1. Universities: the first 2,500 years The history of the first 2,500 years of Universities in the west indicates that they are chaotic, impossible to eradicate, hard to control, and inner directed. The question is will they always be that way? 1

2. One way to ensure Universities retain their essential character Make sure that University management has a deep understanding of our history and is imbued with the desire to treasure it. ATEM runs a course in which it attempts to make sure this happens. First we suggest that University managers at all levels must do a lot of reading. 'A Suggested Reading List of the Classics in Tertiary Education Management‘ by Giles Pickford, Colin Plowman, Warwick Williams and Frank Hambly http://www.atem.org.au/activities_occasional_papers.cfm

3. Weekly Reading University World News http://www.universityworldnews.com The Higher Ed Supplement in Wednesday’s Australian Monday’s and Friday’s Australian Financial Review

4. Six times a year reading The Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management : the ATEM Journal posted to all ATEM Members by Routledge in the UK

5. The Ancient Greek Academies Early experiments: The Socratic Academy 640 BCE conducted in the Olive Grove of Hekademus outside the walls of Athens The Aristotelian Academy 350 BCE conducted in the Lyceum of Athens The Dark Ages 467 AD: invasions of the Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns, Gauls, Vandals, Vikings and Serbs. The works of Ancient Greece were preserved by the Jews of Spain, who were expelled by King Ferdinand, and were taken in by the Arabs of Damascus and the Uzbeks of Samarkand

6. Socrates and Aristotle The first Philosopher and the first scientist

7. The Socratic Method The Socratic method is a form of inquiry and debate between individuals with opposing viewpoints based on asking and answering questions to stimulate rational thinking and to illuminate ideas. These discussions were informal colloquia or symposia. The latter involved wine. They focussed on logic and abstraction.

8. Aristotle’s Contribution He was a student of Plato and tutored Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theatre, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. His method was observation of the natural world rather than abstract speculation.

9. Bologna: the start of the modern University in 1088 There were precursors of the modern University in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indus; and in China, Greece, France and Scandinavia

10. The Church’s contribution The oldest surviving institution in the world is the Army, second oldest is the Church. The University, invented by the students of Bologna and permitted by the Bishop of Bologna, is the third oldest surviving institution in the world. The concept was Universitas di Studorum, a community of scholars where the Student Guilds employed the teachers. Later this became universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning “community of teachers and scholars” All the oldest Universities had the local Bishop as their Chancellor. They fostered the free and open investigations of the intellect. Something that the Church itself was not free to do within its own traditions.

11. Machiavelli and Petrarch

12. The Politician and the Poet The two most famous graduates of Bologna were Machiavelli the first political scientist and Petrarch, one of the finest poets of all time. There were various disturbances in Bologna which led many students to move to Paris. These students were followed by their Professors, because the students paid them. No Students: no money. So nothing has changed. All real universities create disturbances.

13. University of Paris 1160 Eloise and Abelard

14. The Teachers take Control The Teachers took control and created the apprentice- journeyman-master model. The apprentice’s Trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric; the journeyman’s Quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music; and the professional subjects of theology, law and medicine Abelard was a brilliant Philosophy teacher who was very popular. He fell in love with the Bishop’s Daughter Eloise. There was a scandal. The Bishop ordered his men to castrate Abelard. Eloise, heart-broken entered a Convent. There were more disturbances and many students left and went to Oxford.

15. The University of Oxford

16. The University of Oxford Founded 1167 by the Franciscan Friars The earliest Oxford riot recorded was in 1209 and such events continued for a century and a half until the great riot and massacre of St. Scholastica's Day, 1335, which went on for three days. The dispute arose from a disagreement between a landlord and some students in a tavern near Carfax. It resulted in the students setting fire to the town, the townsfolk plundering the students' hostels and sixty-three scholars being killed.

