How the Great Plague Changed European Universities
(and what that can teach us today)
It’s tempting to speculate about how COVID-19 will disrupt and transform our future as teachers and scholars in higher education. I think a longer view may provide a useful corrective and hopeful possibilities.
For the past few weeks, in Canada as in much of the world, university instruction has moved entirely online as governments struggle to limit the spread of the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.
Will university administrations, pressured by governments, use this as an excuse to push for increased online teaching and fewer permanent faculty positions? Are we seeing the beginning of the end for a great many brick-and-mortar regional universities? The internationally famous (and famously well-endowed) elite research universities will survive, no doubt, but perhaps this crisis is the harbinger of a dramatic expansion of online-only university-level instruction? Should universities respond in the short term by coordinating their efforts to provide an online-only learning experience that justifies their tuition fees (especially the lucrative international fees that so many universities covet)?
All reasonable questions as we nervously watch the COVID-19 crisis unfold. I want to offer a different kind of speculation. Epidemics and pandemics have always been terrifying junctures throughout human history. The Black Death, Cholera, Polio, 1918, Ebola, HIV/AIDS. Are there lessons to be drawn from this deeper history that the current global pandemic might highlight for us, and what are those lessons for the university?
Reflecting on the 14th century Great Plague and it’s aftermath for Europe, the late historian David Herlihy notes a proliferation of local universities that grew to challenge “the dominance of the older great centers”. I think the lesson here, for us today, is the importance of local resiliency.
The plague years devastated Europe. The scale is hard to fathom. Estimates suggest between ⅓ to over ½ of the population was lost, but regional variation was terrifying: a few places were completely spared, but elsewhere, entire villages were lost.
Predictably, student numbers dropped dramatically in the mid-14th century at the great European centers of learning. In Herlihy’s account, “in all Europe, the number of universities numbered about 30 before 1348; five of these were wiped out completely.”
Some of Herlihy’s most intriguing speculations involve teaching and scholarship. In his assessment, the proliferation of universities after 1350 “freed the curriculum of the weight of traditional subjects” and diversified the underlying culture of the medieval academy. Eventually eschewing latin for vernacular tongues, Herlihy describes how these regional universities anchored learning closer to communities of terrified distrustful survivors, afraid to send their young too far afield.
Higher education today faces a series of competing and conflicting demands. We’re told to teach relevant skills, but maintain research productivity. We’re asked to differentiate both our research and our instructional programmes to avoid redundancies across provincial and state systems. We’re implored to internationalize our student body and curricula, all against the constant refrain of seeking efficiencies and ‘scaling up’ offerings.
Against these continuing pressures, I think our present crisis, viewed in light of the story Herlihy tells, makes clear that we need to imagine universities as vital anchor institutions bound to, and helping to sustain, diverse and resilient communities.
What does that mean in practice? In addition to buttressing online learning as we hedge against possible futures, and while fully cognisant of global issues and the borderless nature of so much of our research, we must also think carefully about community engagement and partnerships, and teaching our local students in creative ways. We should strive to make ourselves that vital anchor institution for our communities, wherever we are.
To be clear, this isn’t an academic version of the defensive economic localism and disturbing xenophobic nationalism that we see today, and that pandemics have always inspired throughout history, fear and ignorance bringing out the worst in our natures. But it is a call to think very locally indeed when we ponder the role of the university in times like these. The temptation is to shunt our local-focused efforts to the side as we worry instead about scaling up online offerings and keeping our international tuition revenue. That, I think, would be ignoring the deeper and more hopeful lessons of history.
