L-Università ta' Malta : a history

Abstract

In 1771, the University of Malta was caught up in what can be described as its first public scandal. A contemporary diarist noted with distaste how the oratory of the former Jesuits’ church in Valletta was turned into the premises for the nautical school, with a model used for teaching being placed in the middle of the room. This, the diarist felt, was nothing short of profanation and he blamed the Rector of the University for this despicable act. This episode reflects one of the features that would come to characterize University life over time, that is, what happens at University, does not stay at University. This is because of the specificity of the Maltese experience of university, in that the University of Malta was for a long time the only national institution of higher learning, and in many respects, still is. The identification between university and nation is peculiar to the Maltese case, the result of historical processes, and probably even more so, of spatial limitations. The gateway to the University’s campus in Valletta bears a motto in Greek reading ‘Learning is the Gateway to Honour’. That ‘life is a journey’ is a well-worn metaphor, yet it has its validity in trying to illustrate the idealized transformative experience of journeying to and from the gates of learning, of immersing oneself in tertiary education. What is a university? Any attempt at answering this question leads to other closely related ones: what is the role of a university today and tomorrow (with ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ being constantly shifting goal posts)? For whom is a university? What is the relationship between a university and a nation, especially when that university is the nation’s university, funded through its taxes and to a greater or lesser degree having to answer to the state? The history of the University of Malta is characterized by a constant quest of trying to answer such questions across and for different generations. The eighteenth-century Pubblica Università di Studi Generali would give way in the nineteenth century to the University of Literature. In turn this was followed in 1937 by the Royal University of Malta and, from 1974, the University of Malta, with a parenthesis in the late 1970s when there were a ‘New University’ and an ‘Old University’ In October 2017, a rebranding exercise ‘recreated [the] visual identity’ of L-Università ta’ Malta (UM), complete with a new official ceremonial crest and a new official brand logo. In each case, the nomenclature reflected both the mood and the aspirations of a period and of a changing society. A journey across centuries is bound to be marked by numerous highs and lows, achievements and disappointments, change and continuity. This is the story of an institution, but also of its staff and students, the men and (from the early twentieth century) women who were formed by the University but also left some kind of impact on it.