17. Oxford 1209: The Saint Scholastica Day Massacre

18. University of Cambridge 1209

19. The Cambridge Disturbances Some years later similar riots broke out in Cambridge and the townspeople petitioned the King (Edward Longshanks – the Hammer of the Scots) asking him to revoke the University’s charter. The King’s response was to issue an edict saying that in the event of a dispute between town and gown the gown was to prevail. This was an age when the dominant view was that the purpose of industry and commerce was to create prosperity in order to support the quest for knowledge. This contrasts sharply with the present view, which is that the purpose of tertiary education is to support industry and commerce.

20. The Modern Universities The first 400 years 1088 University of Bologna 1150 University of Paris 1167 University of Oxford 1175 University of Modena 1209 University of Cambridge 1218 University of Salamanca 1220 University of Montpellier 1222 University of Padua 1224 University of Naples 1229 University of Toulouse 1240 University of Siena 1209 University of Coimbra 1293 University of Madrid 1300 University of Lleida Closed by the King in 1717 reopened 1972, 255 years later 1303 University of Rome 1308 University of Perugia 1336 University of Camerino 1343 University of Pisa 1348 Charles University of Prague 1361 University of Pavia 1364 Jagellonian University of Krakow 1365 University of Vienna 1367 University of Pécs, Hungary 1386 Ruprecht Karls University of Heidelberg 1391 University of Ferrara 1402 University of Wurzberg 1409 University of Leipzig 1412 University of St Andrews 1419 University of Rostock 1425 University of Leuven 1431 University of Poitiers 1434 University of Catania 1451 University of Glasgow 1456 University of Greifswald 1457 University of Freiburg 1460 University of Basel 1477 Uppsala University, Sweden 1477 University of Tubingen 1479 University of Copenhagen 1494 University of Aberdeen

21. The Craft Guilds: The origin of Technical Education Technical Education began in the middle ages (13 th & 14 th Centuries) in Britain. It advanced more dramatically in Scotland and Wales than England. France and Germany overtook England in Technical Education. By the time of the Exhibition of 1851 it was clear that Britain was in decline from neglecting technical education and relying on the fruits of Empire for its prosperity.

22. The Craft Guilds The organisation of a guild was precisely defined into three hierarchical categories or classes: namely the livery, the freeman and the apprentice. The liveries were people who had established businesses and it was from this category that the Master, the Wardens and the Court of Assistants were elected. They were totally responsible for the organisation and management of a particular guild including the setting of standards, prices and wages.

23. The Freemen and the Apprentices The next category was the Freemen who were bound absolutely to a guild and were referred to as the Journeymen Craftsmen. The final category comprised the Apprentices or trainees who were bound or indentured to a master craftsman for seven years.

24. The Mechanics Institutes 1800-1850 TAFE began in Scotland George Birkbeck, then Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Anderson Institution in Glasgow, founded the movement in 1800. He began formal instruction for workmen and artisans in the scientific principles that were used in their trades. The workers paid a small fee to become members and attend the classes. Following his move to London other institutions were established. By 1824 institutes were established in a number of principal towns and cities including Aberdeen, Leeds, Lancaster and Newcastle and in 1825 in Manchester, Norwich, Birmingham and Devonport. As a result by 1850 around 610 institutes existed with a membership over 600,000. A number of Universities and Colleges began as Mechanics Institutes.

25. The Emergence of Research Degrees At what point did Scholarship become Research? In the 19 th Century at the University of Berlin the German PhD was invented. It was to become the dominant model for research degrees world-wide It was a degree awarded to younger students who had completed a prescribed course of graduate study and successfully defended a thesis or dissertation containing original research in science or in the humanities. In Germany there has never been a time limit for a candidate for the PhD.

