The history of universities in Scotland includes the development of all universities and university colleges in Scotland, between their foundation between the fifteenth century and the present day. Until the fifteenth century, those Scots who wished to attend university had to travel to England, or to the Continent. This situation was transformed by the founding of St John's College, St Andrews in 1418 by Henry Wardlaw, bishop of St. Andrews. St Salvator's College was added to St. Andrews in 1450. The other great bishoprics followed, with the University of Glasgow being founded in 1451 and King's College, Aberdeen in 1495. Initially, these institutions were designed for the training of clerics, but they would increasingly be used by laymen. International contacts helped integrate Scotland into a wider European scholarly world and would be one of the most important ways in which the new ideas of humanism were brought into Scottish intellectual life in the sixteenth century.
St Leonard's College was founded in St Andrews in 1512 and St John's College as St Mary's College, St Andrews was re-founded in 1538, as a humanist academy for the training of clerics. Public lectures that were established in Edinburgh in the 1540s would eventually become the University of Edinburgh in 1582. After the Reformation, Scotland's universities underwent reforms associated with Andrew Melville, who was influenced by the anti-Aristotelian Petrus Ramus. In 1617 James VI decreed that the town college of Edinburgh should be known as King James's College. In 1641, the two colleges at Aberdeen were united by decree of Charles I (r. 1625–49), to form the "King Charles University of Aberdeen". Under the Commonwealth (1652–60), the universities saw an improvement in their funding. After the Restoration there was a purge of Presbyterians from the universities, but most of the intellectual advances of the preceding period were preserved. The colleges at St. Andrews were demerged. The five Scottish university colleges recovered from the disruption of the civil war years and Restoration with a lecture-based curriculum that was able to embrace economics and science, offering a high-quality liberal education to the sons of the nobility and gentry.
In the eighteenth century the universities went from being small and parochial institutions, largely for the training of clergy and lawyers, to major intellectual centres at the forefront of Scottish identity and life, seen as fundamental to democratic principles and the opportunity for social advancement for the talented. Chairs of medicine were founded at all the university towns. By the 1740s Edinburgh medical school was the major centre of medicine in Europe and was a leading centre in the Atlantic world. Access to Scottish universities was probably more open than in contemporary England, Germany or France. Attendance was less expensive and the student body more representative of society as a whole. The system was flexible and the curriculum became a modern philosophical and scientific one, in keeping with contemporary needs for improvement and progress. Scotland reaped the intellectual benefits of this system in its contribution to the European Enlightenment. Many of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment were university professors, who developed their ideas in university lectures.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Scotland's five university colleges had no entrance exam, students typically entered at ages of 15 or 16, attended for as little as two years, chose which lectures to attend and left without qualifications. The curriculum was dominated by divinity and the law and there was a concerted attempt to modernise the curriculum, particularly by introducing degrees in the physical sciences and the need to reform the system to meet the needs of the emerging middle classes and the professions. The result of these reforms was a revitalisation of the Scottish university system, which expanded to 6,254 students by the end of the century and produced leading figures in both the arts and sciences. In the first half of the twentieth century Scottish universities fell behind those in England and Europe in terms of participation and investment. After the Robbins Report of 1963 there was a rapid expansion in higher education in Scotland. By the end of the decade the number of Scottish Universities had doubled. New universities included the University of Dundee, Strathclyde, Heriot-Watt, Stirling. From the 1970s the government preferred to expand higher education in the non-university sector and by the late 1980s roughly half of students in higher education were in colleges. In 1992, under the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, the distinction between universities and colleges was removed, creating new universities at Abertay, Glasgow Caledonian, Napier, Paisley and Robert Gordon.
History
Middle Ages
Background
From the end of the eleventh century, universities had been founded across Europe, developing as semi-autonomous centres of learning, often teaching theology, mathematics, law and medicine.I. Wei, "The rise of universities" in A. MacKay, ed., Atlas of Medieval Europe (London: Routledge, 1997), , pp. 241–3. Until the fifteenth century, those Scots who wished to attend university had to travel to England, to Oxford or Cambridge, or to the Continent. Just over 1,000 students have been identified as doing so between the twelfth century and 1410. Among the destinations Paris was the most important, but also Cologne, Orléans, Wittenberg, Louvain and Vienna.J. Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), , pp. 68–72.
