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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Note on Transcriptions xvii
List of Abbreviations xix
Introduction: Universities in Europe, Medreses in the Muslim World xxi
PART I: Genesis, Development, and Closure of the Darülfünun
1 New Pursuits in Education, Orientation to the Occident 1
1.1 Planning of Central Education 8
1.2 Birth of the Idea of Darülfünun 11
1.3 The Establishment of the Society of Science [Encümen-i Dâniş] 16
1.4 A Critical Voice From Within 21
2 The First Attempt: Enlightening the People 23
2.1 A Drive Toward Harmony Between Modern Science and Islam 26
3 The Second Attempt: Darülfünun-i Osmanî [Ottoman University] 30
3.1 The Comprehensive Modern Framework and 1869 Regulations of Public Education 32
3.2 The Ottoman Version of a French University 33
3.3 Student Affairs 34
3.4 Administrative Structure 35
3.5 Financial Resources 35
3.6 Inauguration of the Darülfünun-i Osmanî 36
4 The Third Attempt: Darülfünun-i Sultanî [Sultanic University] 42
4.1 The School of Law 46
4.2 School of Civil Engineering; School of Roads and Bridges 49
4.3 The School of Arts 51
4.4 Administrative and Financial Structure of the Darülfünun-i Sultanî 52
4.5 Language of Instruction and the Translations of Textbooks 53
4.6 The Legacy of the Sultanic University 55
5 The Successful Commencement 1900 56
5.1 The Inauguration of the Darülfünun-i Şahane [Université Imperiale] 59
5.2 Darülfünun-i Şahane Regulations 61
5.3 Curricula 62
5.4 The First Teachers of the Darülfünun-i Şahane 63
5.5 Admission of the First Students and the Beginning of Education 63
5.6 The First Graduates of the Darülfünun-i Şahane 65
6 The Second Constitutional Period 65
6.1 Tuba Tree Legend and Emrullah Efendi’s Project 68
6.2 The New Bylaws of the Darülfünun 74
6.3 University Education for Girls 79
6.4 Controversy Regarding the Education of Girls and the End of Segregation 83
7 The War Years: 1914–1918 and the German Influence 85
8 The Armistice Years and the Pre-Republican Period 94
8.1 Nationalism and the First Student Boycott in the Darülfünun 99
8.2 The Rapprochement Between the Darülfünun and the Ankara Government 101
9 Darülfünun after the Proclamation of the Republic 103
9.1 A Short Honeymoon 103
9.2 Solving the Building Problems and Sparking the Autonomy Privilege 106
9.3 Accusations and the Recurrence of an Old Refrain: Reform of the Darülfünun 108
9.4 The Resignation of Darülfünun Rector Ismayıl Hakkı Bey and the Election of a New Rector 110
Preface
This book examines the process of founding a Western institution, namely a university, in the Ottoman Empire, a cultural environment wholly different from that of its place of origin in Western Europe. The Ottoman Empire (1299–1923) possessed deeply entrenched academic traditions and institutions of its own that made the transfer much more than a simple process of appropriation. Those who initiated the efforts to found this modern institution of learning were the very Ottoman administrators and intellectuals who styled themselves as the protectors of Islamic civilization. This fact has left its mark as one of the distinctive features of this process. The Ottoman Empire assumed the leadership of the Islamic world throughout the centuries, and considered the seat of their empire, İstanbul, as the capital of the Islamic world. The Ottoman sultan, who was also the caliph of the Muslim world, and his government, the Divân, also assumed responsibility for the development of Islamic civilization and its advancement. Early on, they became familiar with Western science and technology, which they were able to utilize in a “selective” fashion in line with their own particular needs.
