Alcalá before Reform—the Decadence of a Spanish University Open Access

A few miles east of Madrid on the ambling Henares River lies the town of Alcalá de Henares. South of the town the land rises into high bluffs that roll away toward Cuenca. To the north the land slopes gradually up to the Guadarrama Mountains. These fields, once covered with the dun villages and yellow wheat of New Castile, now hold an American air base and the expanding suburbs of a new Madrid. The old Alcalá, somewhat isolated from the modern automobile highway by surviving remnants of a brick town wall, has sunny narrow streets and cool shade beneath the extended second stories of the houses, supported on worn stone posts in the old Castilian fashion. The Spanish paratroopers who crowd the streets and the casual travelers who chance to visit its monuments are, for the most part, little conscious that Alcalá was once a town of importance. Not for numbers, for it was never large; nor was Alcalá so fortunate as its neighbor, Madrid, which received the royal favor of Philip II and became the capital of Spain. Rather, Alcalá was once the seat of a famous university that filled its streets and crowded its houses with students. Its narrow precincts were pressed outwards by many convents and colleges, its market place and shops busy selling bread and books, and its officers concerned with the acquiring and spending of ecclesiastical revenue.

The University of Alcalá was founded, amid the vaulting expectations of the sixteenth century and under the patronage of Cardinal Cisneros, to give Spain a great center of learning that would marry humanism and theology. Living up to its founder’s expectations, it eventually became overburdened with laurels as a part of the Spanish “establishment.” Entrenched and enduring, proud and confident of its place, Alcalá came to look back over nearly three centuries of corporate existence and intellectual accomplishment. As the accidents of time and events shaped her institutions, she came to personify many aspects of Spain before the reinvigoration of the eighteenth century. Her organization and scholarship became the essence of Hapsburg Spain. The variations and modulations of Alcalá’s growth cannot be fully traced here. But a study of this ancient corporation at the moment when it met head-on the modern trends of the late eighteenth century can show us something of Spain and Spanish intellectuals as they faced the Enlightenment.

Alcalá’s antecedents as a seat of learning seem to go back to the thirteenth century. In May 1293, Don Gonzalo Gudiel, archbishop of Toledo, received a privilege from Sancho IV of Castile, authorizing him to erect a “University and General Study” in Alcalá.¹ The fate of this general study is not known, but apparently it had perished by the fifteenth century, for in 1459 Don Alonso Carillo y Acuña, archbishop of Toledo, secured from Pius II a bull diverting certain revenues of his diocese for the founding of three chairs of arts.²

But these primitive beginnings laid only a rude foundation for sustained and costly efforts by the great Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros, who was the real founder of the university. Shortly after becoming archbishop of Toledo in 1495, Cisneros undertook to establish a new university. The church had long needed a Spanish university that would emphasize theology and at the same time incorporate recent progress in humanistic and linguistic studies. Moreover, the cardinal wanted an institution purged of the medieval self-governing usages that had caused so much turbulence at Salamanca. Accordingly, in 1499 he obtained from Alexander VI a bull setting up a university at Alcalá in which theology, canon law, and arts would be taught. Its government was to be modeled after the colleges of San Bartolomé at Salamanca and San Clemente in Bologna.³ Subsequent bulls annexed to the university numerous benefices in the diocese of Toledo.⁴

The cardinal had little attention to spare for his university from 1504 to 1508, but at the latter date, when the accession of Philip and Juana to the throne of Castile was assured, Cisneros returned to Alcalá to oversee the laying of his new foundation. In July 1508, there arrived at Alcalá seven bachelors of Salamanca personally selected by Cisneros to be the first occupants of the college. In the following month Cisneros arranged the plan of studies and appointed the first professors.⁵

From the beginning, Alcalá’s government had certain peculiar features imposed by the cardinal in an attempt to avoid the problems which had arisen at the University of Salamanca. There the right of the students to elect the rector and to vote in the selection of professors had produced an independent and tumultuous university of which Cisneros, as regent and royal confessor, had probably had ample and repugnant experience. Accordingly the founder confided the government of his university to a single college. This college, named for San Ildefonso, consisted of thirty-three persons governed by a rector and three councilors. These officers were elected annually by the collegians from among their own number, and to them was entrusted the whole government of the university.⁶

This principal college (colegio mayor), was to function as a graduate college, and to it Cisneros attached affiliated colleges (colegios de la filiación), assigning a certain task to each one. The colleges of San Eugenio and San Isidoro supported and trained eighty undergraduate students of Latin grammar. Those of Santa Balbina and Santa Catalina had forty-eight beginning students of dialectic and philosophy. The college of Madre de Dios supported eighteen theologians and six students of medicine. Finally the college of San Pedro and San Pablo was assigned thirteen Franciscan friars who pursued theological studies. To this original group there was added in 1528 the Trilingual College, inhabited by twelve students of Latin, twelve of Greek, and six of Hebrew.⁷ The expenses of these colleges and their internal government, as well as the provision of their fellowships and tutors, were a charge on the colegio mayor.

