The Concept of a University

Kenneth Minogue

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351484596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Taking on the challenge of the postmodernists of politics, Kenneth Minogue argues forcefully and persuasively that the current dominant philosophies of education rest upon a mistake. The fashionable belief that the university is society's handmaiden is confronted by a view of the university as an institution with an independent vitality and function. Minogue at one and the same time reminds us of the sources of admiration for university life in the medieval world, and how it rested squarely on its essential autonomy from the very social pressures that have come to define the modern university. The Concept of a University traces many confusions imposed by political ideology to a failure to distinguish academic inquiry from other kinds of intellectual activity, such as journalism, religious proselytizing, and high quality propaganda. Minogue holds that where the university lacks a clear sense of the difference between the academic and the pragmatic, its vitality is sapped by conflicting purposes.Much of the present debate about the crisis in universities rests upon a fundamental error of trying to fit them into some scheme of social functions. Minogue's analysis breaks through much muddled thinking on this subject, presenting instead a coherent, relevant, and stimulating approach to higher education.In a new introduction, Minogue tells us "we have become frightfully tolerant. Anyone can become anything, and we all belong to the one practical world of churning problems and solutions. There is no doubt that a new world is being born. It seems to be a world that will have little place for the disinterested pursuit of truth. A great deal of old fashioned scholarship survives--partly by silence, cunning and exile' --in the universities' of the present day, but little relationship remains between what we used to call universities' and the things called by that name today." Kenneth Minogue is professor emeritus of polit

Part One The Problem of Identification

1 The Beginning of Universities

While the details are often obscure, it is clear that the instituting of universities – their ‘faint, murky, cloud-wrapped dawn’, as Rashdall calls it¹ – was the result of one of those fitful enthusiasms for education which had already several times appeared in the courts of barbaric Europe. Thus Charlemagne had invited the learned Alcuin from England to organize schools in his Frankish realm; and the court of Alfred the Great was in the next century a relatively cultivated place. During this period, in spite of a political and military turmoil which largely yoked men’s endeavours to the barest practicalities of life, a collection of cathedral schools came into existence, becoming in time the soil in which universities could grow. In the twelfth century, a collection of intellectual endeavours – editing, collecting, systematizing – culminated in bands of scholars setting up studia generalia. These were places of learning which, by virtue of the fame of their teachers, could attract students from all over Christendom: it was precisely this universal significance which made such studia also generalia. The two centres which became by virtue of their considerable distinction the models of later foundations were Paris and Bologna; but they were rapidly succeeded by many other centres, so that a network of such institutions soon stretched in Europe from Spain at one end to Poland and Bohemia at the other. In Paris the scholars, and in Bologna the students, found it advantageous to band together into a legal corporation, and consequently acquired the term universitas, a term which might be used of any kind of legal association; towards the end of the Middle Ages it was coming to be restricted to what we now call universities. This organizational character of universities is in a number of respects just as important as their intellectual distinction, for it is here that we may find the secret of that astonishing longevity, that capacity for decay and revival which has marked the university out as distinct from any of the other scholarly institutions of other times and other civilizations. Universities were, as Rashdall puts it, ‘products of that instinct of association which swept like a great wave over the towns of Europe in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries’. And for several centuries, until political sovereignty began to impair their independence, they exercised the corporate freedom of feudalism to the full.

Spontaneity soon gave place to artifice: in 1224 (by which time many other universities, including Oxford, were well established) Frederick II founded a studium generale in Naples, and in 1229 Pope Gregory IX did the same at Toulouse. The intention of each of these eminent founders was that the new creations should be the equals in prestige of Paris and Bologna; and in an attempt to achieve by decree what is really only susceptible to voluntary acquiescence, a Papal bull of 1233 asserted that anyone admitted to mastership at Toulouse should be allowed to teach in any other studium without further examination. The bull did not meet with universal acceptance, and the more successful studia were always suspicious of the prerogatives of other universities. Nonetheless, the granting of the ius ubique docendi came to be the distinguishing mark of universities; and founding them was recognized as the prerogative of imperial or ecclesiastical authority. By this time, their intellectual eminence gave them an important role in the life of European Christendom. Intellectually able young men of all ranks of society flocked to study at them, and many such graduates, after studying, came to occupy influential positions in the Church and the administration of realms. There were even occasions when medieval writers placed Studium as a co-ordinate power in medieval society alongside the powers of Church (Sacerdotium) and State (Regnum). Something new and valuable had arisen in the feudal firmament.

