The Faculty of Arts

One of the four traditional divisions of the teaching body of the university. It is impossible to fix the date of the origin of autonomous faculties in the early medieval universities, because, as Denifle has observed, the division did not take place all at once, or as the result of deliberate action, but came about gradually, as the result of a spontaneous inner development. As a matter of fact, the formation of faculties sprang from the same academic impulse that gave rise to the universities themselves. The mother universities of Europe were those of Paris and Bologna. The germ of the University of Paris was the voluntary association of the teaching Masters, after the fashion of the universally prevalent guild-formation. At Bologna, it was the association of the students that gave rise to the corporate university. In both places it was but natural, and, as it seems to us now inevitable, that the teachers in a common field of knowledge should gradually come to act together along the lines of their identical interests. Such unions appear to have been formed soon after these two universities came into existence, if indeed they did not exist before. Schools of arts, theology, law, and medicine had been established throughout Europe previous to the organization of the universities, and the separate existence of such schools foreshadowed the division of the university teaching-body into faculties. Although there is evidence of the existence of a general association of the Masters at Paris, about the year 1175, the first direct proof of the existence of faculties in the same university goes back only to the year 1213. The four faculties then recognized were theology, arts, canon law, and civil law. The term faculty was used at first to designate a specific field of knowledge; but in 1255 we find the Masters at Paris using the term in the modern meaning of a union of the teachers in a certain department of knowledge. The new turn given to the meaning of the word was not without significance. The centre of power, the "facultas", had shifted from the objective to the subjective side of knowledge. Henceforth the teacher was to be the dominant influence. +