Читать книгу Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities - Lewis Pyenson - Страница 9

Well into middle age the man awoke with a nightmare about honours examinations at his undergraduate college. For years the nightmare took the same form. He was unprepared for the material. Other students streamed towards the classrooms, confident that they had mastered Heine and Heisenberg, Proust and politics, evolution and revolution. He was all at sea, barely familiar with the course syllabi. Before intimations of mortality replaced the fear of inadequacy in the man’s sleeping consciousness, the examination dream evolved a more complicated and quite preposterous plot: though the man held a doctorate, he was returning to complete an undergraduate college degree.

Most people have experienced an anxiety dream about school. The reason is clear: schooling is an unnatural and traumatic event. Children are confided to a stranger for instruction in abstractions. They are required to commit great quantities of facts to memory, largely by the intermediary of the written word. It comes as no surprise that some creative minds have questioned the value of traditional schooling, with its emphasis on examinations. Albert Einstein (1879–1955), in one of his earliest popular writings, found little to commend the traditional German secondary school-leaving examination, the Abitur. The examination was injurious to mental health precisely because it gave rise to nightmares. Furthermore, a good deal of time in the last year of secondary school was wasted in preparing students for the test.¹ Einstein himself never submitted to the Abitur, although he once failed the entrance examination for the Zurich polytechnical institute, and his lover failed the final examinations there.

Einstein studied in Germany and Switzerland, and he may even have attended school briefly in Italy. He could have affirmed that many nations have a hierarchy of schools where citizens are obliged to receive state-sanctioned training. Knowledge may be imparted anywhere, and skills may be acquired on the job, but an academic institution carries an ethos and acts as a crucible for culture. Most important is teaching manners – the essential, outward features of daily life that distinguish civilization from barbarism. Some academic institutions even instruct about what to say at a cocktail reception, which utensil to pick up first at a dinner party, and how to act au courant of the latest intellectual fad. With the eclipse of gentry, priests, and community healers, academic graduates have increasingly been called to officiate in matters large and small.

Whence this prestige attached to the resources controlled by a self-perpetuating guild? The vast majority of academic diplomas no longer lead directly to a post in the workaday world. Today they do not provide evidence, except indirectly, of having mastered the skills required to succeed in business or public affairs. And in an age of sliding-fee structures, social class and family wealth are no longer associated with the crest of a particular institution.

Schools generally are conservative social institutions, and prestige radiates from their traditions, customs, and rituals. They divide the day into class hours and the year into semesters, the calendar of events culminating in colourful ceremonies at which diplomas are conferred. These rituals of formal schooling, which express a way of ordering the world, have entered into the consciousness of a large part of the world’s peoples.

School rituals deriving from religious or moral outlooks vary from place to place. Yet all schools subscribe to one common idea. They hold that knowledge may be acquired through diligent study. There are other kinds of knowledge deriving from religious or artistic inspiration. But schools hold that most things can be learned. The central notion here concerns a distillation of tradition. Learning about knowledge, largely from books, is what has been called science for a thousand years.

In schools, a master imparts knowledge to acolytes, who may eventually create something new beyond their lessons. Whether scholastic lessons are abstract or practical, esoteric or mundane, schools prepare students for a place in society. That place is generally keyed to facility with the written word, which has been the most secure means of transmitting knowledge from one generation to another. In fact, it is not unreasonable to imagine that schools invented writing, and hence that schools are the prime mover of history – the science of knowing the past by its documentation.

In this chapter and the next one we examine how schools of higher learning have been involved with scientific tradition and change. We shall see that academia has both promoted scientific innovation and also stifled it. One of the challenges facing universities in the new millennium will be to implement new ways of breathing relevance into the accomplishments and promises of the past.

The Mediterranean world

What we know about science education in antiquity derives from a variety of documents: a few hundred clay tablets from several sites in Mesopotamia; a few treatises written on papyrus; and diverse histories and texts recopied and reprinted in Chinese, Greek, Arabic and Latin. To this must be added inscriptions on stone, masonry, coins, and pottery, precious castings and carvings, and the accumulated wisdom of archaeology. Because our knowledge of the distant past derives from fragmentary sources, it has sometimes been said that the study of antiquity appeals to people who like mastering a small, fixed syllabus. The sources, however, are much more abundant than commonly imagined.

