Come the millennium, where the university?

Abstract

Allowing for any reference to the millennium at all, my title should have been "Come the next millennium, where the university?", or, even more to the point, "Come the second millennium, where the university?" While I do understand that, with the year 2001, the third millennium ad will begin, it actually will be permitting for some rounding up only the second for universities. The early decades of this second millennium may bring more changes to universities than their first 1,000 years. Some of these changes will be wrenching. By ad 1100, cathedral schools had emerged as the first urban schools in Europe and, with Peter Abelard's arrival, that of Paris achieved preeminence.1 At the beginning of the twelfth century, Irnerius taught Roman law at Bologna and, by the middle of the century, Paris had emerged as a centre for logic and theology. To quote Alan Cobban, the British historian of medieval universities: