Inefficient by Design: How Medieval Values Shaped Today's University

We're told to move faster, to be more like business. Why does it take five years to revise the general education curriculum? Why do decisions require approval from seven different committees? Why can't the university be more efficient?

But the university wasn't built for corporate efficiency. It predates the modern corporation by centuries. It emerged in the Middle Ages alongside institutions like the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire, and like them, it was structured according to medieval values that seem alien to us now: distributed power, rule by consensus, and the subordination of the temporal to the eternal.

These values make universities slow. But that slowness isn't dysfunction. It's by design.

A "Failed" Empire

To the extent anyone ever thinks about the Holy Roman Empire, it tends to conjure one of two thoughts: "doesn't it have something to do with Charlemagne?" or, more commonly, "isn't that what came before Germany?" Both understandings reflect a sense, common even until recently among professional historians, that the Holy Roman Empire was something of a "failed state"—either an unsuccessful restoration of the Roman Empire in the West under Frankish rule in the Middle Ages or the disappointing and over-long medieval prelude to a united Germany in the 19th century. It is a story of what could have been, if only those German kings could have gotten their act together.

The story of Emperor Charles V is a good example of how this view of history operates. Charles V was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Clement VII in Bologna in 1530, roughly halfway through the history of the Holy Roman Empire, which began with Charlemagne's coronation as Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in 800 and ended during the Napoleonic Wars, after which its lands were reconfigured at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 into smaller states ruled by the Hohenzollerns in Prussia, the Romanovs in Russia, and the former emperors, the Habsburgs, in Austria-Hungary. (You can download a VR reconstruction of Charles' coronation that my UConn colleagues and I built via the Meta Quest App Store.)

Through his mother and father, Charles was heir to the empires of both Austria and Spain, and upon his ascension to the throne, he became ruler of very nearly all of continental Europe outside of France. Charles was Archduke of Austria, King of Germany, King of Italy, King of Spain and Portugal, King of Naples and Sicily. He was also Duke of Burgundy and the Netherlands. The Dukes of Saxony and Bavaria, in turn, owed him fealty as Emperor. For a time, there was worry even in England and France that Charles would come to rule over those last remaining European states. If that weren't enough, he also ruled Spain and Portugal's brand new colonial conquests in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, making his a truly global empire. Looking back, it can seem as though Charles V was on the verge of establishing a kind of proto-European Union.

And then it was gone.

Because Charles ruled these territories in a variety of ways and by a variety of feudal rights and hereditary privileges, when he abdicated in 1556, unity went with him. Spain was held as a dynastic title and became the possession of his son Philip II. The imperial crown went to his brother Ferdinand. Although nominally sovereign over Saxony and Bavaria, when Charles stepped down, the Dukes of those territories took the moment to reassert their prerogatives and local powers. In the Netherlands, newly wealthy burghers declared a republic.

It didn't help that one of the compromises Charles had made to hold this disparate set of possessions together at the height of the Protestant Reformation was the Peace of Augsburg, which declared that local princes could choose the religion for their fiefdoms. This 1555 imperial declaration gave individual princes control of the most important political question of the day and caused no end of conflict and disunity, so much so that we remember these conflicts mainly by their extreme length: the Eighty Years' War of the 16th century and the Thirty Years' War of the 17th. After Charles, the Holy Roman Empire became again what it had always been, a complicated tangle of sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating, always shifting kingdoms, principalities, duchies, bishoprics, guilds, cities, and leagues. It would remain that way until 1806 when it was unceremoniously dissolved in the Napoleonic Wars, its lands reconfigured as a set of nation-states of a kind more familiar to us today, with Germany at their heart.

When the history is told this way, it's no surprise that we remember the Holy Roman Empire as a "failed state," a weak and unstable polity that was just hanging around waiting for the "real Germany" to emerge. But that's a hopelessly anachronistic view. The Holy Roman Empire wasn't a failed European Union or a weak Germany. It was a successful version of something else. The Holy Roman Empire wasn't a bad state. It was a good compromise. And it lasted a thousand years.

Rule by Consensus

Historian Bernd Schneidmüller recounts a 1216 law suit brought by two abbesses against the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, who, in his role as King of the Germans, sought to transfer authority over their abbeys from the crown to a local bishop in exchange for authority over an ecclesiastical city. A court of knights and nobles rejected the trade, arguing that they had not been consulted. The Emperor relented and the abbesses won their case. "The princes' maxim was conveyed to the King," writes Schneidmüller, "stating that the kingdom did not belong to him alone. It should be governed, rather, from the consensus of the princes."

Schneidmüller goes on to document a host of decisions that the Emperor could not make unilaterally, including the decision to call an assembly of nobles, the setting of local trading tariffs, and the bestowing of court positions. These and many other decisions were given by right to various councils, assemblies, and colleges. Most visibly, even the imperial succession was decided by consensus: the King himself was chosen by a College of Electors.

