University

A university is an institution of higher education and research that awards academic degrees across multiple faculties or disciplines, typically encompassing undergraduate and postgraduate study, and combining teaching with the production of new scholarship. The University of Bologna, founded in 1088 in the Italian city of Bologna, is generally regarded by historians as the oldest continuously operating university in the world, developing from a student-organized guild of legal scholars, and it was followed within the following two centuries by other early European universities including the University of Paris and the University of Oxford, all of which developed the recognizable European university structure of faculties, formal examinations and degree-conferring authority, initially operating under the authority of the Church. The medieval European university model spread progressively worldwide from the colonial and early modern periods onward, while other, earlier and independently developed traditions of advanced institutional learning existed elsewhere, including Nalanda in India, a major Buddhist center of higher learning active from roughly the fifth century CE, and Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, founded in 859 CE and recognized by UNESCO and Guinness World Records as the oldest existing, continually operating institution of higher learning in the world. Contemporary universities function simultaneously as centers of professional and disciplinary training, credentialing institutions conferring recognized degrees, and, in the modern research university model that developed especially from nineteenth-century Germany onward, as major institutional producers of original scholarly and scientific research.