1. A higher-education degree-awarding school
2. Offering publically recognized, official secular diplomas: originally they were grammar, rhetoric, logic, and different kinds of law, in addition to theology.
Religion, as an element of society that is discrete from our understandings of just how stuff in the world works, is a conception that was pretty unique to Christian civilization (and specifically Protestantism at that) which became generalized due to Western European cultural and economic dominance.
Most other times and places just didn't view them as being all that distinct. Their religious traditions didn't insist on strict separations between worldly pursuits and spiritual ones and often didn't really separate the formal institutions from each other. Most people would just adopt bits and pieces of all the various intellectual traditions from the priests and monks, but they'd adapt them into their personal or family practices. Normal people today would not try and identify themselves as "deontologists" or "utilitarians" today. They pick these ideas up from the nerds and applied them to their lives, but it wasn't really important for them to identify as one or another the way we insist folks split hairs as to whether they're Christian or Buddhist or Taoist or whatever now. These were intense (and sometimes violent) arguments among the intelligentsia, but not so much outside of that.
My alma mater offers a BA in Theology and Religion: https://www.exeter.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/theolog...
Oxford has a Faculty of Theology and Religion: https://www.theology.ox.ac.uk/
Cambridge (the original one) has a Faculty of Divinity: https://www.divinity.cam.ac.uk/
Perhaps what you say is true of lesser institutions.
Source: My biases as an Indian
> Hindus were subjugated by Muslims and English
Which is historically true. All of North India has zero temples or structures of historic importance that are more than a few hundred years old. A Bihari Hindu should not have to go searching in Tamil Nadu for signs that his ancestors achieved things of significance.
> Indians were better
It doesn't come from a place of malice. But, as a people that have been beaten down. It does help to know that your civilization made significant contribution to shaping the world as we know it. A Muslim doesn't have to wonder, the Taj Mahal & Red fort are the 2 crowning jewels of India. India could vanish tomorrow & both Muslims + Christians would still have a flattering model of what their people had achieved in the rest of the world. Hindus are grounded in India, and (mostly) India alone. Great contributions of pre-invasion Indians do not have compete with the architectural wonders that later rulers built. Both can co-exist.
The large majority of Indian Muslims & Christians trace their cultural & ethnic origins to the populace that inhabited this land for the last (at least) 4000 years. There needn't be cognitive dissonance to acknowledge the achievements of of the common ancestor as part of a unified Indian identity.
For example, we (collectively) do not know anything about drawbacks of Nalanda university. All we heard since childhood is that it is great
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
So? India’s a democracy, they were elected.
If you are going to define what is historical truth or propaganda based on who resides in the PMO of India, then you should just stay away from this subject.
Wouldn't the above qualify as multi-subject
"Universal guild of (...)" was a pretty common preamble for a few centuries. It stuck for student guilds - because it all started as rich kids hiring tutors as a group. Whatever they were doing in Bologna in the 13th century is as far as the modern research university as what they did in Nalanda.
In an era where all philosophy, sociology & science was Religion, it sounds fairly comprehensive. All universities were religious. The west simply like to treat universities by and for Christian denominations as somehow devoid of religion.
> Bologna was the first multi-subject, public higher degree-granting institution in history. It invented the term "University"
You can use this self-fulfilling characterization for any topic to establish faux-authoritativeness. See -->> Stand up comedy was invented in the US. Rakugo[1] may have been invented before, has a single performer who weaves an original story through comedic scenarios, but they don't stand up. And after all, if they aren't standing up, is it stand up at all ? The limitations of one institution give it identity, while the limitations of the other render if unworthy. Hypocrisy at its finest.
Nalanda was a university in the spirit of what it means for an institution to be a university.
The real question is a matter of definitions. Is a university a insitute of higher education that follows the university tradition? Or is it any institute with a similar role in the society, regardless of its traditions?
> then hired scholars from the city's pre-existing lay and ecclesiastical schools to teach them subjects such as liberal arts, notarial law, theology, and ars dictaminis (scrivenery)
> The university is historically notable for its teaching of canon and civil law
Please note the phrases .. ecclesiastical schools .. & .. teaching of canon ..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Bologna
It seems reasonable religion (as we define it today) & culture were intertwined to a far greater degree in 10th-15th century Europe in ways similar to Nalanda & Al-Qarawiyin in their times.
It does not seem simple to define exactly when all these institutions passed that rubicon that separates "religious schools" from what the word "university" means.
I interpret "religious school" as a school that teaches religion (a 'madrasa' in Islam).
