In the last chapter the concrete causes of the origin of the university corporations were established - the huge increase in scholarly literature, the specialisation of the big schools, the growth in student numbers, the continuing internationalisation of students and teachers in each school. Behind all this was the economic recovery and society‘s increased need of people with a higher degree of training. But even if the universities thus meet the needs of society, they were not as a matter of course totally suited to the society they had to serve. Already at their beginning they ran into a number of problems that had to do with their social role and status. A little paradoxically, it can be said that many of these difficulties arose because in a manner of speaking the universities came into the world without knowing it.

A teacher or student in Bologna, Paris, or Oxford at the end of the twelfth century would not have felt himself a member of any ‘university’. Perhaps he would use the word universitas now and again, but only as a neutral term for all people associated with his school either as teachers or students. The organisations which he could see right in front of him were not universities in the later sense of the word. They were only fairly loosely structured associations by means of which teachers and students each tried to defend their separate interests. If he thought more carefully about this matter, the student would accordingly have to admit that the position was weak in many ways.