in the East, early universities in Europe developed under the patronage of the church. There were numerous church schools, each clustered around cathedrals in the principal population centers of Medieval Europe. Critically, the university was able to distinguish itself from other sorts of schools by dropping its religious affiliation and becoming independent from monarchs, which began at the Alma Mater Studiorum, otherwise known as the University of Bologna. At around the same time, groups of scholars began to convene in Paris and Oxford, forming the University of Paris and the University of Oxford respectively. These early universities were governed by corporation (in Latin, literally: a body of people), meaning they had an established charter which was ruled by a chancellor and board of directors.

There were certainly countless other universities that formed across the continent; too many to name in a brief overview such as this. Governments, which presided over city-states, each sought to form a university in their town as the demand for knowledge grew. Latin as a common language of learning helped transfer knowledge across cultures and develop an interest in topics including law, medicine, philosophy, arts, and theology. Despite this, the general growth of universities was clearly much slower than that since the 18th or 19th centuries, for example, but still significant enough to push Europe out of the medieval period and in to the early modern period.

Let’s take a moment to analyze the University of Paris (c. 1150), widely considered to be the second-oldest university in Europe. Prior to 1231, the university was composed of the stadium generale (university), and the universitas (students). In 1231 Pope Gregory IX released the bull Parens scientiarum, which essentially granted a degree of autonomy to students and faculty. This is significant because, for the first time, a state-like authority recognized 1) the validity of a degree, and 2) more importantly, “ensured the future security of the fledgling university by reinforcing the right and articulating the social value of its masters and students.”.

At the close of the Medieval period, the university as a instrument for attaining knowledge and climbing the social ladder began to be recognized as a valuable part of society. Much study during this time centered around curriculum introduced by Byzantine and Arab scholars in the natural sciences and philosophy. Principally, their reintroduction of the teachings of Aristotle (and other Greek philosophers) helped transition Medieval Europe into the coming Renaissance. As you can see, the bedrock formed during the early years of university teaching in Europe payed dividends in establishing institutions devoted to the attainment of knowledge; they were 1) recognized by authority as degree granting, 2) academically autonomous, and 3) highly valued in society.

Renaissance and Beyond (1500 — 1800)

A great account of the history of Renaissance universities is Paul F. Grendler’s The Universities of the Renaissance and Reformation. In short, throughout the Renaissance universities played a heavy hand in innovative research across disciplines while expanding their footprint on the map and in the public consciousness. For some broader context, at the close of the Medieval period, there were about 29 universities scattered around major cities in Europe. By 1800, there would around 143 universities — a roughly 500% increase over 300 years.

In some ways, the same ills that are oft discussed about universities today were also the case in Renaissance Europe. Grendler writes: “Students came to the university only to get the all-important arts or law degree that would give them entry into the expanding bureaucracies of government, the important areas of life. Once in the university, they spent their time brawling and laying siege to the virtue of the women of the town. So goes a stereotypical judgment on Renaissance universities.” So too today, a university degree is construed as a piece of paper that grants entry to the next stage of life; a career advancement or perhaps a bump in pay. Let us be clear here: despite being a popularly held belief, this idea was antithetical to the mission of the university during the Renaissance just as it is today. Grendler goes on to explain: “But the kind of marketable training that universities offered was scholarly analysis, the ability to think carefully and to apply analytical reasoning to a problem. This was the deep university fountain that quenched the thirst for learning.”

Another interesting facet of the Renaissance university was the north-south divide. The curriculum across all universities in this period was not dissimilar from the Medieval university, but with a stronger focus on the works of Aristotle and other significant Latins and Greeks. The difference between northern (primarily German and English) and southern (Italian) universities was that “Italian universities concentrated on law and medicine, while northern universities concentrated on theology and arts.” There is much more depth to this difference, but for this purposes of this overview, it’s simply important to understand that northern universities had a close-knit campus of students and faculty, a more cohesive governance structure, and are more analogous to a contemporary undergraduate program. Meanwhile, Italian universities had less structure, phased out the awarding of undergraduate degrees altogether, and more closely resemble the structure of a contemporary graduate program. Moreover, Italian universities had little to no religious affiliation, while northern universities had close ties to religious rites.

The clearest example of the manifestation of both of these models of university structure is the effects each of them had on Renaissance society. The European Renaissance is often linked with innovation on the Italian Peninsula, and rightly so. “The lack of structure in Italian universities made it possible for individual scholars to produce original research, a scarcely noticed form of Renaissance individualism” At the same time, German universities, which were deeply integrated with religion and society already, came to introduce the changes which led to the Reformation and the development of Protestantism: “That is what the University of Wittenberg under the leadership of Martin Luther did.”

Globalization and Research (1800 — 1945)

The university model has not changed drastically since around 1800. In Western Europe, the industrial revolution was setting about changes that would set the course of higher education for centuries to follow. Specifically, a wave of universities were established around the turn of the century, including King’s College London. Let’s take a moment to look at the formational years of King’s, which help inform us of the changing social climate in a quickly industrializing world. King’s was imagined as a secular institution by a group of Christians, Jews and Utilitarians (an esoteric social movement). Not long after, King’s was granted a royal charter, and opened its doors in October of 1831. Evidently, the game had changed.

