Transcript The Ancient Greek Academies

Universities: the first 2,500 years
The history of the first 2,500 years of
Universities in the west indicates that
they are chaotic, impossible to
eradicate, hard to control, and inner
directed.
The question is will they always be that
way?
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One way to ensure Universities retain
their essential character
Make sure that University management has a deep understanding of our
history and is imbued with the desire to treasure it.
ATEM runs a course in which it attempts to make sure this happens.
First we suggest that University managers at all levels must do a lot of
reading.
'A Suggested Reading List of the Classics in Tertiary Education Management‘
by Giles Pickford, Colin Plowman, Warwick Williams and Frank Hambly
http://www.atem.org.au/activities_occasional_papers.cfm
Weekly Reading
University World News
http://www.universityworldnews.com
The Higher Ed Supplement in Wednesday’s Australian
Monday’s and Friday’s Australian Financial Review
Six times a year reading
The Journal of Higher Education Policy
and Management :
the ATEM Journal posted to all ATEM
Members by Routledge in the UK
The Ancient Greek Academies
Early experiments:
The Socratic Academy 640 BCE conducted in the Olive Grove
of Hekademus outside the walls of Athens
The Aristotelian Academy 350 BCE conducted in the Lyceum
of Athens
The Dark Ages 467 AD: invasions of the Goths, Visigoths,
Ostrogoths, Huns, Gauls, Vandals, Vikings and Serbs.
The works of Ancient Greece were preserved by the Jews of
Spain, who were expelled by King Ferdinand, and were
taken in by the Arabs of Damascus and the Uzbeks of
Samarkand
Socrates and Aristotle
The first Philosopher and the first scientist
The Socratic Method
• The Socratic method is a form of inquiry and
debate between individuals with opposing
viewpoints based on asking and answering
questions to stimulate rational thinking and to
illuminate ideas. These discussions were
informal colloquia or symposia. The latter
involved wine. They focussed on logic and
abstraction.
Aristotle’s Contribution
• He was a student of Plato and tutored
Alexander the Great.
• His writings cover many subjects, including
physics, metaphysics, poetry, theatre, music,
logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics,
biology, and zoology.
• His method was observation of the natural
world rather than abstract speculation.
Bologna: the start of the modern University in 1088
There were precursors of the modern University in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indus;
and in China, Greece, France and Scandinavia
The Church’s contribution
• The oldest surviving institution in the world is the Army, second
oldest is the Church. The University, invented by the students of
Bologna and permitted by the Bishop of Bologna, is the third oldest
surviving institution in the world. The concept was Universitas di
Studorum, a community of scholars where the Student Guilds
employed the teachers.
• Later this became universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly
meaning “community of teachers and scholars”
• All the oldest Universities had the local Bishop as their Chancellor.
• They fostered the free and open investigations of the intellect.
Something that the Church itself was not free to do within its own
traditions.
Machiavelli and Petrarch
The Politician and the Poet
• The two most famous graduates of Bologna were
Machiavelli the first political scientist and
Petrarch, one of the finest poets of all time.
• There were various disturbances in Bologna
which led many students to move to Paris. These
students were followed by their Professors,
because the students paid them. No Students:
no money. So nothing has changed.
• All real universities create disturbances.
University of Paris 1160
Eloise and Abelard
The Teachers take Control
• The Teachers took control and created the apprenticejourneyman-master model. The apprentice’s Trivium of
grammar, logic and rhetoric; the journeyman’s Quadrivium
of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music; and the
professional subjects of theology, law and medicine
• Abelard was a brilliant Philosophy teacher who was very
popular. He fell in love with the Bishop’s Daughter Eloise.
There was a scandal. The Bishop ordered his men to
castrate Abelard. Eloise, heart-broken entered a Convent.
• There were more disturbances and many students left and
went to Oxford.
The University of Oxford
The University of Oxford
Founded 1167 by the Franciscan Friars
• The earliest Oxford riot recorded was in 1209
and such events continued for a century and a
half until the great riot and massacre of St.
Scholastica's Day, 1335, which went on for
three days. The dispute arose from a
disagreement between a landlord and some
students in a tavern near Carfax. It resulted in
the students setting fire to the town, the
townsfolk plundering the students' hostels
and sixty-three scholars being killed.
