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5
student rebellion find a distant echo in the student scene of the 1960s and 1970s. But there are important
dissimilarities and it would be unhistorical to press analogies too far. Medieval students had, for the most
part, a highly utilitarian view of the university as an institution of direct community relevance that might
10
well be regarded as too narrowly conceived by a large proportion of present-day students and staff. The
priority of educational utility conditioned students into accepting innately conservative attitudes vis-a-vis
the Establishment. Revolutionary student activity in the medieval situation was rarely directed against the
15
prevailing order of things; it seems to have been either a defence mechanism or was channelled towards the
winning of greater student participation in university structures.
2 For the majority of medieval undergraduates education was a severely practical business; there was
20
simply not the surplus wealth available to support nonvocational courses on any scale. As the student was
bereft of a state system of financial aid and as the rate of graduate production was often in excess of the
rate of graduate absorption, the pressure on the average student was to seek, as rapidly as possible, a
25
lucrative employment within the established order. As vehicles for community needs, the medieval
universities were largely vocational schools training students in the mastery of areas of knowledge and
30
analytical skills which could be utilised in the service of the State or Church, in teaching or in the secular
professions of law and medicine. The movements of student protest in the Middle Ages were not the
explosive outgrowth of pent-up anti-establishment feelings. Nowhere does it appear that direct student
35
action within the universities was orientated towards the ultimate reformation of the wider community.
To
imagine that medieval students thought of the university as a microcosm of society would be anachronistic.
Medieval student power did not embody this degree of self-conscious awareness.
3 Nor were student protest movements concerned with the content of university courses if by this is
40
meant the selection of the ingredients of the syllabus or curriculum. The medieval undergraduate was not
faced with the bewildering range of options that confront the modem student. There was an agreed core of
studies in the medieval universities derived from a series of time-honoured texts and supplemented by the
45
commentaries of contemporary academics. It would appear that medieval students acquiesced in current
educational assumptions and none of their rebellions had as its aim, the widening or modernisation of the
syllabus.
50
4 The earliest European universities were not specifically founded but were spontaneous creations
which evolved in the course of the twelfth century. They first emerged at Bologna and Paris and these were
the archetype which determined the twofold pattern of university organisation in the Middle Ages: the
58
latter, Paris, gave rise to that of the masters' university; the former, Bologna, to that of the concept of the
student-controlled university.
5 The first student power movement in European history had crystallised at the University of Bologna
60 by the early thirteenth century. The idea of guilds of students directing the affairs of a university and
keeping the teaching staff in a state of subservience has been alien to European thinking for about 600
years. But one of the two original universities was, shortly after it came into being, a student-dominated
65 society and the prototype for a large family of universities either partially or mainly controlled by students.
6
The rise of the student university at Bologna has to be seen in relation to the prevailing concept of
Italian citizenship, a possession of the utmost importance in a country fragmented by the spread of
70
communes. The students who had converged on Bologna to study law from many parts of Europe were, in
Bologna, non-citizens and, as such, aliens who were vulnerable in the face of city law. The teaching
doctors should have been the natural protectors of their students: this is what had happened at Paris. But at
75
Bologna the commune succeeded in drawing the doctors within its orbit and driving a wedge between the
teachers and their students. Without their natural protectors the students had to take the initiative in the
matter of organisational defence. By the beginning of the thirteenth century the pristine contractual
80
arrangements that had operated between individual students and doctors had been superseded by a student
guild powerful enough to exact the obedience of the doctors to its members.
7
It is important to stress that at first the student guild at Bologna was a mutual benefit society designed
85
to give its members protection under city law and to provide a measure of defence against hostile parties.
The student movement did not, from the start, set out to gain control over the university and its teaching
staff. There was no blueprint plan as to how a university ought to be organised. Possibly the students never
90
thought about this. But in order to survive they had to adopt a trade union attitude and carve out for
themselves a position of strength within the university. Once this had been attained the momentum of their
power could not be stemmed. In the course of the thirteenth century the students moved from the defensive
95
to the offensive and this resulted in their winning the initiative in university affairs: this was the first