This is to say nothing of the power of the Pope during the Middle Ages. Not only was the King chosen by the College of Electors, he was only made Emperor upon anointing by the Pope in Rome. The Pope, moreover, held significant secular power in his own right, both as a prince in lands held directly by the Papacy and as superior to the various bishops, abbots, and abbesses who served not only as spiritual authorities but likewise as secular lords over often vast landholdings and peasant populations held by their respective dioceses and abbeys. In this way, as Brett Whalen has shown, a now-foreign notion of "dual sovereignty" of Emperor and Pope intermingled with public understandings of temporal power and spirituality to create a system of authority very different from our own.

Not only is the medieval model of rule by consensus, with its various powers, rights, and responsibilities governed by the complicated interplay of assemblies, colleges, ecclesiastical authority, lords and vassals, Kings and Popes unfamiliar to us, it makes for difficult history. In his magisterial 2016 history of the Holy Roman Empire, Heart of Europe, historian Peter H. Wilson writes, "a major reason for the Empire's relative scholarly neglect is that its history is so difficult to tell."

Schneidmüller concludes with the recognition that "Under such premises, the model of the empire possesses little glamour, with its tedious decision-making processes, its seemingly chaotic documentation of arriving or missing letters of consent, its arbitral courts without the power of enforcement and its never-ending discussions and procrastination." It is certainly why the Holy Roman Empire is held in low regard in contemporary understandings of governance, where corporate efficiency and government effectiveness are prized. As Schneidmüller writes, in the modern view, "'rule by consensus' becomes a synonym for ineffectiveness."

Instead of efficiency and effectiveness, medieval institutions like the Holy Roman Empire held very different values in highest regard. These included the just distribution of power, consensus in decision-making, a cautious respect for tradition and precedent, and the subordination of temporal values to eternal ones. And we can find these values of diffusion, consensus, caution, and tradition at work in the few medieval institutions that remain with us today.

The Church Endures

Though the political and economic structures of the Holy Roman Empire are long gone, a few institutions that emerged alongside it have persisted. The single largest and most powerful of these holdover institutions is the Catholic Church.

The Church today retains the basic structure it developed in the Middle Ages: a complex hierarchy with distributed power centers, elaborate procedures for decision-making, and a deep commitment to precedent. The Pope is elected by the College of Cardinals, themselves appointed through a process involving bishops, dioceses, and the Vatican bureaucracy. Major decisions on doctrine require consultation with bishops worldwide through synods and councils (it is a common misunderstanding that whatever the Pope says is Catholic dogma). Local bishops have significant autonomy within their dioceses, much as medieval bishops did within their territories.

This structure makes the Church slow. Agonizingly slow by modern standards. Major doctrinal changes can take decades or even centuries to work through the system. Vatican II, the most significant reform council of the 20th century, took years to convene, years to complete, and is still being debated and haphazardly implemented more than 60 years later.

But this slowness is not dysfunction. It's design. The Church is structured to preserve and transmit spiritual truth across centuries, to build consensus across a global institution, to balance local needs with universal doctrine. Speed would undermine these goals. The values are consensus, preservation, caution, and truth. The structure reflects those values. And the Church, for all its many problems and legitimate criticisms, has lasted two thousand years and claims 1.4 billion adherents today.

The First Universities

Like the Catholic Church, the university emerged alongside and both in concert and in tension with the Holy Roman Empire. The first Western university was founded at Bologna in the late 11th century, followed by Paris around 1150, Oxford in the 1160s, and Cambridge in 1209. By 1500, there were universities throughout Europe—in Italy, France, England, Scotland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and beyond.

These early universities were not created by decree or grand plan. The emerged from more informal gatherings of masters and students, who set their own curricula, fee structure, degrees requirements, and administrative arrangements. As historian Alan B. Cobban writes: "The earliest European universities were not specifically founded: they were spontaneous creations which evolved over a period of time. They first emerged at Bologna and Paris in the course of the twelfth century, and these were the archetypes which determined the twofold pattern of university organization in the Middle Ages: the former gave birth to the concept of a student-controlled university, the latter to that of a masters' university."

At Bologna and to some extent Padua, the studium—a body made up of the whole of the student body—was the primary governing body of the university. The studium chose the faculty, decided the curriculum, and set fees and faculty wages. This body was set against and ultimately superior to the commune of instructors, and the decision-making process for the university existed in the competition between these bodies.

Indeed, by 1400, three hundred or so years after Bologna's foundation, the tables had turned as the commune came to dominate the studium. Nevertheless, the same pattern of decision-making grounded in conflict and ultimate compromise between these bodies remained. Cobban writes: "But the fully-fledged concept of the student university was quickly overtaken by compromise and replaced by the mixed constitution whereby power was shared between students, teaching doctors and the communes: this became the normal state of affairs in Medieval Italy."