Thus the university really consisted of the College of San Ildefonso and its seven affiliated colleges plus the private students and other “minor” colleges that were founded from time to time. The management of revenues, the selection of fellows, indeed, the whole apparatus of university government, were emphatically in the hands of the rector and councilors of the colegio mayor. Though modified by custom and by the orders of the Crown during the next two centuries, the colegio mayor was always the dominant factor in university life.

Cisneros sought also to give his university a strong theological and humanistic orientation. In his opinion Salamanca had too strong an emphasis on civil and canon law. Hence the cardinal forbade the teaching of civil law at all and allowed only enough canon law to serve as an auxiliary to theology. Whether Cisneros’ prohibition was exactly observed, his policy of encouraging theologically oriented humanistic studies bore magnificent fruit in the Complutensian Polyglot Bible.⁸ Moreover, Alcalá supplied many theologians who were active in the Council of Trent and other manifestations of the Catholic Reformation.⁹

To some extent the oligarchical nature of Alcalá’s administration spared her the exhausting turmoil of student government that so vexed Salamanca, and Cisneros and Spanish humanism together made her an important university. But during the viscissitudes of the seventeenth century, these same features were corrupted into a legacy of selfish, oligarchical university government and intellectual stagnation that plunged university learning to its nadir by the middle of the eighteenth century. The causes of this change are beyond the scope of this paper, but its dimensions are amply indicated by a look at the university institutions in the eighteenth century.

The rector who governed Alcalá was chosen by the collegians of San Ildefonso, who met every October 17 to cast secret ballots for four candidates, two from north and two from south of the Guadarrama Mountains. These four names, written on slips of paper and rolled up in wax balls, were drawn from a jar by the college chaplain, who, without looking at the jar, picked one ball with a long pin. The lucky person became the rector and the other three his councilors (consiliarios).¹⁰ These officers met regularly to administer the routine business of the college. For example, they managed the collection and distribution of college revenues, the buying and preparation of food, and necessary construction and repairs to the university buildings and the numerous houses which the university owned. They issued rules for the cook and oversaw the work of the college servants. Perhaps more important was their power to appoint the fellows of the affiliated colleges and to govern their internal affairs as closely as they did the affairs of the colegio mayor.¹¹

Besides administering the affairs of the college, the rector was the supreme governing official of the university itself, presiding over the assembled graduates in the full cloister (claustro pleno).¹² This body consisted of all the holders of licentiate or doctorate degrees granted at Alcalá who resided there and took the annual matriculation oath. It included the professors who taught in the university, of course, but by no means did the chair-holders (catedráticos) dominate the cloister proceedings. Moreover, the powers of the cloister were limited to matters touching on granting degrees or waiving courses and to the minutiae of academic administration. The cloister had no power over the university purse, the appointment of professors, or the curriculum.¹³ The cloister did have the right to elect councilors from each of the three faculties of theology, canon law, and medicine to represent it in the deliberations of the rector.¹⁴ But in practice these officers seem to have had little impact upon policy.

Cisneros had originally provided a check upon the power of the rector by means of an annual visit (visita) by a canon of the collegiate church of Saints Justus and Pastor of Alcalá.¹⁵ But this check was apparently useless by the end of the seventeenth century, for foes of San Ildefonso alleged that the college had consistently resisted and frustrated the visitor. Finally, the college managed to insert into the royal statutes a provision requiring a visitor to undergo investigation of racial purity (limpieza de sangre) at the hands of the college before his appointment. No canon was willing to hazard his reputation and status by such an inquiry, and the custom of annual visitations lapsed.¹⁶ Apparently, the college was not inspected by any outside authority during the eighteenth century until the bishop of Salamanca made a visit in November 1747, at the orders of the Council of Castile.¹⁷ Bishop Granados, although an ex-collegian and a prelate, with an appointment from the Council of Castile, was much opposed and obstructed by the collegians.¹⁸ The college, then, clearly dominated the university government and had only infrequent and careless outside supervision.

But the governmental privileges of the college did not complete the tale of its predominance. Indeed the heart of the college privileges was found in its control over appointments to chairs. Cardinal Cisneros laid down in the founder’s constitutions that chairs were to be filled by the votes of the students following two or more trial lectures. The cardinal provided an elaborate system of oaths to insure honest elections and severe penalities for fraud, subornation, or intimidation.¹⁹

In the seventeenth century, however, this scheme of competitive examinations was considerably altered. The reforms made by the visitor García de Medrano in 1665, specified that all chairs of law, theology, and medicine were subject to competition every six years. The eight chairs of arts were held for only four years, with two chairs falling vacant each year.²⁰ When a vacancy occurred for any reason, the news was announced in classes and posted in a public place for fifteen days. At the end of this period persons wishing to contest for the chair presented themselves before the rector and councilors of the College of San Ildefonso, who oversaw the “taking of points” (tomar puntos). Trial lecture topics would be assigned by having a boy or “other person above suspicion” insert a knife blade into three places in the text assigned to that particular chair. The rector then designated three texts or distinctions drawn from these pages, of which the contestant could choose one as the subject for his lecture. Contestants took their points in order of seniority by faculty and degree and were then allotted twenty-four hours to prepare a Latin lecture which they delivered upon the assigned topic.²¹ These competitive lectures were originally heard by the students, who then voted their preference.²² But apparently this procedure caused so much tumult and corruption, despite severe and detailed regulation, that the Crown eventually derrogated this provision of the founder and reserved final selection to the Council of Castile.²³