Oxford 1209:
The Saint Scholastica Day Massacre
University of Cambridge 1209
The Cambridge Disturbances
• Some years later similar riots broke out in Cambridge
and the townspeople petitioned the King (Edward
Longshanks – the Hammer of the Scots) asking him to
revoke the University’s charter. The King’s response
was to issue an edict saying that in the event of a
dispute between town and gown the gown was to
prevail.
• This was an age when the dominant view was that the
purpose of industry and commerce was to create
prosperity in order to support the quest for knowledge.
This contrasts sharply with the present view, which is
that the purpose of tertiary education is to support
industry and commerce.
The Modern Universities
The first 400 years
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1088 University of Bologna
1150 University of Paris
1167 University of Oxford
1175 University of Modena
1209 University of Cambridge
1218 University of Salamanca
1220 University of Montpellier
1222 University of Padua
1224 University of Naples
1229 University of Toulouse
1240 University of Siena
1209 University of Coimbra
1293 University of Madrid
1300 University of Lleida
Closed by the King in 1717 reopened 1972, 255 years later
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1303 University of Rome
1308 University of Perugia
1336 University of Camerino
1343 University of Pisa
1348 Charles University of Prague
1361 University of Pavia
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1364 Jagellonian University of Krakow
1365 University of Vienna
1367 University of Pécs, Hungary
1386 Ruprecht Karls University of Heidelberg
1391 University of Ferrara
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1402 University of Wurzberg
1409 University of Leipzig
1412 University of St Andrews
1419 University of Rostock
1425 University of Leuven
1431 University of Poitiers
1434 University of Catania
1451 University of Glasgow
1456 University of Greifswald
1457 University of Freiburg
1460 University of Basel
1477 Uppsala University, Sweden
1477 University of Tubingen
1479 University of Copenhagen
1494 University of Aberdeen
The Craft Guilds:
The origin of Technical Education
• Technical Education began in the middle ages
(13th & 14th Centuries) in Britain. It advanced
more dramatically in Scotland and Wales than
England. France and Germany overtook England
in Technical Education.
• By the time of the Exhibition of 1851 it was clear
that Britain was in decline from neglecting
technical education and relying on the fruits of
Empire for its prosperity.
The Craft Guilds
The organisation of a guild was precisely defined
into three hierarchical categories or classes:
namely the livery, the freeman and the
apprentice.
The liveries were people who had established
businesses and it was from this category that the
Master, the Wardens and the Court of Assistants
were elected. They were totally responsible for
the organisation and management of a particular
guild including the setting of standards, prices
and wages.
The Freemen and the Apprentices
• The next category was the Freemen who were
bound absolutely to a guild and were referred
to as the Journeymen Craftsmen.
• The final category comprised the Apprentices
or trainees who were bound or indentured to
a master craftsman for seven years.
The Mechanics Institutes 1800-1850
TAFE began in Scotland
• George Birkbeck, then Professor of Natural Philosophy at the
Anderson Institution in Glasgow, founded the movement in 1800.
He began formal instruction for workmen and artisans in the
scientific principles that were used in their trades. The workers paid
a small fee to become members and attend the classes. Following
his move to London other institutions were established.
• By 1824 institutes were established in a number of principal towns
and cities including Aberdeen, Leeds, Lancaster and Newcastle and
in 1825 in Manchester, Norwich, Birmingham and Devonport. As a
result by 1850 around 610 institutes existed with a membership
over 600,000.
• A number of Universities and Colleges began as Mechanics
Institutes.
The Emergence of Research Degrees
• At what point did Scholarship become Research?
• In the 19th Century at the University of Berlin the
German PhD was invented. It was to become the
dominant model for research degrees world-wide
• It was a degree awarded to younger students
who had completed a prescribed course of
graduate study and successfully defended a thesis
or dissertation containing original research in
science or in the humanities. In Germany there
has never been a time limit for a candidate for
the PhD.