Later foundations in Northern Europe followed this pattern, evolving "a form of constitution which held a more even balance between the competing claims of masters and students in university government; sometimes the evolutionary process was accompanied by violent conflict."

Sound familiar? The values of balance of power and consensus that structured the Holy Roman Empire also underlay the structure and governance of universities.

Disputation as Structure and Culture

These values also shaped medieval pedagogy. Medieval teaching was grounded in a set of practices known as Scholasticism, which held disputation at its core. But as Alex Novikoff has shown in The Medieval Culture of Disputation, disputation wasn't just a teaching method, it was a cultural style that marked how lives were lived and institutions, including the university, were structured.

In scholastic disputation, a master would pose a question, students would argue different positions, and the master would attempt to resolve the dispute through careful reasoning and appeal to authorities. This wasn't just about finding the right answer, it was about testing ideas through structured disagreement, building consensus through rational argumentation, and arriving at truth through dialogue rather than decree.

The university itself was organized as a place in which scholastic disputation could take place. Masters were defined as experts in this kind of disputation. Students advanced by demonstrating competence in it. The curriculum was structured around disputational exercises. And the governance of the university mirrored this: finding knowledge through disputation in the curriculum paralleled finding consensus through competing factions in governance.

Finally, to bring it full circle, universities themselves were one of the power centers that participated in and made up the overall power-sharing and consensus-driven political and social order of medieval Europe. Like artisan guilds, religious orders, and city corporations, universities had their own political rights and privileges within the broader system. Cobban writes: "while the university might be tenuously supervised by an external authority [e.g., a king, prince, or bishop] this supervision must be made compatible with the de facto autonomous position of the academic guild." In some places, universities even came to own great estates and exercised power as feudal lords. Legend has it that one can still walk the 100 miles from Oxford to Cambridge entirely on lands owned by their colleges.

Medieval Values at Work

Today, in politics and elsewhere, efficiency is an unquestioned value. States are good at efficiency, so a strong state is itself an unquestioned good. An inefficient corporation is a bad corporation and needs to be fixed.

But the university doesn't hold efficiency to be the highest good—or at least it's not the good toward which it is organized. The university, unlike a corporation, is not structured for efficiency. Rather, as a medieval institution like the Empire and the Church, the university is structured to optimize other values: distribution of power, consensus, prudence, longevity, and the life of the mind.

This plays out in practice in ways that can seem maddening to anyone used to corporate or governmental decision-making. Power is distributed among faculty, staff, and students (and increasingly parents). Academic decisions require faculty approval through departments, curriculum committees, faculty senates, and boards of trustees. Administrative decisions require consultation with these internal stakeholders and usually a host of external ones: state legislatures, accrediting bodies, the federal government through Title IX and other regulations, the student loan industry, educational technology companies, and athletics boosters. Strategic planning involves seemingly endless rounds of input and revision that usually results in a document that's nearly identical to the one it intended to replace. Major changes can take decades to implement, even when there's broad agreement they're necessary.

Consider curriculum reform. It's not unusual at a larger university for a change in degree requirements to require seven or eight separate committee votes:

• departmental committee approval
• departmental faculty vote
• college curriculum committee review
• college faculty vote
• university curriculum committee review
• faculty senate vote
• provost approval
• board of trustees vote

It can take two or three years for a relatively minor change to work through this system.

From a corporate perspective, this is insane. From a medieval perspective, it's exactly right. If you've ever sat through such a process and wondered why it takes so long, this is why. The curriculum represents the collective judgment of the scholarly community about what students need to know. Changing it should require building consensus among those stakeholders. The slowness is a feature, not a bug. It ensures that changes are thoughtful, widely supported, and likely to endure.

This distributed power structure exists in tension with contemporary demands for accountability and responsiveness. But it's the fundamental architecture of the institution, developed over centuries to serve particular values. These values persist because they serve the university's fundamental purpose: the pursuit and transmission of truth across generations. Quick decisions might feel responsive, but education built to last decades requires the kind of slow, collective deliberation that makes changes stick. Market demands shift year to year, but the university educates people for careers that will span forty years. That requires building programs designed to outlast any particular moment.

The Holy Roman Empire lasted a thousand years. The Catholic Church has endured for two millennia. Universities have survived for nine centuries. All three were built on distributed power, rule by consensus, and a deliberate rejection of the kind of efficiency that prizes speed over durability. All three have been called slow, unwieldy, inefficient. All three have outlasted countless "efficient" competitors.

Standing by these medieval values may mean we never satisfy modern demands for greater efficiency. But they may allow us to outlast them.