218 History of Universities
the Peninsula, including Salamanca, with the important
modification that the professors, although elected to office
by their students, obtained independent support from the
municipality or the Crown. By the time that America was
discovered Salamanca had become one of the largest and
most famous universities in Europe, numbering her students
by the thousands.
The Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, first in
the New World, was founded in 1551 and established in
1553 deliberately on the model of Salamanca. Serving the
richest country in the world, the University of Mexico was
born to full university stature, with professors of Law,
Medicine, and Theology, as well as Arts, with a Chancellor,
a Rector whose negro lackeys carried swords (a privilege
denied even to the viceroy’s servants), with imposing bedels
and gorgeous ceremonies. The democratic Bolognese in-
fluence appears in a public oratorical contest of Opositores
(candidates) for a vacant chair. At the close of the
oposicion, when all the candidates had had their say, the
assembled students and Masters of Arts elected the pro-
fessor by popular vote. This system was so destructive
of university discipline that it was done away with about
1780.
The University of San Marcos de Lima, also founded in
1551, is still in existence, though temporarily closed because
of student participation in politics. And there were two
other universities in the Spanish Colonies—Cuzco and
Cordoba—before the English colonies had even a college.
Lima and Mexico were more wealthy, learned, and probably
more effective in the seventeenth century than any univer-
sity of the United States before the nineteenth century. But
they fell behind in the eighteenth century, owing largely to
a too rigid control by the Church ; and in the nineteenth cen-