1. What is a university? A proseminary

The first lecture in this coursebook aims at making you understand the main functions of the university, as well as your tasks and responsibilities here as students.

Let us start thinking about these issues with the help of an example related to a university professor, Ulysse Aldrovandi, who taught in the 16^th century at one oldest university of the world, the university of Bologna, which was established in 1088. Aldrovandi studied and taught diverse subjects, including philosophy and natural sciences. Today he is best known for the volumes he wrote on natural history, some of which were published by his pupils, after his death. One of these volumes is entitled A history of serpents and dragons (published in 1640). The phrase “history” may sound strange in this title, because it clearly cannot refer to the usual sense, meaning “the arrangement of historical events in a story”. It should be taken in the sense of “the collected knowledge about a specific topic”, in this case about serpents and dragons. The term “dragon” may also be confusing because of its mythical connotations, but we can accept that Aldrovandi thought about dragons (either mythical or not) as a category similar to, and thus belonging to the same group as serpents.

Think about the way you would arrange the knowledge available about this topic. Try to come up with chapter titles you would include in such a book. Write down these chapter titles.

Did you come up with titles such as “Anatomy”, “Habitat”, “Reproduction”, “Feeding”, and “Adaptation”? These are the topics one would mostly expect to find in a science book. Or did you maybe concentrate primarily on dragons as imaginary animals, and thought of chapter titles such as “Mythology and dragons”, or “Dragons in films and literature”?

Now look at a selection of chapter titles from Aldrovandi’s book. These will help us get to know a lot about the logic used for organizing knowledge in Aldrovandi’s time, as well as the way it is different from ours.

° Anatomy

° Methods of capturing it

° Allegorical uses

° Mode of generation

° Habitat

° Legendary mansions

° Food

° The best way of cooking its flesh

What does this selection of chapter titles tell us? Does it reflect the grouping of academic disciplines into sciences and humanities the way we are used to? Can you explain the difference between the approach of the 16^th century professor from Bologna University and our own in grouping the knowledge available about the given topic?

In the examined part, in his book on “Serpents and dragons” Aldrovandi wished to include everything that was known about these animals, while in the larger project, in his series on natural history he wished to collect the knowledge available about the whole world. So his chapter titles quoted above refer to data that would today be included in volumes on subjects that seem unrelated to us: a biology book (e.g. anatomy), a book on heraldry (allegorical uses), but also a book on legends and mythology as well (legendary mansions), and perhaps most surprisingly, a cookbook (the best way of cooking its flesh). An important conclusion that we can draw is that the method of organizing knowledge was different in Aldrovandi’s time.

Interestingly, however, what he did was not simply grouping an existing, pre-given body of facts and data into chapters that seem unusual, or even funny to us. What he also did was to decide what would qualify as proper knowledge, what was to be included in the volumes, and consequently, what was known and accepted as proper knowledge about the world by his readers.

Although today books on the subjects he treated group knowledge differently, while some of his subjects look today suspicious in themselves in the sense that they seem not seriously scientific, there are a lot of similarities in the way his university and today’s universities work in generating and grouping knowledge. Apart from similarities in function, as it is discussed below, interestingly, there is even a real institutional continuity between Aldrovandi’s university, the university of Bologna and other universities in Europe, regulated by the Bologna Declaration signed by ministers of education, creating the European Higher Education Area. In several ways, as students and teachers at a university, we are Aldrovandi’s successors. There may be differences between how we see the world and represent our knowledge, but these differences show us that knowledge is culturally generated – and the universities as institutions play a crucial role in this process. He too, just like us, was interested in understanding and interpreting, in grouping and disseminating – and thus generating knowledge.

Now let us take a more practical look at the question in the title of this chapter.

What is a university? Regarding the hierarchical structure of education, it is the highest level of studies.

The structure of studies is the following:

° pre-school

° elementary/primary studies

° secondary level (US: high-school)

° post-secondary studies (US: community college)

° higher education/tertiary education

Since there are diverse levels of university degrees, university studies are not homogenous.

The structure of university studies is the following

° Lower level [undergraduate studies] – the first three years – type of diploma: BA/BSc

° Upper level [graduate studies] – years 4 and 5 – type of diploma: MA/MSc/MBA/Med

These two levels may be combined, for example in the five-year teacher training program.

° Doctoral [post-graduate] level  – type of diploma: PhD/DLA/DSc

“Post-graduate” may refer to the upper level, since it already requires a degree, while some universities require that students start their planned doctoral studies at the upper level, and “post-graduate” in these cases refers to the upper and the doctoral level combined.

Having a look at Aldrovandi’s example, we see that as a university professor he did several things. He was, of course, teaching, but he also did research, and made this research available to professionals and the public through his volumes. Today’s universities carry out similar tasks. A university has three functions: teaching, research and service.

As students of the university, you obviously benefit from two functions of the university: teaching and services. But what about research? What is the relationship between university research and students? Isn’t research something that is done by professionals only, namely professors?

On the one hand, research is the obligation of your teachers, and either directly or indirectly, the results of these are included in your curricula. If there were no new research, students at universities would still be studying the same as they did in the past, and perhaps even Aldrovandi’s choice of chapters would not seem funny to us. On the other hand, as university students, you have to learn the rules according to which research in your field of studies is conducted. In other words, throughout your studies you become familiar with the rules of academic discourse. You learn

• questions and problems that are relevant in a given field
• the relevant methods dealing with those problems
• the rules of presenting new information/ generating knowledge within that given field
• the context and the assumed knowledge related to a given topic

In this process you develop transferable academic skills, such as

• Critical skills
• Data collection skills
• Presentation skills
• Communication skills
• Intercultural skills

While conducting your own research, for example when you work towards a seminar paper or presentation, you rely on three types of sources: primary, secondary and tertiary sources.

An example for a research topic in the field of English could be the representation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in comic strips. In this case the main primary sources would be comic strips referring to Hamlet; but also Shakespeare’s Hamlet as reference. Secondary sources would be scholarly books or articles that discuss Shakespeare’s influence in comic strips, or more generally Hamlet in 21st century visual culture, or Shakespeare’s dramas in contemporary popular culture. Tertiary sources could be chapters on visual culture and/or popular culture in study guides on Shakespeare.

Importantly, however, it is your research itself that will define whether a source you use will be primary, secondary or tertiary, not the sources. Wikipedia, for example, would normally serves as a tertiary source (and even for that, a questionable one for its accuracy – see the task at the end of this chapter related to Wikipedia). If, however, your research is focused on “Frauds and hoaxes on Wikipedia”, it will logically serve as your primary source.

The academic/scientific accuracy of the research you do is decided by your teachers. The output of your teacher’s research is also evaluated, by reviewers. Their books and articles are published after a review process. The term simple or double blind peer review refers to the number of anonymous readers who decide whether an article or a book presenting original research is worthy of publication.