math / maths

[SlideRule]

The History of Universities (OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS) is a periodical devoted to the study of every aspect of university history development, structure, teaching, and research from the Middle Ages to the modern period, as well as to the history of scholarship more generally. The bi-annual volumes contain a mix of learned articles, unpublished documents, book reviews, research notes, and bibliographical information, which makes this publication an indispensable tool not only for higher education researchers, but historians of all stripe. The contents of the periodical range widely geographically, chronically, and in subject-matter while its contributors are drawn from all parts of the world, giving the volumes a decidedly international flavor.

Chapter 13, pp 159-205, History of Universities (International Handbook of Higher Education) in the Springer International Handbooks of Education book series, suggests this insight to the uniqueness of university;

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 madrasas for the mullahs and Quranic judges of Islam, the Aztec and Inca temple schools for the priestly astronomers of pre-Columbian 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.


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ps: lived very close to OXFORD during my four years in the UK, sometimes venturing to CAMBRIDGE & BRUNEL UNI (LONDON).