26. Wilhelm Von Humboldt The Architect of German Higher Education

27. The University of Sydney 1850

28. The University of Sydney Founded for the same reasons as the University of Western Sydney today During 1848, William Wentworth proposed a plan in the Legislative Council to expand the existing Sydney College into a university. Wentworth argued that a state university was imperative for the growth of a society aspiring towards self- government, and that it would provide the opportunity for 'the child of every class, to become great and useful in the destinies of his country'. It would take two attempts on Wentworth's behalf however, before the plan was finally adopted. The University was established via the passage of the University of Sydney Act in October 1850. Two years later, the University was inaugurated on October 1852 in the Big Schoolroom of what is now Sydney Grammar School. In February1858, the University received its Royal Charter from Queen Victoria, giving degrees conferred by the University equal rank and recognition as those given by universities in the UK [Royal Charter of the University of Sydney]. By 1859, the university had moved to its current site in the Sydney suburb of Camperdown. The University was secular from the beginning and admitted students regardless of social status.

29. So what is a University and what it is not? Universities resemble self-assembling molecules which essentially means they are uncontrollable and indestructible. When they are closed by Tyrants they go underground where they can live indefinitely. In terms of modern management science no-one has ever been able to describe how the University of Cambridge is organised (a comment by a Cambridge Don at a Conference in Prague) Is a university a series of inner directed, loosely coupled systems?

30. Extract from Moo: a novel “Over the years everyone around the university had given free rein to his or her desires, and the institution had, with a fine, trembling, responsiveness, answered, ‘Why Not?’ It had become, more than anything, a vast network of interlocking wishes, some of them modest, some of them impossible, many of them conflicting, many of them complementary.”

31. What a University is Not Above all it is not a business Businesses are not predominantly funded by the Government as a public good. Businesses usually close after going broke; their main aim in life is profit; they do not overthrow regimes; they are not interested in abstract ideas; their membership is not composed mostly of school leavers; they rarely own extensive libraries, museums, galleries; they are not created by Acts of Parliament; they do not publish their discoveries (except for Google!); they do not regard the CEO as the first amongst equals; they do not make most of their important decisions below the level of their governing body.

32. What makes them so different? “It is important to remember that whatever policy- driven demands are placed on universities and whatever the desire to mandate particular outcomes, the space of university endeavour is essentially one where discoveries cannot be determined in advance and where the consequences of the encounter (a) between minds; (b) between a mind, a problem and evidence; and (c) between the minds of successive generations are profoundly and marvellously unpredictable. They are the very conditions of creativity.” Geoffrey Bolton and Sir Colin Lucas.

33. The Need to Discover “All entirely new ideas are born out of chaos. Order merely begets more order and nothing changes.” Friedrich Nietzsche Chaos is an absolutely essential characteristic of Universities. Managers find this very hard to understand, but they should not try to resist it.

34. Who are the owners of the University? The University is neither an agency of the state nor a servant of the people because it has an end in itself which is knowledge, the seeking, sharing and imparting of knowledge. In its unceasing quest for, and love of, knowledge the university is a harmonious whole in which all of its disciplines have their own perfection. When a university preserves its unique identity and is granted the freedom and resources to do so, the state and its citizens always reap a rich and noble harvest. It is a harvest beyond measure. From John Molony’s 10 th Anniversary Address to the ANU Emeritus Faculty July 2010

35. Governments can do nothing Determinants of a university’s reputation, the eminence of its staff, the quality of its graduates and the importance of its research are all made in an international context. It is like the interest rate. It is NOT a Government decision. All Government can do is foster the Universities and endure the disturbances that they cause. When the government Ministers tell you that they are forcing universities to be accountable and transparent, don’t believe it. They are doing their best to impose a suffocating order and to stifle creativity. All Governments are control freaks, which is fine if you are running a gaol, but not a university. The State always wants to know that it is getting value for money. That is OK. We should be telling the State that they give us a few billion dollars and we give them a civilisation. It is the best deal for the tax payer that they can ever get. Universities flourish when left to their own devises and decline under constant interference. But they always outlast their enemies. Acknowledgement: I have drawn on Dr Barry Cameron’s paper “Students, Traditions and Transition” given at the 3 rd Queensland State Conference of ATEM in April 1986.