Love of learning may best be seen as but a part of a wider movement of dissatisfaction with current things which led to new styles of architecture, to a new strictness in monastic disciplines, to a reformation of the Church and to all the other manifold currents which make up what historians have come to call the twelfth-century renaissance. A time of great dissatisfaction with contemporary standards took an intellectual direction. Further, there is in sociological terms no adequate explanation for this turn of events.² Europe was indeed slightly more prosperous in the eleventh century than she had been previously; and the indiscriminate raiding of the Northmen had at last ceased. Peace may marginally have helped the movement along; but its roots run back with little break for some centuries. This new movement is attributable to the logically unpredictable human capacity for looking upon situations afresh, a part – but only a part – of which has been captured in Professor Knowles’s organic image of the period as ‘Europe’s adolescent awakening’.

What kind of intellectual dissatisfaction led to this educational creativity? Christian belief and legal practice – the two most conspicuous areas of revival-had long been left to the play of imagination and practicality. But imagination is tolerant of contradictions – indeed, as in the credo quia impossibile, it may welcome them; and practice builds up, over time and in response to the enormous variety of particular circumstances, a chaotic jumble of expedient rules. Men of an intellectual bent find both situations unsatisfactory. It happened that early in the eleventh century, Roman Law, as it had been systematized under Justinian, became available to a number of scholars in Italy, and supplied a dazzling model of intellectual coherence with which the practices of the European communities – varying admixtures of customary law with debased fragments of remembered Roman practice – might be compared. After the revival of the study of Roman Law, associated with the name of Irnerius, came the standardization of canon law by Gratian. The very title of his famous textbook – the Concord of Discordant Canons – clearly indicates its character. This was the most famous of those books which defined issues and laid out the conflicting statements of authorities and principles; and sometimes, indeed, went on to provide a resolution of the issue. It was not, however, the first enterprise of this kind; nor was the enterprise limited to law. Similar projects were already being pursued in theology. This is, of course, a work of practical value, and it was recognized as such by the students who were soon flocking to Bologna, and later to Padua and the other schools of law which arose. But to see it as a practical enterprise is to miss what gave this passion its enormous capacity for creating institutions and shaping minds: the love of dialectic, the search for truth, the spirit summed up in one of the many meanings of St Anselm’s formula credo ut intelligam. Further, this enthusiasm for knowledge might and did spring up in any of the ranks of feudal society. The sparse records reveal such men as the Picard nobleman Baldwin II, Count of Guines (Bloch describes him as ‘hunter, toper and great wencher’), who arranged to have translated for him Aristotle’s Physics and the Geography of the Roman grammarian Solinus. But the pre-eminent example of such a spirit was, of course, Peter Abelard, who deserted the knightly vocation his circumstances suggested in order to carve out for himself a new life in the sphere of learning. Abelard’s Sic et Non was the classical expression of contemporary dialectic. A millennium of Christian thought, far from having rendered the faith coherent, had left unresolved a great number of disputed questions: that, in the Trinity, each is one with the other had been both affirmed and denied in the writings of the Fathers; and questions such as whether the Angels had been created before Heaven and Earth, whether Joseph had suspected Mary of adultery and whether it is permitted to kill men or not, could all be answered authoritatively in different senses. To describe the activity of elucidating questions like these, Abelard adapted the term theologia by which it is still known. Some of these questions appear, at a distance of eight centuries, to be somewhat less pressing than they were to Abelard; but others (that of pacifism, for example) are perennially disputable.

