Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities

The Museum inspired copies at the administrative centres of Antioch, Ephesus, Smyrna, Seleucia, and Rhodes. The Attalids of Pergamum in Anatolia (in modern Turkey) imitated the Alexandrian example by creating a medical school and magnificent library, an environment of learning that centuries later nurtured the Pergamum native, the famous physician Galen (ca.129–ca.200). A second-century contemporary of Galen’s, the great thinker Claudius Ptolemy (ca.100–ca.170, not related to the royal family) held a professorship at the Alexandrian Museum, part of the small number of chairs in philosophy that Egypt’s nonresident monarchs, the Romans, had financed. After AD 200, however, the Museum began to lose some of its intellectual centrality, despite the extraordinary achievements of Ptolemy. Galen’s writings suggest as much, because he visited the Museum and wrote disparagingly about its physicians. Alexandria’s Museum – with its hundreds of thousands of rolls of books and its heritage in speculative philosophy, with its tradition of high-table meals and sparkling dinner conversation – is a distant mirror of twentieth-century universities. It is difficult to say how much was left of the library and its intellectual circle when Caliph Umar, following a tradition of book burnings stretching from the pre-Socratics through the early Christian zealots, ordered a perhaps largely symbolic purification by fire in AD 646.

Although the ancient museums appear much like the best of our universities today, their line to the present is broken. The medieval arts and philosophy faculties in Europe were not exactly corporations for generating new knowledge; indeed, they owe more to secondary-school instruction in antiquity than they do to the academies and museums. In their final form the seven liberal arts (the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics or music; and the trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic), which formed the base of medieval university instruction, may be traced to schools of the first century BC. By the imperial Roman period, however, in the schools that retailed these liberal arts, literary studies overwhelmed natural sciences. Like their European successors, Hellenistic and Roman engineers, surveyors, and sailors learned their craft apprentice-style.

The schools of higher learning at Athens, Rome, and elsewhere (or rather, the collection of professors of grammar, rhetoric, law, and medicine at these locations) continued into the sixth century AD, when they were extinguished by Christian fanaticism or barbarian neglect. But the classical tradition nevertheless survived for a thousand years, in Constantinople. Between 425 and 1453, diverse classically inspired schools provided the administrative elite of Byzantium.

The warriors of the Fourth Crusade turned their attention to the conquest of Byzantium. They sacked Constantinople in 1204 and then set about to conquer the outlying provinces. The first Latin emperor of Byzantium, Baldwin I, asked Pope Innocent III to send professors from the University of Paris to found a Latin institute in Constantinople. Innocent agreed to the plan. Also in the thirteenth century, Paris founded a Collegium Constantinopolitanum, designed to lodge and train a score of Byzantine clerics. When Michael Paleologus recaptured Constantinople in 1261, he revived higher learning by appointing George Acropolita (1217–1282, a politician, general, and historian, whom he had freed from prison) to the chair of Aristotelian philosophy. Acropolita also served as ambassador to Rome, effecting a reconciliation of sorts between the eastern and western churches. Twelfth-century Europeans knew about classical learning thanks to hundreds of years of translation from Arabic, but Aristotle entered the fledgling European universities on the tide of Greek learning that issued from Byzantium. It is possible that the notion of European faculties of higher learning – variously guaranteed by church and state – derives from Byzantine precedent.

Eastern cultures

Learned colleges appeared in other ancient civilizations, such as South Asia. The end of the Vedic period in India, about 500 BC, saw the emergence of a wandering brotherhood of secular teachers, the vadins. They codified their teachings when imaginative literature began to appear in writing, which until then had been used for administration, commerce, and music. The vadins were in some measure South Asian Sophists, and their activity led to the great schools of Jainism and Buddhism. Jainism, founded by Vardhamana Mahavira, and Buddhism, the teachings of the fifth-century BC Gautama Buddha, both questioned the polytheistic divinities and hierarchical social structure of Vedic traditionalists. For both religious teachers, enlightenment resulted from individual study. Jainist asceticism spread by mass education, while Buddhist thought was concentrated in monastic orders.

