FYS: Why are you here? Universities: Past, Present, and Future

3 Credits.

As an undergraduate student at Hopkins, you’ve likely given much thought about which university to attend and which major to choose. But why does the institution to which you’ve pledged to spend four years of your life exist? Where did universities come from? Why are they currently organized in departments, and why weren’t they organized that way for most of their past? Why was Johns Hopkins founded, and how do its aims and structures differ from those of other American institutions of higher education as well as from other universities around the world?This course aims to give students insight into the history of the university as an institution that structures the quest for knowledge. Concentrating on the period from the founding of the first university in Bologna, Italy to the present moment, we will seek to understand how the human quest to know has informed the structure of academic institutions in different ways over the course of that history. We will explore ways that the quest to know has at times challenged and changed institutional structures. And we will conclude by thinking about how efforts to know that sit uneasily within the contemporary university are challenging its structures today. This course will require students both to engage sympathetically in the close reading of texts that are emblematic of different ways of knowing, and to think in institutional terms about how those different quests to know inspired and challenged academic structures over time. We hope that this manner of studying the history of the university will both expand and discipline our imagination of what is possible and good for its future.