THE HISTORY OF UNIVERSITIES*
I
THE UNIVERSITIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES
AND THE RENAISSANCE
N these lectures I am attempting with all the rashness of
a novice, to cover in some manner the history of Amer-
ican institutions of higher learning and their European back-
ground. This will seem to many of you an odd subject; and
so it is, in a way, since we who belong to the academic world
are seldom conscious of the long history and rich traditions
that determine the conditions of our membership and our
functioning in a university. Even if historians, it is the his-
tory of an era or a country that interests us, not the history
of our college or university. Just as you seldom find a scientist
who cares for the history of science, or a great industrialist
who cares for economic and business history, or an ar-
chaeologist who does his digging in his home town ; so the few
historians who follow the history of their profession or their
university are apt to be regarded by their colleagues as harm-
less antiquarians, dry-as-dust grubbers in a narrow pathway
of the past that has little significance or relevance to our
present problems. Yet I cannot feel that the history of uni-
versities, which have had such an immense influence on the
thought, learning, and creative achievements of the modern
1Lectures delivered at the Rice Institute, April 3 and 4,1935, by Samuel Eliot
Morison, Ph.D., Professor of History at Harvard University.
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