Wilhelm Von Humboldt
The Architect of German Higher Education
The University of Sydney
1850
The University of Sydney
Founded for the same reasons as the University of Western Sydney today
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During 1848, William Wentworth proposed a plan in the Legislative Council to
expand the existing Sydney College into a university. Wentworth argued that a
state university was imperative for the growth of a society aspiring towards selfgovernment, and that it would provide the opportunity for 'the child of every class,
to become great and useful in the destinies of his country'. It would take two
attempts on Wentworth's behalf however, before the plan was finally adopted.
The University was established via the passage of the University of Sydney Act in
October 1850. Two years later, the University was inaugurated on October 1852 in
the Big Schoolroom of what is now Sydney Grammar School. In February1858, the
University received its Royal Charter from Queen Victoria, giving degrees conferred
by the University equal rank and recognition as those given by universities in the
UK [Royal Charter of the University of Sydney]. By 1859, the university had moved
to its current site in the Sydney suburb of Camperdown.
The University was secular from the beginning and admitted students regardless of
social status.
So what is a University
and what it is not?
• Universities resemble self-assembling molecules which
essentially means they are uncontrollable and
indestructible. When they are closed by Tyrants they
go underground where they can live indefinitely.
• In terms of modern management science no-one has
ever been able to describe how the University of
Cambridge is organised (a comment by a Cambridge Don at a
Conference in Prague)
• Is a university a series of inner directed, loosely
coupled systems?
Extract from Moo: a novel
“Over the years everyone around the
university had given free rein to his or her
desires, and the institution had, with a fine,
trembling, responsiveness, answered, ‘Why
Not?’ It had become, more than anything, a
vast network of interlocking wishes, some of
them modest, some of them impossible, many
of them conflicting, many of them
complementary.”
What a University is Not
Above all it is not a business
Businesses are not predominantly funded by the Government as a public
good.
Businesses usually close after going broke;
their main aim in life is profit;
they do not overthrow regimes;
they are not interested in abstract ideas;
their membership is not composed mostly of school leavers;
they rarely own extensive libraries, museums, galleries;
they are not created by Acts of Parliament;
they do not publish their discoveries (except for Google!);
they do not regard the CEO as the first amongst equals;
they do not make most of their important decisions below the level of their
governing body.
What makes them so different?
• “It is important to remember that whatever policydriven demands are placed on universities and
whatever the desire to mandate particular outcomes,
the space of university endeavour is essentially one
where discoveries cannot be determined in advance
and where the consequences of the encounter
• (a) between minds;
• (b) between a mind, a problem and evidence; and
• (c) between the minds of successive generations
are profoundly and marvellously unpredictable. They
are the very conditions of creativity.”
Geoffrey Bolton and Sir Colin Lucas.
The Need to Discover
• “All entirely new ideas are born out of chaos.
Order merely begets more order and nothing
changes.” Friedrich Nietzsche
• Chaos is an absolutely essential characteristic
of Universities. Managers find this very hard
to understand, but they should not try to
resist it.
Who are the owners of the University?
• The University is neither an agency of the state nor a
servant of the people because it has an end in itself
which is knowledge, the seeking, sharing and imparting
of knowledge. In its unceasing quest for, and love of,
knowledge the university is a harmonious whole in
which all of its disciplines have their own perfection.
• When a university preserves its unique identity and is
granted the freedom and resources to do so, the state
and its citizens always reap a rich and noble harvest. It
is a harvest beyond measure.
From John Molony’s 10th Anniversary Address to the ANU Emeritus Faculty July 2010
Governments can do nothing
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Determinants of a university’s reputation, the eminence of its staff, the quality of
its graduates and the importance of its research are all made in an international
context. It is like the interest rate. It is NOT a Government decision.
All Government can do is foster the Universities and endure the disturbances that
they cause.
When the government Ministers tell you that they are forcing universities to be
accountable and transparent, don’t believe it. They are doing their best to impose
a suffocating order and to stifle creativity. All Governments are control freaks,
which is fine if you are running a gaol, but not a university.
The State always wants to know that it is getting value for money. That is OK. We
should be telling the State that they give us a few billion dollars and we give
them a civilisation. It is the best deal for the tax payer that they can ever get.
Universities flourish when left to their own devises and decline under constant
interference. But they always outlast their enemies.
Acknowledgement: I have drawn on Dr Barry Cameron’s paper “Students, Traditions and Transition” given at
the 3rd Queensland State Conference of ATEM in April 1986.