ABSTRACT
All advanced civilizations have needed higher education to train their ruling, priestly, military, and other service elites. but only in medieval Europe did an institution recognizable as a university arise: a school of higher learning combining teaching and scholarship and characterized by its corporate autonomy and academic freedom. The Confucian schools for the mandarin bureaucracy of imperial China, the Hindu gurukulas and Buddhist vihares for the priests and monks of medieval India, the rnadrasahs for the mullahs and Koranic judges of Islam, the Aztec and Inca temple schools for the priestly astronomers of preColumbian America, the Tokugawa han schools for Japanese samurai-all taught the high culture, received doctrine, literary and/or mathematical skills of their political or religious masters, with little room for questioning or analysis. The same might be said for the monastic schools of early medieval Europe that kept alive biblical studies and classical learning in the dark ages between the fall of Rome and the twelfth-century Renaissance. The athenaeums and lyceums of ancient Greece had some of the characteristics of the medieval European university, free speculative thought and the challenge to authority, and for much the same reason. the fragmentation of authority and possibility of escape for the dissident philosopher to another city, but they never achieved the corporate form that gave the university its permanence.
