Universities and their missions in early modern times

Abstract

Since the nineteenth century, we have become used to associating universities with professional training and with basic and applied research, and, as a consequence, with skills, performance, invention and innovation. Before 1800, the relations between the university and society and between the university and research were not so obvious. A continuous tension can be perceived between knowledge, education and social needs. Finding a balance between continuity and change and between teaching and research, have been the great challenges universities have encountered throughout their long history. In the Middle Ages, the mission of the university was clear: transmitting knowledge, explaining truth and forming a cadre of university teachers. Fundamental innovative research was done almost exclusively within the framework of a university and within the conceptual frameworks of Christian doctrine, Aristotle and his interpreters and other authoritative textbooks. The humanist intellectuals of a later period sought solutions to these constraints. They were more secular in outlook, broadened intellectual life and broke the research monopoly of the university by creating alternative institutions, forms and methods that paved the way for departures in almost all the disciplines. During the Enlightenment, governments became actively involved in the reorganization of higher education, making it directly useful for the needs of the new progress-minded society. The universities had to participate in the search for innovations in a booming economic society with developed new religious, moral and political codes.