Paul Goodman’s Community of Scholars

Like Dr. Johnson, Paul Goodman loves the University of Salamancha. He admires the strong sense of corporate responsibility and independence among those old Dominicans who spoke with one voice against the most powerful government of their time. He guesses that their students must have rallied enthusiastically to their side, knowing, as modern students presumably do not, that they were studying with men. In his book The Community of Scholars, Goodman suggests the self-governing medieval corporation as an alternative to the modern university—also a corporation, but no longer a community and no longer self-governing.

Like every appeal by modern radicals to the example of the Middle Ages, this is a strange suggestion. Paul G...