existed some seventy-five or eighty of these institutions scattered over all the countries of Europe. STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATION OF UNIVERSITIES. -No individual during the Middle Ages was secure in his rights, even of life or property, certainly not in the enjoyment of ordinary freedom, unless protected by specific guarantees secured from some organization. Politically, one must owe allegiance to some feudal lord from whom protection was received; economically, one must secure his rights through merchant or craft guild; intellectual interests and educational activities were secured and controlled by the Church. In the cases mentioned, groups of students are collected in centers made famous by earlier cathedral or monastic schools, but are now no longer governed by the narrow interests of the monastic or clerical aspirant and no longer controlled by the rigid rules of these institutions. It became necessary that these groups should organize in order to regulate their own conduct, to protect themselves from extortion by citizens of the community, to secure themselves legal rights, and to maintain their interests in the face of Church authorities. By the conferment upon them of these special rights, such groups of students, or of students and teachers, were recognized as distinct bodies. The unorganized group of students and teachers was called a studium generale, a name indicating either that a generality of studies was here pursued, or that the students were drawn from the widest territorial limits. Since none of these new centers of learning, in the early period, taught all the university subjects, the wide origin of the student clientèle is prob ably the primary characteristic indicated. Other features of the universities that distinguished them from previous schools were their government, democratic in its nature; their location in centers of population rather than in remote spots, such as those sought by the monasteries; their special privileges, legal and pecuniary; and the fact that these privileges had to be conferred by general authority, and hence that universities were founded by pope or emperor or later by kings, but could never be founded by local patrons as were monastic or other ecclesiastical schools. Privileges of Universities. These special privileges conferred by pope and emperor upon students and masters were the specific instruments through which the university protected itself and built itself up. In general, these charters conferred upon all masters, students, and even their attendants the privileges of clerks or of the clergy. Thus the privileges originally belonging to the teaching class and extended by the Roman emperors to the clergy of the Christian Church, in turn, were again extended to the teaching class, and developed a new professional interest and a new class in society. Such privileges exempted students from official service, from military service, except under specific limitations (e.g. at Paris only when the enemy were within five leagues of the city wall); from taxation, especially the petty local exactions, from contributions, etc. One of the greatest of these privileges was that of internal jurisdiction. Just as the clergy had been permitted to absorb in their privileges the right of trying their own members practically in all civil and many criminal cases, so in turn the universities developed much the same power over their own members and their adherents. This custom first grew up in Bologna under the favor of the emperor, where, since civil law was the chief study, students and masters were particularly competent to exercise this right. The civil or at least police jurisdiction which the German university yet exercises over its student members, and the special favor of a privileged standard of conduct which the American college student claims, are survivals of this once extended right. The other important privilege is that of granting the degree, which was merely the license to teach. Previous to this time extended. this important privilege had been granted only by the Church through the archbishop, the bishop, or one of their subordinate officers; and thus the Church had controlled the method and the content of teaching. Ordinarily, under authority conferred by the pope, the university diploma granted the privilege of teaching in any institution wherever the authority of the university—that is, of the pope delegated by his charter This practically meant entire Christendom; and though nominally sanctioned by the pope, the authority was exercised by the university direct, and thus one important monopoly of the Church over learning was destroyed. These privileges possessed a sanction in the "right," not granted by charter but developed by usage, known as cessatio, the right of "striking" or of moving the university, consisting as it did of students and teachers only, if its privileges were infringed. Thus the importance of Oxford dates from a migration from Paris in 1229; the importance of Cambridge from a similar disturbance at Oxford in 1209. Many petty privileges were developed peculiar to each university. These, such as the right to demand bread or wine from dealers on certain feast days, though all such are merely incidental, were held on to quite as tenaciously as these more important ones. The Nations and the University. These privileges had to be conferred upon definite bodies of people, and hence a more definite organization than the studium generale was necessary. The most natural division of these heterogeneous masses of students, drawn from all over Europe at a time when territorial lines were very indefinite and national distinctions were more those of a genetic than of a territorial and political character, was that of language and kinship. Hence students and masters organized into groups according to their national affiliations. And upon these nations singly, or more often in group organization, charters containing privileges were granted. Such a body was called universitas magistrorum et scholarium. The term universitas means primarily "all of us" or "some of us," and had the general significance of our word corporation or association or company. In time, but not until the fourteenth century, the one word came to be used instead of the previous more general term. At Paris there were four nations, the French, the Normans, the Picards, and the English (after the Hundred Years' War began the latter was changed to German). In Bologna there were at first four universities; then two, the Cisalpine, consisting of seventeen nations, and the Transalpine, consisting of eighteen nations. Finally, all were amalgamated into one organization. A most peculiar characteristic of the Southern universities was the fact that the nations, and hence the governing bodies, were there wholly controlled by the students. Thus the students in the nations determined when lectures should begin, how long they should continue, whether the charges were legitimate, etc. In the North, where the students were for the most part those of the arts instead of those of law and were consequently much less mature, the masters themselves constituted the controlling force in the nations. - The Faculties. The organization of the nations had to do with conduct, civil right, and ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It had little direct reference to the studies. In time, however, it became necessary to regulate studies and methods, in fact, scholastic procedure in general. The faculties were a somewhat later development than the nations. In Paris they took shape in the second half of the thirteenth century. The term itself, quite as indefinite as the term university, simply meant knowledge or science; but in time it was applied to a department of study, as faculty of law, theology, arts, etc., and finally to the body of men, previously termed consortum magistrorum, that had control of a particular department of study. This body, as it developed, obtained control of the granting of degrees and was originally composed of all who had taken their degree. Governing Body and Other Officials. The nations elected, usually annually, a procurator or councilor; each faculty a dean; and these representatives together a rector of the university. This official head of the university possessed only delegated power, was usually elected annually, and in the South, at least, was usually a student. The real governing power of the university lay in the nations. By the sixteenth century these head officials had become for the most part political appointees, and the nations had long since lost all material authority. In the earlier centuries the Church continued to be represented directly by the chancellor, who nominally represented the archbishop in the conferring of the license to teach. This right soon became restricted to the ceremonial of the public conferment of the degree. DEGREES. The nature of the degree and of the entire work of the university can best be understood by a comparison with some simpler aspects of medieval life which the student life paralleled. Such, for example, is the chivalric education, with its seven years of training as a page and seven years as a squire preceding the acquirement of full knighthood. A similar parallel can be found in the making of a master in any craft or mercantile pursuit, where the youth had first to serve seven years as an apprentice; then a more or less indefinite period as a journeyman, a further period under a master while yet working for an independent wage,all before he finally became a master possessing full rights in the guild. In quite a similar way the youth of thirteen or fourteen who wished to study the liberal arts, or to prepare himself for teaching, appeared at the university where he had to enroll himself with a master who was thereafter (for the first period at least) responsible for him. Here he served an apprenticeship of from three to seven years, until he learned to read the ordinary texts in grammar, rhetoric, and logic, to define the words and determine the meaning of phrases, Y |