Important to note at this point is that higher education did not spread to colonized territories in a vacuum. Clearly, early English settlers in North America played a large part in the development of universities such as Harvard and William & Mary, both founded before the year 1700. Most people do not know that the British and Spanish founded universities across the New World, including the University of Havana, for example, founded in 1728. In fact, the National University of San Marcos, in Lima, Peru, was founded in 1551 — nearly 300 years before King’s College London. There is a long and complicated history here, which probably warrants its own blog post.

Furthering this was the organizational structure first implemented by the Germans, which called for a regimented undergraduate program. Early adopters in the burgeoning United States included five colonial colleges (Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Columbia), five state universities (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and California), and five related private research universities (MIT, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago). It is probably no surprise, then, that virtually all universities in the United States today are built on various iterations of the German model. For instance, Evan Pugh — Penn State’s first President — received his Ph.D from the University of Göttingen. Johns Hopkins was composed of almost exclusively German faculty members. If leading American research universities were modeled after those of Western and Northern Europe, how did they come to “claim unrivaled global preeminence?” [3]

American Hegemony (1945 — Present)

The success of universities in the young United States was not always guaranteed. Often, only wealthy Ivy League schools were able to control their own destiny. The establishment of state universities across the nation helped bring together resources and educate the masses on a variety of topics; early on, this was a mix of agriculture, engineering, the liberal arts, and medicine. Further, the management of universities on a state-by-state basis helped hedge against economic downturns. More often, though, the government intervened in helpful ways, such as the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, commonly referred to as the Land-Grant Acts. Here, you can see the expansion of land-grant universities across the nation, which were more often than not public universities (exceptions include Cornell and MIT, to name a few).

Most significant in achieving hegemony among world universities was the breadth of research conducted in the United States. As states became industrialized, it was increasingly important that universities develop new technologies and output world-class engineers. There’s a few reasons why American universities were best positioned to take advantage of this. First, they benefitted from the world’s top talent being willing and able to come to the United States to pursue an education. This was not always guaranteed elsewhere, and even if it was, international students faced, at times, intense xenophobia and worse. All of this is not to say that America was perfect; it most certainly was not. Despite this, it was often the most desirable option for the world’s top talent. For example, a quick glance at the names of the Manhattan Project speaks to the claim that the world’s talent was trying to come in, not the other way around.

During World War II, the United States was able to attract top talent that helped it win the war through research and development. From labs in Berkeley and Chicago to on-site testing in Los Alamos, innovation drove post-war economic cycles and hatched new industries. Specifically, in the second-half of the twentieth-century, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the world’s two superpowers. On university campuses, federal dollars were directed to R&D in an effort to outmatch one another in nuclear and space. You can get a general sense of R&D spending as a share of GDP on a state-by-state basis here. [4]

More broadly, in the second half of the twentieth-century, large swaths of Americans were able to receive higher education for the first time. Legislation such as the GI Bill and the Great Society programs of the 1960s increased access to education and allocated more federal dollars to the construction of facilities, community colleges, and regional vocational schools. Crucially, the Higher Education Act of 1965 provided federal scholarships and low-interest loans to students. This decidedly influential piece of legislation has become ripe with discontent, particularly from those that feel it gives too much credit to too many people who are not trustworthy borrowers. This is certainly a topic that could be given a blog of its own, so for now, I’ll simply refer you to my friend Aditya Datta’s blog post, which lays out a framework of the relationship between low-interest government loans and the blooming cost of tuition at American universities.

As universities have transitioned to the 21st-century, they have been met with some challenging problems, but none that are uniquely positioned to change them, at least in the short term. Age-old questions like: to what degree are universities places committed to academic freedom? have been revisited. Similarly, the financial solvency of universities has been called in to question. I’m skeptical of the idea of the university — the one that has been agreed on as the best way to agglomerate knowledge — will fade away in my lifetime. If anything, economic interdependence, a multi-polar world, and emerging technologies give universities a stage to display how they can still be a force for good. It’s still a good idea to bet on a college degree, even in the face of new challenges. Just as before, the university will mold itself to fit the function of whatever is required of it: as long as there are people to learn, the university will teach.

[1] Early institutions, such as that in Harran, can be best conceptualized as a collection of scholars and scientists that happen to agglomerate their knowledge in a shared location, rather than a brick-and-mortar campus. So, the Madrasa of Harran was conceived in the same way as other universities in Europe, but was not a university per se because of its loose structure, as well as lack of records. Interestingly, Harran was a deeply diverse community, primarily practicing pagan religions, with other groups of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Notably, Harran was one of the last outposts of Roman pagan religion, surviving the widespread adoption of Christianity across the Roman Empire and subsequent waves of Muslim caliphates (more on that here).

[2] The variance in health outcomes between those with a college degree and without a college degree in the United States is staggering. E.g., adult life expectancy for Americans without a college degree has been declining since 2010, a significant departure from its peers. The average years of life remaining for 25-year old American college graduates is is 59 (life expectancy of 84), and 50 years for non-college grads (life expectancy of 75) — a startling nine-year gap.

[3] Pugh’s experience studying in Europe was common for academics at the time, who sought degrees at leading European universities and transferred their content expertise and institutional knowledge to early universities in the United States. Pugh even brought laboratory equipment back from Europe when he came to Centre County, Pennsylvania to become the first president of the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania.

[4] This is an inherently flawed metric, though still useful for getting a sense of how governments choose to allocate capital. Governments have been spending less and the private sector has been spending more on R&D for quite some time now, such that business now spend more on research than the government.