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A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees at all levels (bachelor, master, and doctorate) in a variety of subjects. A university provides both tertiary and quaternary education. The word university is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning "community of teachers and scholars".^[1]

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The main gate of Oriel College, Oxford.

Oriel College, located in Oriel Square, Oxford, is the fifth oldest of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Oriel has the distinction of being the oldest royal foundation in Oxford, a title formerly claimed by University College, whose claim of being founded by King Alfred is no longer promoted. In recognition of this royal connection, the college has also been known as King's College and King's Hall.

The original medieval foundation set up by Adam de Brome, under the patronage of Edward II, was called the House or Hall of the Blessed Mary at Oxford. The first design allowed for a Provost and ten Fellows, called 'scholars', and the College remained a small body of graduate Fellows until the 16th century, when it started to admit undergraduates. During the English Civil War, Oriel played host to high-ranking members of the King's Oxford Parliament.

The main site of the College incorporates four medieval halls: Bedel Hall, St Mary Hall, St Martin Hall and Tackley's Inn, the last being the earliest property acquired by the college and the oldest standing medieval hall in Oxford. The College has nearly 40 Fellows, about 300 undergraduates and some 160 graduates, the student body having roughly equal numbers of men and women.

Oriel's notable alumni include two Nobel laureates; prominent Fellows have included John Keble and John Henry Newman, founders of the Oxford Movement. Amongst Oriel's more notable possessions are a painting by Bernard van Orley and three pieces of medieval silver plate. As of 2006, the college's estimated financial endowment was £77m.

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News

• 2007 December 19 - As many as 25 football players attending Florida State University will not play during the December 31 Music City Bowl due to an ongoing investigation of academic fraud. The investigation has been handed over to Chuck Smrt, who has worked with NCAA for 17 years. Article from the Orlando Sentinel ¹

• 2007 December 19 - The University of California system will pay a $2.8 million fine to the Department of Energy for the security breach at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which involved Jessica Lynn Quintana, a subcontrator's employee, stealing more than a thousand classified documents from the National Nuclear Security Administration and printing classified files and stored others on a USB drive in 2006. The University of California, in a press statement, "recognizes that further protections could and should have been provided to reduce the opportunity for the cited unauthorized removal." Article from the SC Magazine ²

Did you know

• Academia is a general term for the whole of higher education and research. The word comes from the Greek referring to the larger body of knowledge, its development and transmission across generations. In the 17th century, English and French religious scholars popularized the term to describe certain types of institutions of higher learning.
• Institutions of higher learning considerably older than the most ancient European universities existed in countries such as China, Egypt and India. Some of them are still in operation today. (Example)

• McGhee Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies in Alanya is run by Georgetown University as the only independent study program in Turkey?
• The Royal Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, was once the largest in the world.
• In the last decades of the 20th century, a number of mega universities have been created, teaching with distance learning techniques.
• Colloquially, the term university is used around the world for a phase in one's life: "when I was at university…"; in the United States, college is often used: "when I was in college…".
• The Times Higher Education Supplement, a British publication, annually publishes the Times Higher World University Rankings, a list of 200 ranked universities from around the world.
• The Academic Ranking of World Universities is compiled by researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and includes major institutes of higher education in all countries of North America, Europe, Asia, Pacific, and Latin America, compared and ranked by multiple numerical criteria, including publications in peer-reviewed journals and Nobel prizes awarded to alumni and staff.

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