The Only Democratic Universities are Private Universities

Abstract

The first European universities were independent and democratic. But both traditions were soon killed by the Church and State. Consequently, having been neutralised, the European universities played little part in the revival of European thought in the great intellectual movements of the renaissance, reformation, enlightenment, the industrial and agricultural revolutions, and the romantic movement. It was the independent universities of the USA that eventually embarrassed the European universities into (modest) reform.