Clay tablets allow us to conclude that schools existed in Mesopotamia, and that they coincided with the earliest representations of the Sumerian language about 3100 BC. Among the documents of Old Sumerian, which existed until about 2500 BC, are school exercises – lists of signs and words. At the time of the Semitic invasion of Mesopotamia, about 1700 BC, we find a compendium of celestial omens called the Enuma Anu Enlil. These omens concern the moon’s eclipses, halos, and conjunctions with fixed stars; solar eclipses; weather and earthquakes; and planetary stations. They held special importance for those who believed in astrology, a system of correspondences constructed between celestial phenomena and terrestrial events. The celestial phenomena must have been catalogued over centuries and at diverse places by trained observers. These circumstances suggest an early social pairing of priestly and scholastic functions.

Many of the Sumerian calculations we possess treat practical measuring problems, often involving land area. (In modern terms they reduce to complicated algebraic equations, often cubic or even quadratic expressions.) The problems are sometimes formulated with what we may call malice of forethought (correct answers are integral numbers), and sometimes they have absurd proportions (lengths stretching more than a thousand kilometres or food for an impossibly large army). We have problem sets both with and without solutions, and some solutions feature elementary mistakes. We must conclude that the corpus relates to instruction in schools. The techniques were no doubt useful for keeping track of state assets, but it seems more reasonable to imagine that this specialized knowledge served better to discipline young minds.

The presence of codifying abstruse calculations (whatever their ostensible, practical referent) implies the existence of schools, even if we cannot say much about scholastic organization. Egyptian mathematics, for example, is based on unit fractions – fractions where the numerator is always one. It is possible to speculate about the origin of such a convention (in terms of family structure, inheritance practices, land tenure and taxes), but there can be no disagreement about the ultimate impracticality of the convention for advanced mathematics. Among the few surviving compendia of Egyptian mathematics, we find calculations dividing the contents of a jug of beer into minuscule parts, obviously a school exercise by its lack of utility.

A new kind of teaching emerged in the fifth century BC, and it left its mark on learning in all cultures with access to the Mediterranean world. The innovation related to a group of Greek teachers known as Sophists. They were private professional pedagogues (like later-day itinerant lecturers) who operated in a free-market economy. They would teach by contract whatever people wanted to learn. Their syllabuses suited individual tastes, and their pitch seems to have been a mixture of affable cultivation and practical skills designed to propel a citizen forward in his city.

Their innovations notwithstanding, Socrates (ca.470–399 BC) and Plato (ca.427–347 BC) were teachers in the Sophist tradition, even though they distinguished themselves by their strong claim to methodological precision and systematization of knowledge. Plato’s Academy occupied a large athletic facility long used by teachers like him. Aristotle (384–322 BC), who might have succeeded Plato, created his own school at another athletic facility, the Lyceum. Aristotle’s chosen successor Theophrastus (372–287 BC) produced written anthologies of his pre-Socratic predecessors in addition to general manuals and new works. He purchased land near the Lyceum and donated it in perpetuity to his colleagues for a school, although the Lyceum’s library left Athens for Anatolia as a result of an ideological schism. Later the library returned to Athens and eventually found its way to Rome (as spoils of conquest), where it received wide notice. Permanency of place and syllabus, coupled with the international and public nature of instruction, produced a search for certainty rather than, as with the Sophists, mere expediency.

The Academy and the Lyceum were institutions of higher learning. They departed from the smorgasbord of Sophist offerings whose heritage we find, today, in undergraduate liberal-arts curricula. Young people associated with these schools absorbed particular truths as well as the spirit of the place, and then contributed to the discourse; it pleased some men (we have no clear record of women scholars) to stay on for part or all of a lifetime. The excitement of scholarly discussion and the presence of libraries, where knowledge was collected and stored, made such a choice attractive. We possess no diplomas from antiquity because the world of Greek learning was so small as not to require them. A quick conversation would be enough to establish a person’s credentials.

State funding ensured the contemplative life of these colleges, which continued in some form for many hundreds of years. At least at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, academic contemplation related directly to political involvement. Because the end of all learning was to train better citizens, scholars often applied themselves to statecraft. The goal was to produce someone like Henry Kissinger or, more optimistically, Woodrow Wilson, each of whom was a distinguished academic before entering politics.

The Big Three – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – closed the Greek golden age. In the far-ranging conquests and the subsequent Hellenizing process initiated by Alexander the Macedonian, these and other thinkers of contemporary renown received tremendous exposure. What distinguishes the sequence of the Big Three is not speculative moral or political philosophy, but rather a tradition of collective enquiry into nature. They also sought explanations rooted in experience and capable of standing up under sustained, reasoned debate. Whatever the philosophical colour of knowledge-seekers in Hellenistic times (the philosophies came in dozens of hues), their accomplishments depended on libraries and secular centres of higher learning.

