European universities date from the founding of the University of Bologna in 1088 or the University of Paris (c. 1150–70). The original medieval universities arose from the Roman Catholic Church schools. Their purposes included training professionals, scientific investigation, improving society, and teaching critical thinking and research. External influences, such as Renaissance humanism (c. mid-14th century), the discovery of the New World (1492), the Protestant Reformation (1517), the Age of Enlightenment (18th century), and the recurrence of political revolution, enhanced the importance of human rights and international law in the university curricula.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, European universities concentrated upon science and research, their structures and philosophies having shaped the contemporary university. The French Ecole Polytechnique was established in 1794 by the mathematician Gaspard Monge during the Revolution, and it became a military academy under Napoleon I in 1804. The German university — the Humboldtian model — established by Wilhelm von Humboldt was based upon Friedrich Schleiermacher's liberal ideas about the importance of freedom, seminars, and laboratories, which, like the French university model, involved strict discipline and control of every aspect of the university. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the universities concentrated upon science, but were not open to the general populace until after 1914. Moreover, until the end of the 19th century, religion exerted a significant, limiting influence upon academic curricula and research, by when the German university model had become the world standard. Elsewhere, the British also had established universities world-wide, thus making higher education available to the world's populaces.

The first European universities

Historically, the Bologna University, founded in 1088, is considered the "mother of European universities". However, the date of the University of Bologna's founding is uncertain. The university was granted a charter (Authentica habita) by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa in 1158, but in the 19th century, a committee of historians led by Giosuè Carducci traced the founding of the university back to 1088, which would make it the oldest continuously operating university in the world. Top Universities World University Rankings Retrieved 2010-1-6Our History - Università di Bologna However, the development of the institution at Bologna into a university was a gradual process. Paul Grendler writes that "it is not likely that enough instruction and organization existed to merit the term university before the 1150s, and it might not have happened before the 1180s."Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (JHU Press, 2002), 6.

The first significant colleges of the medieval, is the University of Paris, founded in 1150-1170.excerpt Its library was among the first to arrange items alphabetically according to title.Murray, Stuart A. P.. The Library : An Illustrated History, Skyhorse Publishing, 2009, (Print) .

The rediscovery of ancient Græco–Roman knowledge (e.g. Aristotle's works and Roman law), led to the development of (student guilds), and thus the establishment of the university in the contemporary sense.Rudy, The Universities of Europe, 1100-1914, pp. 15–16 In turn, the traditional medieval universities — evolved from Catholic church schools — then established specialized academic structures for properly educating greater numbers of students as professionals. Prof. Walter Rüegg, editor of A History of the University in Europe, reports that universities then only trained students to become clerics, lawyers, civil servants, and physicians.Rudy, The Universities of Europe, 1100-1914, p. 40 Yet rediscovery of Classical-era knowledge transformed the university from the practical arts to developing "knowledge for the sake of knowledge", which, by the 16th century, was considered integral to the civil community's practical requirements.Rüegg, "Themes", A History of the University in Europe, Vol. II, p.30 Hence, academic research was effected in furtherance of scientific investigation,Rüegg, "Themes", A History of the University in Europe, Vol. II, p. 7 because science had become essential to university curricula via "openness to novelty" in the search for the means to control nature to benefit civil society.Rüegg, "Themes", A History of the University in Europe, Vol. II, p. 15.

The structure and spread of early European universities

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.Rudy, The Universities of Europe, 1100-1914, p. 27 Some leaders also created universities in order to use them to increase their political power and popularity. For example, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor founded the University of Naples in 1224 to train lawyers and administrators who could rival the University of Bologna's influence, which served the hostile Lombard League.Rudy, The Universities of Europe, 1100-1914, p. 27-28 And in 1218, King Alfonso IX founded the University of Salamanca, the oldest university in the Hispanic world and one of the oldest in the world in continuous operation.

