Ruhr University Bochum

Ruhr University Bochum (German Ruhr-Universität Bochum, RUB), located on the southern hills of central Ruhr area Bochum, was founded in 1962 as the first new public university in Germany since World War II. Instruction began in 1965.

The Ruhr-University Bochum is one of the largest universities in Germany and part of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the most important German research funding organization.

The RUB has been very successful in the Excellence Initiative by the German Federal and State Governments (2007), a competition among Germany's most prestigious universities. It was one of the few institutions left competing for the title of an "elite university", but did not succeed in the last round of the competition. There are currently nine universities in Germany that hold this title.

The University of Bochum was one of the first universities in Germany to introduce international Bachelor and Master degrees, which replaced the traditional German Diplom and Magister. Except for a few special cases (for example in Law) this process has been completed and all degrees been converted. Today, the university offers a total of 150 different study programs from all fields.

Ruhr University is financed and administered by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Currently, 34,024 students (2010) are enrolled, and the university employs over 5,000 staff (461 of which are professors), making it one of the ten largest universities in Germany (as of 2003). Kurt Biedenkopf, who later became prime minister of the state of Saxony, was director of the university from 1967 to 1969.

Unlike a number of traditional universities, the buildings of Ruhr University are all centralized on one campus, except for the Faculty of Medicine, which also includes some hospitals in Bochum and the Ruhr area. Although the university is notorious for its monotonous 1960s architecture, mainly consisting of 14 almost identical high-rise buildings, its location at the edge of a green belt on top of the Ruhr valley is rather scenic.