Institutions with a teaching function began to take shape, emphasizing the search for knowledge of nature, with the result that the contentious ethical-political side receded into the background. A pupil of Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus, Demetrius Phalerius (ca.345–293 BC), deposed as dictator of Athens, went to the Egypt of one of Alexander’s generals turned potentates, Ptolemy I Soter; there Ptolemy, acting on Demetrius’s advice, founded the institute for advanced study known as the Museum of Alexandria. The name suggests a secular temple for receiving inspiration by the muses, the nine avatars of arts and letters (including astronomy) in classical antiquity. Though under the direction of a priest (until Rome imposed a supervisor) and with their material needs overseen by curatorial staff, the Museum’s fellows were free to study what they liked. They lived sumptuously at the king’s expense. They had outdoor galleries and lecture theatres for learned discussions, and they ate in a large dining hall. Attached to the Museum were a botanical garden and what became the largest library of Mediterranean antiquity, the Serapeum. The prestige of the Museum made it a magnet for scientists throughout Hellenistic and Roman times – Euclid (fl. ca.295 BC), Apollonius of Perga (fl. ca.200 BC), Aristarchus (ca.310–230 BC), Eratosthenes (ca.276–ca.195BC), Archimedes (ca.287–212 BC), and Hero (fl. AD 62) all resided in Alexandria for longer or shorter periods. Museum fellows could and did take on pupils – the grammarians Dionysius Thrax of Alexandria (fl. AD 40) and Apion (fl. AD 30) are traditionally held to have studied there under Didymus (b. 63 BC). Scholars generally found it a safe haven from political storms. The Museum was the nerve centre of a cultural community that we would find today in places like the Cambridges.

The Museum inspired copies at the administrative centres of Antioch, Ephesus, Smyrna, Seleucia, and Rhodes. The Attalids of Pergamum in Anatolia (in modern Turkey) imitated the Alexandrian example by creating a medical school and magnificent library, an environment of learning that centuries later nurtured the Pergamum native, the famous physician Galen (ca.129–ca.200). A second-century contemporary of Galen’s, the great thinker Claudius Ptolemy (ca.100–ca.170, not related to the royal family) held a professorship at the Alexandrian Museum, part of the small number of chairs in philosophy that Egypt’s nonresident monarchs, the Romans, had financed. After AD 200, however, the Museum began to lose some of its intellectual centrality, despite the extraordinary achievements of Ptolemy. Galen’s writings suggest as much, because he visited the Museum and wrote disparagingly about its physicians. Alexandria’s Museum – with its hundreds of thousands of rolls of books and its heritage in speculative philosophy, with its tradition of high-table meals and sparkling dinner conversation – is a distant mirror of twentieth-century universities. It is difficult to say how much was left of the library and its intellectual circle when Caliph Umar, following a tradition of book burnings stretching from the pre-Socratics through the early Christian zealots, ordered a perhaps largely symbolic purification by fire in AD 646.

Although the ancient museums appear much like the best of our universities today, their line to the present is broken. The medieval arts and philosophy faculties in Europe were not exactly corporations for generating new knowledge; indeed, they owe more to secondary-school instruction in antiquity than they do to the academies and museums. In their final form the seven liberal arts (the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics or music; and the trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic), which formed the base of medieval university instruction, may be traced to schools of the first century BC. By the imperial Roman period, however, in the schools that retailed these liberal arts, literary studies overwhelmed natural sciences. Like their European successors, Hellenistic and Roman engineers, surveyors, and sailors learned their craft apprentice-style.

The schools of higher learning at Athens, Rome, and elsewhere (or rather, the collection of professors of grammar, rhetoric, law, and medicine at these locations) continued into the sixth century AD, when they were extinguished by Christian fanaticism or barbarian neglect. But the classical tradition nevertheless survived for a thousand years, in Constantinople. Between 425 and 1453, diverse classically inspired schools provided the administrative elite of Byzantium.