It seems that Al-Qarawiyin was mostly that during most of its history though not only (and it was founded as a mosque):
"Among the subjects taught around this period or shortly after were traditional religious subjects such as the Quran and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), and other sciences like grammar, rhetoric, logic, medicine, mathematics, astronomy and geography." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_al-Qarawiyyin
Those fragments are simultaneously true for Nalanda or any other school too.
It's like saying there is no proper engineering existed before civil engineering (civilian engineering) while military engineering has existed since time immomerial.
There were numerous institutions of higher learning or universities in Muslim Spain, Middle East and Italian Sicily that the latter was at the time under Muslim rule before Norman's conquest. The latter universities in Sicily then spilled over to the rest of Italy as many degree granting medical schools and other schools were established including the infamous Schola Medica Salernitana [1]. The irony is that in the English Wikipedia entry mentioned it as the first of its kind even though it's probably another copycat as it's jointly founded by the Christian, Jews and Muslim scholars at the time.
Ever wondered why all degrees granting universities using Arabic styled robe during graduation?
English and France are even more honest by using the word Bachelor and Baccalauréat, respectively as their degree names with both of the words literally mean degree granting in Arabic.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schola_Medica_Salernitana
I have read before about the origin of the convocation robe from the fruits gown but it's rather comical IMHO. The more plausible explanation is that they want to copy the learned people at the medieval time, i.e. Arabic speaking people, during the European dark ages by imitating the Arabic styled robe with the robe and the turban. It is very similar today when all the people in the corporate boardroom meeting are expected to wear two piece suits in order to look professional.
[1] About the etymology of Bachelor:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/160839/about-the...
The academic dress found in most universities in the Commonwealth of Nations and the United States is derived from that of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which was a development of academic and clerical dress common throughout the medieval universities of Europe.[1]
...
The modern gown is derived from the roba worn under the cappa clausa, a garment resembling a long black cape. In early medieval times, all students at the universities were in at least minor orders, and were required to wear the cappa or other clerical dress, and restricted to clothes of black or other dark colour. The gowns most commonly worn, that of the clerical type gowns of bachelor's degrees (BA and BS) and master's degrees (MA and MS), are substantially the same throughout the English-speaking world. All are traditionally made of black cloth, (although occasionally the gown is dyed in one of the university's colours) and the material at the back of the gown is gathered into a yoke.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_dress#Overview_and_hi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_dress#United_Kingdom_...
That's just terrifically improbable. Historically, bachelor's degrees were, in fact, intermediate degrees awarded part way through the period of study required to achieve a master's degree - which was the "real deal". The degrees emerged during a period when the term bachelor was already established as a term referring to a squire or junior knight.
We already have plenty of English words from Arabic; there's really no need to retcon even more.
I always assumed that's an American thing. I'm from southern Europe, I've graduated from university, and I've never seen anyone do the graduation with hats and capes, I've only seen it in Hollywood movies.
But it's common across Europe, you can find plenty of pictures if you search things like "graduation robes Berlin" or Prague or Paris.
Finland does hats and swords for PhDs though.
i believe you mean “monastic robes”; parts of the regalia retain liturgical names. (like “stole”).
european universities retain a distinct monastic connection because that’s where many of them arose: monks teaching the wastrel children of the rich to be marginally more civilized.
I can't say I've ever found anything Arabic about Western university dress. But it does ressemble clerical gowns which have been around since the Roman Empire, and as it happens Medieval students were part of the clergy...
Those are not synonymous; and therein lies the problem with your assessment. There were many institutions of higher learning in the ancient world, with histories documented back to e.g. 21st c. BCE in China.
A university is not simply an institution of higher learning; the word implies a certain composition and structure, and that doesn't trace back prior to Bologna. There's no value judgment implied in that.
>Ever wondered why all degrees granting universities using Arabic styled robe during graduation?
Academic dress in the early universities (Bologna, Oxford, etc) imported styles typical of contemporary ecclesiastical dress, which has a (fairly) straight line history back to the 4th c. CE Nicene church, and those styles were mimicked by later universities. I'm not sure what you're trying to get at there.
How? Remember that the Chinese script isn't even that old...
Using different standards for Christian and non-Christian intellectual monasteries is strange. It doesn't make sense to call the latter universities and then turn around and act like the former weren't. For instance, from the article:
> The monastic university predates the University of Oxford and Europe's oldest university, Bologna, by more than 500 years.
If Nalanda counts as a university, then Europe certainly had universities older than Bologna. Or perhaps those institutions shouldn't count, and neither should Nalanda. I personally don't care which definition is used, as long as it's used consistently. But we seem to be dealing with definitions that change mid-sentence to accommodate whatever conclusion the author wants.