With the progressive expansion of Buddhism came the revival of Sanskrit – the language of the Vedic commentaries – as a learned lingua franca. The fusion of Buddhism and Vedic traditions around 1200 led to classical Hinduism, with three kinds of educational institution. First (and especially in northern India) were the Gurukula schools, small groups of pupils gathered around a private teacher; astronomy was part of the curriculum. Second were the Hindu temple schools of southern India, inspired by the Buddhist monastic seminaries and supported by land grants; natural sciences seem not to have figured in the syllabus, but because the temple schools had hospitals we may imagine that they incorporated medical instruction. Third were the agrahara centres designed to spread Brahmanic learning. These Hindu schools were pale reflections of the Buddhist colleges that had functioned within grand monasteries since the fifth century. Nalanda (located south of Patna in Bihar, eastern India), one of the most famous of these monasteries, had 10,000 inhabitants at the end of the seventh century; of these as many as 1500 were teachers and about one third were students. It was at Nalanda in the seventh century that the Chinese scholar I-hsing (672–717) copied 400 Sanskrit texts.

Natural sciences in South Asia found their firmest supporters not in schools, but in family-controlled guilds. Astronomical knowledge, for example, was a guild secret. The restricted nature of certain kinds of natural knowledge also coloured science instruction at Chinese colleges. Insofar as we have certain knowledge of them, Chinese institutions of higher learning may be traced to the philosophical schools formed at the time of the Warring States, from 475 BC to 221 BC, when kingdoms large and small contested for supremacy. Teachers were required to train and discipline a civilian bureaucracy, and states naturally competed to recruit teachers who could transform administrative norms into ethical principles. The resulting philosophical free-for-all is known as the time of the Hundred Schools. In terms of the multiplicity of sectarian doctrine, the Hundred Schools seem not unlike the late Hellenic period. A handful of the Hundred Schools survived a period of internecine warfare and continued to have an impact long into a time of imperial rule, indeed, up to the present: the Confucianists, the Legalists, the Mohists, the Taoists, the Logicians and the Naturalists.

The Confucianists, followers of Master Kung, held that virtue could be acquired by learning, although his disciples, from Mencius to Xun Zi, differed about how much education might do for people. Legalists, under Han Feizi, believed in the literal interpretation of legal canons and the inflexible application of jurisprudence, a procedure offered to make law both equitable and independent of executive privileges. Mohists, followers of Mo Zi, proclaimed a religious vision of love and encouraged technological improvements that would defend the weak against the strong. Taoists, tracing their origin to the teachings of Lao Zi, advocated the dissolution of reason in ascetic spirituality; their disengagement from the mechanism of statecraft translated into an antipathy for mechanical contrivance, but their quest for a state of grace led Taoists to experiment with therapeutic regimes for extending and improving life. Logicians, followers of Hui Shih and Kungsun Lung, emphasized a search for generalized concepts transcending the ephemeral particular. The Naturalists elaborated the theories of the two forces (Yin and Yang) and the Five Elements (water, fire, wood, metal, earth), attributed to their master Tsou Yen; in contrast to the other schools, they actively sought to advise heads of state.

As in Hellenistic times with the schools of Athens, the Hundred Schools came together in a secular institution of higher learning, the Academy of the Gate of Chi, located in the capital of the State of Chhi. Founded by King Hsüan about 318 BC, and perhaps inspired by one of its fellows, the naturalist Tsou Yen, the academy assembled scholars of many persuasions and from diverse states. These included Taoists, Mohists, and the great Confucian scholar Mencius. Fellows wore special, flat caps and apparently had no obligations beyond advice-giving; they could aspire to the title of grand prefect.