The warriors of the Fourth Crusade turned their attention to the conquest of Byzantium. They sacked Constantinople in 1204 and then set about to conquer the outlying provinces. The first Latin emperor of Byzantium, Baldwin I, asked Pope Innocent III to send professors from the University of Paris to found a Latin institute in Constantinople. Innocent agreed to the plan. Also in the thirteenth century, Paris founded a Collegium Constantinopolitanum, designed to lodge and train a score of Byzantine clerics. When Michael Paleologus recaptured Constantinople in 1261, he revived higher learning by appointing George Acropolita (1217–1282, a politician, general, and historian, whom he had freed from prison) to the chair of Aristotelian philosophy. Acropolita also served as ambassador to Rome, effecting a reconciliation of sorts between the eastern and western churches. Twelfth-century Europeans knew about classical learning thanks to hundreds of years of translation from Arabic, but Aristotle entered the fledgling European universities on the tide of Greek learning that issued from Byzantium. It is possible that the notion of European faculties of higher learning – variously guaranteed by church and state – derives from Byzantine precedent.

Eastern cultures

Learned colleges appeared in other ancient civilizations, such as South Asia. The end of the Vedic period in India, about 500 BC, saw the emergence of a wandering brotherhood of secular teachers, the vadins. They codified their teachings when imaginative literature began to appear in writing, which until then had been used for administration, commerce, and music. The vadins were in some measure South Asian Sophists, and their activity led to the great schools of Jainism and Buddhism. Jainism, founded by Vardhamana Mahavira, and Buddhism, the teachings of the fifth-century BC Gautama Buddha, both questioned the polytheistic divinities and hierarchical social structure of Vedic traditionalists. For both religious teachers, enlightenment resulted from individual study. Jainist asceticism spread by mass education, while Buddhist thought was concentrated in monastic orders.

With the progressive expansion of Buddhism came the revival of Sanskrit – the language of the Vedic commentaries – as a learned lingua franca. The fusion of Buddhism and Vedic traditions around 1200 led to classical Hinduism, with three kinds of educational institution. First (and especially in northern India) were the Gurukula schools, small groups of pupils gathered around a private teacher; astronomy was part of the curriculum. Second were the Hindu temple schools of southern India, inspired by the Buddhist monastic seminaries and supported by land grants; natural sciences seem not to have figured in the syllabus, but because the temple schools had hospitals we may imagine that they incorporated medical instruction. Third were the agrahara centres designed to spread Brahmanic learning. These Hindu schools were pale reflections of the Buddhist colleges that had functioned within grand monasteries since the fifth century. Nalanda (located south of Patna in Bihar, eastern India), one of the most famous of these monasteries, had 10,000 inhabitants at the end of the seventh century; of these as many as 1500 were teachers and about one third were students. It was at Nalanda in the seventh century that the Chinese scholar I-hsing (672–717) copied 400 Sanskrit texts.

Natural sciences in South Asia found their firmest supporters not in schools, but in family-controlled guilds. Astronomical knowledge, for example, was a guild secret. The restricted nature of certain kinds of natural knowledge also coloured science instruction at Chinese colleges. Insofar as we have certain knowledge of them, Chinese institutions of higher learning may be traced to the philosophical schools formed at the time of the Warring States, from 475 BC to 221 BC, when kingdoms large and small contested for supremacy. Teachers were required to train and discipline a civilian bureaucracy, and states naturally competed to recruit teachers who could transform administrative norms into ethical principles. The resulting philosophical free-for-all is known as the time of the Hundred Schools. In terms of the multiplicity of sectarian doctrine, the Hundred Schools seem not unlike the late Hellenic period. A handful of the Hundred Schools survived a period of internecine warfare and continued to have an impact long into a time of imperial rule, indeed, up to the present: the Confucianists, the Legalists, the Mohists, the Taoists, the Logicians and the Naturalists.

The Confucianists, followers of Master Kung, held that virtue could be acquired by learning, although his disciples, from Mencius to Xun Zi, differed about how much education might do for people. Legalists, under Han Feizi, believed in the literal interpretation of legal canons and the inflexible application of jurisprudence, a procedure offered to make law both equitable and independent of executive privileges. Mohists, followers of Mo Zi, proclaimed a religious vision of love and encouraged technological improvements that would defend the weak against the strong. Taoists, tracing their origin to the teachings of Lao Zi, advocated the dissolution of reason in ascetic spirituality; their disengagement from the mechanism of statecraft translated into an antipathy for mechanical contrivance, but their quest for a state of grace led Taoists to experiment with therapeutic regimes for extending and improving life. Logicians, followers of Hui Shih and Kungsun Lung, emphasized a search for generalized concepts transcending the ephemeral particular. The Naturalists elaborated the theories of the two forces (Yin and Yang) and the Five Elements (water, fire, wood, metal, earth), attributed to their master Tsou Yen; in contrast to the other schools, they actively sought to advise heads of state.

