The Commonwealth of Universities

Abstract

Professor Martial Staub will present a discussion about how and why medieval intellectuals created universities and what higher education and democratic societies today can learn from those efforts.

Beginning with underlying assumptions about the role of intellectuals in public debate and the nature of the production and transmission of knowledge, Staub will examine several major historical factors in the higher education landscape. He will combine contemporary analyses of individual scholars? charisma with an examination of how charisma and other personal motives are tied to the institutional development of universities.

Staub will also address the creation of a commonwealth of universities in light of several major influences on the higher education landscape:

* The creation of the earliest universities in Bologna and Paris in the twelfth century * The initiative taken by students and masters of arts, particularly the insistence on general knowledge * The departure from ideas of specialism and the emancipatory dimension of medieval universitates * The knowledge production and transmission in medieval universitates that created a commonwealth of universities * The role played by universities in the emancipation of western societies in a democratic context