History
Attempts to establish a university in Regensburg had been advocated since the late 15th century. In 1487, Duke Albrecht IV of Bavaria and the Regensburg city council sent a petition to Pope Innocent VIII to establish a university within the city. The idea was rejected, failing for economic reasons. In 1562, Croatian Protestant reformer Matthias Flacius again advocated the creation of a university in the city, arguing that a university in Regensburg would spread the ideas of the Protestant Reformation to Slavic lands. Protestant intellectuals again tried to establish a university in 1633, though their attempts were blocked by the arrival of imperial troops from orders of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II. Following the end of the Second World War, a group of concerned intellectuals and academics in Eastern Bavaria established the Association of the Friends of the University (Verein der Freunde der Universität Regensburg e. V.) in 1948, advocating the creation of a university for Regensburg and the Upper Palatinate region. The association's advocacy proved successful in 1962 when the Bavarian Landtag authorized the creation of the university.
Construction began with the official groundbreaking ceremony on November 20, 1965. The first lectures began during the 1967 winter semester, with the faculties of Law and Business Sciences and Philosophy as the first schools for students. The following year, the faculty of Catholic Theology opened to students. Since 1967, the university has expanded to twelve faculties, including medicine, biology, psychology, and chemistry. The German Research Association has deeply supported a number of research projects in the university, including the fields of biochemistry and microbiology.
The university's most famous faculty member is Pope Benedict XVI, who taught from 1969 until he was appointed Cardinal and Archbishop of Munich in 1977. In 2006, one year following his election to the papacy, Benedict XVI returned to the University of Regensburg to make a highly controversial lecture that garnered the university international attention. The Pope is still listed as a Professor of the university.
Another famous former faculty member, Karl Stetter, worked as head of the Archaea Center and the Department of Microbiology between 1980 and 2002. Among his discoveries were Pyrococcus furiosus in 1986, Aquifex aeolicus, Aquifex pyrophilus, and Nanoarchaeum equitans, discovered in 2002.
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“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)