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Abstract. The article is an editorial introduction to the main topic of the current journal issue – the university, its past and present. Choosing the topic “My Universities”, the editors concerned both literal and metaphorical sense. On the one hand, the university is a social institution, universitas magistrorum et scholarium, on the other hand, the university is a “school of life”. The article outlines the range of problems that are relevant to the current state of the university education but rooted in long-standing – including medieval – history of European universities. Some problems deserve special mention: the emergence of new centers of education, the relationship of the university corporation with the authorities, the university in urban socio-cultural space, cooperation and conflicts within the university community, a ratio of local (national) and supranational (universalistic) trends in the course of a long evolution of universities, nature and content of university education. The authors pay attention to another factor – the interconnection between study of university history, its comprehension and the main trends in the development of historical knowledge. The keen interest toward the problems of university life is due to not only to the jubilee celebrations, as it was last year in Rostov-on-Don, but also to the attention of contemporary science to the «real» existing corporations, the development of intellectual and personal history. The members of editorial staff hope that the articles of this journal issue will promote setting of unsolved or debatable problems of the university history as well as conceptualization of the phenomenon of “university” as changeable permanence.
Keywords: university, academic corporation, imaged and real communities, civilization, intellectual history, change ability, permanence.