The Academy of the Gate of Chi – the Chinese counterpart to the Museum of Alexandria – did not survive the imperial unification that ended the Warring States period. The grand victor, Chhin Shih Huang Ti, organized an imperial bureaucracy, brought the defeated aristocracy to heel at his court, expanded public works, maintained a large army, and engineered the great northern wall. As part of his codification of laws and rites, he ordered the destruction by burning of all books except his own archives and treatises on medicine, divination, and agriculture. Along with purging wrong words, the new potentate executed wrong-thinking scholars. Chhin Shih Huang Ti died about 210 BC, barely fifteen years after unifying China; his successor, a usurper son, lasted four years more before the Chhin empire (and its academy) dissolved in social disintegration and revolt.

Liu Pang, an escapee from death row, emerged from the ruins of the Chhin to found the Han empire in 202 BC. His dynasty invented ‘classical’ China. Genuine concern for preserving what the Chhin had condemned (and not entirely eradicated) is found in the establishment of an imperial school (Ta Hsüeh) in 124 BC, with various chairs (occupied by professors, po shih); its aim was to produce functionaries. The Han school produced scholars for the imperial regime, and they were selected by examination. Students received honorary titles commensurate with their test results; the best of them landed positions in the central bureaucracy. (The whole process was sped by the invention of paper, traditionally attributed to Tshai Lun late in the first century AD.) Various accounts describe an impressive campus, with entry restricted to the sons of noble or administrative families. Although students paid no fees, they were required upon arrival to offer gifts to their professors.

Buddhism made its appearance in China by the third century AD. Its ascetic and non-aggressive doctrine found popularity at the time of material dislocation surrounding the collapse of the Han empire into competing kingdoms. In disunited China there were significant attempts at promoting institutions of higher learning, but the instaurations all seem to resemble the various ephemeral and unsuccessful universities of medieval Europe. Around the beginning of the fifth century, for example, the Northern Wei established an imperial school in their capital; the name soon changed to the Central Book School, reflecting its concern with the Confucian classics, for which an anthology, or codex, had recently been prepared.

Chinese civilization emerged from divisions and rivalries to create a golden age under the autocratic Sui and then the Thang. About 583 the first Sui emperor, Wen Ti, revived the nobles’ school (Kuo Hsüeh), a school for meritorious commoners (T’ai Hsüeh), and a preparatory school (the Four Gates School), each of which had five professors; he also created for the first time a separate mathematics school with two professors. The purpose of higher education under the Thang was still to prepare students for a government position, and this could be attained by success in a national examination. An inflexible form of this system emerged much later, in the Yüan, when the mandarinate drew exclusively from students who had mastered the Confucian classics. The system did not entirely ignore natural knowledge (from the Thang onward there were separate mathematics examinations), but science undoubtedly constituted the lowest path to success.

A later Thang emperor, Hsüan Tsung, assembled an independent group of high officials to advise him in scholarly matters – the Hanlin (literally, ‘Forest of Pencils’). The Hanlin Academy, as it came to be called, emerged as the premier learned authority in China. Awarded the title of Learned Scholar in 738, Hanlin associates – men who were practical as well as erudite – became, by the middle of the century, China’s court society of government advisers. Hanlin academicians were charged with emending and authenticating the Confucian corpus that served as the basis of the civil-service examinations. By the Ming period, membership was an exclusive prerogative of senior and accomplished scholars. The Academy extended its authority straight through the Chhing (Manchu), and it expired only in 1911.

The Hanlin Academy regulated orthodox scholarship. Furthermore, the genre of scholarship to be regulated – the Confucian classics – offered scant place for treatises in natural knowledge. The Hanlin did, however, directly supervise an advanced imperial school, revived in the middle of the eighth century, and over the next five hundred years there are persistent intrusions of extra Confucian discourses into diverse state schools. In part this reflects the syncretic evolution of devotional thought, where Buddhist and Taoist notions were incorporated into Confucianism; in part it was a desire to train adepts in medicine, agriculture, and possibly also geography. The time of the Yüan, under the Mongols, again saw the introduction of foreign ideas, the expected result of an empire that stretched from Budapest to the Pacific Ocean. Interest in things Islamic continued with the establishment of the Ming dynasty in 1368. As Chinese traditions merged with those of the Mongols, it becomes appropriate to turn to the institutions of higher learning in medieval Islam.

