A Different Organizational Model: The University of Paris

The other major model for the organization of university studies was more common in France.^[115] It existed in Italy as well, however, and it gradually became the rule there as the universitas scholarium (the “university” as an organization of students, professors excluded) shifted to the universitas scholarum (a “university” that included both students and professors).

The chief characteristic of this second model was the participation, at the same time and in one organization, of three elements that seemed to be and in practice were separate and distinct in the “Bolog­nese model”: students, professors, and a chancellor endowed with governing powers (who was the bishop of the university city). In this model, if there were student organizations they were attached to the student collegia or the nationes connected with the colleges, or they were completely extraneous to the official structure of the studium.

Within the university, activities, spheres of competence, and pow­ers became specifically defined, and “magistracies” were formed that were entrusted with (or recognized to have) power to choose the pro­fessors, establish their teaching responsibilities and their stipends, provide for financial administration, guarantee the quality of instruc­tion, establish the curriculum and the program, and safeguard the freedom and set the limits of teaching.

In the 1400s this was the most common university structure, and, although in preceding centuries it had been typical of Paris alone, by that date it was common to universities new and old throughout Eu­rope. We can find the same structures, with certain variants, in Italy in Perugia, Florence, Pavia, and Catania, and outside Italy in Prague, Pecs, Heidelberg, Toulouse, Salamanca, and a large number of other universities.

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