The world’s first university is believed to be the University at Takshashila, which flourished as an important Hindu and Buddhist centre of learning in India (nowadays Pakistan), established circa 600BC and reaching its educational heights by the 5th century AD when 68 subjects were taught (including languages, philosophy, medicine, commerce, music) to, at a stage, 10 500 students.
The oldest and continually operating is the University of Karueein, founded in 859 AD in Fez, Morocco. And the oldest European one is, of course, the University of Bologna, founded in 1088 and the first one in the real sense of a higher-learning and degree-awarding institute.
So it shall come as no surprise that the word university was coined at its foundation.
The word is derived from the Medieval Latin root universus ‘whole, entire,’ where in Late Latin the noun universitas had the meaning of a ‘corporation, society.’ In the academic sense, the term came as a shortening of the universitas magistrorum et scholarium ‘community of masters and scholars.’
The word entered the Middle English in circa 13th century as an adaptation of the French université and early spelling of vniuersite.
Oldest University in England
The claimed to be the oldest university in the English speaking words, the Oxford University, has no clear date of its foundation, but records show that teaching existed at Oxford in some form since 1096, but flourished at the end of the 12th century when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris.
And the first recorded use of the word university, in its academic sense, comes in reference to the University of Oxford, from The early South-English legendary; or, Lives of saints, circa 1300.
In its initial meaning of ‘a whole, entire, all creatures,’ the word is firstly met in The Wycliffite Bible from 1328: “Thou, Lord of university, or of all creatures.”
The opposition between the academic and the real life experience education was firstly referenced in 1564, William Bullein’s A dialogue both pleasant and piety-full, against the fever pestilence: “You learned your Retorike in the university of Bridewell”. Bridewell was a colloquial term for prison, deriving from the 16th century St Bride’s Well, a house of correction in London.
Following the same concept, the phrase the university of life came into the vocabulary scene, to be firstly recorded in use in 1854, ironically in an Address Association Alumni Harvard College by the President of the University, Cornelius Felton, to commemorate professor Simon Greenleaf, who contributed extensively to the development of Harvard Law School, but who was retained from active academic duties and spent his last years as a professor emeritus: “The late Professor Greenleaf,..who, not born to affluence, and not bred up to scholarly studies, achieved an honorable scholarship in the university of life.”
