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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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
—J.A.H. (James Augustus Henry)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)