As far as education was concerned, the Ottomans inherited the academic institutions and traditions that had proliferated under the rule of their political predecessors, the Seljuk Turks (1037–1194). The most important of these institutions and the primary source of scholarly–scientific activities were, without any doubt, the medreses. These charitably funded centers of learning had been in continuous existence since the founding of the empire until its end in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
The intensity of Ottoman medrese construction paralleled the political and economic advance of the empire, and these developments reached their peak during the sixteenth century. The number of medreses in each century was double that of the previous century. The city that had the largest number of medreses was the imperial capital, İstanbul. During the nineteenth century, prior to 1869, the period when modern Western educational institutions were also becoming
more widespread, there were 166 active medreses in İstanbul and 5369 students [talebe-i ulûm] at these institutions. According to one estimate, the Ottomans founded 665 medreses in the European provinces that currently constitute the nations of Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Hungary, and the former Yugoslavia. The Italian priest Giambattista Toderini, who stayed in İstanbul from 1781 to 1786, where he studied and documented aspects of its cultural life, held the opinion that Ottoman medreses were in many respects more advanced than their counterparts in Europe. This was particularly the case for their scientific autonomy.1
Medrese education in the Ottoman period was divided into two major branches of learning. The first group was composed of the so-called traditional sciences [culūm naqlīyah], which consisted of Arabic linguistics and grammar, rhetoric, and religious studies. The remaining disciplines were categorized under the rubric of the rational sciences [culūm caqlīyah]. They had been appropriated and assimilated into various cultures of Islam from classical Greek, Persian, and Indian antecedents, and included logic, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. The medrese provided a common education, culture, and shared worldview among the mosaic of Muslim peoples of diverse ethnic origins. At the same time, it functioned to ensure equality of opportunity in education for the individual, as well as providing mobility, both vertical and horizontal, among the various strata of society. Structurally, medreses were charitable institutions initiated by wealthy patrons and protected under shari’a law through a system known as the waqf [Turkish Vakıf]. Because the medreses’s land endowments and revenues were held in trust through the waqf, they were able to achieve financial autonomy and institutional longevity.2
The system continued as such over a period of hundreds of years. The state officials and medrese teachers, as well as their students and graduates, were an integral part of the Ottoman social fabric and the political powers that governed them. They were all essential to the strength of the empire and the stability of society.3
Until the nineteenth century, the Ottomans would continue to seek answers to their most pressing intellectual and practical problems from within Islamic
1. Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, Science, Technology and Learning in the Ottoman Empire: Western Influence, Local Institutions, and the Transfer of Knowledge (Oxford: Ashgate, 2003), 48–49.
2. Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, “Emergence of the Ottoman Medrese Tradition,” in Archivum Ottomanicum 25 (2008): 283–338.
3. Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, “Ottoman Educational and Scholarly Scientific Institutions,” in History of the Ottoman State Society and Civilisation, ed. E. İhsanoğlu (İstanbul: IRCICA, 2002), vol. 2, 368–389.
culture and its institutions of learning. It was only after the Ottoman government was compelled to face the political advance of Europe that Ottoman administrators turned their attention westward for scientific and pedagogical inspiration. The balance in the Ottomans’ struggle with Europe began to tilt against them by the eighteenth century. By then, the nation-states in Europe surpassed the Ottoman Empire economically, technologically, and militarily. After the result of the long wars during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that ended in Turkish defeats, the Ottomans began to examine their rivals more carefully and to follow with greater interest the features that had ensured European superiority, including new developments in education and learning. The Ottomans could no longer take their superiority over the Europeans for granted. What in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been a selective appropriation of Western science and technology became a far more comprehensive transfer of knowledge by the nineteenth century. However, it is important to note that the transfer did not take place in a vacuum, and that it marked the beginning of a multifaceted interaction between Ottoman and Western cultures, traditions, and institutions.
The crushing superiority achieved by some European nations as a result of the Industrial Revolution in economic productivity, intercontinental and overseas transportation, communication, and military power contributed to perceptions of the decline of traditional societies such as those of the Ottomans, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese. The advances in European science and technology came to symbolize the immense chasm between these countries and the West.
European countries undergoing the Industrial Revolution felt the need for experts qualified in modern science and technology and for a workforce similarly equipped. This led to the demand for a more systematic modernization process in the fields of science and engineering in the universities that would be capable of responding to these new requirements. The reform measures that Ottoman intellectuals and administrators decided to adopt in the attempt to bridge the gap with Europe resulting from the Industrial Revolution included the foundation of a modern university. This was to be a completely new institution rather than the simple transformation of the existing pre-modern medreses. At the same time, this new project formed part of the French educational system that the Ottoman administrators were adopting throughout the empire as their new model. French public educational policy ensured that public education would be divided into primary, secondary. and higher education, and that it would be state funded. This became possible only with the centralization of the state administration. The conditions that were conducive to the development of the modern university in Europe in the nineteenth century, as explained by Walter Rüegg, that is,
secularization, bureaucratization, and specialization, had their parallels to a certain extent in the Ottoman Empire.4
The Ottoman administrators who assumed the leadership of the Islamic world also aimed at the development of a modern Ottoman culture built on a harmonious synthesis between Islamic and Western values. Their keenness to create their own version of modernization was very clear from the beginning during which they coined a new word for the institution they were about to establish. For the modern institution of higher education known in the West as a university, they coined the term darülfünun, the “house of sciences,” to underline its distinct modern character, which is entirely different from that of medrese. Even so, from the very beginning they had set about founding this new institution on their own resources, and thus their goal of realizing a modern university was never a simple or straightforward process.