The prestige of universities in the Middle Ages was enormous, and it rested upon an admiration for ‘education’ – an admiration which, in our present age of universal literacy, is difficult to recapture. Medieval men seem to have thought of universities in the way an improverished craftsman regards the brilliant child for whose education he is making sacrifices; and they bequeathed support to universities with the same open generosity with which they endowed the huge Gothic cathedrals of Europe. At the lowest level, no doubt, they were impressed by the mystery of wisdom contained in books; for to illiterates every book has the romance of secrecy. More impressive still, these books were written in a language remote from everyday life; to learn it was to acquire the capacity of living in the remote classical world, never forgotten, always valued. Above all, the universities were the beneficiaries of the persistent dualism of medieval Christian thought: men lived in two worlds, one here and now, a world of material things in which life was constant toil and ceaseless scheming to provide the necessities and distractions of life; the other world, of which the Church was the custodian, was spiritual and superior to anything directly known on earth. Here were Augustines’ two cities, and human beings lived at the point of intersection between them. At death a man might hope to promote himself from the one to the other; but a special reverence was given to men who, so far as it was humanly possible, already lived exclusively for (and to some extent within) this other world. They wanted priests to be visibly distinct from other men; and particularly after the Lateran Council of 1215 this tradition was sharply enforced. It is easily understandable that medieval men should have sought to understand the distinctiveness of the don in these easily available religious terms. ‘For,’ as an edict of the University of Oxford, obliging tailors to cut academic dress to ample proportions, said in 1358, ‘it is decent and reasonable that those whom God has distinguished with inner qualities from laymen also be different from laymen in appearance.’ A concern with books and learning had, indeed, begun centuries before in the shelter of the cloisters; and a vocation to be a clerk seemed no very mysterious thing to a community accustomed to priests, monks and nuns. As a result of these beliefs, the members of a university lived generally under another jurisdiction from that of the townspeople among whom, and often in deadly enmity with whom, they resided. In Oxford, in Paris, in Bologna, the populations detested students for their turbulence as much as they admired universities for the economic benefits they brought and the mysterious realm they were thought to inhabit. It was a time in which anti-clericalism and religiosity could run easily together: universities became involved in both feelings.

The philosophical paradigm of the academic world is to be found in the dialogues of Plato. What we commonly find there is Socrates beginning an inquiry in the market place, an inquiry that soon reveals the answers of the market place to be confused. In the developed doctrine of the forms, practical life is characterized by opinion, which sometimes corresponds to the truth and sometimes does not, and the business of the philosopher is to move-the metaphor is usually one of ascent – by the use of reasoning to a form of understanding which may appropriately be called knowledge. Knowledge is an understanding of the principle of things, and is composed of clear ideas or forms from which the accidental and contingent associations inevitably found in the world have been purged. As an account of the two realms – ‘the world’ or ‘practice’ on the one hand and ‘philosophy’ on the other – this Platonic distinction remains a structure on which a large number of interesting variations may be performed. But in the early centuries of the Christian era it was inevitably overtaken by theological preoccupations, and pressed into service as a scaffolding for Christian theology. For no one could fail to recognize the similarity between the philosopher who by reasoning ‘left the world behind’ and the hermit, monk or anchorite who abandoned ‘the world’ and devoted himself so far as was humanly possible to the service of Christ. When the universities were founded, an enthusiasm for piety and an enthusiasm for learning were not easily to be distinguished. Since the academic used reason, and since Reason was also the mode of God’s creation, the academic could be thought of as inhabiting a world whose remoteness was similar to that of the monk or the mystic: and similarly closer to God. Philosophy might well be seen-it was by John of Salisbury-as a Jacob’s ladder linking the clerk to heaven; linking him indeed more effectively than simple faith might manage, for (as J. Bass Mullinger has put it) ‘a belief sprang up that an intelligent apprehension of spiritual truth depended on a current use of prescribed methods of argumentation.’³ Thus Hugh of St Victor, early in the twelfth century, can approve as definitions of philosophy both that it is ‘a meditation about death’ (and therefore a mental attitude that above all is suited to Christians who live in anticipation of a heavenly future) and that it is ‘a discipline that investigates the probable causes of all things human and divine’.

Even in the Middle Ages it soon became clear that the academic world need not be identified with the other-worldliness of the Christian. The very method of dialectic – which began with an assembly of arguments and authorities tending to contradictory conclusions – would immediately suggest that reason was a two-edged weapon which might as easily destroy as reinforce faith. Those whom reason led from the path of orthodoxy generally went on this journey inadvertently, for it required no very severe discipline to keep in one fold men who had no desire to stray. Among the few heretical beliefs proscribed in the University of Oxford in the thirteenth century, proposals for the simplification of Latin grammar have as prominent a place as actual heresies. Still, learning was very early recognized as a potential source of the sin of pride. One master ‘declared that he understood the Pauline Epistles better than St Paul himself, [and] lost all his learning forthwith, until a girl was appointed as his tutor who with difficulty succeeded in teaching him the seven penitential psalms’,⁴ and Robert de Sorbon warned that ‘clerks busy themselves with eclipses of the sun, but fail to observe the darkening of their own hearts by sin.’⁵

