“Faculty meant ability before it meant a body of professors — Latin facultas described a capacity, a power, a facility for doing something, and only later became the institutional name for a university's teaching body.”
Latin facultas derived from facilis (easy, feasible) and ultimately from facere (to make, to do). Facultas was ability, capability, the power to do something — the facility that made an action possible. Cicero used facultas extensively for intellectual and rhetorical capacity: the faculty of memory, the faculty of argument, the natural abilities that a speaker cultivated.
Medieval universities adapted facultas for the organized teaching divisions of a university. The four traditional faculties were theology, law, medicine, and the liberal arts. Each facultas was organized around a body of knowledge and the ability — the faculty — to teach and examine it. The University of Paris (founded ~1150) established this model, which spread to Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna, and throughout European education.
The English word faculty carried both meanings through the Renaissance and Enlightenment: a natural capacity (the faculty of sight, the faculty of reason) and a body of university teachers (the arts faculty, the medical faculty). John Locke used faculty extensively in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) to describe the mind's capacities — understanding, memory, will.
Today faculty primarily means the teaching staff of a university in American English, while the older sense of natural capacity survives in philosophical and cognitive psychology contexts: mental faculties, the five faculties of perception. The human mind's powers and the university's teaching body share a name that was always, at root, about the ability to do.
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Faculty meetings are among the defining rituals of academic life — often characterized as slow, contentious, and productive only in inverse proportion to their length. The irony is that facultas meant ability, capacity, the power to do. A body gathered to deliberate about education ought to embody precisely those things.
The dual meaning — natural capacity and institutional body — is still useful. When a university's faculty is excellent, the two meanings overlap: the institution has, in aggregate, the capacity to do what a university should do. When they diverge, the institution is in trouble.
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