An easy and quick read on how universities came to be. Most of the book describes the early 12th and 13th century Western university, teacher and student. The earliest universities were founded in Paris and Bologna. The university arose out of students need to prevent the individual student from the townspeople’s expropriating prices. Before universities, if someone studied under a scholar, they would not be able to show proof of the studies. The rise of universities was the diploma received as proof of the studies and the general concentration of study.

Over time, and due to the demands of the students, the teachers become professionalized and needed a sort of license to teach. Also over time, universities became guilds for scholars and students became more a necessary cost. Teachers taught mostly practical issues such as law, medicine, grammar, and logic. Teachers can teach anything as long as it was what acceptable from the perspective of the authoritarian doctrine.

The medieval students resemble students of contemporary time, with more time spending in leisure than study. Students used to write letters to their patrons for more money for studies, of which the money was often not spent on studies. Some of the money went to bribing the teachers for good grades.

The author explains that part of the rise of universities was the knowledge bought from the Arabic world, while does not specify whether they had universities. The book also misses what seem to be universities, at least by definition, in China at earlier times. ( )

12/5/21

I bought this for a quarter this morning. The premise was rather promising. Apparently the text was culled from a rasher of lectures delivered in the 1920s. There is a depressing dearth of example or citation. I would've pitched it were it not for the links to Waddell's Wandering Scholars. ( )

THis book, which is pretty much impossible to find outside of a library, was written in the early 1900s and is so far unmatched as a study of how transportation and information flow affects the behavior of culture. It talks about how the universities in Europe were set up because there were certain roads (Roman roads) that scholars could travel to get places. a great book and too bad it is so damned hard to find. ( )