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humanistic period the degree of M.A. became connected with that of Ph.D., and vanished in the eighteenth century. Originally the degrees of “ master’ and “ doctor ’’ could be gained only after possession of the lower degrees of “‘ bachelor” and “ licentiate.” The latter, originally denoting merely the interval before receiving permission to assume the insignia of a doctor, developed, by the seventeenth century, into a special degree, since many remained licentiates to save the fees necessary for promotion to the doctorate. In the faculty of arts the licentiate was never popular, and in the eighteenth century the bachelor’s degree also disappeared from most German universities, being replaced by the testimonium maturitatis from the gymnasium. Promotion to a degree was preceded by a public disputation in which the candidate was required to show his learning before the assembled university, while the doctor’s degree was conferred with imposing ceremony. Possession of the doctor’s hat conferred the privilege of teaching in any university, but this soon degenerated into an empty title which merely gave certain prerogatives in ecclesiastical and civil life, the degree later still even being sold, though such doctores bullati were never recognized by the universities. In virtue of their corporation rights, universities were empowered to choose their own teachers, to make and execute their own laws both in civil and in criminal matters, and to administer their estates. The teachers were exempt from civil duties and taxes, and as doctors ranked as nobles, this probably being due to the jurists after they had come to control the administration of the State by the introduction of Roman law.
Except in the oldest universities, where thousands of students flocked, the most of the German uni-
versities were obliged to be content 7. Students. with a few hundred scholars. The
first students were chiefly clergy, nor was it until near the end of the Middle Ages, when juristic activity had fairly begun, that civilians sought university education. The faculty of arts was naturally the largest, and, while at first the theological faculty seems to have outnumbered the juristic, these conditions were reversed from the fifteenth century on. The medical faculty was relatively unimportant in Germany until the nineteenth century. The philosophical faculty is now the university proper, the other faculties being merely technical schools. No special preparation was required for matriculation in the Middle Ages; students began their university careers, with most unequal training, at the age of fifteen, or even younger, and their entire life was rigidly monastic. They heard two or three lectures daily, followed by private repetitions, exercises, and disputations. The lectures in the higher faculties were delivered free by the salaried professors, and it was only in the faculty of arts that, up to the beginning of the sixteenth century, special fees were required for individual lectures and exercises. Charges for tuition in the modern sense were unknown.
The scholastic organization of the medieval universities was shaken by humanism and destroyed by the Reformation, the result being reconstruction, on the Protestant side by Melanchthon and on the
Roman Catholic by the Jesuits. The universities of Wittenberg, Erfurt, Tiibingen, Heidelberg, Basel, Leipsic, Frankfort, Greifswald, Ros-
8. Post- tock, Copenhagen, and Upsala became Reformation Protestant; and new institutions were
Founda- called into being by the Reformation
tions. and Counter-Reformation: the Protestant foundations of Marburg (1527), Konigsberg (1544), Jena (1558), Strasburg (1566; an academy until 1621), Helmstedt (1576), and Altdorf (1578; an academy until 1623); Roman Catholic institutions were Dillingen (1554), Braunsberg (1565), Olmiitz (1574), Wiirzburg (1582), and Graz (1586). Reformed establishments were founded at Herborn in 1580, at Geneva and Lausanne in Switzerland (both in 1536), and at Leyden (1575) and Franeker (1585) in the Netherlands. A fourth university was founded at Edinburgh in 1583, and in 1591 the Roman Catholic University of Dublin was established. In Italy the Jesuits founded at Rome the famous Gregorian University in the Roman College, and the first institution of learning in the Americas was the Roman Catholic University of Lima (1551). In the seventeenth century Giessen was founded in 1607 and Rinteln in 1621 as a Lutheran protest against Marburg, which had become Reformed, while the Roman Catholics established the Benedictine University of Salzburg (1662), the Jesuit academies of Paderborn (1615), Molsheim (1618), Osnabriick (1630; destroyed by the Swedes three years later), and Bamberg (1648), and the national Hungarian University of Tyrnau (1635; transferred to Ofen-Pest in 1777-83; now the University of Budapest). The Swedes founded the Livonian University of Dorpat in 1632 and the Finnish University of Abo (now at Helsingfors) in 1640, while the Dutch Reformed added the universities of Groningen (1614), Utrecht (1636), and Harderwijk (1648). The first North American university was that of Harvard (1636). With the Thirty-Years’ War the establishment of denominational universities practically ended, though the Protestants founded Duisburg (1655; Reformed), Kiel (1665), and Lund (1666), and the Roman Catholics Innsbruck (1672).
