798 
hired houses; the academic convocations 
were held in churches or monasteries. 
When there were difficulties with the city 
authorities or with their colleagues, a group 
of professors or students might migrate 
and found a new studium elsewhere. Thus 
in the thirteenth century offshoots from 
Bologna gave rise to studia at Reggio, 
Vicenza Arezzo, Padua, Vercelli and Siena. 
Oxford, the third of the great medieval 
universities, was probably due to a migra- 
tion from Paris in 1167. 
At Bologna the universities of students 
—who were men of maturity from all parts 
of Europe, as many as ten thousand at the 
end of the twelfth century, it 1s said— 
obtained control, lording it over the pro- 
fessors by means of the boycott. At Paris 
the students, organized into nations, were 
somewhat younger, and the professors, doc- 
tors or masters, as they were indifferently 
named, were in control. In one respect the 
conditions were curiously similar to the 
contemporary American university, for 
there was a college of arts of younger 
students, and professional schools of theol- 
ogy, law and medicine. We even read of 
an anticipation of present tendencies in 
that students had to receive the degree in 
arts before entering the medical school. 
About the middle of the thirteenth century 
there were established colleges of residence 
which were endowed as eleemosynary insti- 
tutions for poor students, usually under 
the control of the church. In England the 
colleges were the property of the head and 
fellows, who had complete control of the 
establishment; on the continent they were 
somewhat less independent. In the course 
of time the differences became emphasized. 
The continental colleges became absorbed 
in the university and disappeared as halls 
of residence, whereas at Oxford and Cam- 
bridge the colleges practically constituted 
the university. 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Vou. XXXV. No. 908 
It is truly remarkable that there should 
have been some seventy-five universities 
throughout Europe before the time of the 
invention of the printing press and amid 
the incessant warfare of those days. One 
may wonder whether love of learning was 
not greater, intellectual curiosity keener, 
then than now. The students, numbered 
by the thousand—legend puts it as high as 
30,000—flocked to a university attracted 
by the reputation of a great teacher. The 
rich came with their retinues, while the 
poor begged their way. Irnerius at Bo- 
logna, Roscellinus and Abelard at. Paris, 
Grossetéte and Roger Bacon at Oxford, 
were followed by long lines of great men, 
teachers, scholars, founders of science. 
My main concern with the medieval uni- 
versity is that it was extraordinarily un- 
hierarchical, democratic, anarchic, in its 
organization. The university was then, as 
it now should be, the professors and the 
students. The professors, of course, had 
complete control of the conditions under 
which degrees were given and in the selec- 
tion of their colleagues and successors. 
The doctor earned the jus ubique docendi; 
he was not employed or dismissed. There 
was an elected council and rectors were 
elected for a year or for some other short 
period. Only later there came to be a 
single rector for the entire studium. The 
whole paraphernalia of the modern univer- 
sity—endowments, buildings and grounds, 
trustees and president, heads of depart- 
ments and deans, curricula, grades and ex- 
aminations—were absent or subordinated. 
There were indeed all sorts of routine, cus- 
toms and limitations, but the university, in 
an age of feudalism and of absolutism of 
state and church, attained a remarkable 
freedom, and its great performance was in 
large measure due to this freedom. 
It further seems to be the case that the 
waning of the influence of the university 
