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Question!
So, given this:
In his book The Uses of the University the former Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, Clark Kerr, suggested that a university President has three key tasks which his or her main stakeholders will expect to see achieved: ‘sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.’ Only the last of these, he suggested, presented a problem.If there was a Renaissance-level university (that was more contained on a campus than medieval universities had been) which therefore, because Renaissance, had no parking...what would be the universal complaint among the faculty?
Another related bon mot also attributed to him is that a university consists of ‘a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over car parking.’
--quoted from
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bigger office?
Better classroom?
Stable or something for horses?
Cafeteria food?
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Questions of precedence for official functions (possibly with implications for things like access to materials/books/spaces/etc.)
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Horse poop
Drunken singing at night
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I'm also imagining a lot of complaining about the rationing of candles and/or lamp oil. Maybe also things like ink and paper, but for some reason I feel like the candles and lamp oil might more universally seem like something they'd have the right to complain about.
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2. Office size and location, but also, intensely, office furnishings, quality and quantity thereof. Intense, silent, unspoken competition around nice chairs and "good" desks. A small office with excellent furniture trumps a large one with crap.
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Coveted class times. Maybe the professor wants it early morning, to get out of the way. Or, maybe the professor knows that students like to sleep in (did they back then?), so he wants late morning or early afternoon, to accommodate them.
If there is a faculty dining room with limited space and thus people are required to enter in waves, always getting first dibs.
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FacebooksTwittersdiaries and correspondence. But a serious answer, or even a half-joking half-serious answer, would depend a lot on how you defined a Renaissance university, because there was a great deal of difference in how institutions of higher learning were constituted in different areas (even different areas in western Europe, let alone the Middle and Far East) and at different times within the ~100ish years of the Renaissance.Probably they all shared similar complaints about insufficient faculty salaries, privileges, and perks (exactly which depending on the local situation, may include lodging or teaching space availability); the institution as an extracurricular-focused degree-mill/finishing school/social fraternity for the upper-middle-class versus a curricular-focused site for rigorous higher learning; students' hijinks rising to the level of criminal mischief causing problems with the civic authorities for the whole collegiate institution...
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And, yeah, the definition is so different from nation to nation, city to city, and decade to decade! In this case, although the city it's in is roughly ca. 1550-1650 northern Italy (think Venice, Florence, Siena, etc.), I have been grabbing details from a couple of hundred years on either side (plus, you know, magic) as fits what I need to do, or as fits the Rule of Cool.
So the university is a bit more centralized than your usual medieval one, with dedicated buildings for teaching and archives and workshops and wardens at the door as you'd think of Oxbridge-type universities during the Enlightenment, but it's not 100%--some teachers will keep their studies off-campus in their own homes (especially the more well-off ones) and teach students there, others will do so on-campus.
The organization is probably way more modern than anything else, because that's just the way it's coming out. Various areas of study (logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, history, natural sciences, esoteric sciences and probably a few others I haven't had to think of yet) have their own departments, each led by an Archmagister and the teaching faculty are called Magisters. The equivalent of grad students and non-teaching faculty are Researchers and Assistant Researchers.
I lso envision a big hall used for large meetings and ceremonies and formal dinners, which probably also serves as a dining hall for any faculty and students who live on-campus or who pay to eat there instead of fending for themselves, but it hasn't had a need to show up yet. XD
Other universities in other city-states and nations will be arranged differently--this one is one of the oldest, and is based upon a much older institution of learning that nobody really knows much about because mysterious backstory, so it's bit more modern-seeming. :)
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A big chunk of my Renaissance collegiate-ish (young adults gathered for some mix of higher learning and social networking/preferment with senior experts in their target roles) culture sources have to do with England's Inns of Court, 1500-1700ish. English Inns of Court are obviously not Italian and not exactly universities -- but mho had a broadly similar cultural landscape different only in the specific details, which a magical alternate reality would adjust anyway.
I found out about them tangent to study of historical dance of the Renaissance in its social context, that I was a big nerd about for several years, for which records from the Inns and their members are a noteworthy primary source for England. France and Italy were the other major players in the Renaissance dance landscape with significant surviving sources, but those weren't embedded in a university-like social setting, but in private households that engaged masters for individual tutoring. So they're less useful to your question.
Each Inn (not to be confused with the sort of hotel + tavern or bed & breakfast type of inn, more like a fraternity house maybe) was a group of buildings, all of them nearby each other in London, where lawyers and students of law (who might become lawyers, or clerks, administrators, or other roles where such internship would come in handy) lived, studied, and taught -- not only the practice of law but also related subjects and social skills appropriate to such roles (hence dancing; but also poetry and drama -- Donne, Shakespeare, and Marston were affiliated with the Inns though not layers as such-- perhaps for rhetoric & oratory, or perhaps just because in any college students everywhere tend toward revelry at any excuse). The different Inns weren't different departments, more like different fraternities at the same university (or Hogwarts houses, if each house had its own cluster of separate buildings rather than a portion of a shared castle). There wasn't a strictly-defined university campus, as at the Oxbridge sort of religious-based universities whose physical campuses developed from monastic-style compounds. Instead, the 'campus' of the Inns of Court consisted of the collective buildings of the Inns, with kitchesns, stables, etc., as well as residences with their own halls and parlors to supplement individual lodgings as classrooms and places for mock-trials, meetings over administrative matters & collective self-governance by the members(*), dining, socializing and entertainment. The 'masters' or 'professors' were the Utter Barristers who had passed the bar and were qualified to litigate or teach or whatever (and from among whom the house governing board members were selected); the students (many of whom had already been at Oxbridge or had equivalent individual education, so really more of grad students) were the Inner Barristers.
(*Random tidbit I remembered, that speaks to what faculty complained of - iirc., some instructor got in trouble with their house governing board for ordering too many expensive textbooks on the shared household account without permission, and he was penalized by being refused commons for some months -- basically, he was cut-off from 'free' meals or entertainments usually provided as part of his household membership. Apparently faculty abusing their institutionally-funded purchasing powers is as venerable as complaining about parking.)
I could natter on a while, but if you want to read a primary source, try:
A Calendar of the Middle Temple Records (google book version :
https://books.google.com/books?id=ikbGAAAAMAAJ&ots=waGTzXLwl4&lr&pg=PA9#v=onepage&q&f=false )
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Apparently faculty abusing their institutionally-funded purchasing powers is as venerable as complaining about parking.
HAHAHA yes! XD