Tradition places the emergence of the first university in Bologna, a city in present-day Italy, in 1088, around the time a teacher named Irnerio gave private lessons in Roman law to students from different parts of Europe. This chair was a completely innovative development, in a context in which that ancient way of understanding law was almost forgotten. The Code of Justinian, which brought together almost everything the Roman Empire had developed in terms of law, had been lost for centuries and was rediscovered only in the seventies of the first century of the second millennium.
The reappearance of the body of law that had made it possible to regulate an entire empire could not have come at a better time: it fit perfectly with the Catholic Church’s claim to strengthen its unity to confront the powerful monarchies that were emerging. It also suited its need to strengthen its presence, govern its subjects, and reorder its relationship with its opponents.
Just as countries today tend to dissolve into global regions, the small kingdoms that had been sprouting here and there were now grouped under the rule of the new monarchs. This growing unity gave the population confidence, and they began to move more freely and gather in larger groups based on common interests. These groups attracted more people, both within and around them, leading to the development of the first cities and new ways of life tied to the growing exchange of goods, knowledge, and services.
However, although they brought great advantages, these drastic changes also increased tension both within and outside these populations. Stability and well-being were certainly growing, but—as in our day—the powerful had become more so, and conflicts between them threatened to worsen beyond those that, for at least eight centuries, had turned Europe into a field of war.
The continent had only recently entered a stage of relative stability and prosperity; it had to be preserved. In this context, the reappearance of the Code of Justinian sparked hope and drew worldwide attention. It was then that Master Irnerius, who had specialized in studying, commenting on, and teaching the Code, became an “institution” in his own right, and Bologna became the first European center where people from all over could go to study this new type of law. What would later be called a university began not with a complex institutional structure, but with the personal relationship between a teacher and his group of students.
This model was soon replicated in many places, with teaching extending beyond Roman law to various disciplines. The boom it achieved forced teachers and students to formalize their relationships and create increasingly well-organized communities. These comprised so-called universitas, which means, precisely, community.
We like to think that the synergy between that contradictory society and these educational centers was explosive. Sixty years after Irnerio began his adventure in Bologna, Europe was already a hotbed of cities, markets, migrant populations, money in circulation, novel products, and amazing technologies (among them, paper, which would accelerate the spread of knowledge).
But so many sudden changes also brought with them unprecedented needs. It would be difficult to exaggerate the intensity of what was emerging. Urbanization, overcrowding, trade, and innumerable exchanges with people from different regions (including some very remote ones) had altered the population’s health conditions and caused new diseases to appear. These, along with the lack of a legal system with sufficient scope, posed the greatest risks at that time.
A second competing challenge appeared in religion. The church, once dispersed across small kingdoms, with a relatively common creed but a wide diversity of practices and even beliefs, now saw the urgency of unifying dogma, doctrine, and ritual, and of propagating them among an immense and dispersed population. Without this unity, it would be impossible to stop its increasingly voracious political opponents.
Another issue was security. Of course, it is not surprising, much less to us, that social changes are accompanied by an increase in organized crime (the inhabitants of the twenty-first century have much similar experience). Life became a constant buzz of alarm about highway robbers, naval pirates, kidnappers, extortionists, counterfeiters (of currency, documents, products), smugglers, tax evaders…, all of them, obviously, in collusion with rulers, merchants, the military, and members of the church.
In such a world (and here too the similarity with the present is no mere coincidence), it was vital to know what was happening in other regions and what could happen in one’s own. Then came a boom in communication, fueled by the immense spiderweb of roads built for trade. Wandering along them, a veritable network of town criers, messengers, orators, pilgrims, merchants, and passersby flooded the cities, initiating a frenetic flow of news, rumors, messages, and warnings.
As the twin brother of that information boom, the art of troubadours, minstrels, and other theatrical figures also flourished. They went from town to town and city to city, turning that whirlwind of news into stories, songs, and shows and making the din more digestible. Their songs, unlike the ecclesiastical ones, were not in Latin but in the people’s languages, and they related not only biblical stories but also present events, with full validity. Their innovative poetic resources (rhymes, metrics, stanzas, verbal architecture) and their unprecedented virtuosity in theatrical art constituted true communication and entertainment technology, not unlike today’s fantastic creations of artificial intelligence.
Given all the above, is it necessary to explain the urgency, for these people, of expanding the universitas and intensifying their programs to train more people capable of regulating the new reality? Society needed more experts; moreover, it was important that these experts, who often came from distant places, be supported by reliable authorities who would accredit them, urgently, as I say, to occupy administrative positions, judge crimes, build roads, philosophize about the foundations of the faith, heal people, compose songs and poems, make speeches, calculate transactions, and gather disciples to teach them all these arts.
Thus, from the germ of those incipient communities formed around Irnerio and other teachers, the great institutions of learning emerged and, over time, became modern universities.