The organization of the universities remained essentially unchanged. At the same time, humanism gained recognition beside Aristotelianism, and in Protestant institutions scholasticism was sup-
planted by Lutheran and Melanch-
9. Changes thonian or by Calvinistic systems of Due to theology. The professors in the faculty Humanism of arts were now salaried, in great part and the Ref-from secularized property of the ormation. Church. Each “ public professor ”’ was bound to lecture three or four
times a week, his work being supplemented by heavy private instruction. The monastic life of the students ceased, though where no preparatory institution was connected with the university, each young scholar was required to choose a tutor to supervise his studies and character, this being the origin of the modern privat-docents. In the second half of the sixteenth century, moreover, the public lectures gave place, in great measure, to private lectures for which fees were required. During this and
the following centuries the universities lost their international character, while their entire faculties were obliged to subscribe to the denominational standard of the university to which they might be attached. From political, religious, and economic motives the universities passed under the control of the State, though their corporation rights and their autonomy were unmolested. The Protestant universities aimed to give their students practical training for the ministry, while the Roman Catholic universities left this work to the seminaries and entrusted their faculties with the scholastic defense of the ancient faith and polemics against the Reformation. The Protestant institutions, therefore, were forced to subordinate Biblical studies to dogmatics, the result being an intensification of religious antagonisms and the outbreak of the Thirty-Years’ War. With the close of the struggle interest in theological controversy waned. Spener and Francke brought university theology back to the study of the Bible and to practical Christianity; national law received recognition beside Roman; natural science, mathematics, and modern philosophy all became factors of moment. German replaced Latin in the lectures, and German universities became the home of a general literary culture which they had never known before. French influence was also active, to the especial advantage of the jurists, who now became the leading faculty to the detriment of theology.
The innovator of the new state of affairs was Thomasius, who, with Francke, impressed his stamp on the lately founded University of Halle (1693),
until this institution yielded its pres-
1o. The tige to Gottingen (1734). In this
Eighteenth period of transition to the period of Century. the Enlightenment (q.v.) belongs the foundation of the Protestant Univer-
sity of Erlangen (1743), as well as of the last German Jesuit university, Breslau (1702), and the academy of Fulda (1734). In America Yale was now founded at New Haven (1701), while in 1721 the Dominicans established a Roman Catholic university at Havana. With the rationalism of the reign of Frederick the Great the universities ceased to transmit learning, believing themselves called to create it. Unrestricted philosophical theorizing received its first sanction at Halle. The universities were no longer denominational bodies for the benefit of the national church; the non-theological professors were officially dispensed from subscribing to the creeds (at Giessen, for example, on Oct. 31, 1777); and by the end of the eighteenth century Prussian law could claim them as institutions of a creedless State. The movement spread from the Protestant north to the Roman Catholic south. The Jesuits were charged with being behind the times, and, about the middle of the century, the courses of studies were radically revised at Ingolstadt and Vienna. Wirzburg, Treves, Mainz, and Erfurt followed their example; only Cologne remained true to the past. The fate of the last-named, while Erfurt, Mainz, and Treves enjoyed a short revival, was to be supplanted by the rationalistically Roman Catholic University of Bonn in 1777. A new Roman Catholic university was founded, along more con-