As in Hellenistic times with the schools of Athens, the Hundred Schools came together in a secular institution of higher learning, the Academy of the Gate of Chi, located in the capital of the State of Chhi. Founded by King Hsüan about 318 BC, and perhaps inspired by one of its fellows, the naturalist Tsou Yen, the academy assembled scholars of many persuasions and from diverse states. These included Taoists, Mohists, and the great Confucian scholar Mencius. Fellows wore special, flat caps and apparently had no obligations beyond advice-giving; they could aspire to the title of grand prefect.

The Academy of the Gate of Chi – the Chinese counterpart to the Museum of Alexandria – did not survive the imperial unification that ended the Warring States period. The grand victor, Chhin Shih Huang Ti, organized an imperial bureaucracy, brought the defeated aristocracy to heel at his court, expanded public works, maintained a large army, and engineered the great northern wall. As part of his codification of laws and rites, he ordered the destruction by burning of all books except his own archives and treatises on medicine, divination, and agriculture. Along with purging wrong words, the new potentate executed wrong-thinking scholars. Chhin Shih Huang Ti died about 210 BC, barely fifteen years after unifying China; his successor, a usurper son, lasted four years more before the Chhin empire (and its academy) dissolved in social disintegration and revolt.

Liu Pang, an escapee from death row, emerged from the ruins of the Chhin to found the Han empire in 202 BC. His dynasty invented ‘classical’ China. Genuine concern for preserving what the Chhin had condemned (and not entirely eradicated) is found in the establishment of an imperial school (Ta Hsüeh) in 124 BC, with various chairs (occupied by professors, po shih); its aim was to produce functionaries. The Han school produced scholars for the imperial regime, and they were selected by examination. Students received honorary titles commensurate with their test results; the best of them landed positions in the central bureaucracy. (The whole process was sped by the invention of paper, traditionally attributed to Tshai Lun late in the first century AD.) Various accounts describe an impressive campus, with entry restricted to the sons of noble or administrative families. Although students paid no fees, they were required upon arrival to offer gifts to their professors.

Buddhism made its appearance in China by the third century AD. Its ascetic and non-aggressive doctrine found popularity at the time of material dislocation surrounding the collapse of the Han empire into competing kingdoms. In disunited China there were significant attempts at promoting institutions of higher learning, but the instaurations all seem to resemble the various ephemeral and unsuccessful universities of medieval Europe. Around the beginning of the fifth century, for example, the Northern Wei established an imperial school in their capital; the name soon changed to the Central Book School, reflecting its concern with the Confucian classics, for which an anthology, or codex, had recently been prepared.

Chinese civilization emerged from divisions and rivalries to create a golden age under the autocratic Sui and then the Thang. About 583 the first Sui emperor, Wen Ti, revived the nobles’ school (Kuo Hsüeh), a school for meritorious commoners (T’ai Hsüeh), and a preparatory school (the Four Gates School), each of which had five professors; he also created for the first time a separate mathematics school with two professors. The purpose of higher education under the Thang was still to prepare students for a government position, and this could be attained by success in a national examination. An inflexible form of this system emerged much later, in the Yüan, when the mandarinate drew exclusively from students who had mastered the Confucian classics. The system did not entirely ignore natural knowledge (from the Thang onward there were separate mathematics examinations), but science undoubtedly constituted the lowest path to success.

A later Thang emperor, Hsüan Tsung, assembled an independent group of high officials to advise him in scholarly matters – the Hanlin (literally, ‘Forest of Pencils’). The Hanlin Academy, as it came to be called, emerged as the premier learned authority in China. Awarded the title of Learned Scholar in 738, Hanlin associates – men who were practical as well as erudite – became, by the middle of the century, China’s court society of government advisers. Hanlin academicians were charged with emending and authenticating the Confucian corpus that served as the basis of the civil-service examinations. By the Ming period, membership was an exclusive prerogative of senior and accomplished scholars. The Academy extended its authority straight through the Chhing (Manchu), and it expired only in 1911.

The Hanlin Academy regulated orthodox scholarship. Furthermore, the genre of scholarship to be regulated – the Confucian classics – offered scant place for treatises in natural knowledge. The Hanlin did, however, directly supervise an advanced imperial school, revived in the middle of the eighth century, and over the next five hundred years there are persistent intrusions of extra Confucian discourses into diverse state schools. In part this reflects the syncretic evolution of devotional thought, where Buddhist and Taoist notions were incorporated into Confucianism; in part it was a desire to train adepts in medicine, agriculture, and possibly also geography. The time of the Yüan, under the Mongols, again saw the introduction of foreign ideas, the expected result of an empire that stretched from Budapest to the Pacific Ocean. Interest in things Islamic continued with the establishment of the Ming dynasty in 1368. As Chinese traditions merged with those of the Mongols, it becomes appropriate to turn to the institutions of higher learning in medieval Islam.

