At medieval Bologna, students hired, fined and policed their own professors
The world's oldest continuously operating university was run by its students. Foreign students in Bologna formed mutual aid guilds, hired teachers, set their pay and fined them for running late. A student committee called the Denouncers of Professors watched for misbehaviour, and the threat of a strike kept the city in line.
The guilds began as protection. Bologna's laws punished foreigners collectively for the debts and crimes of their compatriots, so students banded into nations grouped by origin. They engaged scholars from the city's existing schools to teach liberal arts, notarial law, theology and letter-writing, then united into a larger association, the studium. Because visiting students brought the city real income and could simply leave, they won collective bargaining power, ended collective punishment, and governed the school through a council of two representatives per nation. Professors fought back by forming their own committees that set exam fees and degree requirements, and eventually the city took over paying them from taxes.
Its birth date is uncertain. Frederick Barbarossa granted a charter in 1158, and in the 19th century a committee led by the poet Giosuè Carducci settled on 1088, the date on its emblem beside the motto Alma Mater Studiorum, nourishing mother of studies. The historian Paul Grendler doubts there was enough organisation to call it a university before the 1150s, perhaps even the 1180s. Law was central: the school grew largely to study the Digest, a key text of Roman law rediscovered in Italy in 1070, and for centuries the only degree it granted was the doctorate.
Women made history there. Bettisia Gozzadini earned a law degree in 1237 and began teaching at the university in 1239, the first woman known to do so. In 1732 Laura Bassi, aged twenty, publicly defended 49 philosophical theses and received a doctorate on 12 May, becoming the first woman with a science doctorate; by December she was a salaried professor of natural philosophy, and she became Italy's leading populariser of Newton's mechanics.
Nicolaus Copernicus studied there. In 1711 Luigi Ferdinando Marsili persuaded Pope Clement XI to fund Italy's first public astronomical observatory at the university. It now enrols over 90,000 students, with campuses across Romagna and branches in Buenos Aires, New York, Brussels and Shanghai.
Source: University of Bologna
