Medieval universities were staffed largely by their own newest graduates: a Master of Arts was required to teach — "necessary regency" — for a year or two after graduating, lecturing on the set texts while pursuing a higher degree. The system made every university self-staffing, and made teaching a toll paid on the way to somewhere else. Endowed chairs and salaried, permanent professorships gradually replaced the regents, and the graduate-who-must-teach survives only in the modern teaching assistantship.
Regent master no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
500 – 1500
Madrasas and masters' guilds
The medieval Islamic world built the endowed teaching institution — al-Qarawiyyin in Fez from 859, al-Azhar in Cairo from the 970s — where a scholar's ijazah licensed a student to teach in turn. Latin Europe reinvented the pattern as a guild: the universitas of masters and students at Bologna, Paris and Oxford, with formal degrees, the disputation as its examination, and the licentia ubique docendi as its passport. The medieval master was legally a cleric, with a cleric's privileges and immunities.
What else was happening then
1231
Parens scientiarum, the university's magna carta
After a town-gown riot in Paris left students dead and the masters suspended teaching for two years in protest, Pope Gregory IX's bull Parens scientiarum confirmed the University of Paris's right to govern itself — including the right to strike. Degrees from the great universities came to carry the licentia ubique docendi: a license to teach everywhere.
Where that work lives now
The scholar paid to profess a subject in public — twenty-five centuries of teaching and discovery, from Plato's grove to the tenure track and the AI tutor.
🎓 Professor →