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.Rudy, The Universities of Europe, 1100-1914, p. 33 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.Rüegg, "Themes", A History of the University in Europe, Vol. II, p.8

Philosophic and external influences By the 16th century, the humanist ideas of the Renaissance (14th–16th century) were slowly accepted; France had propagated them first to Germany, then to England, during the Protestant Reformation (1517).Rudy, The Universities of Europe, 1100-1914, pp. 50–52 In that intellectual humanist mode, university education began including preparing the student for a civilized life — of culture and civility — and concern for society's public affairs.Rüegg, "Themes", A History of the University in Europe, Vol. II, p.24. To achieve that, the curriculum comprised the liberal arts trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic), and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music) meant to prepare students for further specialized education in either theology, law, or medicine.Leff, "The Trivium and the Three Philosophies", A History of the University in Europe, Vol. I, p.308. 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.(Rüegg v.2, p.22. The European enslavement of the native (aboriginal) populaces they conquered in the "New World" of the Americas eventually raised ethico-moral questions in Europe about the human rights of the American aboriginals — questions of cultural tolerance evinced by Renaissance humanism, the Bible, and mediæval theories of natural law.Rüegg, "Themes", A History of the University in Europe, Vol. II, p.22. In analogy to the ancient world's works, Rüegg relates the "New World" idea to the idea of "new knowledge." It is worth pointing out, that Christopher Columbus's letter to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain describing the native Taíno, he remarks that "They ought to make good and skilled servants"Robert H. Fuson, ed., The Log of Christopher Columbus, Tab Books, 1992, International Marine Publishing, . and "these people are very simple in war-like matters... I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased".Columbus (1991, p. 87). Or "these people are very simple as regards the use of arms … for with fifty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them" (Columbus & Toscanelli, 2010, p. 41) The Catholic Monarchs rejected Columbus' enthusiasm for the slave trade, issuing a decree in 1500 that specifically forbade the enslavement of indigenous people. In the mid-16th century, scholarly and scientific journals made it feasible to "spread innovations among the learned"; by the 18th century, universities published their own research journals.Rüegg, "Themes", A History of the University in Europe, Vol. II, pp.16–17. In the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment also encouraged education's 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 adopted Enlightenment ideas about the harmfulness of monarchic absolutism more readily than did the older universities.Rudy, The Universities of Europe, 1100–1914, pp.99, 82.

European university models in the 19th and 20th centuries

Modern universities

Moving into the 19th century, the objective of universities evolved from teaching the "regurgitation of knowledge" to "encourag[ing] productive thinking."Röhrs, "The Classical Idea of the University," Tradition and Reform of the University under an International Perspective p.20 Two new university models, the German and the post-Revolutionary French Grandes écoles, arose and made an impact on established models such as the Russian and British - especially the newer foundations of University College London and King's College London. Both have been connected with the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, the rise of the bourgeoisie during industrialization and the decline of classical medieval Scholasticism but used rather different approaches. Such free thinking and experimentation had notably already begun in Britain's oldest universities beginning in the seventeenth century at Oxford with the fathers of British scientific methodology Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, and at Cambridge where Isaac Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics & Physics.

The situation in Germany, or rather the various German states, was different. The specific German Bildungsbürgertum, which emerged starting in the mid-18th century with an educational ideal based on idealistic values and classical antiquity, had failed in gaining political power and in its aims for a nationalist movement. The Bildungsbürger turned to education as a means to construct a common national culture and strived for freedom against the nobility in power. Only when Prussia and its absolutist government had been utterly defeated by the Napoleonic armies in 1806 did the weakness of the defeated government allow for the Prussian reforms of the county's institutions.The European and American University Since 1800, Sheldon Rothblatt, Bjorn Wittrock, Cambridge University Press, 28.01.1993 Wilhelm von Humboldt was appointed Geheimer Staatsrat (not minister as intended) of education in 1809 and held office for just one year. He nevertheless succeeded in drafting a complete reform of the country's educational system,Eduard Spranger: Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Reform des Bildungswesens, Reuther u. Reichard, Berlin 1910 including the primary Prussian education system in the :de:Königsberger Schulplan and establishing the new University of Berlin. Based on Friedrich Schleiermacher's and his own liberal ideas, the goal was to demonstrate the process of the discovery of knowledge and to teach students to "take account of fundamental laws of science in all their thinking". Thus, seminars and laboratories started to evolve.Rüegg, "Themes", A History of the University in Europe, Vol. III, p.5-6 Humboldt envisioned the university education as a student-centered activity of research: