The Origins of Higher Education
Origins of Higher Education
The creation of academia has been the human race’s greatest success at countering the inevitable loss of human capital and knowledge that each generation must endure. While the education of ruling, clerical, and military elites has existed since the inception of civilization, the system that we would characterize as a university did not originate until the medieval era.
![University of Bologna [1]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/805d47_882624defef7450abd825bc5efc95e5f~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_750,h_242,al_c,q_80,enc_auto/805d47_882624defef7450abd825bc5efc95e5f~mv2.jpg)
![University of Paris [2]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/805d47_df8dca9859b5476a811b136c2d017f35~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_200,h_329,al_c,q_80,enc_auto/805d47_df8dca9859b5476a811b136c2d017f35~mv2.jpg)
The first universities were housed in Bologna, Italy and Paris, France. Students flocked from across the Western world to be graced by the presence of William of Champeaux, Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, or Peter Abelard.[3] The Christian world was understood through these universities and the proliferation of knowledge for the ruling class transmitted across generations. The “Student University” in Bologna devised a hierarchical system where the students were in control, often determining the salary of their professors, fining them for being late or diverging from the syllabus, or even for leaving the city without permission.[4] While this structure only lasted until the late fourteenth century, one could imagine the affects that it had on educational outcomes within the community.
The success of Paris and Bologna was evident across the globe and their replication was inevitable. The emergence of institutions in Oxford and Cambridge played a pivotal role in the “intellectual controversies of the later Middle Ages.”[5] Universities sprang up in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Germany over the coming centuries—leading the world in educating the elite and powerful. Universities eventually evolved to provide a wider range of academic programs, utilize specialized research professors, and even begin to see the emergence of state supported/regulated universities.[6] These evolutions, once deemed successful, would be replicated across nearly all institutions in the Western world.
Next Week's Blog: America's Public Universities
Sources:
[1] https://inomics.com/university-bologna
[2] http://letralia.com/146/articulo03.htm
[3] Goodchild, Lester F, and Harold S. Wechsler. The history of higher education. (Boston, Pearson Custom Pub. 1997).
[4] Ibid., 7.
[5] Ibid., 8.
[6] Ibid., 17.
About the Author:
Lukas Wenrick spends his days working to develop innovative solutions to the most complex issues universities face. He does so to ensure that the most marginalized students may pursue an alternative trajectory than the one laid out by their zip code. He believes that universities and other educational enterprises have the duty to expand educational opportunity to as many individuals as possible and that excellence should be judged by the students that an institution includes, rather than those that it excludes.
Lukas holds a Master's of Education in Higher Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Bachelor of Arts in Social Science Education from Wright State University. His experiences at both an open access public university and an elite private institution inform the work he does every day. Currently, Lukas serves as a University Innovation Fellow at Arizona State University where he works to leverage the ASU enterprise to resolve educational and social inequities in the world.
If you'd like to know more about Lukas you can find him on the following sites:
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