Collegiate universities

A collegiate university is a university in which functions are divided between a central administration and a number of constituent colleges. The two principle forms are residential college universities, where the central university is responsible for teaching and colleges may deliver some teaching but are primarily residential communities, and federal universities where the central university has an administrative (and sometimes examining) role and the colleges may be residential but are primarily teaching institutions. The larger colleges or campuses of federal universities, such as University College London and University of California, Berkeley, may be effectively universities in their own right and often have their own student unions.

For universities with residential colleges, the principal difference between these and non-collegiate halls of residence (or dormitories) is that "colleges are societies (Latin collegia), not buildings". This is expressed in different ways in different universities; commonly students are members of a college, not residents of a college, and remain members whether they are living in the college or not, but this is not universal and the distinction may be drawn in other ways (see, e.g., the University of Otago below). Residential colleges also commonly have members drawn from the university's academic staff in order to form a whole academic community. Students in residential colleges are often organised into a junior common room, with academic staff forming a senior common room.

The development of the collegiate university in western Europe followed shortly after the development of the medieval university itself. The first college to be established was the Collège des Dix-Huits () at the University of Paris, founded in 1180 by John of London shortly after he had returned from Jerusalem. This has led to the suggestion that the college was inspired by madrasas he saw on his travels, although this has been disputed, particularly as, unlike madrasas, the early Paris colleges did not teach. Other colleges appeared in Paris shortly after this, including the College of St Thomas du Louvre (1186) and the College of the Good Children of St Honore (1208-9) – although these may both have had more of the character of grammar schools that colleges of the university – various monastic colleges starting with the Dominicans in 1217, and the College of Sorbonne for non-monastic theology students in 1257. From Paris, the idea spread to Oxford, where William of Durham, who had been a Regent Master of Theology at Paris, left a legacy to found University College, Oxford in 1249. Although this is taken as the foundation date of University College, it was not until after 1280 that the college actually began operating. At around the same time Balliol College was founded by John de Balliol via a grant of land in 1263 as a penance imposed by the Bishop of Durham, and Merton College was founded with an endowment by Walter de Merton in 1264.

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