Through such special rights the universities obtained great power and became very independent. Soon the liberty allowed to students degenerated into recklessness and license, and they became dissipated and quarrelsome. This is especially seen in the life of the so-called ‘wandering students,’ who migrated from university to university, begging their way, and were shiftless, rollicking, and vicious. The one compensating feature of such degeneracy was their production of jovial Latin and German songs to voice their appreciation of forbidden pleasures and their protest against restraint. [Sidenote: The ‘university’ a corporation.] [Sidenote: The nations,] [Sidenote: councilors,] [Sidenote: faculties, deans, and rector.] =Organization of the Universities.=--The term _universitas_, or ‘university,’ did not imply originally, as often claimed since, an institution where ‘everything’ is taught, but it was used of any legal corporation, and only in the course of time was it limited to an organization of masters and students. The phrase _studium generale_ was also often used of a university, to indicate a school where the students from all parts of civilization were received, and to contrast it with a _studium particulare_, which was confined to pupils of a limited neighborhood. The formation of a university had been preceded by the organization of ‘nations,’ or bodies of students grouped according to the part of Europe from which they came, but these nations soon began to combine for the sake of obtaining greater privileges and power. Every year each nation chose a ‘councilor,’ who was to represent it and guard its interests. On the side of the masters, the university became organized into ‘faculties,’ of which there might be at least four,--arts, law, medicine, and theology; and each faculty came to elect a ‘dean’ as its representative. The deans and the councilors jointly elected the ‘rector,’ or head of the university. [Sidenote: Arts.] [Sidenote: Law.] [Sidenote: Medicine.] [Sidenote: Theology.] =Course in the Four Faculties.=--The course of study to be offered by each faculty was largely fixed by papal decree or university legislation during the thirteenth century. The course in arts, which occupied six years, included the texts on the liberal arts mentioned for the monastic schools (see pp. 56 f.) and several of the treatises of Aristotle, as rapidly as they were recovered. In the law course, _Corpus Juris Civilis_ was the authorized text for civil law, and the _Decree_ of Gratian for canon law. The faculty of medicine utilized the Greek treatises by Hippocrates (c. 460-375 B. C.) and Galen (c. 130-200 A. D.), the _Canon_ of Avicenna (see p. 66), and the works of certain Jewish and Salernitan physicians. The students of theology put most of their time upon the four books of Peter the Lombard’s _Sententiæ_ (Fig. 9), although the _Bible_ was studied incidentally. [Sidenote: Lectures.] [Sidenote: Debates.]