Therefore, this study sheds light on an important and pioneering experiment involving both Islamic and Western cultures. It will track the multifaceted transformation at work in İstanbul during the transition from classical to modern modes of scientific education. The Ottoman administrators themselves occupy the focus of my study, as they were the ones who set the terms for the new ethos that came to undergird the modern norms and institutions of the empire. In doing so, this study situates the establishment of the Darülfünun within the general context of Ottoman modernization. Nevertheless, it also challenges a conventional opinion, which maintains that the nearly fifty years that it took to establish the full-fledged Ottoman University was due to the traditionalist government’s opposition to reform policies. According to this narrative, the government was reticent to welcome the modernization of the centuries-old Ottoman educational system because of a bitter struggle between religious and secular parties within its ranks. This simplistic conflict between traditionalists and modernizers, at the same time, either neglects or underestimates the ways in which the Ottoman cultural heritage was preserved within the Darülfünun.
As well as explaining the origins of the Darülfünun and the motivations for its founding, this study also highlights the impact of the Ottoman University outside the Ottoman domain. The Darülfünun in İstanbul inspired various leaders in other parts of the Muslim world. Students trained at the Darülfünun became influential advocates for the new Arab nationalism by providing the necessary infrastructure for national universities throughout the Arab-speaking world. Out of this intellectual ferment, a new Ottoman Turkish scientific language developed,
4. Walter Rüegg, “Themes: Introduction,” in A History of the University in Europe, ed. Walter Rüegg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), v, 3–9.
the terminology from which served as a convenient vehicle for expressing and teaching modern science throughout the empire. This is perhaps the first monograph study of the development of such a language.
To put this study in the right perspective, concise introductory information is given regarding the origin of the university in Europe, the modernization of the university in the nineteenth century, and the diffusion of the university as an institution of higher education outside Europe, specifically to the Muslim world.
Acknowledgments
This study goes back almost three decades to 1989. On the 150th anniversary of the Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire, I was asked to contribute to a commemorative volume. In 1990 I offered a detailed study on the first attempts to establish an Ottoman University: the “House of Sciences” or Darülfünun in Turkish. Two years later, I published a survey article on the changes in notions of science that emerged in Turkey in the nineteenth century, as well as the institutions that arose to meet the demand for modern science and education at the time. Since then, I have been following up on research into these topics, which has culminated in the publication of two Turkish-language volumes on the history of the modern Turkish university under the title Darülfünun: A Focal Point of Ottoman Cultural Modernization (2010).
Throughout these years, I have extensively benefited from the newly opened Ottoman and Republican Archives attached to the Office of the Prime Minister, minutes of Ottoman and Republican Parliaments, official published documents hitherto not studied, newspapers, memoirs, and many other sources. During this long period, some PhD studies, which were inspired by my first articles, have been written, illuminating aspects of the most recent periods of the Darülfünun up to the present day.
Studies on the emergence, evolution, and diffusion of the university in Europe, particularly in the nineteenth century, were of great help to me as I came to develop a proper framework for understanding the rise of the modern university in a Muslim environment. Such a comparative approach allowed me to correct many misconceptions, which have come to constitute a sort of established orthodoxy in the field through the published work of generations of scholars. However much this present contribution will serve to address the lacunae and distortions in past scholarship on science and education in the late Ottoman period, much basic research still remains to be done.
I would like to thank my colleagues who helped me in preparing this English text. In particular, I would recognize the great work done by the late Semiramis
Acknowledgments
Çavuşoğlu in translating the English edition from the Turkish original. Grateful acknowledgment is due to my lifelong colleague Dilek Orbay, for her care and diligent work, and to Didar Bayır, for her help and advice.
