UNIVERSITY (Lat. 'unitersitas, corporation), a corporation of teachers or students instituted for the promotion of the higher education. Mr. Kirkpatrick, in his Histori cally Received Conception of a University (Loud. 1857), poikts out. the prototype of the uni versities of modern Europe in the schools of Isocrates and Plato at Athens, and the museum at Alexandria. These institutions certainly much resembled the university of after-times, both in their objects and their organNation; and in Greece and Rome, as well as in the later Byzantine empire, something analogous to the degree was conferred on those who had successfully passed through the trivia m or guadriviam, which together comprised what was regarded as the seven liberal arts and sciences. The university is, however, usually considered to have originated in the 12th or 13th c., and to have grown out of the schools which, prior to that period, were attached to most of the cathedrals and monasteries, providing the means of education both to churchmen and laymen, and bringing together the few learned and scientific men who were to be found in Europe. Such an institute of the higher learning was at first called' stadium, or stadium generate. When a teacher of eminence appeared, such as Abelard or Peter Lombard at Paris, or Irnerius at Bologna, a concourse of admiring students flocked round him; and the mem bers of the stadium generale formed themselves, for mutual support, into a corporation, on which the general name of nave/is/tits came to be bestowed. In this way the oldest universities arose spontaneously, The crowds drawn from every country of Europe to Paris, Bologna, and other educational resorts, bad first local immunities bestowed on them for the encouragement of learning, and to prevent them removing elsewhere; and the academical societies thus formed were, by papal bulls and royal charters, constituted an integral part of the church and state. One great difference existed between the con
stitution of the two most important universities of early times. In Paris the teachers alone constituted the corporation; in Bologna the university consisted of the students or scholars, who at first held the supreme power, and appointed the academic officials. In this respect Bolegna became the model of the subsequent universities of Italy and the provincial universities of France, which were corporations of students; while the univer sities of Britain, Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia were, like Paris, corporations of teachers, and the Spanish universities occupied an intermediate position. Along with a general resemblance, there was much difference in the constitution and character of the pre-reformation universities, the form of each being the result of a combination of vari ous circumstances and ideas acting on an originally spontaneous convocation of teachers and scholars.
The several faculties of a university are subordinate corporations, consisting of the aggregate of students or teachers in a particular department of knowledge. The num ber of faculties has varied much in different universities. The university of Paris had at first only a faculty of arts, which, as early as 1169, existed as a separate body, with an organization of its own. Faculties of theology, medicine, and canon law were added in the 13th century. Bologna was at first exclusively, as it continued to be pre-eminently, a school of law. Oxford and Cambridge, in their origin, existed only in the faculty of arts. • Some of the smaller French universities, as Orleans and Montpellier, were pro hibited from teaching theology, lest they should become rivals to Paris. See UNIVER