Suddenly, it seemed less like a kitschy mail-order self-improvement great books thing, and more like a serious effort to spread learning, while making some money at the same time. The company was founded by Thomas Rollins, former chief counsel for the Senate Labor and Human Resources committee. He felt teaching was undervalued, and wanted to do something to promote great university teaching. Well, as a teacher, I certainly agree with that mission.
To judge from the website, he's done what he set out to do. Here's an excerpt from Philip Daileader's lecture on the state of universities in the High Middle Ages, relevant to a lot of us adjuncts and part-timers today:
Although all universities were founded for more or less the same reasons, nonetheless, two different types of universities emerged in the High Middle Ages. Paris and Bologna were rather different institutions, in many respects. They were different in terms of their academic specialties, and they were different in terms of their structures.
Paris was best known for theology. Bologna was best known for its law faculty, especially its civil law and secular law courses. The differences in structure often reflected these differences in academic specialization. The University of Paris was run by the teachers, magister, or "master," in the singular, magistri in the plural, whereas the University of Bologna was run by the students, not by the faculty. All medieval universities followed one of these two models, either the master-dominated University of Paris, or the student-dominated University of Bologna.
The reason for these different structures was the manner in which teachers were paid. Theoretically, no teacher was ever supposed to charge money, or demand money for teaching. All teaching should have been done for free, because knowledge was God's gift to humanity, and for a human being to charge money for that which was actually God's, was presumptuous. The teacher was to rely solely on gifts, freely given by students out of gratitude for the fact that teachers had shared God's knowledge with them. In practice, this was a highly unsatisfactory system of remunerating teachers; one who had to show up in class, and pray that someone gave him an apple, so that he could eat that day, and different sorts of arrangements had to be reached, whereby teachers could feed themselves.
In Paris, because it was so strong in theology, and the theology faculty really dominated the university, most teachers were supported by the Church. They were given salaries, called benefices, that they were able to live off of. Because the teachers in Paris, for the most part, did not have to rely on student gifts, but rather, were paid by the Church, they were free of student control, and were able to run the university as they saw fit.
At Bologna, with its strength in the law faculty, especially in secular law and in civil law, teachers had to rely on student fees directly for their livelihood, and since students were paying their salaries, students got to run the university. Indeed, modern teachers can only shudder with horror when they see the consequences for the poor faculty members at the University of Bologna. If you had been a master teaching at the University of Bologna, and you wanted to leave town for any reason, a getaway weekend, etc., you had to post bond with the students, guaranteeing that you were going to return to the University of Bologna, and actually teach your classes.
Teachers were fined for all sorts of infractions by the student body; I hope they don't see this tape. If you failed to attract five students to your class on any given day, you, the teacher, were marked as absent, because you had failed to gather a quorum, and you were fined for having been absent, even though you had been physically present. If you failed to keep pace with the syllabus, and you fell behind on your lecturing schedule, that, too, was a fine that you had to pay. If you were late for class, well, that was also a fine. It could be rather lucrative to be a student at the University of Bologna.
The manner in which the master's salary was negotiated at Bologna also seems rather odd today. At the beginning of an academic semester, during the first meeting of class, you as the master would choose one student from the class, a student whom you trusted. That student was given the responsibility of negotiating your fee for that semester with the student body. You, then, had to exit the room and sit outside anxiously, while the student, on your behalf, talked with the other students about how much you were actually worth. Given the fact that the student negotiating your fee had to pay whatever fee was negotiated, the results were not always that lucrative from the master's point of view. If you as a master had a choice between an appointment at the University of Paris, or the University of Bologna, well, that was a no-brainer. You wanted to go teach at Paris.
Perhaps when the history of teaching is taught a few centuries from now, a professor will cite the Teaching Company as an alternative to Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind...
UPDATE: Here's an article on the subject from The Chronicle of Higher Education
