State of the university

Higher education has come a long way since the Greeks

Signy Holmes Staff

The woes of the university student are many. Financial difficulties, classes that can be too tough or too boring, or maybe some warped combination of the two, can add up to a lot of stress. One day you’ll sit your grandchildren on your titanium knee and tell them how much tougher it was for you than it is for them, as grandparents have been doing since the beginning of time.

When it comes to university, however, your grandparents and their grandparent might actually have been right. Life was no party for students of yore most of the time, and when it was, it was a boring party indeed.

In the beginning

Walking through the shade of olive trees with Plato or Aristotle, discussing truth and meaning and why the blood of a deer doesn’t coagulate — what a dream that would be; much better than crowded lecture theatres, not to mention the advantages of wearing a toga every day.

Let’s take a quick poll, though: Are you male? Are you a citizen of Greece? Have you served your two years in the Greek military? Do you come from a wealthy family and have a lot of time on your hands? Yes? Well then it sounds like further learning would be just the thing for you — you could study some ethics, maybe dabble in some rhetoric or poetry.

If you answered “no” to any of the above, however, you might want to consider an alternative life path, like making pottery or babies.

Even before Plato, back in the sixth century BCE, you could have learned from Pythagorus, the triangle man himself. Pythagorus, who has been called “the father of numbers,” was a mathematician, a philosopher and a cult-leader of sorts to boot.

Studying under Pythagorus could be difficult at times. For starters, disciples were only admitted after a period of probation a little tougher than academic probation today. Although accounts vary, the length of this initiation may have varied by student, but it was at least two years and probably more like five. Oh, and there was no talking during that time.

After going through all that and finally being admitted into the society that Pythagorus had created, disciples were sorted into two levels. The mathematici, or inner circle, got to learn Pythagorus’s teachings in full, while the acousmatici, or outer circle, only got a summary and usually no explanation to go with it. Hardly seems worth the wait.

The “Pythagoreans,” as they were called, had certain rules to follow. Many of these rules told them what not to do. For starters: don’t pick up what has fallen, don’t look in a mirror beside a light, don’t eat beans and don’t touch a white cock (and no, given how widespread homosexual behaviour was in Ancient Greece, the rules probably had nothing to do with what you’re thinking of).

Pythagoreans were strict vegetarians, drank no wine and shared communal property. They would purify their minds when they went to bed and shake off the effects of sleep in the morning with the music of the lyre. Besides being overly idyllic and a little creepy, this way of life would win few converts today. The years of silence are one thing, but lyre music in place of coffee is just asking too much.

Moving on, looking back

Greece may be famous in North American society today as an early place for higher learning, but it may be worth noting that the earliest full-fledged universities were in fact in India and Egypt, not Europe.

If you really want to blame someone for the institutionalization of learning, you might want to try Takshashila University in India, founded around 700 BCE, or Nanjing University in China, which dates back to the year 258.

Nonetheless, it was the Greeks who first influenced the Romans, and higher education in Rome was, in many ways, a copy of the Greek system.

What did change, at least in some cases, was the source of funding. Running an institution for learning is only idealistic until the bills come, and only rich families could send their sons to the schools of antiquity.

It was only when the Roman Empire came along that schools benefited from state support, writes M. L. Clarke, former fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, in his book Higher Education in the Ancient World.

Clarke also writes that while salaries were provided from municipal funds to support teachers, this didn’t keep professors from accepting payment from students — or demanding high fees, as the case may have been.

Such a system would have done little to make education accessible to any but the very wealthy, but there is no reason to believe that accessibility was ever the goal. With philosophy and grammar still the main subjects to be studied at the time, higher education was still only for a narrow band of people.

European chic

Think back to your high school days. Maybe you had to wear a uniform, maybe you didn’t — either way, you were probably involved at one time or another in a debate over the pros and cons of uniforms. Good thing that’s all over, right?

