Bender, Thomas. The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Summary
Since their inception, universities and colleges based on the model of Cambridge and Oxford have been identified with cities, often the great cities that dominate the political, economic, and cultural life of nations. The university, like the city, has mutual medieval origins. Bender concludes, based on these essays, that the urban university is a “semi-cloistered heterogeneity in the midst of un-cloistered heterogeneity.” The relationship between the two, while at times can be seen as homologous, are better understood as necessarily tense, as one cannot assimilate into the other. “To do so,” he writes, “either practically or conceptually, is to empty each of its distinctive cultural meaning and to falsify the sociology of each.” Both are bounded fields of contention, “comprising various traditions, interests, and ideals.” ("Town/Gown" tension) The university is contingent on local processes (city), but is directed to the universal and trans-local. Nonetheless, as many of these essays reflect, city shaped and influenced the nature of the university, just as much as the university influenced the character of the city (reciprocity)

Examples:Stephen C. Ferruolo “Parisus-Paradisus: The City, Its Schools, and the Origins of the University of Paris”  shows how it was in the city, by living and working in close quarters with merchants and artisans that scholars began to think of teaching as a “business” and change their methods. For example, he notes, theologians began to become less speculative and creative and more practical and routine.

See also: William Clark, Academic Charisma and The Origins of the Research University;