The name is absent

232 History of Universities

of the curriculum for four years, exactly as the regent masters
had done in the medieval universities.

The multiplication of colleges made a great difference in
the life of the English universities. College gates enclosed
the free cleric of the middle ages, and gave him security in
return for liberty. The collegian’s entire day was mapped
out, with fixed hours for academic exercises, study, meals,
prayers, and recreations—a system that lasted in some Amer-
ican colleges to the end of the nineteenth century. He was
subject to a schoolboy discipline, and corrected by fines and
whipping. Not only the crude horseplay of a rougher age,
but pastimes like cards, dice, and playing such musical in-
struments as “provoked levity and interfered with work,”
were forbidden. But the colleges provided the student with
many good things to compensate for the robust liberty that
he had lost. He was assured of sufficient board and lodging.
For recreation in summer, college gardens, bowling greens,
tennis courts, and fish ponds were provided; in winter, at
stated seasons, there were private theatricals and drinking
parties. Bishop Fisher, founder of St. John’s College, Cam-
bridge, would have the college hall cleared after supper; but
“whenever there is fire lighted in honour of God or His glori-
ous Mother, or some other Saint,” the fellows, scholars, and
college servants might sit up late singing songs, reciting po-
etry, telling tales, and such other honest recreations “as
becometh Scholars.”

The first American institutions of higher learning were
founded when most of the colleges of Oxford and Cam-
bridge were well performing their founders’ intentions of
providing financial support and instruction for students of
moderate means. The academic associations of Englishmen
were centered about their colleges which took care of them,
rather than around their universities, which merely examined
them and granted degrees. That is why the first Anglo-

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