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Council had somehow come to the point of allotting chairs entirely on the basis of seniority and college connection. Moreover, the six-year limit on tenure was observed only in a purely formal way. That is, the edicts of vacancy were posted for only three days in the classroom of the professor whose term had ended. He naturally entered the competition, was assumed to be the sole candidate, and was thus “repossessed” of his chair without a real contest.²⁴ An examination of the lists of professors shows that invariably in the eighteenth century once professors obtained a job they were promoted in ascenso, that is, in accordance with seniority as chairs superior to their position fell vacant. For example, when the senior professor of canon law died in 1740, his subordinate colleagues were all advanced one step, and the vacant slot at the bottom was filled by a junior degree-holder.²⁵

Within the framework of seniority, however, there was much room for the play of court influence or other types of pressure in the selection of professors. For example, surviving records of the Council of Castile show that the royal confessor had a decided influence on the selecting and promoting of professors of theology.²⁶

But the most notable example of privilege and court influence was found in the substantial domination which the colegio mayor exercised over appointments in the faculties of law and theology. Here were the disciplines offering easiest access to prebends and canonries or to positions in the royal service. There were sixteen of these chairs in law and theology, and in the years between 1740 and 1756 the collegians of San Ildefonso held an annual average of six. During one year eleven of the chairs were in their possession.²⁷ If we add to this number the one to three minor collegians who obtained chairs, the pickings for the students who were not collegians (the manteistas) were very slim.²⁸ Even more, the collegians developed an “alumni network” that functioned all over Spain and gave to the collegians immense advantages in obtaining governmental and church positions. The manteistas argued that the most meritorious and learned candidate had not the slightest chance of a canonry, a government post, or a university chair in competition with a collegian. Inevitably the votes and influence of any collegian were pledged to his fellows.²⁹ Since the Council of Castile itself was dominated by collegians, their advantage in competitions was obvious and pronounced.

Another source of control by the College of San Ildefonso over the professoriate at Alcalá arose from the fact that the collegians often obtained their degrees at other universities and then transferred them to Alcalá, thus bypassing the university’s undergraduate requirements and fees. Manteistas of course might do this also, but they usually did not obtain chairs. Indeed, the whole question of incorporated or transferred degrees was a sore point at Alcalá from about 1720. Degrees obtained during the eighteenth century from minor universities in Spain were at best not very demanding and frequently wholly fraudulent. The secretaries of minor universities were suspected of carelessness and of giving credit (cédulas de curso) and degrees with “great facility.” Moreover, these degrees could be freely incorporated or transferred to institutions with higher standards for their own graduates. The cloister’s efforts at reform were frustrated by royal orders requiring free transfer of degrees and by a fear that costly investigation of student credentials would turn students away from an already underpopulated Alcalá.³⁰ In 1740 the faculty of canon law finally agreed to bear part of the cost of investigating transferred degrees.³¹ But within two years this cost was growing so unbearable, that the faculty ended by requiring a substantial deposit from transfer students to help defray it.³²

Although this policy was later relaxed, and degrees from Salamanca and Valladolid were accepted at face value, the problem continued to be a difficult one. In 1751 the University of Valladolid asked Alcalá to join in an appeal to the Council of Castile to stop the numerous fraudulent degrees. Alcalá considered its hands tied by previous royal orders permitting transfer of degrees, however, and did not join in the protest.³³

We may imagine then the indignation and dismay of the faculty of canon law in September 1755, when they read a decree of the rector allowing collegians who held transferred degrees to enter competitions, provided four calendar years had elapsed since they had obtained their bachelor’s degree.³⁴ Previously, the entering of competitions had required four years’ residence (pasantía) at Alcalá. This was one of the few safeguards which prevented the university from sinking to a diploma-mill like the minor universities and somewhat equalized the contest between those who took all their degrees at Alcalá and those who merely transferred a degree. Moreover, the cloister was never officially informed of the rector’s decree and discovered it only when the secretary began to admit bachelors without residence time to the lists of competitors. In spite of great protest, the rector resolutely refused to call a cloister meeting to deal with the matter, and it was not until 1761 that an effective appeal reached the crown.³⁵

The petition of the cloister brought on a counteraction by the college and a demand for information from the Crown that occupied the next year.³⁶ Through 1761 and 1762, petitions and demands for reports were exchanged between Alcalá and Madrid, but with no decisive result. Then in the fall of 1763 a member of the cloister, Dr. Angel Gregorio Pastor, at his own expense exposed a totally fraudulent degree transferred from the University of Sigüenza.³⁷ At this revelation the Crown demanded a general report on incorporated degrees from all the Spanish universities.³⁸ It was nearly a decade before this report bore any significant fruit.