Well, it wouldn’t have been if you had lived in 15th- or 16th-century Europe. Those silly robes we wear for graduations and academic ceremonies weren’t invented out of thin air, after all. Flowing robes, billowing sleeves, ruffles and folds and impractical hoods were all part of the academic dress for learned men at Oxford or Cambridge, — often with a mortarboard complete with tassel, worn at a jaunty angle for good measure.

In all, the dress code could be quite stringent. The colour and cut of the robes a student would be allowed to purchase depended on the nature and level of education he had received.

For example, fur- or silk-lined hoods might be permitted to Bachelors of Divinity, who were not to wear headdresses, but silk was generally intended for higher degrees only. As a result, the authorities cracked down, and silk became allowable only for those who had originally been permitted silk at least six years before. Fur, on the other hand, was a safer choice, as in 1533 when, by an act of Parliament, all bachelors were permitted to choose from a variety of furs for the lining of their hoods.

And they say governments aren’t concerned with the really important issues.

Ah, Paris

The scary thing is, wearing white brocade and purple silk was practically one of the perks of attending a university. Students at the University of Paris in the early 1500s went through a lot for their higher education.

Author Francis Hackett gives a vivid description of Montaigu, one of the colleges at the University of Paris, in his 1934 historical work Francis the First, based on descriptions by Dutch theologian Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus.

“Erasmus so piteously described [Montaigu as] a barrack, filthy, bleak, inhospitable, reeking with the foullest smells, clotted with dirt, brayed with noises, where the dinner would be stale bread and half a herring. Here, at four in the morning, a small wretch of 14 would begin his lessons. With short breaks they would go on to seven in the evening . . . with religious exercises and with floggings.”

Not only that, but Erasmus’s biographer, George Faludy, alleges that the citizens of Paris referred to the college as “the very cleft between the buttocks of Mother Theology.”

One could even consider that a compliment, given that students at the university were apparently beaten in class, fed rotten food and forced to live in deplorable conditions and with extreme sleep deprivation. All in the name of knowledge, naturally.

These conditions are well-illustrated in a rivalry between the Collège Montaigu and the Collège de Sainte-Barbe, which was right across the street, involving copious amounts of, literally, shit.

The street shared by the two colleges was colloquially known as the Street of the Dogs, due to the fact that Montaigu drained its wastes onto the road, making quite a smelly mess.

Sainte-Barbe wasn’t having any of this, and complained. The city council decided the best way to deal with the mess would be to have the road paved, with the two colleges sharing the costs. The end result was that all that sewage slid right into the doorway of Sainte-Barbe.

It was on like Donkey Kong at that point, and after Sainte-Barbe’s latest complaints were ignored, a secret night mission was the only possible solution. Students from Sainte-Barbe snuck out to break up the pavement and send the poo sliding straight back to Montaigu.

They were found out, naturally, and after a good-natured fight with thrown rocks, extensive property damage and several casualties, it was agreed by these highly educated individuals that the best idea might be to put in a drain.

It shouldn’t surprise you, then, that the University of Paris was also perhaps the most influential and powerful university in Europe at the time, and quite costly to attend. There was, after all, no tuition fee freeze back then.

No looking back

While the University of Manitoba has had a marked lack of flogging in its past due to its relative youth — although 129 years isn’t too shabby — a lot of changes have come and gone, or come and stayed, since our university was established only seven years after the creation of Manitoba.

There was a time when public money for higher education came largely from marriage license fees — a total of $3,756.49 in 1884. You can be glad that we have come at least a little way since then, as many of us today see tuition fees alone that far outstrip this total.

There was also a time — quite a long time actually — when men were expected to wear suits to class here, and as women finally began to make up a significant portion of the student body, it was quite a while before you would see any of them in anything other than skirts and high collars.

Yet in spite of all of this, it could be said that there was a lot more school spirit and attachment to the university back in the days of the annual pumpkin ball. There’s just something missing in the youth today. Back then, at least, students had some respect for the university and appreciated the opportunity for higher education.

At least, that’s what your grandparents would say.