The idealized image of those first universities paints them as centers of knowledge safeguarded by serene, eloquent sages, monks studying by candlelight, and young men absorbed in reading and discussing books. But that image is more symbolic than real. Symbolic, because we would all like human knowledge to be, truly, protected in that way, with unfathomable devotion. Given the value that we sense these hold, we envision the wise as bottomless wells of knowledge, where the best in us is kept.
But the truth is that, although universities are undoubtedly that (almost sacred guardians of knowledge), they are also many other things, some very prosaic and others, really, disturbing. All of them are mixed with that first vocation of stewardship, and it is not uncommon for them to overshadow, hide, and even corrupt it. Universities have always been a kind of experimental, and often explosive, melting pot of the human condition.
Yesterday and today, higher education institutions have had phases in which the transmission of knowledge focuses on resolving urgent social problems (or what those in power deem urgent) and becomes a kind of training for standard experts. Teaching transforms into indoctrination. Its function is to provide students with all the resources to renounce their autonomy and adopt the system’s way of life as their own.
In these contexts, the intrinsic nature of knowledge is no longer assessed; instead, the extrinsic aspects are evaluated. Exams function as tests that certify whether your knowledge is up to date and whether you are competent in this world. Teachers, despite their personal knowledge, cease to be living sources of knowledge and become intermediaries. The goal is to meet standards, no matter how. The intimacy of oral teaching and its power of transmission, exclusive to class time (an intimacy that can reach levels of initiation), falls into oblivion. Human experience, subjective and lived (existential, let’s say), fits in the classroom only if it has been standardized and quantified.
Personality and one’s own voice are hidden. Now it is about a quick exchange. Fast school, we can call it. Grades, degrees, credentials, and credits are currency that makes people comparable and, therefore, more easily selectable by the social system that requires them. The potential employer no longer values knowledge and is only interested in knowing how well the graduate can move through the economic system; that is, how much he will be able to fulfill, obey, and adapt in the scope of his work; if he will be able to finish tasks “on time and in a proper manner,” follow orders and guidelines, work with teams of people, and tolerate unforeseen – and even arbitrary – changes in time, space, direction, and even premises, values, and goals. To this, the university, of course, will have added specific knowledge about certain subjects, without delving into topics that are not going to be applied in practice: no historical background, theory, or contexts that do not “contribute” to the specific – almost always quantifiable – result that is sought!
In short: from their origin and for long periods, universities have experienced moments of high tension between wisdom and performance. The university degree has always represented a difficult-to-balance combination of both. In their best moments, institutions train wise men and, at the same time, provide social trust, reducing the community’s uncertainty about the aptitudes of its members. Young people who enter their classrooms as illustrious unknowns graduate as socially recognizable subjects. However, they are not always only this. As we have seen, sometimes the molding process takes them to a lamentable extreme: predictability. In such cases, the university replaces true human trust with certification.
Thus, although higher education institutions reconcile two vocations, that of being the critical conscience of society and that of being an entity that trains useful people, too often one is emphasized, even radicalized, and the institution loses its autonomy and becomes intertwined with some dominant interest. Then, the universality of the university gives way to standardization, the teacher/disciple relationship is reduced to that of evaluator/evaluated, and the search for truth is abandoned in favor of chasing credit.
It should be added that this dramatic vision of the university (made, I know, very bird’s-eye view) would lose veracity if it were limited to describing only the two pillars that I have mentioned. There is another pillar, one that adds a third dimension to what I have been proposing (I like this third dimension because it suggests a sense of depth, inseparable from the educational experience). That third pillar is something like everyday depth, life in its daily flow, the kind that refuses to be shaped by knowledge, and much more to be driven by objectives and purposes. John Lennon described it well when he said that life is what happens while we are making plans; I would add that, also, while we are “knowing.” Students, teachers, university authorities, governors, and employers (today and always) may have many plans and knowledge for themselves and others, but in the end, life happens in its own way, in each of their lives. In addition to being a “temple of knowledge” and a “skills workshop,” the university is the place where we spend our daily lives. In its spaces, students fall in love, make friends, flee family boredom, postpone adulthood and its responsibilities, learn tricks (which they sometimes turn into skills), and reinvent what they call a profession. Teachers also create relationships, form communities outside the classroom with their students, protect them, reinterpret programs and escape the lack of freedom with a thousand subterfuges. These underground shelters, which all university students create and discover, are the ones that, in the end, together with their knowledge and obligations, make the university “experience a true biographical transformation” (I confess that this beautiful phrase was given to me by my AI assistant). John Dewey (who, by the way, is one of the most distinguished assessors of that assistant of mine) sums it up like this: “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
Karl Jaspers, the German philosopher, thought that higher education should not only produce specialists, but also human beings capable of confronting the ultimate questions of existence. I believe these questions are precisely what we seek to answer when we immerse ourselves in these three dimensions of university life: everyday life, essential knowledge, and future usefulness. The fact that education is increasingly reduced to the latter is a serious deviation from the university spirit.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
