ABSTRACT
In their academic and intellectual orientations, universities historically have been international institutions. Communicating in Latin, scholars would wander from one place of learning to another. Nobody asked for their papers or bothered them with bureaucratic restrictions or academic qualifications. It was a spontaneous movement and not the result of planning. Although it is clear that the contemporary wandering scholar may be less footloose than in medieval times, international academic exchange and mobility have remained important aspects of university enquiry and teaching. In contradiction to its intellectual orientation, the universities’ institutional environment has become very national, especially through the establishments of welfare states in the decades following the Second World War and the subsequent massification of higher education. The ties between national authority and university were already intensified in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however (Neave, 2000).