There is strong evidence that transferred degrees were eroding both the standards and the attendance at the University of Alcalá, and that collegians and others used such degrees to circumvent the rules of the university. For example, of the eighteen competitors who contested for the senior chair of theology in 1774, only four had taken all their degrees at Alcalá, and these four had entered Alcalá after 1763. The remaining fourteen competitors had all transferred at least one and occasionally two degrees. The members of the regular orders seemed to prefer the University of Ávila, while the favorite institution of the secular clergy was the University of Sigüenza.³⁹

The passionate interest surrounding the contest for chairs was a commonplace of the Spanish university world. But there existed at Alcalá a situation that extended the vocational rivalries of the competion even into the examinations for degrees in theology, and gave to these a color of unique and virulent partisanship.

Cisneros had obtained from Leo X a bull annexing to his new college the privilege of naming the prebendaries of the collegiate church of Saints Justus and Pastor in Alcalá.⁴⁰ The archbishop of Toledo objected to this infringement upon his privileges, and finally in 1534 the rival parties struck a compromise providing that prebends falling vacant in February, April, June, August, October, and December would be filled by nomination of the university, while vacancies occurring during the other six months of the year would be filled by the archbishop of Toledo from among the graduates of Alcalá, Paris, Bologna, or Salamanca. Of those prebendaries named by the university, all but two had to be natives of Castile, León, or Granada.⁴¹ The right to nominate the abbot was restricted to the archbishop.⁴²

Following Cisneros’ will, the university determined its nominees by ranking the candidates who took the licentiate examination in theology and then naming them for vacant prebends in order of rank. The ranking was done in a special cloister (claustro de poner letra) held after all the candidates of a particular year had finished the requisite academic disputations (actos). In the capitular hall of the collegiate church the rector presided over the solemn and tense gathering, which included the abbott, the treasurer, and the dean of the faculty, and all degree-holders in theology. The first step was to select by lot a teller to assist the rector and secretary in counting the votes. Then, each examiner individually took an oath by God and the Holy Gospels, on an open missal, to vote according to the “merit and sufficiency” of the candidates. The secretary then gave to each voter a bundle of printed slips containing the names of all the candidates. The secretary further warned all on pain of the “censura” of the rector not to vote in blank, to cast only one ballot each time, and to vote every time. Each voter then marked a slip with the name of his preference for first place and gave the slip to the chancellor, who placed it in an urn carried by the secretary. The votes were emptied out onto a table arranged like an altar with a crucifix at its head and then counted. If there were the same number of votes as examiners, they were unfolded and the winner determined. Voting then proceeded in the same manner for each ranking until every candidate had been given a place. The first man was given his degree at once so that he would be senior to all his companions.⁴³

The fear of failure and the desire for a prebend put the candidates under very great pressure. Moreover, the ranking occurred immediately after a five-year series of academic disputations, few of which had any statutory time limit. Under these circumstances, despite the precautions and oaths, it appears that the cloisters de poner letra came to be much influenced by matters outside the merits of the candidate. Examiners who were collegians or members of religious orders supported their colleagues. Communities frequently appointed “comisarios de las licencias” who traded votes, exercised what influence they could, and otherwise drummed up support for their candidate. Family influence, old grudges, promises of patronage, and other forms of intrigue played their part in many examinations.⁴⁴

To share in the fees and the fun of examinations, many graduates returned to Alcalá every spring, and a complacent or conniving rector allowed them to matriculate and vote in the examination. In the course of time this practice produced a collateral controversy between the resident doctors at Alcalá (including members of the teaching faculty) and those who merely returned for two weeks in June to vote for their favorites and harvest their fees (segar propinas), as the phrase of the time had it.⁴⁵ Thus came into existence another area of sustained and intense conflict between the colegio mayor and its allies, the religious communities, and the manteistas. Each group was vitally concerned about examinations and also about the rules of matriculation, for fear that some one might pack the cloister de poner letra.

Casual matriculation had advantages beyond collecting fees and helping one’s fellows. Members of the university were entitled to the fuero académico, a right that removed them from the ordinary territorial or superior jurisdiction and placed them under the control of the rector. This arrangement, which dated back to the Siete partidas of Alfonso X, was obviously intended to apply only to bona-fide students at Alcalá.⁴⁶ By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the jurisdiction of the rector had been so enlarged that continued matriculation offered a substantial legal advantage, especially to collegians who could be sure of a very friendly judge in the person of their rector.⁴⁷ Furthermore, the rector’s increased legal power was often used in a highhanded way to support the partisan interests of the college.

