The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present

by Thomas Bender (Editor)

This book contains an innovative and important series of studies of the complex relations of major cities associated with key moments in the history of higher learning in the West. By exploring the interplay of university learning and civic culture over the centuries, Bender provides a novel perspective on the history of both universities and cities. The theme is pursued in studies of Bologna, Paris, Florence, Leiden, Geneva, Edinburgh, London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Chicago, and New York by several distinguished scholars, including Gene Brucker, Carl Schorske, Edward Shils, Martin Jay, and Nathan Glazer.

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Alice Wonderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book sounds like a thought-provoking read, especially with the way it examines the relationship between universities and urban life. It’s a great place for finding new ideas and tools to enhance your work or study routine. You can check it out here mysupergeek reviews for students who are in need of help. It’s interesting to think about how institutions of higher learning shape and are shaped by the cities they inhabit. I’m curious to see how the author tackles the modern challenges universities face in an increasingly interconnected world.

[Frank Stein · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is based on a conference at NYU in 1997 on the history of the university and the city, and apparently most of the conference presenters took this as an opportunity to assemble a bunch of disparate facts from other research projects that might be distantly related to the subject and patch them together into some sort of paper. There appears to be little new research and little focus.

Be that as it may, the early papers on the early medieval universities are the best. The founding of the first university, at Bologna about 1198, is shown to be part of the explosion in guild formation started fifty years earlier. The author shows that it was also a particular type of guild, a consumer guild of foreign students created to defend their rights, which was later combined with a teachers' guild designed to limit ferocious competition. Other articles, on Paris, Florence, and Leiden, show the enormous legal priveleges universities were granted throughout the middle ages, and show that these were connected to the intense competition for young scholars (not wealthy necessarily, but, like tourist dollars, not competitive with local industries) when universities were mobile enough to move on a whim. There was royally and municipally constructed housing for students, rent controls, and privleges against almost any town law. Locals who even defended themselves against drunk and violent scholars were hung and subject to "trial by water."

The articles on modern universities, except one by Nathan Glazer on the fall of City University in New York (riots, extreme affirmative action quotas, Jewish resistance and then flight), are less illuminating. Most have more to due with cultural history broadly defined than cities or universities.