Islam

A little more than a hundred years after the death of Muhammad in 632, Muslim rule in the form of the caliphate (the successors of the prophet) extended from Samarqand to Barcelona, stopped only by the Byzantines and the Franks. After a century or so of imperial rule, the caliphate devolved into a number of autonomous kingdoms and regimes, the periphery seceding first, organized under a diverse spectrum of caliphs, sultans, maliks, emirs, wazirs, and so on. The notion of a pan-Islamic world survived internecine wars and foreign invasions. Islamic rights were not restricted by political regime, and they entailed no national citizenship. All Muslims were equal before Quranic law in any Muslim jurisdiction, and this equality received continual reinforcement from trade and from the experience of the hadj, the pilgrimage to Mecca made by pious Muslims.

Because there was no Islamic pope to decide doctrinal matters (and disputes about dogma precipitated a number of schisms beginning with the earliest caliphs), the teaching of Islamic law became a practical necessity. By the ninth century, nonresidential law schools, or masjids, retailing Islamic knowledge in the context of everyday problems, emerged in association with mosques in most large Islamic centres; students lived in khans, nonprofit Islamic hostels for pilgrims and transients. From the masjid and the khan came the madrasa, the signal educational institution of Islam. It dominated learned life from the end of the tenth century until the nineteenth century.

Masjids and madrasas owed their existence to the charitable donation, or waqf. The usual inspirations for charity – piety and pride – lie behind the endowment of madrasas, but Islamic law provided special encouragement for it. A waqf donation, made in person or in a will, circumvented the divisions of an estate among a man’s sons, which resulted in the dissolution of private fortunes. By analogy with today’s philanthropies, an Islamic waqf could prevent fortunes from being taxed. Furthermore, the donor exercised complete liberty about the conditions of his waqf, provided that he did not contravene Islamic law. He could, for example, purchase or construct an institution, endow it, install himself as director, and specify that direction pass to his descendants. The waqf was inviolate, and it could be broken only if its object was heretical or uncharitable. It comes as no surprise that breaking a waqf – like breaking a modern will – was a regular occurrence.

The madrasas were waqf-endowed colleges for Islamic wisdom, complete with buildings, libraries, curators, service staff, dormitories, and (one imagines) dining commons. Professors and fellows, appointed by terms of the waqf, taught students in numbers from a dozen to more than a hundred. The madrasas had no corporate identity beyond the terms of the waqf, however; Islamic law gave rights only to individuals. There were, then, no corporate diplomas. A disciple received a written commendation from an individual master, his madrasa professor. By implication, madrasas had no sinecures. A professor was paid not to write books, but rather to train students in the art of debating Islamic truth. If he had no students, he could not receive a waqf-endowed salary, and the exercise of dazzling rhetoric was the way to attract students away from hundreds of competing madrasas.

The individualistic approach to higher learning (the lack of which in modern universities educators so often decry) extended to the matter of documentation. A madrasa student aspired to a certificate of mastery signed by a professor. The competent authority – always a man – authorized the acolyte to teach law or issue legal opinions. This licence to teach was a unique development. The Islamic certification, it may be argued, is the origin of the facultas ubique docendi – the authorization to teach a particular subject anywhere – issued corporately by professors or by the church at the early Christian universities in Europe.

The madrasa curriculum generally excluded the so-called ancient sciences, the inheritance from the schools and museums of the Hellenistic-Roman world, which in the ninth century, under the patronage of caliphs Harun al-Rashid and especially al-Mamûn, had been translated into Arabic. The exclusion has been seen as a conservative rejection of heretical, or at least contentious, doctrines. Yet the madrasas do seem to have instituted just the method of disputation that dominated the Hellenistic schools, survived into the late medieval period at Constantinople, and formed the basis of scholarly interchange at Christian universities in medieval Europe. Despite contempt for and amusement directed at the ancients, classical works in science did not suffer the opprobrium of a universal ban. Students informally read treatises in natural science and medicine with madrasa professors. Twelfth-century Iberian-based Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), known in the Latin world as Averroës, is illustrative. A professor of Islamic jurisprudence, he wrote major treatises on astronomy and medicine. Although his philosophical works were anathematized and burned at Córdoba in Spain, his writings on the ancients suffered no indignities.

