Model of universities

The history of European research universities started from founding of the University of Bologna
in 1088, or the University of Paris. European universities were concentrated upon research and
science since 19
th
and 20
th
centuries. The medieval university was the Catholic Church schools
that transformed in universities. The medieval university was a corporation organized during the
High Middle Ages for the purposes of higher learning.
There were also some external influences, such as Renaissance humanism, the Age of
Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, the discovery of the New World and the political
revolution.
By the 19
th
century, the French and German university models were established. Ecole
Polytechnique was established by France in 1794 during the French Revolution, and it became
military academy. The Humboldtian model was the German university model, was based on
liberal ideas of importance of freedom, seminars and laboratories. This also involved, like the
French university model, strict discipline and control of major aspects of the university.
Historically, the University of Bologna, founded in 1088, is considered the mother of European
universities. This claim was made as symbolic of Italian national unity, leading some to
question the legitimacy of Bologna's claim to be the first university proper. If the term
"university" requires that a single corporate body be made up of students and professors of
different disciplines, rather than that a corporate body simply exists, the University of Paris,
founded in 1208, can be considered the first university.
The European University proliferated in part because groups decided to secede from the original
universities to promote their own ideals; the University of Paris fostered many universities in
Northern Europe, while the University of Bologna fostered many in the South.
Some leaders also created universities in order to use them to increase their political power and
popularity.
The structure of these early classes involved a master reading from texts and commenting on the
readings, as well as students learning by teaching other students. Masters also offered disputed
questions to their classes for discussion. Moving into the 18th century, professors became less
focused on simply training university teachers and more focused on forming the minds of the
elite of a larger society.
By the 16th century, the humanist ideas of the Renaissance were slowly accepted; France had
propagated them first to Germany, then to England, during the Protestant Reformation. In that
intellectual humanist mode, university education began including preparing the student for a
civilized life of culture and civility and concern for societys public affairs. To achieve that, the
curriculum comprised the liberal arts Trivium, and the Quadrivium, meant to prepare students for
further specialized education in theology, the law, or medicine. In 1492, the socio-political
consequences of the discovery of the New World expanded European university curricula, as
human rights and international law became contemporarily relevant matters. The Spanish
enslavement of the native populaces they conquered in the New World of the Americas
eventually raised ethic-moral questions in Europe about the human rights of the American
aboriginals questions of cultural tolerance evinced by Renaissance humanism, the Bible, and
medieval theories of natural law. In analogy to the ancient worlds works, Regg relates the
New World idea to the idea of new knowledge. In the mid-16
th
century, scholarly and
scientific journals made it feasible to spread innovations among the learned; by the 18
th

century, universities published their own research journals. In the 18
th
century, the Age of
Enlightenment also encouraged educations transition, from the preservation and transmission
of accepted knowledge to the discovery and advancement of new knowledge; the newer
universities effected that change more quickly, and adapted Enlightenment ideas about the
harmfulness of monarchic Absolutism more readily than did the older universities.
Freedom was an important concept in the German university model, and the system of professors
was based on competition and freedom: although professors served as state functionaries, they
had the freedom to choose between several states, and their identity and prestige arose from the
specialization of scientific disciplines.
The French University model lacked the freedom of the German model, consisting of severe
discipline and control over the curriculum, awarding of degrees, conformity of views, and
personal habits.
French university professors trained at the cole Normale Suprieure, and much of their prestige
depended on their schools reputations. By 1866, though, the German model had begun to
influence the strict French model. Polytechnique was established in 1794 by the mathematician
Gaspard Monge during the French Revolution, and became a military academy under Napoleon I
in 1804. Today, the institution still runs under the supervision of the French ministry of Defense.
The German university model was also used in Russian universities, which hired lecturers
trained in Germany and which dedicated themselves to science. At the same time, Russian
universities were meant to train the bureaucracy in the same way as the French grandes coles.
Throughout the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries, Russian universities underwent much variation in their
degrees of strictness and control
Ultimately, European research universities established the intellectual and academic traditions of
university education world-wide; by the 19
th
centurys end, the Humboldtian university model
was established in Europe, the US, and Japan. In the Americas, first the Spanish, then the British,
and then the French founded universities in the lands they had conquered early in the 16
th

century, meant to professionally educate their colonists and propagate monotheistic religion to
establish formal, administrative rule of their American colonies; like-wise, the British in Canada,
Australia, and the Cape Colony; and like-wise Japan, the Near East, and Africa. Those
universities disseminated Western European science and technology and trained the natives to
develop their countries resources; and, although most promoted the social, political, economic,
and cultural aims of the imperial rulers, some promoted revolutionary development of the
colonial societies. In the 20
th
century, urbanization and industrialization made a university
education available to the mass populace. Throughout, the basic structure and research purposes
of the universities have remained constant; per Clark Kerr, they are among the least changed of
institutions.
Until the 19
th
century, religion played a significant role in university curriculum; however, the
role of religion in research universities decreased in the 19
th
century, and by the end of the 19
th

century, the German university model had spread around the world. Universities concentrated on
science in the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries and became increasingly accessible to the masses. In
Britain, the move from Industrial Revolution to modernity saw the arrival of new civic
universities with an emphasis on science and engineering, a movement initiated in 1960 by Sir
Keith Murray (chairman of the University Grants Committee) and Sir Samuel Curran, with the
formation of the University of Strathclyde. The British also established universities worldwide,
and higher education became available to the masses not only in Europe.
In 1963, the Robbins Report on universities in the United Kingdom concluded that such
institutions should have four main "objectives essential to any properly balanced system:
instruction in skills; the promotion of the general powers of the mind so as to produce not mere
specialists but rather cultivated men and women; to maintain research in balance with teaching,
since teaching should not be separated from the advancement of learning and the search for truth;
and to transmit a common culture and common standards of citizenship."
There are many reasons why you would love to study in Europe. Long traditions in the field of
higher education and a great variety of different countries in a relatively small area attract many
international students from all continents.
World-class quality higher education with reasonable cost of studying combined with
multicultural environment and rich historic cultural background makes Europe an ideal place to
study in.








Bibliography:
1. Medieval Universities And the Origin of the College
2. A History of the University in Europe



Craciun Dan Stefan
SPE III