Concept
University
Overview
A university (from Latin universitas 'a whole') is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. University is derived from the Latin phrase universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs.
The first universities were developed in Europe from schools that had been maintained by the Church for the purpose of educating priests.
The following properties were common among the oldest universities:
They used the word universitas (which was coined at its foundation).
They received students from everywhere (not merely the local district or region).
They engaged in higher learning that went beyond teaching the Seven Liberal Arts, and had at least one of the higher faculties (Theology, Law or Medicine).
They awarded degrees through an oral and public event managed by a guild of masters.
They had some degree of autonomy from ecclesiastical authorities.
They enjoyed academic freedom.
They issued secular as well as non-secular degrees.
The oldest universities with the former criteria were University of Bologna, University of Paris, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge and University of Palencia.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where University is discussed.
The problem is to unify, to organize, education, to bring all its various factors together, through putting it as a whole into organic union with everyday life. That which lies back of the pedagogical school of the University is the necessity of working out something to serve as a model for such unification, extending from work beginning with the four-year-old child up through the graduate work of the University…
John Dewey, The school and society
names the idea; states what it is
The universities are thus reverting to a position more analogous to that which they occupied in the Middle Ages; they are becoming training schools for the professions. Barristers, clergymen and medical men have usually had a university education; so have the first division of the civil service. An increasing number of engineers and technical workers in various businesses are university men. As the world grows more…
Bertrand Russell, Education and the good life
a chapter is titled for it; names the idea
But it is at any rate permissible to hope that in the course of time the Jerusalem University will grow into a centre of Jewish intellectual life, which will be of value not for Jews alone. (1921) (3) A University is a place in which the universality of the human spirit finds self-expression. Science and investigation recognise as their aim the truth and nothing but the truth.
Albert Einstein, About Zionism
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
In countries where church benefices are, the greater part of them, very moderate, a chair in a university is generally a better establishment than a church benefice. The universities have, in this case, the picking and chusing of their members from all the churchmen of the country, who, in every country, constitute by far the most numerous class of men of letters. Where church benefices, on the contrary, are many of…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
states what it is; opens on it; names the idea
At Columbia, through the Teachers’ College, there is an extensive and close connection between the University and the training of teachers. Something has been done in one or two other places along the same line. We want an even more intimate union here, so that the University shall put all its resources at the disposition of the elementary school, contributing to the evolution of valuable subject-matter and right…
John Dewey, The School and Society Being three lectures
names the idea; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed University
- Edmund Burke
- William Whewell
- Young Marx
- Richard McKeon
- Seneca the Younger
- Henry of Ghent
- Ahmad Fardid
- Saviour Bernard
Related ideas
- Erasmus
- Avicenna
- Galen
- Grammar
- Hippocrates
- Great Britain
- Alcuin
- Michael Psellos
- Italy
- Industrial Revolution
- Student
- Justinian I
- Massachusetts
- Latin
- Friedrich Schleiermacher
- Modernity
- Latin America
- Music
- Metaphysics
- Geometry
- Mediterranean Sea
- Culture
- Middle East
- Nalanda mahavihara
Place in the tradition
Part of Professional ethics.