Law – whether natural, conventional, or supernatural – requires a record of opinions, and for this reason large libraries were also a familiar feature of the ninth-century Islamic world. The most famous of these was the Bayt al-Hikmah, or Hall of Wisdom, founded by the caliph al-Mamûm at Baghdad, but it was by no means the only one – in Baghdad or elsewhere. In antiquity and the medieval world, libraries were places for all activities related to books, whether reading, copying, or convening seminars and debates. A library in tenth-century Basra even had a professor-in-residence who gave courses. We see something of this tradition today in the broad sponsorship of cultural activities by the world’s great libraries. Influential scholars and historians of modern times – Lucien Herr and Philippe Ariès in Paris, George Sarton in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Daniel Boorstin in Washington, DC – published their work as associates of a library.

The Middle Ages

The thirteenth century, the century of great cathedral construction, was a time of unusual organizational ferment. One of its achievements was the emergence of modern universities. Over the preceding centuries, Christian Europe had been studying Roman law and wrestling with foreign wisdom, variously Byzantine and Arabic. Law became important as the Catholic church contested with civil authorities for control of temporal realms. Teachers of law and related matters – the grammar, rhetoric, and logic of the classical trivium – were in great demand at urban centres. There, overlapping and competing jurisdictions exerted by the church, nation, county, town, or guild, each with its rights and privileges, divided up the citizenry. At the same time cities stimulated the formation of groups of like-minded people into corporations with clearly defined responsibilities and fields of action. Students and masters of higher learning fell into line. They took the term universitas, a legal entity with powers extending beyond the individuals who composed it, much as other trades could have taken the term.

Universitas was at first always qualified to indicate whether the academic guild was one of students who named a rector (as at Bologna, Salamanca, Leipzig, the first Cracow university, or the law faculty at Montpellier and Prague), one of masters (as at Paris), or a power-sharing arrangement of students and masters together, as at Louvain. A large class of students were also masters, especially those in the higher, professional faculties who had completed a teaching licence in the lower arts faculty. (The system continues today in universities like Yale, where undergraduates are taught by graduate-student faculty, and in Oxford’s Christ Church college, where the masters are called ‘students’.)

Student-masters or the senior professors – the doctores – could hold courses under a wide range of institutional shelter. These shelters derived from the ‘nations’ – the protective associations for foreign students that were loosely affiliated with regional origins. By the late medieval period, the shelters were variously called fraternitates, societates, congregationes, corpora, paedagogia, contubernia, regentia, aula, collegia, or bursae; these fraternities, halls, and colleges had as principal or rector a master who was accredited by the university and was responsible for organizing instruction and overseeing living accommodation. In many cases the halls emerged as an act of charity with stipulations (regarding who might join, for example) reminiscent of stipulations involved in the Islamic charitable trusts that endowed madrasas. The system encouraged a division of the student body into hierarchies of wealth and privilege.

Universities, indeed, were confederations of constituencies – the faculties, the colleges, and all those from maids to apothecaries, copyists, stationers, and later book printers who came under academic protection. Students in many cases ran the show. In southern France, Iberia, and eastern Europe, students not infrequently controlled university offices, notably those of councillor and rector. At Bologna, the student nations had proctors, bursars, and beadles, and they managed considerable amounts of cash. Indeed, masters at Bologna and Padua (both institutions were known as students’ universities) organized into doctoral colleges just to defend their interests; in the Paris arts faculty, the masters controlled the nations – and their treasuries. The constituencies took diverse forms across Europe, but they were everywhere at the organizational centre of things. The familiar name of the University of Paris, the Sorbonne, derives from a college founded by Robert of Sorbon (1201– 1274), royal chaplain and canon of Notre Dâme Cathedral.

The collegiate structure continued for a long time at a number of universities. The most famous examples are the colleges still at the base of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but colleges figure in the life of other universities as well, notably Pavia. As late as the middle of the eighteenth century, Paris had ten residential colleges. The ambiguity attached to the word ‘college’ – certainly a learned connotation but otherwise unspecified with regard to level – persists up to our time. North-American colleges function variously as faculties or dormitories at universities, while in the Latin world a college is the usual designation for a secondary school. One of Montreal’s most distinguished private schools, Lower Canada College, now instructs a class of six-year-olds; Montreal’s most distinguished university, McGill, includes Victoria College, a women’s dormitory. In Paris and Mexico City there are national colleges with professors who devote most of their time to research. At Rome and Washington, special colleges convene from time to time to choose a new pope or president. In all these instances we find the notion of a common pursuit.