The exact nature of the rector’s jurisdiction and the manner in which it was exercised are not immediately clear from the surviving records of his court, but other references show that the rector held jurisdiction in matrimonial cases, cases involving wills and inheritances, collection of debts, crimes of violence, and civil suits of various kinds involving university property or the ecclesiastical revenues of the university.⁴⁸ Moreover, he had (or at least in practice exercised) the right to excommunicate and to launch other ecclesiastical censures. There was widespread fear of this power and of its reckless use in quarrels with individuals, orders and communities, and even the city of Alcalá, with which the collegians quarreled very frequently.⁴⁹

Thus, the colegio mayor possessed not only the power to dominate competitions, but also entry into prebends, and it could sustain its position through misuse of the rector’s administrative and judicial authority. The most decisive and bitterly resented of all the college’s powers was its nearly absolute control over the financial operation of the university. The most striking fact about the college’s management of Alcalá’s money is that it spent remarkably little on instruction. An examination of the university accounts from 1740 to 1770 shows that only six percent of the total average annual expenditure went to faculty salaries and only thirteen percent for all expenses connected with instruction. This contrasted markedly with expenses for administration, amounting to about thirty-five percent of the yearly outgo, and the expenses of the colegio mayor and other colleges, which reached nearly forty-seven percent of the budget.⁵⁰

If the proportion of university income allotted to instructional purposes was small, the individual faculty salary was miniscule. In the 1740s, the senior professor of theology received only 1,985 reals for a year’s lectures. In contrast, the proprietary professors at the University of Salamanca received a pro-rata share of one-half the university’s net income. Since fifty percent of the income was always used for instructional purposes, the salaries of Salamanca’s senior professors were quite high. For example, in 1739 the prima professor of canon law there received 19,292 reals. In the same decade salaries at Alcalá ranged downward from the senior theology professor’s 1,985 reals to the really paltry sum of thirty-eight reals paid to the junior professor of Roman law. As a result, professors were put to all sorts of expedients to live unless they possessed some private income or a college fellowhip.⁵¹

University revenue was derived mostly from the tithes of certain parishes in the archdiocese of Toledo, centering mainly in Toledo and Alcalá. The dues from these parishes, paid partly in kind and partly in cash, inevitably involved the university in collecting, storing, and selling wheat and other grains, wool, lambs, wine, oil, and a host of other products. The administration of the university income was confided to three stewards (mayordomos) who were really independent contractors “farming” the university revenue in return for a fixed fee or a percentage of their collections. Wheat was the key item in the university’s revenue, and since the sale of this and other products was always delayed two or three years, frequently longer, the steward advanced his own funds to meet the university expenses.⁵²

While two of these stewards (the mayordomos of Alcalá or Toledo) were concerned almost exclusively with income from tithes and benefices, the third (called the mayordomo de juros y censos) administered certain annuities (juros), payable by the royal treasury, as well as annual quit rents (censos) and loans (censos al quitar) held by the university. In addition the university held a great deal of house property in Alcalá and much agricultural land which it owned outright and leased to various persons. It also had a water mill and a half share in a tannery.⁵³

From these sources, the university derived an income that averaged approximately 560,000 reals annually in the thirty years before 1770.⁵⁴ Expenditures averaged about 420,000 reals, thus leaving a surplus of approximately 140,000 reals per year. Seldom, however, was this sum or even part of it actually in hand. As indicated, it required two to three years to complete the collection of the revenue due in any year. Meanwhile, the university drew upon the stewards. In rich years a large part of these advances went into building, festivity, and food, skimming off the cream of the revenues, which then had to be devoted to reimbursing the stewards. However, there is evidence that the accumulated capital was used for loans or other speculative ventures to produce income.⁵⁵ What is most certain and most important is that the professors neither shared any of the surplus nor took part in the management of the university’s funds. Thus the faculties had rankling grievances against the university for its salary schedule and fiscal practices, grievances which grew appreciably during the century. At last, when the university’s income soared startlingly in 1768-1769, the professoriate began to insist that it share in the new-found prosperity.⁵⁶

But administration is supposedly the mere handmaid of instruction and learning, which are the university’s true functions. How did Alcalá fare intellectually by the eighteenth century? Regrettably it must be said that the curriculum at Alcalá showed the same characteristics of prescription, privilege, and routine conservatism that so generally characterized university government and academic life in Spain. Learning was now largely cast in the scholastic mold. This of itself is no condemnation. But Alcalá suffered from a stale scholasticism concerned with abstruse questions, preoccupied with place and promotion, lacking originality and vigor, and above all reluctant to face the intellectual problems of the eighteenth century. Moreover, to a great extent, Alcalá’s students and even professors were occupied with merely vocational aims, preparing themselves for careers in state or church employment.⁵⁷ This practical bent inevitably gave much emphasis to the study of civil and canon law. Hence the university had moved very far from the humanistic and theological emphasis given it by its founder.

