Ever since ancient times, universities have been hotbeds of radicalism and controversy. Today’s institutions have recently been at the forefront of debates about whether to ban controversial speakers and whether marketisation, through tuition fees and expanded choice, is an ethical and workable model for higher education in the 21st century. These debates go to the heart of both the limits and extent of freedom of speech and what the role of a university in a modern society should be. But when we look back at the history of universities we can see that similar debates have raged since the very first institutions took shape in medieval times. Indeed, while we might think our ancestors’ student lives may have been much different from our own, there were many similarities.

Oxford, Bologna and Paris
University culture in Europe was influenced by the classical institutions in ancient Greece and Rome. However, although medieval universities liked to boast about their connections to the classical world, in fact the first universities or studia generalia were founded around the 12th century. Oxford University is the oldest surviving university in the UK and its date of foundation is hard to pin down. For a long time stories circulated that it was founded by King Alfred the Great in 873, another attempt to link the university to Britain’s cultural heritage and bolster its reputation, but there is little evidence for this. It is now believed that there were schools from around the 11th century but the earliest records of Oxford existing as a university date from 1214, before the signing of the Magna Carta or the Protestant Reformation.

What made the institutions special was that – in theory – they were supposed to be closed communities, with the tutors allowed to teach and test what they wanted without interference. However, in practice universities in the medieval world were largely designed to educate members of the clergy before they began a career in the Catholic Church. The church therefore heavily influenced teaching.

Subjects on offer at early universities were the arts (including the traditional liberal arts – grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music – as well as ethics, physics and metaphysics, which made up philosophy, plus theology, law and medicine. Each city-state’s university, however, soon became known for its own specialisms and culture. Bologna, for example, was known for law and Paris for philosophy and theology.

Political interference in universities was also an issue. In 1219 Pope Honorius III banned the teaching of civil law in Paris with his Papal Bull ‘Super Specula’. According to Hunt Janin this was because civil law had become so popular it was “threatening the primacy of canon law ie, ecclesiastical law, and, by extension, it was thus undermining theological studies as well”. As a result, students wishing to study civil law headed to Orleans and civil law became that university’s specialism.

Financing your studies
Financing your studies in the medieval and early modern world was just as contentious as it is today. Tuition fees were payable and there was an additional fee when a student graduated. Academics’ salaries were paid for by these fees and in Italy and Spain were topped up by the church or the state. Scholarships began around the 13th century and by the 16th century most universities and colleges had a scholarship for the student in need, though this is not to say university students weren’t poor like they are today.

Early ‘town vs gown’ disputes would also arise when students rented rooms in local houses and the locals charged students more expensive rates.

Early academics
Records survive of some of the earliest masters of Oxford University. The earliest master we have evidence of is of a Frenchman, Theobald of Etampes, who began teaching liberal arts and philosophy from around 1089-1095, perhaps no surprise since William the Conqueror’s son William Rufus was on the throne, and both of them wanted to suppress Anglo-Saxon culture following the Norman invasion.

Theobald was a deeply religious man but, certainly by the standards of the day, a progressive. In one of his surviving letters he argued that lust – and therefore promiscuity and sex outside of marriage – was less serious than pride. In another letter he is forced to defend himself to the bishop of Lincoln, arguing that he had never taught his students that unbaptised children could be ‘saved’ or redeemed before they entered heaven. The very fact that he has had to defend this view shows that he had a reputation as a radical academic who was challenging the conservative teachings of the Catholic Church long before the reformation.

Cambridge
The disconnect between academics, the Church and the State, and how this debate was exacerbated by local townsfolk, would have profound consequences for Oxford and university life in England.

In 1208 or 1209, a liberal arts student at Oxford murdered – or perhaps accidentally killed – a woman. The account of Roger of Wendover written in the 1220s is one of the few sources we have about the incident. According to Wendover, the perpetrator fled the scene, leaving his three housemates to explain what happened. The Mayor and the town officials threw the housemates into prison and a few days later they were hanged on the orders of King John. In protest at what happened a significant number of students left the university, fleeing to Paris, Reading and Cambridge where they set up a rival university. Other accounts dispute this, stating that many scholars had already fled at the time of the incident because of the autocratic regime of King John – Oxford was a traditional royal stronghold.

