Exploring Life in the University Setting

Universities, the outgrowth from the monasteries in towns such as Padua, Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge, were the original sites where systematic knowledge were accumulated and where the ideology of treating knowledge as having a value per se, notwithstanding its practical utility, was first enacted. Starting as theological pursuits accompanied by agricultural interests (to this day, monasteries in, e.g., Belgium brew some of the most sought after beers in the world), monasteries and the emerging universities were domains protected from everyday work, what the Greeks referred to as Skholē, ‘the absence of work’, being the root of a variety of concepts including schools and scholars (see below). Practical utility was not the starting point for the universities, but scholarly debates regarding theological matters were held in esteem. Even until the end of the eighteenth century, in the sciences, by now increasingly technical and engaging with a variety of non-theological matters, ‘natural philosophers’ entertained the upper classes with physical or chemical experiments. This may sound a frivolous view of the sciences but it was not until the last decades of the eighteenth centuries, Porter (2009: 299–300) argues, that the sciences were conceived of as a social resource in the organization of society. Early proponents of the sciences, such as the French encyclopaedists and August Comte in the first half of the nineteenth century, pointed to the sciences as a means to transcend traditional modes of thinking and ancient beliefs. The sciences thus became a tool in modernization and, to use Max Weber’s term, ‘rationalization’ of society.