The phrase "earliest universities" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You could use it in any context where you are referring to the most ancient or original universities. For example: "Some of the earliest universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, date back to the 13th century."
The earliest universities emerged as associations of masters or students (the Latin universitas means guild or union) that were dedicated to the pursuit of higher learning.
Yet the history books say Timbuktu boasted 25,000 students in its heyday, having established one of the world's earliest universities in the 12th century.
More than 1,000 years ago, Baghdad was the centre of an outward-looking Islamic world – home to one of the earliest universities and to writers and poets whose works have survived the centuries.
But Mr. Wilder, scholars say, seems to be the first to look beyond particular campuses to take a broader look at the role of slavery in the growth of America's earliest universities, which, he argues, were more than just "innocent or passive beneficiaries" of wealth derived from the slave trade.
The earliest university in Hungary, the University of Pécs, founded in 1367 by Louis I, was abolished by the Turks but was renamed Janus Pannonius University of Pécs and reopened in 1922.
On the earliest university networks, Unix buffs could "ping" colleagues at UCLA, MIT or a dozen other colleges, then initiate a "chat" session once they knew their colleagues were online.
These early universities were corporations of students and masters, and they eventually received their charters from popes, emperors, and kings.
Paris remained preeminent among the early universities; its famous schools became associated as the faculties of arts, canon law, medicine, and theology, gaining jurisdictional independence under papal protection by 1231.
These early universities had no permanent buildings and little corporate property, and they were subject to the loss of dissatisfied students and masters who could migrate to another city and establish a place of study there.
As noted earlier, universities are more likely to be condemned for their breaches than congratulated for their good practice, and the University of Wollongong is no exception.
Because of this instruction, Bacon's later works, written in haste, consist of short treatises united by a self-conscious rhetoric for the reformation of education in the early universities of the Latin West.
