Actors

A university is a complex entity requiring a host of different people to function. Retracing more than 550 years of history for the many students, professors, teachers, assistants, support staff, administrative workers, technical staff, and librarians, and of so many university committee members, office holders, and official representatives, would be an endless task.

Only selected aspects can be highlighted here. More research and reconstructions are urgently needed: accounts of people and their stories, along with descriptions of official duties, institutions, and committees, and of those who have kept these structures working and given them meaning for over half a millennium.

The following pages address, in only very basic and incomplete terms, some questions about the two main groups in this history: university teachers and their students. It must also leave largely unexamined those services essential to a university’s functioning.

A secular change – the presence of women
One aspect that in recent decades has increasingly, and more significantly, come to distinguish the modern university from all previous periods requires more systematic treatment: the presence of women. Initially admitted only reluctantly at the end of the nineteenth century, they have formed the majority of students since the beginning of the twenty-first century and are now indispensable to the teaching staff.