Yup, a lot of things have existed earlier than we perceive. I do think 0 was invented by cave dwellers when they plucked 2 fruits from a tree, eat those 2 fruits over a day and counted the next day how many fruits were remaining(When they felt hungry and if they had to pluck more fruits)
1000
+ 900
+ 90
+ 9
I'd say that Plato's Academy is a good candidate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy
Claiming, as you do, that everything was Muslim/Arab is clearly "disingenuous at its best and propaganda at its worst".
(Others have already disproven your etymological claims.)
So, if something meets the requirements before a word was coined to describe a set of those requirements cannot be retroactively called that?
So, for example Mathematics before the word Mathematics was coined is just mumbo jumbo. Got it!
You can always try to create definitions to suit your preferred narrative. But Nalanda was multi-subject beyond teaching religion.
If the ability of women to vote is considered essential for democracy, then the world’s oldest democracy is New Zealand and not the US.
But rather than going by dictated definitions, if we go by popular perceptions of the words, then Nalanda is a university and US became a democracy before New Zealand.
several of the swiss cantons have been democratic to some degree for 700 years and quite democratic since before 01776
(though women didn't get the vote there until the 01970s)
They gathered here to learn medicine, logic, mathematics and – above all – Buddhist principles from some of the era's most revered scholars.
How is that not multi-subject?
So were most of the world greatest universities - harvard, yale, oxford, etc.
Modern universities as we know it ( secular, research based, etc ) started with the humboldtian model in the 1800s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...
Neither Bologna, nor nalanda, are universities as currently defined.
Just because Harvard had a religious school didn't mean it was as religious school.
Since 1088, when Bologna coined the term to describe its new institution, a university has been (1) an institution of higher education which (2) offers multiple official, publicly recognized diplomas in secular subjects among others. You can redefine it as you like but I think about 250 schools would have words with you.
They weren't initially. They tranformed into modern universities in the 1800s.
'A 1643 publication defined the university's purpose: "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University
Do you think that's what harvard is about today?
> (1) an institution of higher education which (2) offers multiple official, publicly recognized diplomas in secular subjects among others.
A degree mill doesn't a univeristy make. Universities today have to be accredited. Who accredited Bologna? Nothing.
1088 Bologna is not anything anyone around the world considers a university. When people around the world found universities, nobody looks at 1088 Bologna. All modern universities are secular/research based institutions following the humboldtian model.
When harvard decided to transform from a religious institution to a modern university, they didn't look to bologna.
> A 1643 publication defined the university's purpose
In 1643. Harvard had changed quite a lot well before 1810.
All universities were. Those other subjects you talk about have entered the curriculum as 'ways to understand the god and its creation' etc. Even including mathematics.
Everything was, until very recently in history. That should not, by itself, matter.
But I agree that idea of an adult obtaining a degree after a fixed period of study is essential to the idea of an university.
Without fail, whenever this topic arises, there are always people who come to vehemently defend the Christian/European university tradition as the only “true” university. Everything else, and especially institutions older than Bologna, are nitpicked to oblivion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Constantinople
Indeed, we can trace the following sequence of events:
1054: Great Schism divides the Byzantine Empire and Western Europe
1048-73: Holy Roman Emperor Henry III attempts to dominate the election of popes
1050-80: Bishop, later (1073) Pope Gregory VII initiates the Gregorian Reforms, reigniting interest in the legal codes of Justinian, which gave legitimacy to the Church's autonomy contra the Emperor
1088: Irnerius begins teaching Roman law at Bologna, supposedly teaching the Four Doctors of Bologna (disputed by some historians), who would complete the medieval exegesis of Roman law in Europe
The principal innovation of the European university, which occurred sometime in the early 12th century, was the granting of degrees by the doctoral committee, rather than the advisor. As with most achievements in history, the development of the university was a gradual process, not a single event. The incorporation of students and professors into the universitates scholarum and colegia doctorum was initially necessary as collective bargaining against the mercurial and often conflicting state and church authority in medieval Europe, but eventually proved to maintain a higher standard of quality than had been previously possible.
Do we know for a fact that Fibonacci learned decimal arithmetic (and simple algebra) there or did he learn it -- as I thought we knew -- on his travels with his merchant dad?
Neither was Al-Qarawiyin in Morocco (until the 1960s).
These were religious schools, or in some cases schools for limited higher education subjects, and before Bologna, there were plenty of them in Europe too.
Bologna was the first multi-subject, public higher degree-granting institution in history. It invented the term "University" (from universitas magistrorum et scholarium). Claims that Nalanda or Al-Qarawiyin etc. were ancient "universities" is mostly propaganda which does not serve them well nor allow us to appreciate their important historical position.