University researchers have a special obligation to pursue the common good, an obligation that has not always been part and parcel of the university mission. Medieval universities (Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, established in the tenth century, may be the oldest) were constructed for the scholastic guilds, the members of which were the sons of land-owning families. The curriculum, or magistrorum, was designed around religious knowledge, and the main subjects included theology, law, the arts, and medicine. Furthering the good of commoners or of the wider society was not a part of the mission. Nor was this part of the mission of European universities established during the Renaissance’s eleventh to fourteenth centuries. Again, only young men of the wealthy elite classes were allowed to study, and they had to know Latin to pursue scholarship. One of the central purposes of a higher degree was to continue the universitas scholarium, reviving it with a new generation of humanistic scholars steeped in classical languages and values. Improving the state of the working classes was not part of this aim.

On this score, little had changed by the seventeenth century when the first US universities were created. Modeled on British institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge, private institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton set out to train the sons of the leaders of the New World. The students learned Greek, Latin, and other ancient languages, and their instructors preserved and promoted the study of classical texts. Students pursued research in the sciences in addition to their humanistic studies in theology, history, and philosophy.