In 1740 there were forty functioning chairs in the University of Alcalá, fourteen devoted to theology, eight to canon and civil law, six to medicine, and twelve to “arts” or philosophy. In addition there was a chair of combined grammar, rhetoric, Greek, and Hebrew maintained on a separate footing by the College of San Ildefonso. This chair was the sole survivor among several chairs of Latin grammar and rhetoric, one chair of Greek, and one of Hebrew that had existed in the seventeenth century.⁵⁸ The chair of Greek had been suspended in 1698, and the chairs of Hebrew and Latin rhetoric had lapsed at some uncertain date before that. Apparently the study of Latin grammar continued but on a reduced basis. In 1734 there was one professor, Juan Francisco Pastor, who taught not only Latin grammar but supposedly rhetoric, Greek, and Hebrew as well.⁵⁹

The next step above language study at Alcalá sent students to the faculty of arts. These chairs in the Spanish university taught the fundamental courses in logic, metaphysics, and natural philosophy intended to prepare the student for the higher faculties of theology, law, and medicine. Cardinal Cisneros founded eight chairs for this purpose, and these alternated on a four-year cycle. Thus two teachers presented elementary logic to the freshmen. Subsequently they advanced with their students through three successive years of advanced logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, returning the fifth year to meet a new class of freshmen and to repeat the cycle.⁶⁰

The original scheme had been profoundly altered in the seventeenth century by the introduction of the so-called alternativa. This meant essentially that certain chairs of arts were given only to partisans of a particular philosophical or theological school. Thus there were Thomist chairs of arts, Jesuit chairs of arts, and in time Franciscan chairs of arts, each held by a member of the order in question or by some one sympathetic to its views. These professors taught logic, physics, and metaphysics in a manner calculated to support their particular theological position.

The whole scheme seems to have originated in the famous controversy on grace between the Jesuits and the Dominicans which began in 1588 and raged furiously in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.⁶¹ So intense did the struggle become that it began to be reflected in the way professors of arts taught their courses. Finally about 1600 the Jesuit father Antonio Rubio produced a course of philosophy that by 1603 was apparently being used in four of the chairs of arts.⁶² The Dominicans redressed the situation in 1615 by securing an order that the remaining four chairs use the text of Juan de Santo Thomá.⁶³

For the rest of the century, the instruction in fundamental philosophy was profoundly affected by the orientation of teachers and courses toward a particular school of theology. This type of teaching was given a final seal in 1737 when the Franciscans, after much effort, obtained two chairs of arts for their order and began to teach the arts “according to Duns Scotus.”⁶⁴ Hence by 1740 there were twelve chairs of arts, with three new professors appointed each year who took their students through the quadrenio Jesuíta, the quadrenio Scotista, or the quadrenio Tomista.⁶⁵ While a final judgment upon the matter must await a thorough investigation, it can be said that the repeated outcries by the partisans of the Enlightenment in Spain against the “philosophy of the schools” are not merely aimless blasts at Aristotle, but attacks upon the kind of abstruse, biased teaching of logic and metaphysics required by the support of a particular theological doctrine.

Professors of arts were apparently never reappointed but always drawn from the new graduates. Generally those who held a chair of arts went on to enter competitions in the higher faculties. Indeed they almost always had the doctorate in law or theology before obtaining the chair of arts.⁶⁶ These conditions, taken together, seem to have destroyed any independence enjoyed by the faculty of arts and condemned it to teach only courses which would serve the higher faculties. And because the salaries of these chairs were low, the faculty was troubled with rapid turnover, amateurish teaching, and chronic and prolonged absenteeism.⁶⁷

By the mid-eighteenth century the alternativa was well established, and with it the influence of the convent “schools” or colleges at Alcalá achieved a final cachet. An aspiring professor’s entire career depended on his choice of schools and his convent or college. In these circumstances intellectual independence was rare, and asserting it was costly indeed. The pressure of interest and comfortable habit became overwhelming in precisely that faculty which gave the student his basic intellectual equipment and his first introduction to the schools.

Sadly enough, the same may be said of other sectors at Alcalá, where the higher faculties of theology, law, and medicine were affected with analogous problems. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century the faculty of theology had fourteen chairs. Eight of these chairs belonged to the university. The remainder, though public chairs, were supported and manned by various religious orders and devoted to teaching the special theological doctrines of these orders.⁶⁸ The Duke of Lerma began this policy in 1601 by founding two chairs reserved for Dominicans to teach the doctrines of St. Thomas. Sixty-six years later the queen, Mariana of Austria, set up the same type of foundation for the Jesuits, and the Franciscans achieved a similar status in 1736 after great exertions.⁶⁹ How far the movement might have gone is indicated by the attempt of the Carmelite order sixteen years later to establish two chairs of theology to teach the doctrines of John Bacon.⁷⁰

The lectures in theology at Alcalá had the unique characteristic of being entirely organized around the eight “acts” or scholastic disputations that constituted the major part of graduate theological studies. This situation was formalized by the Reformación de Medrano in 1665, which noted that although the Latin Constitutiones had specified the use of St. Thomas, “Gabriel,” and “Durando,” “there is no memory that this disposition has ever been executed,” and accordingly ordered, “that each professor is obligated to teach one of the principal matters or subjects that can afterwards be defended in the acts . . . required to receive the doctorate in Theology.”⁷¹ The faculty was obliged to congregate annually and to choose in order of rank those materials which they would teach.⁷²

