A Brief History of Universities


Book Description

In this book, John C. Moore surveys the history of universities, from their origin in the Middle Ages to the present. Universities have survived the disruptive power of the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific, French, and Industrial Revolutions, and the turmoil of two world wars—and they have been exported to every continent through Western imperialism. Moore deftly tells this story in a series of chronological chapters, covering major developments such as the rise of literary humanism and the printing press, the “Berlin model” of universities as research institutions, the growing importance of science and technology, and the global wave of campus activism that rocked the twentieth century. Focusing on significant individuals and global contexts, he highlights how the university has absorbed influences without losing its central traditions. Today, Moore argues, as universities seek corporate solutions to twenty-first-century problems, we must renew our commitment to a higher education that produces not only technicians, but citizens.




The Origins of the University


Book Description

The University of Paris is generally regarded as the first true university, the model for others not only in France but throughout Europe, including Oxford and Cambridge. This book challenges two prevailing myths about the university's origins: first, that the university naturally developed to meet the utilitarian and professional needs of European society in the late Middle Ages, and second, that it was the product of the struggle by scholars to gain freedom and autonomy from external authorities, most notably church officials. In the twelfth century, Paris was the educational center of Europe, with a large number of schools and masters attracting and competing for students. Over the decades, the schools of Paris had many critics--monastic reformers, humanists, satirists, and moralists--and the focus of this book is the role such critics played in developing the schools into a university. Ferruolo argues that it was the educational values and ideas promoted by the critics--ideas of the unity of knowledge, the need to share learning freely and willingly, and the higher purposes and social importance of education--that first inspired the scholars of Paris to join together to form a single guild. Their programs for educational reforms can be seen in the first set of statues promulgated for the nascent University of Paris in 1215.




The First Universities


Book Description

This is a general study of the development of higher education in Europe from antiquity until the end of the Middle Ages, set against a background of the social and political history of the period. It shows how the slender traditions of ancient learning, kept alive in the monastic and cathedral schools, was enriched by an enormous influx of knowledge from the Islamic world and how in consequence the schools developed into universities. These early institutions are examined from a variety of points of view, as institutions, as places where ideas spread and as points of interaction with local and national authority. Special attention is paid to early intellectual history and to the scientific disciplines and to the everyday life of the students and their teachers. The book is intended as a broad introduction to the subject for students of the history of education, but it will also attract general readers with only a slight knowledge of the subject.




Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University


Book Description

Tracing the transformation of early modern academics into modern researchers from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University uses the history of the university and reframes the "Protestant Ethic" to reconsider the conditions of knowledge production in the modern world. William Clark argues that the research university—which originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication. With an astonishing wealth of research, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University investigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of "lecturing with applause" and "publish or perish," and the role of reviews and rumor. This is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic.




Universities in the Middle Ages


Book Description

This, the first In the series, is also the first volume on the medieval University as a whole to be published In over a century. It provides a synthesis of the intellectual, social, political and religious life of the early University, and gives serious attention to the development of classroom studies and how they changed with the coming of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Following the first stirrings of the University In the thirteenth century, the evolution of the University is traced from the original Corporation of masters and Scholars through the early development of the colleges. The second half of the book focuses on the century from the 1440s to 1540s, which saw the flowering of the University under Tudor patronage. In the decades preceding the Reformation many colleges were founded, the teaching structures reorganised and the curriculum made more humanistic. The place of Cambridge at the forefront of northern European universities was eventually assured when Henry VIII founded Trinity College In 1546, In the face of changes and difficulties experienced during the course of the Reformation.




The University of Chicago


Book Description

An expanded narrative of the rich, unique history of the University of Chicago. One of the most influential institutions of higher learning in the world, the University of Chicago has a powerful and distinct identity, and its name is synonymous with intellectual rigor. With nearly 170,000 alumni living and working in more than one hundred and fifty countries, its impact is far-reaching and long-lasting. With The University of Chicago: A History, John W. Boyer, Dean of the College from 1992 to 2023, thoroughly engages with the history and the lived politics of the university. Boyer presents a history of a complex academic community, focusing on the nature of its academic culture and curricula, the experience of its students, its engagement with Chicago’s civic community, and the resources and conditions that have enabled the university to sustain itself through decades of change. He has mined the archives, exploring the school’s complex and sometimes controversial past to set myth and hearsay apart from fact. Boyer’s extensive research shows that the University of Chicago’s identity is profoundly interwoven with its history, and that history is unique in the annals of American higher education. After a little-known false start in the mid-nineteenth century, it achieved remarkable early successes, yet in the 1950s it faced a collapse of undergraduate enrollment, which proved fiscally debilitating for decades. Throughout, the university retained its fierce commitment to a distinctive, intense academic culture marked by intellectual merit and free debate, allowing it to rise to international acclaim. Today it maintains a strong obligation to serve the larger community through its connections to alumni, to the city of Chicago, and increasingly to its global community. Boyer’s tale is filled with larger-than-life characters—John D. Rockefeller, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and many other famous figures among them—and episodes that reveal the establishment and rise of today’s institution. Newly updated, this edition extends through the presidency of Robert Zimmer, whose long tenure was marked by significant developments and controversies over subjects as varied as free speech, medical inequity, and community relations.




A History of the University in Europe: Volume 2, Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800)


Book Description

This is the second volume of a four-part History of the University in Europe, written by an international team of scholars under the general editorship of Professor Walter RÜegg, which covers the development of the university in Europe (both East and West) from its origins to the present day. Volume 2 attempts to situate the universities in their social and political context throughout the three centuries spanning the period 1500 to 1800.