How Have Universities Survived for Nearly a Millenium

How have universities managed to survive and evolve over almost 1,000 years to become wildly heterogeneous, unusually fractious, multi-product, non-profit entities? Universities began as teachers’ guilds, and they still give faculty a remarkable degree of autonomy. That structure attracts and empowers intellectuals, who are selected in part on their taste for knowledge, and those entrepreneurs and philanthropists have enabled universities to morph in ways that firms rarely do. Intellectual autonomy can also explain why universities are so often at odds with legal authorities and why faculty fight so often with each other and with their bosses. This essay presents a model of university organization and sketches the evolution of the university’s products and conflicts over the last 900 years. We also discuss the social value of university education.