The precise nature of these subjects seems impossible to ascertain, but they were apparently drawn from the first division of the second part of St. Thomas’ Summa theologica, from scripture, and from canon law.⁷³ By the mid-eighteenth century meetings to divide the subjects among the professors were no longer being held, and apparently each professor merely lectured on what he wished to.⁷⁴ Under pressure from the Crown, the theology faculty did meet on one occasion in 1769 to designate the subjects for lectures, and the choices of the professors at that time ranged widely over scattered treatises of St. Thomas, Scotus, and Durandus.⁷⁵ Moreover, it is uncertain just how much active teaching was done. The professor of scripture complained in 1764 that he was totally without students and asked, for the “peace of his conscience,” to be allowed to teach “scholastic theology,” which would attract some students to his classroom.⁷⁶

In the eighteenth century it took at least five years to hold the acts in theology, and not a few unfortunates apparently needed a much longer time. The students seem to have entered the first act (tentativa) about a year after taking their bachelor’s degree and to have held one act about every six months thereafter until the eight were completed.⁷⁷ The first, fourth, and eighth disputes were voted on by the entire theology faculty, and any student who failed had to repeat the disputation.⁷⁸ For each act the proponent announced at least nine theses and had to sustain them against at least twelve doctors of the faculty and three bachelors. No definite time limit to the examinations was apparently given, except for the Alphonsina, which was limited to four hours.⁷⁹

Most of the conclusiones or theses presented in these disputations have apparently perished, and an analysis of them is impossible. But one may perhaps theorize that, like the courses of arts, they became deeply preoccupied with questions growing out of the theological battles of the seventeenth century, especially the long controversies on grace. In turn, this led to excessive subtlety and complications, as successive generations sought to wring some new approach or conclusion out of much-used material. Moreover, the contemporary development of literary taste perhaps played its own part in giving the conclusions a farfetched and overblown air.⁸⁰

Elsewhere in the Spanish university world, at Salamanca an active medical faculty had partly offset the intellectual isolation which stale controversy had inflicted upon the arts and theology faculties.⁸¹ The presence of the ailing, pain-wracked patient seems to have forced a grudging empiricism upon even the most scholastic physician. But, lamentably, this leavening agency was much weakened at Alcalá, where the medical faculty was near prostration by the mid-eighteenth century. The basic problem was simply economic. The highest paid professor of medicine received 2,205 reals; the lowest, the truly paltry amount of 588 reals. These salaries were totally inadequate, and complaints about them were frequent and piteous. For example, in 1750 the medical faculty petitioned the cloister to apply to the Crown for some alleviation. They maintained that in the last thirty years the lot of the medical faculty had worsened considerably. Formerly the low salaries could be borne in hope of an “honorable promotion” of some sort, or, failing this, private practice might be sufficiently remunerative. However, since 1700 medical practice had become more and more unrewarding because of the poverty and the excessive unhealthiness of the area around Alcalá. In 1749 Dr. Moscoso died leaving nothing except a confession of poverty, and a few years later Dr. Peña and Dr. Gallegos had to be buried by charity.⁸² To relieve the situation, the professors suggested suppressing the chair of anatomy and one post in medicine and applying these salaries to the payment of the surviving chairs.⁸³

The assertions of poverty by the medical faculty are confirmed and explained elsewhere. As early as 1726 the question of higher salaries had arisen, and the Crown noted then the low morale and poor expectations of the faculty. It appears that the “honorable promotion” that had earlier sustained medical excellence despite low salaries was the appointment of no fewer than thirty-five Alcalá professors to become royal physicians. But in the eighteenth century, the king had for some reason shifted his patronage. Perhaps he had grown wary of the notorious loyalty of the faculty at Alcalá to “ancient medicine” and the defense of Galen and Avicenna. But even the court was aware that teaching the doctrines of ancient medicine was a requirement of the statutes, and the Crown did nothing to alter these.⁸⁴ The onlyway to offset these factors of low salary and poor prospects was to engage in exhausting and ill-rewarded private practice. As a result, the classes of medicine at Alcalá were poorly taught and unattractive to either professors or students.

The University accounts show that among the six chairs of medicine at Alcalá those of surgery and anatomy were almost continually vacant.⁸⁵ The four higher chairs, two of prime (prima, taught in the morning) and two of vespers (vísperas, taught in the afternoon), were continuously occupied but apparently not very effective. In 1764, at the behest of the Council, the university made a very revealing report on its condition. A faculty committee informed Madrid that the Reformación de Medrano provided that one prima professor lecture on the third and fourth books of Avicenna and certain treatises of Galen that bore on the same material. The other prima professor took up Galen’s Método. Galen also served as the text for the professors of vespers, together with Hippocrates. The professor of anatomy used as a text separate treaties of Galen. Moreover, he was obligated to hold ten “universal and particular” dissections a year.⁸⁶ But by mid-eighteenth century, this curriculum had long been abandoned. The chairs of anatomy and surgery had both been vacant for years. No one could remember when there had been an anatomical dissection or even find a record that one had been held.⁸⁷ The general subject headings specified for medical teaching were no longer observed, so that it was “without clarity or method.”⁸⁸ There were no disputations, except by those required to take degrees, and the medical faculty met infrequently. Moreover, the faculty had recently received a ten percent salary cut. Incentives for students were lacking, since the fellowships assigned to medical students in the colleges had been taken over by the theologians. Indeed, all students except those taking a bachelor’s degree left the university at Eastertime not to return until the next fall.⁸⁹ Thus, perhaps the most scientific of the Alcalá faculties was prostrate and its influence on the university at large virtually nil.

