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Student power in middle ages

by Allan B. Cobban

1 Student power is virtually coeval with the emergence of the medieval universities. In southern Europe it became endemic, in one form or another, for about 200 years. The motives that gave rise to medieval

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

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

prevailing order of things; it seems to have been either a defence mechanism or was channelled towards the winning of greater student participation inuniversity structures.

2 For the majority of medieval undergraduates education was a severely practical business; there was

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

 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

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

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

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.

It is important to stress that at first the student guild at Bologna was a mutual benefit society designed

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

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

to the offensive and this resulted in their winning the initiative in university affairs: this was the first student take-over bid in European history.

Although the teaching doctors had to accept the reality of student power they never conceded its

legality: that is to say, they contested the alleged right of the students to organise themselves into guilds with elected officers, statutes and legal independence. It was argued that the students by themselves did not constitute a profession: students were merely the pupils of the doctors, the academic equivalents of trade

apprentices and, as such, were devoid of professional status. But the reluctance to give a legal recognition to the student guild could not check student militancy and the teaching doctors were forced to acquiesce in a university situation wherein they were very obviously employed as the functionaries of the students.

    9  It needs to be stated that a fair number of the Bologna law students were older than the majority of students in northern Europe. It has been reckoned that their average age lay between eighteen and twenty-five, and some were on the borders of thirty upon entry to the university. And it is established that a

sizeable proportion held ecclesiastical benefices or offices upon their enrolment as law students, and that a significant number of them were laymen from easy social backgrounds. It is clear, then, that many of the

Bologna law students were young men of substance with experience of the world and accustomed to administering responsible offices in society, all of which makes the fact of students controlling power in a university more intelligible.

 Under the student governmental system at Bologna the teaching doctors were excluded from voting

in the university assemblies, although they may have been allowed as a concession, to attend as observers. Yet all lecturers had to obey the statutory wisdom emanating from these student congregations. The students seem to have elected their prospective teachers several months in advance of the beginning of the

academic session in October. Upon election the successful doctors took an oath to submit to the student rector in all matters affecting the life of the university. Student controls over the lecturing system were impressive. The lecturer's life proceeded in an anxious atmosphere of impending fines. A lecturer was fined

if he started his lecture a minute late or if he continued after the prescribed time: indeed, if the latter occurred the students were required to leave the room without delay. At the opening of the academic session the students and the teaching doctors elected by the students reached agreement on how the

material of the lecture course was to be distributed over the year. The harassed lecturer had to reach stipulated points in the set texts by certain dates in the session. Failure to do so resulted in a heavy fine. It

would hardly be an exaggeration to say that lecturing performance in thirteenth-century Bologna was continuously assessed by the students on both a qualitative and quantitative basis. A doctor who glossed over a difficulty or who failed to assign an equal emphasis to all parts of the syllabus would incur financial

penalties. As a surety for his lecturing performance the lecturer, at the beginning of the session, had to deposit a specified sum with a city banker, acting for the students. From this deposit, a student review court would authorise the deduction of fines incurred by the lecturer for infringements of the statutes. If the fines

were of such an order of magnitude that the first deposit was used up, the lecturer was required to make a second deposit. Refusal to comply was pointless: no lecturer with fines outstanding was permitted to collect student fees for his teaching and thus his source of university income would be cut off. In any event,

a recalcitrant doctor could be rendered less obstinate by means of the student boycotting machinery which was fundamental to the workings of the student-university. Even in normal circumstances a lecturer had to have an audience of at least five students at every ordinary lecture: if he failed to attract that number he

himself was deemed to be absent and incurred the stipulated fine. This whole gamut of student controls was underpinned by a system of denunciations by secretly elected students who spied on the doctors. Controls extended even into private areas: for example, if a lecturer got married the students allowed him only one day and one night for his honeymoon.

From: History Today, Vol. 30, February 1980.

 


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