Islam

A little more than a hundred years after the death of Muhammad in 632, Muslim rule in the form of the caliphate (the successors of the prophet) extended from Samarqand to Barcelona, stopped only by the Byzantines and the Franks. After a century or so of imperial rule, the caliphate devolved into a number of autonomous kingdoms and regimes, the periphery seceding first, organized under a diverse spectrum of caliphs, sultans, maliks, emirs, wazirs, and so on. The notion of a pan-Islamic world survived internecine wars and foreign invasions. Islamic rights were not restricted by political regime, and they entailed no national citizenship. All Muslims were equal before Quranic law in any Muslim jurisdiction, and this equality received continual reinforcement from trade and from the experience of the hadj, the pilgrimage to Mecca made by pious Muslims.

Because there was no Islamic pope to decide doctrinal matters (and disputes about dogma precipitated a number of schisms beginning with the earliest caliphs), the teaching of Islamic law became a practical necessity. By the ninth century, nonresidential law schools, or masjids, retailing Islamic knowledge in the context of everyday problems, emerged in association with mosques in most large Islamic centres; students lived in khans, nonprofit Islamic hostels for pilgrims and transients. From the masjid and the khan came the madrasa, the signal educational institution of Islam. It dominated learned life from the end of the tenth century until the nineteenth century.

Masjids and madrasas owed their existence to the charitable donation, or waqf. The usual inspirations for charity – piety and pride – lie behind the endowment of madrasas, but Islamic law provided special encouragement for it. A waqf donation, made in person or in a will, circumvented the divisions of an estate among a man’s sons, which resulted in the dissolution of private fortunes. By analogy with today’s philanthropies, an Islamic waqf could prevent fortunes from being taxed. Furthermore, the donor exercised complete liberty about the conditions of his waqf, provided that he did not contravene Islamic law. He could, for example, purchase or construct an institution, endow it, install himself as director, and specify that direction pass to his descendants. The waqf was inviolate, and it could be broken only if its object was heretical or uncharitable. It comes as no surprise that breaking a waqf – like breaking a modern will – was a regular occurrence.

The madrasas were waqf-endowed colleges for Islamic wisdom, complete with buildings, libraries, curators, service staff, dormitories, and (one imagines) dining commons. Professors and fellows, appointed by terms of the waqf, taught students in numbers from a dozen to more than a hundred. The madrasas had no corporate identity beyond the terms of the waqf, however; Islamic law gave rights only to individuals. There were, then, no corporate diplomas. A disciple received a written commendation from an individual master, his madrasa professor. By implication, madrasas had no sinecures. A professor was paid not to write books, but rather to train students in the art of debating Islamic truth. If he had no students, he could not receive a waqf-endowed salary, and the exercise of dazzling rhetoric was the way to attract students away from hundreds of competing madrasas.

The individualistic approach to higher learning (the lack of which in modern universities educators so often decry) extended to the matter of documentation. A madrasa student aspired to a certificate of mastery signed by a professor. The competent authority – always a man – authorized the acolyte to teach law or issue legal opinions. This licence to teach was a unique development. The Islamic certification, it may be argued, is the origin of the facultas ubique docendi – the authorization to teach a particular subject anywhere – issued corporately by professors or by the church at the early Christian universities in Europe.

The madrasa curriculum generally excluded the so-called ancient sciences, the inheritance from the schools and museums of the Hellenistic-Roman world, which in the ninth century, under the patronage of caliphs Harun al-Rashid and especially al-Mamûn, had been translated into Arabic. The exclusion has been seen as a conservative rejection of heretical, or at least contentious, doctrines. Yet the madrasas do seem to have instituted just the method of disputation that dominated the Hellenistic schools, survived into the late medieval period at Constantinople, and formed the basis of scholarly interchange at Christian universities in medieval Europe. Despite contempt for and amusement directed at the ancients, classical works in science did not suffer the opprobrium of a universal ban. Students informally read treatises in natural science and medicine with madrasa professors. Twelfth-century Iberian-based Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), known in the Latin world as Averroës, is illustrative. A professor of Islamic jurisprudence, he wrote major treatises on astronomy and medicine. Although his philosophical works were anathematized and burned at Córdoba in Spain, his writings on the ancients suffered no indignities.