I also owe the publication of this English version to two dear colleagues: William Shea from Padua University, who enthusiastically urged me to see it through to press; and Ronald Numbers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who read the first English manuscript meticulously, and proposed many suggestions and recommendations to develop the text to appeal to an English-speaking readership. I also would like to acknowledge the significant contribution of Michael Shank from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who read the introduction, and made useful suggestions and amendments.
Note on Transcriptions
In this book, Turkish words, regardless of their language of origin, names of places within the boundaries of modern Turkey, and the names of Ottoman Turks, are transcribed according to the official modern Turkish orthography, with the exception that proper names ending with “d” are not changed to “t”.
Some words and annexation of words are given in italic, e.g. Meclis-i Vâlâ, Encümen-i Dâniş. In such cases, the following explanation regarding the pronunciation of Turkish is noted here:
â: as English a in “far”
c: as English j in “jam” or “John”
ç: as English ch in “China” or “charity”
ğ: a soft guttural, pronounced almost like the gh in “ought”
ı: as English i in “dirt”
î: as English ee in “feet”
ö: as French eu in “deux” or German ö in “können”
ş: as English sh in “show” or “shine”
û: as English u in “rule”
ü: as French u in “lune” or German ü in “über”
The “^” sign is used to indicate long vowels in the following cases:
a. In those cases when lengthening and softening the vowels is necessary (tersâne, zâbitan, mekâtib);
b. “î” to indicate the possessive “î” (dahilî, sultanî);
c. also used to indicate the long vowels in Arabic and Persian words (ruûs, mekâtib, danishgâh) and in proper names to indicate the long vowels.
For geographical names, common English forms, e.g. Ankara, Aleppo, Baghdad, and İstanbul, are given as such. For less known places both Ottoman and current names are given, e.g. Skopje (Üsküp), Bitola (Manastır), Mytilene (Midilli).
Ottoman Turkish words existing in an English dictionary (e.g. Vizier, Grand Vizier, Pasha) are used as such.
Italics are used for foreign terms, book titles, and names of institutions throughout the text.
The names of institutions and offices are capitalized: e.g. Darülfünun, Divân-ı Muhasebat, Encümen-i Dâniş, etc. Titles are not capitalized unless they come before a personal name: e.g. grand vizier, müderris; but Grand Vizier Mustafa Reşid Pasha, Müderris Hilmi Efendi.
Abbreviations
AUB American University of Beirut
BCA State Archives of the Prime Ministry (Republican Archives) [Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri— Cumhuriyet Arşivi]
BOA State Archives of the Prime Ministry (Ottoman Archives) [Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri—Osmanlı Arşivi]
CHF Republican People’s Party [Cumhuriyet Halk Fırkası]
CUP Committee of Union and Progress Party [İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti Fırkası]
DİA Türkiye Diyanet Foundation Encyclopedia of Islam [Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi]
IRCICA Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture
ISAR Foundation for the Research on Islamic History, Art and Culture
M. Stands for French Monsieur, if it comes before European names
MMZC Meclisi Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi
OMLT History of Mathematical Literature During the Ottoman Period [Osmanlı Matematik Literatürü Tarihi]
OTTBLT History of the Literature of Natural and Applied Sciences During the Ottoman Period [Osmanlı Tabii ve Tatbiki Bilimler Literatürü Tarihi, 2 vols., 2006]
RPEs Regulations of Public Education (1869) [Maârif-i Umûmiyye Nizâmnâmesi]
SPC Syrian Protestant College
TBMM Turkish Grand National Assembly [Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi]
TBTK
TTK
TÜBA
Abbreviations
Turkish Society for History of Science [Türk Bilim Tarihi Kurumu]
Turkish Society of History [Türk Tarih Kurumu]
Turkish Academy of Sciences [Türkiye Bilimler Akademisi]
Introduction
Universities in Europe, Medreses in the Muslim World
The birth and evolution of the university as degree-granting institution of higher learning and research are interconnected with cultural and socioeconomic developments in Europe. Obviously, there were older and long-standing educational institutions in civilizations outside Europe, and the Islamic civilization may be the most outstanding example of these. However, these institutions were not identical to the universities. In Europe, the university developed under different conditions and was distinct from the institutions of higher education of the other civilizations, specifically regarding its legal structure and the stages of its development.
