A Study On The Formation And Evolution Of The Characteristics Of West Universities

In the western countries, university has been seen as the second elder institution except for Christian Church. As a social institution providing advanced education, the reason of university surviving in the changes of ages is that university has its irreplaceable social functions. University has double attributes including natural attribute and social attribute, the former makes university could root, grow and develop in every country, the latter makes university be ironed features of nation and country. Just as the British scholar Ashby's point "University is the product of inheritance and environment", university was born from the medieval university, the modern university evolved from the 1810's Berlin University built by Humboldt, even nearly all the world first-class universities belong to the western countries, so in some sense, university is the product of western society. Research on the formation and evolution of characteristics of western university is meaningful that it can reinstate the true appearance of the university development course, summarize and explore the educational and social function of university that inherited form its birth, and reveal how the western university make choice by themselves and response the change of their surviving environment in the context of society, economy, humane geography and technology in different countries, what's more, it can apply some theory support for solving the university's homogenization problem and developing university characteristically by using the logical relation between generality and individualityThis paper bases on the objective law of higher education development and use dialectical thinking methodology to choose the method of documental analysis, history research, logical deduction and comparative analysis. With a clue of four western university development stages of the European Medieval University, the traditional university of 17^th-18^th century, the modern university of 19^th-20^th50'century and the contemporary university after the second world war, this paper makes research on the general character of each stage and its evolution process.There are six parts in this paper. The first part is the introduction, including presentation of questions, the definition of the core concepts, the literature review of the university's characteristics and the western university, the research content, the research method and the research meaning. The second part is the research on the formation of the characteristics of medieval university with concentrations on expounding the feature of the students and professors of medieval university, the occupational characteristics of medieval college education, the religiousness and internationalization and privileged identity. The third part is the research on the first evolution of western university with concentrations on the conservative, elite and classical tendency of the university of 16th-18thcentury. The forth part is the research on the characteristics of university from 1810' Berlin University to the middle of 20th century, with concentrations on the nationalization of the university management, the dualization of university function, autonomy-oriented of school running and democratization of the western college education. The fifth part is the research on the characteristics of the contemporary western university with concentrations on diversification of western university, prosperity of postgraduate education, the mass higher education, the three-dimensional university function and the return of university's internationalization. The last part is the concluding remarks to summarize the objective existence of western university's characteristics, the regularity of the western university characteristics' evolution, and to apply some theory support for developing university characteristically by using the logical relation between generality and individuality.