Fortunately this picture of outright decay in the medical faculty was lightened considerably in the faculty of law. Here were to be found, if not better study and teaching, at least a vigorous rivalry for chairs and an air of activity. The chairs of law, like those of theology, were coveted by collegians and manteistas alike as a possible entry into royal preferment. Though most of the law chairs were the bailiwick of the colegio mayor, they evoked intense and sometimes brutal contests of influence, faculty politics, and wire-pulling at court. The air of torpor and frustration typical of the medical faculty was enlivened by the fire of controversy.

Cisneros, the founder, had felt that his university should not compete with the long-established law faculty at Salamanca, and had forbidden the teaching of any civil law at Alcalá. On the other hand, he recognized the need of some canon law to supplement theology and arts, and accordingly he founded two chairs of canon law.⁹⁰ In the next century four more chairs were added to this faculty.⁹¹ Then, in 1672, the faculty petitioned successfully for two chairs of civil law.⁹² Thus by the eighteenth century there existed eight chairs of civil and canon law, a focus of interest second only to the faculty of theology.

The Reformación de Medrano sets out, as the curriculum of these chairs, certain títles drawn from the canon law.⁹³ No specific text is mentioned. Apparently the professors simply dictated the text of the law aloud and then enlarged and commented upon it. By the eighteenth century this practice was far outdated. In the 1760s the faculty recommended that dictation be dropped and a text of the Crown’s choice adopted. But outdated teaching was the mere beginning of the faculty’s troubles. One faculty member maintained that the classes in canon law were “notoriously decadent” and that there was neither teaching nor learning.⁹⁴ Attendance was low and credit was given far too easily. The rector permitted one course to be “permutated” for another (i.e., a course in theology to stand for one in canon law), and transfer of courses from other universities was far too easy. Professors sometimes did not bother to teach at all, because of the low salaries, while the professors who were collegians often sent servants to teach in their place. It was the comfortable custom to give credit if students attended two months of the course.⁹⁵

It was generally agreed, however, that one bright spot was the academies of canon and civil law, which most law students attended. Under the direction of students themselves these academics met outside the university and were not governed by it.⁹⁶ The oldest was that of civil law, called Santa María de Regla, founded by a cédula of Philip V in 1737. Three years later, the academy of San José was established for students of canon law.⁹⁷ These academies met on Sundays and Thursdays to dispute points drawn from the “Decretals” or “Justinian.” The faculty maintained that the academies provided good training and that the licentiate examinations in canon law were well done. In these respects the faculty was flourishing,⁹⁸ but the program of public disputations for the licentiate degree had largely lapsed, as had the requirement that professors and doctors of the faculty preside over disputations.⁹⁹

Even the examinations for the licentiate degree had been eased. The two-hour Latin lecture twenty-four hours after taking points in the Decretales, although required by the Latin constitutions, had not been enforced “since time immemorial,” according to one professor. Rather, a mere one-hour lecture was the custom, followed by the arguments of only three doctors. Moreover, the rector did not reveal the number of votes to pass or fail, and there was thus no means of knowing the relative merit of the candidates.¹⁰⁰

The recital of the ills and problems of the university could be considerably extended. It is abundantly clear that the university suffered from a stifling institutional decadence, which was doing grave damage to both teaching and learning.

It must not be thought, however, that such a prodigality of abuses failed to produce complaints and strenuous though muffled demands for reform. The manteistas, who bore the brunt of discriminatory rule by the colegio mayor, seem to have led the way in agitating for reform. Their efforts had scant success until the accession of Charles III in 1759, when for the first time they found favor at court. There then began a decade of work for betterment, which climaxed in the general university reform of the 1770s. The inception and final triumph of this movement is so lengthy and complicated that it requires separate treatment. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that initiatives for reform came from Alcalá as well as from the ministerial reformers at Madrid.

We see, then, in the University of Alcalá an institution harboring ills typical of those which afflicted Spain before the reforms of Charles III. The dominance and the role of the College of San Ildefonso seem to be the key to the situation. Conceived as a kind of meritocracy which would direct the university and inspire it by example, it had apparently functioned as planned in the sixteenth century. But the passing of two centuries had changed the college into a citadel of prescriptive privilege. Its abusive domination of university government, its preemption of a major part of the revenue, and above all its special privileges or the abuses which it tolerated in examinations and competitions for chairs had a disastrous effect upon the selection and promotion of professors and thus upon the entire intellectual climate of the university. The impact of this disaster was, in turn, undoubtedly felt throughout the comparatively small Spanish university intellectual world.

Eventually accumulation of privileged abuse gave rise to a group of reformers whose activity and number grew apace in the eighteenth century. By the 1760s, this group began to strike back at their oppressors and to demand reforms in the university administration that they found so oppressive. But the centuries of stultification were not to be undone in a generation or two, and Spanish universities of the nineteenth century continued to bear marks of the earlier decadence.

Author notes