| A university is an institution of higher education and of
research, which grants academic degrees. A university provides both tertiary and quaternary education.
University is derived from the Latin universitas, meaning corporation since the first medieval European universities were often groups of
scholars-for-hire.
History
Arguably the first western university was the Academy founded in 387 BC by the Greek philosopher Plato in the grove of Academos near Athens, where students were taught philosophy, mathematics and gymnastics.
About a thousand years later, institutions bearing a resemblance to the modern university existed in Persia and the Islamic world, notably the Academy of Gundishapur and later also Al Azhar university in Cairo, which remains the oldest operating
university in the world. One of the most important Asian universities, next to the Persian
Academy of Gundishapur, was Nalanda, in Bihar, India, where the second century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna was based.
In the Carolingian period a famous academy was created by Charlemagne for the purpose of educating the children of aristocrats to help train
the professionals needed to run an empire. It was a foreshadow of the rise of the University in the 11th century.
The first European medieval universities were
established in Bologna (Italy) and Paris (France) in the Middle Ages for the study of law, medicine, and theology.
In Europe young men proceeded to the university when they had completed the study of the trivium: the preparatory arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic; and the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. See Degrees of
Oxford University, §1 for the history of how the trivium and quadrivium developed in relation to degrees, especially in
anglophone universities.
Universities are generally established by statute or charter. In the United Kingdom, for instance, a
university is instituted by Act of Parliament or Royal Charter; in either case generally with the approval of Privy Council, and only such recognised bodies can award degrees of any
kind.
In France, students can also attend Grandes écoles, which are very
prestigious and elitist schools, with small promotions—usually a couple hundred students—and very selective
competitive exams at the entrance. There are Grandes écoles for literature, business, and engineering. Formation provided in
these schools is usually of a better level than the corresponding one in French universities. The system of the Grandes écoles is
particular to the French education system.
In the United States, universities are usually treated by the law as a
corporation like any other, although many states impose special
responsibilities to safeguard the welfare of a university's students. Because the American federal government
does not directly organize or regulate universities, informal systems of accreditation have been developed by regional networks of academic institutions. The vast majority of private
and public American universities are non-profit (meaning that excess tuition is plowed into providing higher quality of service),
but starting in the 1970s, many for-profit colleges and universities were founded to take advantage of certain changes in the federal student assistance
programs.
In the late 19th century, the U.S. Congress encouraged the creation of
many land-grant universities.
In the last decades of the 20th century, a number of mega universities have been created, teaching with distance learning techniques.
Selective admissions
Unlike community colleges, enrollment at a university is
generally not available to all comers. Prospective university students must apply through an arduous selective admissions
process during their last year of secondary education.
In most industrialized countries, universities have formed nonprofit organizations or public government agencies to centralize
the administration of standardized admission exams and the processing of applications.
Such organizations include:
Colloquial usage
Colloquially, the term university is used around the world for a phase in one's life: "when I was at
university…"; the American equivalent is college: "when I was in college…". See college, §3, for further discussion.
Related terms
- academia - academic
rank - academy - admission - alumnus - aula - Bologna process - business schools - Grandes écoles - campus - college - college and university rankings - dean - degree - diploma - discipline - dissertation (http://wiktionary.org/pac/Dissertation) - faculty - fraternities and
sororities - graduate student - graduation - lecturer - medieval university - mega university
- perpetual student - professor - provost - rector - research - scholar - senioritis - student - tenure - tuition -
universal access - university administration
External links
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