The necessary conditions for the establishment of European universities were contemporaneous with the first breaches in the feudal system. This same period witnessed a period of urbanization. Many new cities were founded, some of which, especially those in Italy, organized communes, thus giving rise to new social classes and guilds. Similarly, international trends and contacts with other civilizations upset many customs and ways of thinking. This resulted in what many scholars have called an intellectual renascence in the twelfth century.
As commonly acknowledged, universities were formally established associations or guilds [universitas in Latin]. The first to appear in the historical record were the University of Bologna (1088) and the University of Paris (ca.1150).
At Bologna, the students—many of them grown men and lawyers with established practices—formed themselves into several universitates. Bologna therefore developed at first as a universitas scholarium or an association of students who employed and paid the teachers. However, in Paris, the teachers banded together
to form a universitas magistrorum, a different type of organization, which became the dominant model.5
As the examples of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford illustrate, guilds of masters and students in very different locations achieved an autonomy that resulted in a new kind of educational institution: a school with universally valid privileges [studium generale] that often incorporated multiple disciplines or faculties.6 Some of the early universities developed under the aegis of the Latin Church, usually developing out of preexisting cathedral schools. Early universities that were corporations of students and masters received their charters from popes, emperors, and kings. In the case of the University of Paris, the papacy was directly involved, issuing a bull that offered specific protections for the university’s curriculum or studia generalia. Despite these early interventions on the part of the church and other authorities, the privileges that were conferred actually amounted to a grant of autonomy.7
During the early modern period, from the late 1400s to 1800, the number of the universities in Europe grew tremendously. Toward the end of this period, new universities were being founded under the auspices of the state, as the old established ones increasingly came under state control. Faculty self-governance, reminiscent of the model first developed at the University of Paris, became more prominent with faculty “masters” exerting authority and control over the students. The application of this model came in at least three forms. There were universities with a system of faculties in which teaching was centralized around a very specific curriculum; this model tended to train specialists. There was a collegiate or tutorial model based on the system implemented at the University of Oxford. At such universities, teaching and organization were decentralized and knowledge was of a more generalist nature. There were also universities that combined these models, applying the collegiate structure but having a centralized organization.8
Until the French Revolution, European universities, although divided by their dependence on Catholic and Protestant sovereigns, were organized in much the same way, and taught more or less the same branches of knowledge in four or
5. A History of the University in Europe: Universities in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. H. De Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), vol. 1.
6. Michael H. Shank, “Schools and Universities in Medieval Latin Science,” in Cambridge History of Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 207–239.
7. H. C. Dent, Universities in Transition (London: Cohen & West, 1961), 18–19.
8. On the types of the universities in the early modern period, see Willem Frijhoff, “Patterns,” in A History of the University in Europe: Universities in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. H. De Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), vol. 2, 64.
five classical faculties. By the end of the eighteenth and through the nineteenth centuries, however, religion gradually lost its prominence in European universities. During this period, universities became institutions of modern learning and research. Some were secularized in their curriculum and administration.
Walter Rüegg, in his examination of the history of the university in nineteenth-century Europe, attributes the emergence of the modern university to three processes, namely secularization, bureaucratization, and specialization. By secularization, he means the transformation of public universities into lay institutions everywhere in Europe. The university was bureaucratized, he explains, through the creation of state agencies, such as the French Ministry of Education in 1828. Such state sponsorship, and other related processes, resulted in the transformation of university professors into civil servants of the secular state. The most important consequence of this process was the professionalization of a career in the university. As for specialization, students were introduced to specific scientific disciplines through laboratory experimentation and the research seminar. In this respect, the modern universities reached back to the so-called Humboldtian model that first arose in the Germanies in the early nineteenth century. Named after Prussian polymath and educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt, these universities came to dominate the intellectual landscape of Europe, America, and Japan. In Italy, for instance, toward the end of the century, doctoral theses began to present original research instead of mere compilations and recitations of previous work. Specialist chairs were created, and scientific journals achieved a continuous existence in the form of periodical publication.9
Despite the ubiquity that the Humboldtian model of education would come to enjoy, there were other divergent forms that the European university took. These often emerged and took on definition along nationalist lines. France, for instance, had developed its own system of schools and universities that was different from that of the Germans in important ways. In the French model, higher education was offered through two sets of institutions. Public universities had a legal obligation to accept all candidates in their region who held a baccalaureate. University faculties were organized into four categories (law, medicine, science, and humanities) under the strict supervision of the government. During the nineteenth century, a number of higher-education institutions under the name of les grandes écoles were established to support the nation’s industry and commerce. The admissions of the grandes écoles [literally, great schools], which were established outside the main framework of the French universities, were based mainly
