Talk:Bursar

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Are there really any famous bursars? I mean come on. - Drew

Yes there are. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.102.4.36 (talk) 19:42, 8 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

John the Bursar is another who comes to mind. From what I understand, he wrote a great deal of the New Syllabus, though I'm not sure how much of it was retained in the Grand-Tutor's, Revised New Syllabus. Teetotaler 3 November, 2010 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.68.144.114 (talk) 02:34, 4 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

UK prospective military officers title[edit]

Apparently in the United Kingdom, university students whose education is being funded by the MOD and are in a structured program leading to a commission carry the title of Bursar. Could some UK military type shed more light on this? It should result in a separate article plus a disambiguation page. I don't know enough about it to write it and have not found enough about it online. Ray Trygstad (talk) 05:40, 13 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Scholars[edit]

The usage described above seems to have come into the British army from Scotland, where financial support (other than the modern "university grant") to enable a worthy or needy person to attend school, college or university has for a long time been called a "bursary." In England it would have been a "scholarship" or an "exhibition." It could come from central or local government, a charity or a private trust. The recipients could in the past have been called "bursars," but the term has fallen out of common use.

I don't know how far back its use in the universities goes, but D. B. Horn's "A Short History of the University of Edinburgh" (Edinburgh University Press, 1967) says on page 23, referring to the period 1583 - 1700, that it was the duty of the bursars to clean the floors and passages of the college before lectures commenced at 6 am (5 am in summer), and one of them had to ring the bell to summon the other students. They resemble the servitors and sizars of bygone Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin, who had other humiliations imposed on them but were much more likely to graduate than the richer students. Attitudes changed in the nineteenth century and it became an honour to have won a scholarship, rather than a marker of poverty.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a third meaning for "bursar," namely a German undergraduate student living in a house or "bursa" supervised by a graduate. I suspect that this too is obsolete. NRPanikker (talk) 23:11, 29 May 2019 (UTC) Modified NRPanikker (talk) 11:38, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]