The danger that the ‘other world’ of the universities might not coincide with that of Christianity led in the sermons of the time to a collection of exemplary tales of professors whose conceit of dialectical skill was divinely punished. It was the achievement of the high century of Scholasticism to produce a synthesis – in the strict technical sense – of faith and reason; the generation of Aquinas composed a world in which all the cognitive faculties united to generate a single image of the creation, both that which is visible and that which is not. And when, in the next century, this image began to dissolve again into discordant fragments, the theory of double truth, borrowed from Averroes, was available to allow the universities a certain amount of freedom in which to roam without denying the propositions of the faith. For academically speaking the experience of the mystic, the writings of the Fathers and the theological assumptions of Churchmen might all feature as objects of inquiry and criticism; all of these things belonged, in an important sense, to a practice of life from which the university was in principle remote. If this is realized, then the ivory tower of the academic can no longer be assimilated to the other world of the Christian. It then becomes necessary to specify the academic world in other terms; possibly in the procedures by which it seeks objectivity.

Being seen as an institution with roots in another world, the university did not recruit its members by birth, but rather by vocation. They came from all ranks of feudal society, so that the student with his own servant jostled his impoverished fellow who lived merely on tripe and the cheapest kinds of sausage. The giving of alms was a medieval duty; and the poor scholar qualified as a recipient of them. Universities soon established ‘poor chests’ which served as provision for the scholar without resources of his own. This diversity of social origin was combined with an equal variation in countries of origin, so that most of the major continental universities were organized in ‘nations’ of students, subordinate corporations within a university which was in all senses a world apart from the intense localism of the cities, and even more, of the feudal countryside. During the first few centuries of their existence, universities constituted an entirely ‘international’ society in which men might move with entire freedom, being marked neither in their actions nor in their writings by any very evident national or regional individuality. As the Middle Ages gave way to what by convention are recognized as modern times, this international character came to be contested by patriotic devotion to sovereign and realm: a political influence which long afterwards reached its apex of exclusiveness in nineteenth-century nationalism. But it has been one of the peculiar strengths of universities to have developed a set of attitudes, standards and conventions which resisted parochialism. Such universality is an important part of civilization; and once, under the wing of the Church, it emerged from the parochialism of the barbarians, it was tenacious. Universities never lost for long their remoteness from the divisive allegiances of practical life. While many ambitious men sought to pursue their careers in the universities, and while in day-to-day living both students and masters shared the ordinary human preoccupations, universities were always concerned with matters at a tangent from the confined circles of practicality. What they provided was, in form, the kind of training which might turn a man into the same sort of scholar as his teachers. Most of the students of medieval universities, of course, had no ambition to devote their lives to academic pursuits. Once any institution has been successfully established, it will be seen as a source of profit and advancement. Men studied, graduated, and then, as educated men, went out into the world to seek their fortune in whatever way circumstances and their own wits might suggest.

It might seem from this account that the distinctive feature of medieval universities was their revolt against accepted ideas. Their history might be told in such a way as to confirm the popular current view of originality as a consequence of rebellion. Abelard’s career easily fits this stereotype. His well-known account of one of his teachers, Anselm of Laon, tells us a good deal about his own impatient spirit : ‘a wonderful flow of words he had, but their sense was despicable and empty of all rational argument. When he lit a fire, he filled his house with smoke; no illumination came.’ What dissatisfied Abelard was that his predecessors had merely been collectors; the prickly mind of Abelard saw problems everywhere, and he attained a vast popularity among students by exhibiting the Christian faith as a dark continent, to be mapped and comprehended by the new kind of dialectical inquiry. His work was a kind of agenda and was in one direction very quickly completed in the Sentences of Peter the Lombard, who produced a textbook which remained in active currency for five hundred years and which already exhibits the Scholastic method which was brought to perfection in the next century by men like Aquinas.

Abelard’s account of himself as a rebel is a legend which has these days the disadvantage of being fashionable; it needs immediately to be corrected by the reminder that the rise of universities was just as fundamentally a renaissance, and depended upon a vigorous and dedicated re-entry into a heritage which had been lying around more or less unused for many generations, its mere external forms preserved in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• fmchapter
• Introduction Of Heels and Hammers
• Part One The Problem of Identification
• Part Two Imitations of the Academic
• Part Three The Siege of Academe
• Index