The name is absent

Middle Ages and Renaissance 233
American institutions of higher learning were called “col-
leges,” and why we still speak of “going to college” in Amer-
ica, rather than “to the university,” as do Europeans.

Three other factors besides colleges profoundly affected
the European universities before any colonial institutions of
higher learning were begun. These were the Renaissance, the
Reformation, and the rise of Nationalism. Nationalism, to
be sure, had already appeared in the European universities
while the Catholic front was still unbroken. When the first
Scandinavian universities, Upsala and Copenhagen, were
founded toward the close of the fifteenth century, the kings
of Sweden and Denmark forbade their subjects to study else-
where. Prince Hamlet could not have gone to Wittenberg,
had he lived in Shakespeare’s time. After 1500 it was un-
usual for a European student to study outside his own
country. And this loss in international exchange we
have only lately been attempting to make good through such
arrangements as the Rhodes Scholarships and Common-
wealth Fund.

While Nationalism was narrowing the watershed of each
university, the Renaissance was broadening the curriculum,
developing the functions of research and creative scholar-
ship ; and bringing a new type of young man into the univer-
sities. Intellectual America owes as much or more to the Ren-
aissance as to the middle ages ; for it is from the Revival of
Learning that our colonial colleges caught the notion of a
liberal training designed to develop the complete man, and
to train youths to be men of action and affairs, not merely
priests. And although our colonial colleges were too poor,
and the conditions of a new country unsuitable for creative
scholarship and scientific research, we obtained those priceless
gifts in the nineteenth century through fresh contact with the
German and French universities where they were a living
tradition.

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