Can Universities Survive? The Thousand-Year Story

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David Runciman (1:07)

Hello, my name is David Runciman, and this is Past Present Future, the History of Ideas podcast. Today, we are starting a new series which is about the long history of and current predicament of universities. What are universities? What is the idea behind them? What are they for? How have they managed to survive so long? What's made them so durable? But are we now at the end of that story? Can they survive much longer? And we're starting with that near thousand year history. I'm talking today and next time to the historian William Whyte about the history of the university. What made universities different from what came before? How did they survive? How did they flourish? How many near-death experiences have they had?

William, it's a long story that we're talking about. The history of universities goes back nearly, not quite a thousand years, so it's close to a millennium. But I want to go back to the beginning and to start, ask you the first universities.

What made them different from trying to find the language for this? Places of higher learning or some such that existed before that? There was the Academy in Ancient Greece. There were madrasas across the Islamic world that predate the European universities. So this thing comes along, it gets called the university. What made it different? Did people think it was different?

William Whyte (2:42)

Yes. All cultures seem to have a sort of institution that functions as a place or an institution of higher learning. So I mean, the suggestion is that you go back and look at cave paintings, and what you can see there is a sort of process of teaching in which the paintings themselves are doing some teaching, but also as the young men, they assume young men, but the young people place their hands on it. There they are inducted into some form of higher adult status. And, you know, monasteries, madrasas, various other forms of institutionalization of higher learning, are good examples of that. And what the difference is between all those different functions and the university as it becomes in the medieval West is essentially a legal status as much as anything. A universitas is a corporation. It's a corporation with its own separate legal personhood.

And that gives it certain rights and privileges. It also is something that's perpetual, so it can be carried on. So, you know, at a boring level, what the university is, is literally a legal status and a set of timetables. And in some respects, that is what distinguishes the medieval university from, for example, a madrasa. So a madrasa is a different form of charity. It's also part of an Islamic education system, which remains throughout most of history, largely person-based. So it matters more with whom you study than it does where you study.

Whereas for the university, very, very quickly, it matters from where you've graduated. It matters what course of instruction you followed, and therefore what is the process by which you yourself have become a master.

David Runciman (4:35)

So in that, I'm already hearing, and I think this is going to be a theme in this story, two ideas that pull in slightly different directions. Because on the one hand, we have the corporation. It's a legal category. It is itself a legal idea.

It is an idea of something that exists in perpetuity, but that means unlike maybe some of these other institutions, it's not peripatetic. It might not follow around the teacher, which might happen in other contexts. So it's now located in a place. So we have an institution that is both an idea and a place. It's an idea of learning enshrined in law. And as now, presumably then, you went somewhere to do it and you identified the place you went to with the thing.