Notable deceased figures
Mary Whiton Calkins Harvard: she passed her doctoral examination with distinction in 1895. Harvard refused the degree. She led two national learned societies anyway.
Henry Dunster Harvard president saved the college from collapse in 1640, built its first graduating class, and was expelled for questioning infant baptism.
Francisco de Vitoria Salamanca: the Dominican theologian whose 1539 lectures at Salamanca argued that the Spanish conquest of the Americas had no legal basis, and laid the foundations of international law.
William of Wykeham New College Oxford: how a self-made bishop designed a college in 1379 whose layout, statutes, and feeder school shaped English education for six centuries.
Robert Grosseteste bishop of Lincoln: Oxford’s first chancellor, medieval science pioneer, and the man who defied a papal order and got away with it.
Elena Cornaro Piscopia Padua: the Venetian noblewoman who earned the world’s first female university degree in 1678, and the theology doctorate she was refused.
Introduction History of the world’s oldest universities begins not in medieval Europe but in ninth-century North Africa, with a woman whose name most people have never heard. In 859 AD, in the city of Fez in what is now Morocco, a merchant’s daughter named Fatima al-Fihri used her inheritance to endow a mosque and a
