University

an institution of higher learning. The word is derived from the Latin, meaning a union, and we may add, for the purpose of study and instruction. The name was adopted first by students' associations or guilds. Later it passed to the institution. The oldest university is that of Cairo, Egypt, founded in 988. It is still attended by 9,000 students. The earliest European university was that of Salerno, Italy. It became known as a school of medicine in the ninth century and continued until 1817. It appears to have been managed liberally. Jews, then a hated and despised people, were admitted both as students and as professors. The models of all the older universities in Europe were Bologna, Paris, and Oxford. Bologna made a specialty of law; Paris of theology.

Carrying out the original meaning of the word, the Bologna institution early had at least four universities or students' guilds. The students at Paris were associated likewise and naturally into four universities, unions or nations--the French nation, including Italians and Spaniards, the Picard nation, representing the students from the northeast and the Netherlands, the Norman nation, and the English nation, the latter including students from Ireland and Scotland. All these associations grew up out of the natural desire of students to associate and live with their own countrymen. The students were ordinarily full-grown men, often graybeards. They came great distances, and remained perhaps for years. Instruction was given by lectures in the Latin tongue. The subjects taught usually included grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geography, music, astronomy, theology, law, and medicine. Save such instruction as was given here and there by some studious and pious monk, there were no preparatory schools or common schools abroad. This was shown in the founding of the University of Leipsic in 1409. The Saxon, Pole, and Bavarian elements, becoming dissatisfied with the domination of the Bohemian element in the University of Prague, seceded and marched in a body to Leipsic.

Some of the older universities were Prague, Vienna, Heidelberg, Erfurt, Leipsic, Basle, Tubingen, Mainz, and Cambridge. Following Bologna, Paris, and Oxford as their models, forty new universities were established in the fifteenth century, the century in which America was discovered. They formed a strong factor in the changes that came over Europe. After the fall of Constantinople many learned Greeks, driven from their homes, brought Greek into prominence in the western universities.

At first the university consisted rather of the students, but custom now applies the word to buildings, outfit, students, and faculty taken as a whole. As distinguished from a college, a university is held to comprise more than one faculty. Properly speaking, we may have colleges of law, medicine, engineering, the liberal arts, etc. An institution comprising several colleges is entitled to adopt the word university. An institution practically of one college manifests self-respect by adopting the name of college. Omitting the summer session enrollment, the attendance at the leading American universities for 1908 was as follows:

See Sorbonne; Upsala; Oxford; Cambridge; Paris; Yale; Harvard; Michigan; Vassar; Dartmouth; Johns Hopkins; Leland Stanford