The Challenge of University Autonomy

Abstract

There is a consensus among European historians that the oldest European university was founded in Bologna in 1088. However, there are disputes about the location of the oldest university in the world. There were important centers of scholarship in the ancient world and major institutions of theological, legal, and scientific study in the Islamic world before Bologna. The medieval European universities enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy depending on their legal status and the source of their funding. The cities in which they were located tended to draw their reputation and prestige from the existence of the university, which played an important economic, social, and political role in the life of the city and the surrounding region. Until the nineteenth century, participation in university education tended to be limited to the social and political elite. In the nineteenth century, higher education (HE) expanded considerably with the establishment of new institutions of HE, increasingly with a more scientific and technological perspective.