A national university is generally a university created or managed by a government, but which may at the same time operate autonomously without direct control by the state.
Some national universities are associated with national cultural or political aspirations. For example, the National University of Ireland during the early days of Irish independence collected a large amount of information about the Irish language and Irish culture. In Argentina, the national universities are the result of the 1918 Argentine university reform and subsequent reforms, which were intended to provide a secular university system without direct clerical or government influence by bestowing self government on the institutions.
Famous quotes containing the words national and/or universities:
“The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner’s visit to Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)