The name is absent

212 History of Universities

world; which have been the object of so much devotion, and
the scene of wave after wave of youthful effort (even though
much of it has been effort to avoid effort), is of any less
interest or significance than the history of the Christian
Church, or of political institutions. The literature is not
great in quantity, and very unequal in quality. No man has
attempted to write even a short history of universities and
lived. Fr. Denifle tried it, but died after publishing one
volume of his Die Universitdten des Mittelalters. Hastings
Rashdall left three volumes, but many gaps; and he did not
even reach the Renaissance. Stephen d’lrsay, sometime of
Johns Hopkins, had just completed the second volume of his
Histoire des Universités, extending into the sixteenth cen-
tury, when he died. So I feel that I have cheated fate by
flying over the ground quickly.

For the origin of universities, we need go no further back
than the middle ages. There had indeed been schools since
the dawn of civilization, and classical antiquity was familiar
with the noblest form of education, in which men of learning
taught pupils not merely so much as was conceived proper
for the adolescent mind, but methods of attaining knowledge
and wisdom. It flattered the men of the Renaissance and the
eighteenth century to call a school or group of learned men
an academy, after the grove where Plato walked and argued.
According to a medieval tradition which American colonial
colleges accepted with uncritical alacrity, the prophet Samuel
presided over the world’s first university, consisting of “Sons
of Prophets” organized in colleges at Bethel, Jericho, and
elsewhere; and a learned Dutchman, writing in 1602, at-
tributed the founding of the first university to Noah, as a
means of spreading the knowledge of good letters, and so
preventing another flood !

Now, every university is a school. The mid-western usage

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