9. Walter Rüegg, A History of the University in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), vol. 3, 6–13.
on competitive examinations. The French model epitomized a state-steering, meritocratic society. In France, professionals with a specialized education were regarded as an exquisite elite selected for their intellectual and social superiority. The French model remained in force under successive regimes, and it was only in the last third of the nineteenth century that it was eroded as French intellectuals came under the influence of the German model.10
Wilhelm von Humboldt’s German university system, with its flagship institution Humboldt University, which also bears his name, gave prominence to research and the education of scientists above all else. In the Humboldtian university, professors were expected to integrate research methods into their teaching so that students would be exposed to it from the very beginning of their studies. In von Humboldt’s own words, “If the teacher and student relationship in schools is of one type, a completely different one prevails in the university; there the former does not exist for the latter; rather both exist for science. The presence and cooperation of students is an integral part of research work, which would not be as successful if the students did not back up the teacher.”11
The introduction of students to scientific research through seminars and laboratories only came about slowly. However, liberal reform bore fruit. While, at the beginning of the century, Paris had been a mecca for scholars and scientists from all over the world, by the 1830s the French government was sending representatives to Germany to enquire about progress in higher education. In the same way, young French people, and later Americans as well, trained at German universities under professors who taught according to these new scientific methods. From the end of the nineteenth century, the German model represented the modern university not only in Europe, but also in the United States and Japan.12
The English residential model known as Oxbridge, a term used to refer collectively to the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, continued to be England’s only university system until the nineteenth century. This residential model, so called because of its collegiate structure whereby the university is a cooperative of its constituent colleges, provided pastoral care as the principal teaching method for its undergraduates. Small classes with low student-to-teacher ratios, known as tutorials, provided close contacts between the students and their faculty. This has remained an important element of the Oxbridge system and is
10. Ibid., vol. 3, 4–5.
11. Alfonso Borrero Cabal, The University as an Institution Today (Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 1993), 5–6.
12. Rüegg, A History of the University in Europe, vol. 3, 9–13.
considered vital for the intellectual development of young people in the Englishspeaking world.13 The British model, for instance, has been highly influential in North America, taking root early on in the British colonies. Nevertheless, by the later nineteenth century the German university model also began to challenge the American college system as the principal dynamic source for aspiration and emulation.
I.1 The Diffusion of Universities Outside Europe
The establishment of new universities and colleges outside Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued these earlier patterns of institutional foundation and expansion. New universities in Western and Central Europe reproduced existing models under new locations. By 1800, Central and South America had already taken their models of universities from Spain, and the North Americans had taken theirs from Great Britain. In the nineteenth century, the German universities, markedly affected by the ideas of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt, were to become the sources of yet another—but still European—model that was implanted in the United States, in Japan, and elsewhere.14 This is not to say, however, that important cases of adaptation and modification did not also take place in these new regions.
The first universities outside of Europe took root in the Americas as an extension of institutions of European culture; this was followed later by Asian and African countries under the aegis of the church or as an element of colonial development.
The university was carried to the New World after Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492. The Catholic Church and other religious institutions, in their haste to found institutions of higher education under their own control, chose to cooperate with the kingdom of Spain. The University of Santo Domingo was founded in 1538 and the universities of Mexico and Lima in 1551. These universities are clear examples of the Reformation and Counterreformation leading to a religious emphasis in universities that was less marked in the medieval period. During the period of invasion and colonization, these were succeeded by one university after another on the model of the great Renaissance universities of Salamanca (founded in the thirteenth century) and Alcalá de Henares.15
13. Cabal, The University as an Institution Today, 29–35.
14. Edward Shils and John Roberts, “The Diffusion of European Model Outside Europe,” in A History of the University in Europe, ed. Walter Rüegg, vol. 3, 163.
15. Cabal, The University as an Institution Today, 3–4.
