Looking at the development of the medieval university, one can
say that it was the embodiment of the reification of language,
of the Greek logos and of the Roman ratio. The entire history of
reifying the past was summarized in the university and projected
as a model for the future. Alternative ways of thinking and
communicating were excluded, or made to fit the language mold
and submit, without exception, to the dominating rationality.
Based on these premises, the university evolved into an
institution of methodical doubt. It became an intellectual
machine for generating and experimenting with successive
alternative explanations of the universe, as a whole, and of its
parts, considered similar in some way to the whole they
constituted.
The circumstances leading to the separation of intellectual and
educational tasks were generated by an interplay of factors. The
printing press is one of them. The metaphors of the university
also played an important role. But the defining element was
practical expectations. As people eventually learned, they could
not build machines only by knowing Latin or Greek, or by
reciting litanies, but by knowing mathematics and mechanics.
Some of this knowledge came from Greek and Latin texts preserved
by Moslem scholars from the desolation following the fall of the
Roman empire. People also had to know how to express their
goals, and communicate a plan to those who would transform it
into roads, bridges, buildings, and much more.
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