The University

Catalog description

This course is an on-ramp for the emerging field of “critical university studies.” It takes a deep historical approach and begins in the medieval period for one crucial reason: the core function of the university, instruction at a high or expert level, has remained unchanged for almost a millennium. The course additionally presents a broad survey of key scholarship on early modern, on the nineteenth-century German university and on other institutions of higher learning. The second half of the course focuses on the twentieth-century university with a special focus on American institutions and on the natural sciences.