The waning of the Middle Ages led to vesting ultimate academic authority in the faculties on the one hand, and to a levelling of the student body on the other hand. The masters appropriated the collegiate model for their own ends. But the medieval legacy is not hard to spot today. In addition to faculty senates and directors of residential life, we have university fraternities and privately endowed student societies, residential colleges and dining clubs, concessions (bookstores, presses, tailors), and a bewildering hierarchy of professional bargaining units – trade unions of professors, teaching assistants, janitors, and cafeteria workers.

The greatest medieval legacy is that of academic freedom – and not merely for the masters. Medieval students enjoyed considerable privileges. These sometimes included the right to strike as well as protection against cruel and unusual treatment by civil authorities. The privileges were eroded when, over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the masters claimed control of corporative activity, but certain student rights have persisted into the modern world. At some universities today, students exercise a decisive role in the choice of new professors, in matters of professional promotion, and in curriculum reform. Universities continue to discipline members of their own corporation. Even institutions that bear little resemblance to medieval guilds – certain state or provincial universities in North America – tread carefully around the matter of allowing municipal police or soldiers on their campus.

Following the model of early thirteenth-century Paris, law, theology, and medicine were the recognized ‘higher faculties’; arts, the fourth faculty, was a grab-bag of skills deemed preparatory for professional careers. The object of university study was to acquire knowledge and be able to teach it, and the course of study was open to any qualified person – that is, any man of the right faith and class. Although the medieval university was a fast track to the three professional guilds, it did not directly prepare students for earning a living productively. There were, it is significant to note, no faculties of engineering, architecture, navigation, or commerce.

By the late medieval period, European Christian universities issued various certificates: the baccalaureate, for competence in teaching certain subjects under supervision; and a master’s or doctorate, awarded after a public examination, for admission to the corps of masters. These diplomas persist to our own time, albeit with modifications. German university faculties came to offer, by the eighteenth century, only a doctorate, by which time Oxford and Cambridge awarded, as earned degrees, little beyond a bachelor’s. (The nineteenth-century honours degree at Cambridge was held to be equivalent to a German DPhil, according to the polymath John Theodore Merz [1860–1922], who had intimate experience with both systems.² ) In all cases the diploma signified that the holder came from a background of wealth and ease, and it augured (but did not promise) a career in law, medicine, one or another church, or government.

The universities functioned until the eighteenth century in the absence of a coherent system of secondary education, although something in this line came to be provided by Jesuit colleges and English public schools, among other institutions. For this reason the lower faculties – arts (frequently divided later into letters and sciences) or in Northern Europe, philosophy – continued to provide basic, or remedial, services. Professors of many sciences, then, were from the beginning under continual pressure to lecture far below the level of the research front. The pattern persists to the present day. Medical students learn about the latest diseases, drugs, and instruments; prospective lawyers study last year’s legal opinions; future theologians receive the party line from clerical conclaves. But a great many science students never get beyond rational mechanics of the Baroque and thermodynamics of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution.

This is not to say that research into natural phenomena and laws did not occur at universities. Medieval university philosophers at Paris, Oxford, Valladolid, Cracow, and elsewhere laboured to elaborate Aristotelian notions of motion, both terrestrial and celestial, as well as Galenic medicine – for these pagan texts had been translated from Arabic and Greek into Latin by the thirteenth century. Investigators committed to understanding the laws of the world including Nicole Oresme (ca.1320–1382), John Buridan (ca.1295– ca.1358), Albertus Magnus (ca.1200–1280), and Roger Bacon (ca.1219–ca.1292) all taught at universities for longer or shorter periods of time. Then as now, however, a professor’s freedom to navigate by his conscience depended on the secular and ecclesiastical winds, even after medieval universities acquired self-policing statutes.

A central paradox of institutions of higher learning has always been their vulnerability to ideological or political repression. The burning of academic libraries in classical antiquity and medieval Islam is exactly matched by conflagrations over the past five generations – at Strasbourg, Louvain, Madrid, Königsberg, Tokyo, Beirut, and Kuwait. The condemnation in 1927 of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti by officers of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a cause célèbre of the 1920s, echoes the condemnation of the subversive Joan of Arc by the University of Paris.

Universities do not make society. They teach what people want to learn, and they give voice to what people prefer to hear. But because they are keepers of tradition and accumulated wisdom, their response time is slow. This allows universities to become authorities for what we know. Relative isolation from prosaic concerns provides a unique environment for encouraging new knowledge about the world. The tension between tradition and innovation is a fundamental characteristic of the European university, and it is central to the enterprise of modern science.