Among these travelling scholars, the most important intellectual figure was John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308), who studied at Oxford, Cambridge and Paris. He probably died at Cologne in 1308, after becoming a major influence on late medieval religious thought.B. Webster, Medieval Scotland: the Making of an Identity (St. Martin's Press, 1997), , p. 119. After the outbreak of the Wars of Independence (1296–1357), with occasional exceptions under safe conduct, English universities were closed to Scots and continental universities became more significant.B. Webster, Medieval Scotland: the Making of an Identity (St. Martin's Press, 1997), , pp. 124–5. Some Scottish scholars became teachers in continental universities. At Paris, this included John de Rait (died c. 1355) and Walter Wardlaw (died c. 1387) in the 1340s and 1350s, William de Tredbrum in the 1380s and Laurence de Lindores (1372–1437) in the early 1500s. The continued movement to other universities produced a school of Scottish nominalists at Paris in the early sixteenth century, of which John Mair (1467–1550) was the most important figure. He had probably studied at a Scottish grammar school and then Cambridge, before moving to Paris where he matriculated in 1493.
First Scottish universities
This situation was transformed by the founding of St John's College, St Andrews in 1418. Henry Wardlaw, bishop of St. Andrews, petitioned the anti-Pope Benedict XIII during the later stages of the Great Western Schism, when Scotland was one of his few remaining supporters. Wardlaw argued that Scottish scholars in other universities were being persecuted for their loyalty to the anti-Pope.P. Daileader, "Local experiences of the Great Western Schism", in J. Rollo-Koster and T. M. Izbicki, eds, A Companion to the Great Western Schism (1378–1417) (BRILL, 2009), , p. 119. St Salvator's College was added to St. Andrews in 1450. The other great bishoprics followed, with the University of Glasgow being founded in 1451 and King's College, Aberdeen in 1495. Both were also papal foundations, by Nicholas V and Alexander VI respectively.J. Durkan, "Universities: to 1720", in M. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), , pp. 610–12. St. Andrews was deliberately modelled on Paris, and although Glasgow adopted the statues of the University of Bologna, there, like Aberdeen, there was an increasing Parisian influence, partly because all its early regents had been educated in Paris.A. Broadie, A History of Scottish Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), , p. 34. Initially, these institutions were designed for the training of clerics, but they would increasingly be used by laymen who began to challenge the clerical monopoly of administrative posts in government and law. They provided only basic degrees. Those wanting to study for the more advanced degrees that were common amongst European scholars still needed to go to universities in other countries. As a result, Scottish scholars continued to visit the Continent and returned to English universities after they reopened to Scots in the late fifteenth century.
By the fifteenth century, beginning in northern Italy, universities had become strongly influenced by humanist thinking. This put an emphasis on classical authors, questioning some of the accepted certainties of established thinking and manifesting itself in the teaching of new subjects, particularly through the medium of the Greek language.W. Rüegg, "The rise of Humanism", in Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ed., A History of the University in Europe: Volume 1, Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), , pp. 452–9. However, in this period, Scottish universities largely had a Latin curriculum, designed for the clergy, civil and common lawyers. They did not teach the Greek that was fundamental to the new humanist scholarship, focusing on metaphysics and putting a largely unquestioning faith in the works of Aristotle, whose authority would be challenged in the Renaissance.J. Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), , pp. 183–4. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, a humanist influence was becoming more evident. A major figure was Archibald Whitelaw, a teacher at St. Andrews and Cologne who later became a tutor to the young James III and served as royal secretary from 1462 to 1493.A. Thomas, "The Renaissance", in T. M. Devine and J. Wormald, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), , pp. 196–7. By 1497, the humanist and historian Hector Boece, born in Dundee and who had studied at Paris, returned to become the first principal at the new university of Aberdeen. In 1518 Mair returned to Scotland to become principal of the University of Glasgow. He transferred to St. Andrews in 1523 and in 1533 he was made Provost of St Salvator's College. While in Scotland his students included John Knox and George Buchanan.A. Broadie, The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy: A New Perspective on the Enlightenment (Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), , p. 23. These international contacts helped integrate Scotland into a wider European scholarly world and would be one of the most important ways in which the new ideas of humanism were brought into Scottish intellectual life in the sixteenth century.
Early modern era
Renaissance