Studia Generalia

It was at about this point in my first year here that one of my discussion-section allies turned to me and said, “Dude, what’s with all the old people?” I assume that by now even new students will have discovered that the School of General Studies exists and that it contains old, passable, and genuinely young students, according to the regrettable classification system imposed on us all. But after all, you are only as mature as you feel—for instance, I recently found myself at a party in EC, urging my host to “fight the power” (in this case a very uncool RA). GS students can speak for themselves; the name of their school, however, is slightly more mysterious.

It certainly sounds suspicious—i.e., vague, rudimentary, or meaningless—and the colleges that offer not-very-rigorous majors in “general studies” do not help. And of course the name places the school squarely on the less fashionable side of the dichotomy between the general and the particular (general practitioner vs. vascular surgeon, for example).

So why General Studies? There was a general studies major in University Extension, the forerunner to GS, but it was the only major that its students—“so-called University undergraduates,” as the board of trustees termed them in 1921—were allowed to select. As such it didn’t reflect what they actually studied—future Nobel laureates in economics and medicine alike earned degrees in “general studies.” In part the GS name refers to this broad range of disciplines, but it also reaches farther back, to the beginning of modern education, the medieval university.

Background on the history of education, although necessary, will have to be superficial, with an obvious European bias. There are schools everywhere, but, as one might expect, Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lykeion are kind of a big deal. The Romans take the idea of artes liberales and everything else not bolted down from the Greeks. Enter Christianity; Rome falls and Latin declines, except in monasteries, where ancient texts are copied and more or less neglected as the monks withdraw from the wicked wisdom of the filthy world.

The rise of universities coincides with a general détente between civilization and various barbarian hordes, with towns becoming increasingly independent of feudalism, with the wheeled plough (which is huge in ways we can’t even fathom), but most of all with the influx of Arabic translations of classical texts in the 11th and 12th centuries. Individual schools—now primarily run by the church rather than monasteries—can’t handle the glut of information and have to specialize.

Places like Bologna, Paris, and Cambridge gain prominence as centers for the study of one discipline or another, and people from all over Europe make the trip for the privilege of instruction. Because their student bodies and faculties are heterogeneous and international rather than local, these schools become known as studia generalia (vs. studia particularia). As a name studia generalia persists throughout the medieval period but gradually falls into disuse, its place usurped by universitas, a holdover from the Roman legal system used to designate a corporation of students and teachers.
A student’s life at a studium generale would have been cosmopolitan (within the confines of Christendom), but it would also have been rather individualistic. The high degree of specialization meant that students lacked what the Columbia College Web site calls “sophisticated general education perspectives.” Consequently, to get a fuller education and advance in the Church hierarchy, they often had to travel from school to school, frustrating any kind of lasting, BFF-style bonds. Of course so many things can befall the innocent traveler, or lure him/her (almost always him, except in books by the Marquis de Sade) from the one true path, from highwaymen to taverns to my personal favorite, women of questionable virtue. It is also simply not a good idea to have anyone—much less book-smart underlings in the Roman Catholic Church—roaming around Europe with sacks of money to pay tuition fees.

Once safely in a town, though, students’ lots were not much better. They were almost always impoverished and either begging for alms or stealing—although as clergymen they were exempt from civil or criminal prosecution and could only be tried in ecclesiastical courts. This and other tensions kept town/gown animosity high, as in Paris in 1229 when a dispute between students and an innkeeper turned into a full-scale riot. The students were chased out of town, but came back the following day with reinforcements and, as one source had it, “razed the inn to the ground and let the wine run dry in the gutters.” The townspeople called the cops, and—1968 spoiler alert—things did not go well for the students.

With time and the involvement of several popes, things eventually calmed down, generally to the benefit of the schools rather than the towns. After a particularly nasty fracas in Oxford (scalps were taken), the town was ordered to pay the university an annual fine—and did so for nearly 500 years. But such conflicts helped to introduce more comprehensive social and academic structures to the universities, as well as a notion of solidarity among students (or at least an us vs. them mentality) that had not previously existed.

The obvious snide remark is that solidarity is what the School of General Studies lacks today, to which one can perfunctorily reply that things are clearly getting better, that the student council has new initiatives, etc. But we should not overlook the benefits of seeing education as a fundamentally individual matter, as it was in the studia generalia and is at Columbia today.

We are all racking up some sort of private debt for the privilege, either in money, filial obligation (your parents could have bought a car or four), or, tragically, both. But in that debt is a kind of liberating urgency—someday you will have to pay, so right now you should make sure you get your money’s worth of zany antics, Fox News appearances, or, I suppose, education.

The author is a senior in the School of General Studies.
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