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A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is a corporation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education. The word university is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning "community of teachers and scholars." [1] The original Latin word "universitas" was used at the time of emergence of urban town life and medieval guilds, to describe specialized "associations of students and teachers with collective legal rights usually guaranteed by charters issued by princes, prelates, or the towns in which they were located."[2] The original Latin word referred to degree-granting institutions of learning in Western Europe, where this form of legal organization was prevalent, and from where the institution spread around the world. For non-related educational institutions of antiquity which did not stand in the tradition of the university and to which the term is only loosely and retrospectively applied, see ancient centers of higher learning. An important idea in the definition of a university is the notion of academic freedom. The first documentary evidence of this comes early in the life of the first university. Bologna university adopted an academic charter, the Constitutio Habita,[3] in 1158 or 1155,[4] which guaranteed the right of a traveling scholar to unhindered passage in the interests of education. Today this is claimed as the origin of "academic freedom".[5] This is now widely recognised internationally, when on 18 September 1988 430 University Rectors signed the Magna Charta Universitatum,[6] marking the 900th anniversary of Bologna's foundation. The number of Universities signing the Magna Charta Universitatum continues to grow, drawing from all parts of the world. Prior to their formal establishment, many medieval universities were run for hundreds of years as Christian cathedral schools or monastic schools (Scholae monasticae), in which monks and nuns taught classes; evidence of these immediate forerunners of the later university at many places dates back to the 6th century AD.[7] The University of Salerno alongside the University of Constantinople in the 9th century, Preslav Literary School and Ohrid Literary School in the Bulgarian Empire, also established in the 9th century AD, were the first institutions of higher education in Medieval Europe.[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]
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