Bologna University is the oldest university in the world, first established in 1088. But if professors struggle with bumptious students today, these first professors had an even more difficult time of it: the students ran the university, voting through their representatives on who to hire as teachers, how much to pay the professors and the content of the courses.

There was even a committee, called the ‘Denouncers of Professors’, to which students could report teachers who did not keep time or who failed to teach all their classes during a term. Students at Bologna, and indeed at all the later medieval universities, began their education by studying the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.