Law – whether natural, conventional, or supernatural – requires a record of opinions, and for this reason large libraries were also a familiar feature of the ninth-century Islamic world. The most famous of these was the Bayt al-Hikmah, or Hall of Wisdom, founded by the caliph al-Mamûm at Baghdad, but it was by no means the only one – in Baghdad or elsewhere. In antiquity and the medieval world, libraries were places for all activities related to books, whether reading, copying, or convening seminars and debates. A library in tenth-century Basra even had a professor-in-residence who gave courses. We see something of this tradition today in the broad sponsorship of cultural activities by the world’s great libraries. Influential scholars and historians of modern times – Lucien Herr and Philippe Ariès in Paris, George Sarton in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Daniel Boorstin in Washington, DC – published their work as associates of a library.

The Middle Ages

The thirteenth century, the century of great cathedral construction, was a time of unusual organizational ferment. One of its achievements was the emergence of modern universities. Over the preceding centuries, Christian Europe had been studying Roman law and wrestling with foreign wisdom, variously Byzantine and Arabic. Law became important as the Catholic church contested with civil authorities for control of temporal realms. Teachers of law and related matters – the grammar, rhetoric, and logic of the classical trivium – were in great demand at urban centres. There, overlapping and competing jurisdictions exerted by the church, nation, county, town, or guild, each with its rights and privileges, divided up the citizenry. At the same time cities stimulated the formation of groups of like-minded people into corporations with clearly defined responsibilities and fields of action. Students and masters of higher learning fell into line. They took the term universitas, a legal entity with powers extending beyond the individuals who composed it, much as other trades could have taken the term.

Universitas was at first always qualified to indicate whether the academic guild was one of students who named a rector (as at Bologna, Salamanca, Leipzig, the first Cracow university, or the law faculty at Montpellier and Prague), one of masters (as at Paris), or a power-sharing arrangement of students and masters together, as at Louvain. A large class of students were also masters, especially those in the higher, professional faculties who had completed a teaching licence in the lower arts faculty. (The system continues today in universities like Yale, where undergraduates are taught by graduate-student faculty, and in Oxford’s Christ Church college, where the masters are called ‘students’.)

Student-masters or the senior professors – the doctores – could hold courses under a wide range of institutional shelter. These shelters derived from the ‘nations’ – the protective associations for foreign students that were loosely affiliated with regional origins. By the late medieval period, the shelters were variously called fraternitates, societates, congregationes, corpora, paedagogia, contubernia, regentia, aula, collegia, or bursae; these fraternities, halls, and colleges had as principal or rector a master who was accredited by the university and was responsible for organizing instruction and overseeing living accommodation. In many cases the halls emerged as an act of charity with stipulations (regarding who might join, for example) reminiscent of stipulations involved in the Islamic charitable trusts that endowed madrasas. The system encouraged a division of the student body into hierarchies of wealth and privilege.

Universities, indeed, were confederations of constituencies – the faculties, the colleges, and all those from maids to apothecaries, copyists, stationers, and later book printers who came under academic protection. Students in many cases ran the show. In southern France, Iberia, and eastern Europe, students not infrequently controlled university offices, notably those of councillor and rector. At Bologna, the student nations had proctors, bursars, and beadles, and they managed considerable amounts of cash. Indeed, masters at Bologna and Padua (both institutions were known as students’ universities) organized into doctoral colleges just to defend their interests; in the Paris arts faculty, the masters controlled the nations – and their treasuries. The constituencies took diverse forms across Europe, but they were everywhere at the organizational centre of things. The familiar name of the University of Paris, the Sorbonne, derives from a college founded by Robert of Sorbon (1201– 1274), royal chaplain and canon of Notre Dâme Cathedral.