First Meeting of MSC Spring 2022

Supplement From First Meeting of MSC Spring 2022 What Do Colleges and Universities Owe Democracy?

What High School did you attend, and did it attempt to provide you with a “civic education” (and did it succeed generally)?

What colleges/universities did you attend, did they provide you with a “Liberal Education,” and did they provide you with a civic education? Did the school provide these to all students?

In this first class we will consider and discuss the following questions/topics:

Discussion of Types, Purposes/Goals, History, etc. of universities/colleges—are there any types where civic education might work against institutional missions?

(A) I believe that in many ways we can say that the one of oldest “European” university arose when Plato returned to Athens from his travels after his teacher died and founded a school (The Academy) on family land about a mile outside the City walls. There Plato taught philosophy for the rest of his life. He left his Academy to his sister's son, Speusippus, upon his death, and The Academy continued to exist as a center of study and learning until 529 C.E., when the Christian Emperor Justinian had it closed because it was a pagan institution. Founded in 387 B.C.E., the Academy lasted for 916 years

The medical school at Salerno was founded by 850 C.E., but it was not a full university (the current one was incorporated, in fact, in 1970 C.E.). By 1077 it had become well-known. The University of Bologna, which was founded in 1088 C.E., but it may not be correct to call it the “oldest” either. It did not have permanent buildings until 1565. It and Salerno were specialized schools concentrating in law [Bologna] and medicine [Salerno]. Oxford [1096 [earlier?], chartered 1216] and Paris [1150, chartered in 1215] and were the first in the core sense. In his Medieval Philosophy Anthony Kenny clarifies this as follows:

a typical medieval university consisted of four faculties: the universal undergraduate faculty of arts, and the three higher faculties, linked to the profession s of theology, law, and medicine. Students in the faculties learned both by listening to lectures from their seniors and, as they progressed, by giving lectures to their juniors. A teacher licensed in one university could teach in any university, and graduates migrated freely in an age when all academics used Latin as a common language.

The teaching programme in the faculties was organized around a set of texts. It took some time to settle the canon in the arts faculty: in 1210 an edict at the University of Paris forbade any lectures on Aristotle’s natural philosophy and ordered his texts to be burnt. But though reinforced by papal bulls, the condemnation seems to have quickly become a dead letter, and by 1255 not only Aristotle’s physics, but his metaphysics and ethics, and indeed all his known works, became compulsory parts of the syllabus. In theology the text on which lectures were based, in addition to the Bible, was the Sentences of Peter Lombard. The lawyers took as their core text Justinian’s codification of Roman law or Gratian’s Decretals. In the medical faculties the set texts varied from university to university.”[1]

In 2022, using the 1096 date which the University of Oxford mentions, it may well claim to be [one of,] the “oldest European Universities” having been in existence for 926 years. Daniel Del Castillo, however, notes that al-Azhar University in Cairo was founded by the Fatimids (followers of Fatima, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad) in 970 C.E. and continues unto today—cf., Daniel Del Castillo, “A 1,000-Year-Old University Takes on A New and Troubling Role,” The Chronicle of Higher Education v. 47 (May 11, 2001), pp. A 47-48, p. A 47. It is not clear that this institution, however, is a university in the core relevant sense throughout its history.

From “University” from The Encyclopedia Britannica:[2] until the end of the 18^th century, most universities offered a core curriculum based on the seven liberal arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. Students then proceeded to study under one of the professional faculties of medicine, law, and theology. Final examinations were grueling, and many students failed.

The Protestant Reformation of the 16^th century and the ensuing Counter-Reformation affected the universities of Europe in different ways. In the German states, new Protestant universities were founded and older schools were taken over by Protestants, while many Roman Catholic universities became staunch defenders of the traditional learning associated with the Catholic Church. By the 17^th century, both Protestant and Catholic universities had become overly devoted to defending correct religious doctrines and hence remained resistant to the new interest in science that had begun to sweep through Europe. The new learning was discouraged, and thus many universities underwent a period of relative decline. New schools continued to be founded during this time, however, including ones at Edinburgh (1583), Leiden (1575), and Strasbourg (university status, 1621). (See Protestantism.)

The first modern university was that of Halle, founded by Lutherans in 1694. This progressive-minded school was one of the first to renounce religious orthodoxy of any kind in favour of rational and objective intellectual inquiry, and it was the first where teachers lectured in German (i.e., a vernacular language) rather than in Latin. Halle’s innovations were adopted by the University of Gvttingen (founded 1737) a generation later and subsequently by most German and many American universities. (See Halle-Wittenberg, Martin Luther University of, Lutheranism.)

It is clear that the core disciplines, and character of universities has undergone significant changes throughout the period from The Academy to now!

What should colleges and universities do? Teaching, research, cultural/artistic performance and preservation, service (to...).

Here the comment by As Henry Rosovsky, in his The University: An Owner’s Manual, is appropriate:

...reading and research are not the same thing. One can read merely for pleasure, or to keep up with a subject, or to learn a new skill; perhaps simply to acquire new information. None of these includes the aim of revising an accepted conclusion—of saying something “in the light of newly discovered facts.” Of course, reading (and experimentation) are indispensable research activities, but it is a special kind of reading: purposeful, planned, and goal-oriented....research and publishing, while not identical, are very closely related. For the “revision of an accepted conclusion” to be meaningful, it has to be announced, debated, and adopted or rejected, and that means some form of publication.[3]

“Scholarship,” of whatever flavor one is focused upon, I believe, is such only if it is offered up for effective “peer-evaluation.” Of course, the “peers” may be different in different scholarly contexts, but we are too sloppy if we count “service” or “doing good” as all there is to our engagement and service activities.

In his “In Your Hands A Sacred Trust,” an essay addressed to college and university trustees, Steven Sample maintains that:

in his book The Uses of the University, Clark Kerr observed that since the year 1520 only about 85 institutions have remained continuously in existence in recognizable forms. They include several Swiss cantons, the Roman Catholic Church, and the parliaments of the Isle of Man, Iceland, and

Great Britain

. But some 70 of the 85 institutions that have survived continuously for the past half-millennium are universities. So when trustees consider their role, they should think in terms of centuries. [4]

What Daniels says: pp. 8-9: “everything that universities embody is inimical to the autocrat’s interest in the untrammeled exercise of arbitrary public power. They are institutions committed to freedom of inquiry, to the contestation of ideas through conversation and debate, to the formation of communities that gather and celebrate a diverse array of experiences and thought, and to individual flourishing achieved through diligent study. They rest upon a foundation of reliable knowledge and facts, which are antidotes to the uncertainty and dissimulation peddled by authoritarian regimes. They are, to quote William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, an “institution born of the democratic spirit.””

Notes: [click on the note number to return to the text for a given note]

[1] Anthony Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 55-56.

[2] The following is: “university,” from Encyclopedia Britannica Online, <http://www.eb.com:180/bol/topic?thes_id=395110>, accessed on May 17, 1999.

[3] Henry Rosovsky, The University: An Owner’s Manual (New York: W.W Norton, 1990), p. 87.

[4] Steven Sample, “In Your Hands A Sacred Trust,” Trusteeship (November, December, 2003), pp. 15-18, p. 18.