King John’s hostility towards the university stems from the fact that it was almost completely the reserve of the Catholic Church and King John was in dispute with the Pope over who should appoint the Archbishop of Canterbury, part of a wider debate about whether the King should be subservient to the Pope.

Northampton
While Oxford and Cambridge are today widely regarded as the most prestigious British universities, the town of Northampton briefly played host to a third English university, set up in 1261 which, had it survived, might have eclipsed both.

At this time Northampton was a much more powerful town than it is today; indeed it was one of the most important towns in England. It boasted a Norman castle and English monarchs often held court there, so it is no surprise that a university was established.

Dr Cathy Smith at the modern University of Northampton says the university was an interesting place to study and was attracting academics away from Oxford and Cambridge because of its diversity. “The academics at Northampton all came from slightly different backgrounds,“ she says. The teaching was broader and Northampton was in a “religiously vibrant area with various abbeys nearby” plus there was a thriving academic Jewish community.

What led to the university’s downfall just a few years later in 1265 was the decision of the scholars to support the barons in the Second Barons’ War. Henry III had reneged on promises he had made relating to Magna Carta, the so-called ‘provisions of Oxford’. England fell into a state of civil war with Northampton a key stronghold for the barons. The town was sacked and the university was closed. In fact when University College, Northampton applied for permission to become a university in 2005, legal historians delved into the archives to ensure a 700-year-old ban on a university being established in the town would not halt the project; as it happened UCN was built outside the original town boundaries.

Some historians argue the closure of the university may also have had much to do with the fact that Oxford was the King’s stronghold and the academics there used their influence with the King to persuade him to close down Northampton, a rival, more appealing institution.

Scottish heritage
The university culture in Scotland has always been different to England. Scottish university undergraduate courses tend to last for four years and, upon graduating, students become Masters of the Arts (MA) or Masters of Science (MSc) while English universities traditionally separate their bachelors and masters courses, with an MA or MSc etc awarded as a postgraduate qualification. Devolved governments in Scotland have also ensured that higher education is free for Scottish students while English students pay tuition fees.

This is no doubt because Scotland’s three oldest universities – St Andrews, Glasgow and King’s College, Aberdeen – were established when England and Scotland were separate countries, with separate monarchs, in the 15th century.

In the 18th century, during the Enlightenment or Scottish Renaissance, these universities became highly influential in philosophy and economics where the English institutions fell down. Scottish universities were arguably at their intellectual peak in the decades following the Act of Union in 1707.

To study in Scotland in the 1700s would have been to have studied with some of the greatest minds in history including Adam Smith, Sir Walter Scott and James Boswell. Indeed, Adam Smith, who received a scholarship for a postgraduate course at Balliol College, Oxford, complained, as Donald Winch puts it, of how the “intellectual conservatism and indolence” of the teachers “contrasted unfavourably with the teaching at Glasgow. Smith’s damning verdict on Oxford has become part of the standard indictment of the ancient English universities during the 18th century. By family background and education – Whig, Presbyterian, and Hanoverian – Smith could not have been in sympathy with the Tory, high-church, and Jacobite sympathies of Balliol. Nor could the anti-Scottish prejudices of the place have helped him to feel at home there.”

Expansion
For most of their history universities have been selective and exclusive institutions for the wealthy and, occasionally, the extremely intelligent lower classes. Since Victorian times, however, there has been a move to make higher education more accessible in the belief that a more educated society can lead to a stronger, more competitive economy. As the industrial revolution gripped the country, more universities in England opened. Durham gained degree-awarding powers in 1832 as did the University of London in 1836, incorporating King’s College and University College. For the first time the city of London became an academic hub, able to compete with Oxbridge and Edinburgh (founded in 1582).

Over the course of the late 19th and 20th century, following in the footsteps of the 1880 Education Act which made school attendance compulsory, more universities opened than at any point in British history. Today there are more than 100. The result has been to change the entire university culture in Britain.

Instead of closed societies for a selective few, where learning, academic fulfillment and intellectual debate was the only real priority, British universities are today the key to employment and career advancement. Supporters of university expansion claim our society is now educated like never before, a necessity for a modern globalised life and a world apart from our ancestors’ lives in the 12th and 13th century society where farming and agriculture dominated society and travelling from one part of the country could take several days. Opponents, however, bemoan the emphasis on vocational education, believing the closed communities and quirky nature of Oxbridge colleges in times past was a golden age of intellectualism and discovery.