University of Bern

• 1. Introduction

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  The University of Bern was founded in 1834, but its roots reach back three centuries earlier, to the upheaval of the Reformation. A city that needed to train new pastors built a school. That school became an academy. That academy became a university. And that university, by the turn of the twentieth century, had become the largest in Switzerland. Today it enrolls around 19,000 students and ranks among the top 150 universities in the world. But the numbers only hint at the stranger, richer story underneath. How did a small cantonal institution at the edge of a mid-sized Swiss capital become a place where Albert Einstein stood at the blackboard, where a Russian woman shattered the boundaries of academic rank, and where a surgeon earned a Nobel Prize all within a single two-year window? And what does it mean for a university to plant itself firmly inside a city rather than retreat to a campus on the outskirts?

• 2. A City Inside a University

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  Länggasse is the name of the old university district in Bern, and it sits close enough to the city centre that students and professors have always moved through it on foot. The University of Bern made a deliberate choice not to build a sprawling campus on the city's edge, and that principle has shaped its physical character ever since. Most of its institutes and clinics still cluster in Länggasse, within walking distance of one another. What makes the architecture stranger and more interesting is what the university chose to move into. The Faculty of Theology and parts of the Faculty of Humanities now occupy a former chocolate factory, the building known as the Unitobler. In 2005, a former women's hospital was refurbished to become the UniS, housing institutes from the Faculty of Law and the Department of Economics. Another former factory building, the vonRoll site, is being converted to accommodate the Faculty of Human Sciences and the Department of Social Sciences. The decision to inhabit old industrial and civic buildings rather than construct purpose-built academic towers gives the university a particular texture. It is a place where the history of the city and the history of learning are literally housed in the same walls.

• 3. Russians, Liberals, and Early Growth

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  When liberals took control of the Canton of Bern in 1831, they moved quickly. By 1834 they had converted the existing academy into a full university, staffed by 45 academics teaching 167 students. The political turbulence of the era slowed things down; it was not until the federal constitution was promulgated in 1848 that the institution could develop without interruption. The growth that followed was striking. Between 1885 and 1900 enrollment doubled, from 500 to 1,000 students, and the University of Bern became the largest in Switzerland. Much of that growth came from abroad. Germans and Russians together accounted for half of total enrollment. It was Russian female students who, in the 1870s, pressed for and won the right for women to study at the university. That victory was not a small administrative adjustment. It was a precedent that rippled outward. A new Main Building opened on the Grosse Schanze in 1903, and the number of faculties expanded alongside it.

• 4. Two Years That Changed Everything

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  In 1908 and 1909, three figures arrived at the University of Bern in quick succession, each carrying a different kind of significance. Albert Einstein joined the faculty in 1908 and taught three semesters of theoretical physics. Anna Tumarkin, a Russian-born philosopher, was appointed to an extraordinary professorship in 1909. That appointment made her the first female professor at a European university who held the right to examine doctoral and post-doctoral theses. That last detail mattered enormously. Many institutions had allowed women to teach in some capacity before, but the full power to examine, to validate the scholarly work of others, had been withheld. Tumarkin held it. Also in 1909, Theodor Kocher, a surgeon from Bern, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The institution that had started life training Protestant clergymen now had, within a span of two years, produced a Nobel laureate, appointed Europe's first fully empowered female professor, and given Einstein a room in which to think. In the years that followed, enrollment stabilized at around 2,000 students as the university found its footing as a compact centre of serious scholarship.

• 5. Expansion, Autonomy, and Reform

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  After World War II, Switzerland began rethinking the scale of its universities. Pressure built through the 1950s and 1960s, and by 1968 enrollment at Bern had reached 5,000. The university crossed the 10,000 mark in 1992. The legal structure had not kept pace with the institution's size, and the University Act of 1996 addressed that directly. It converted the university from an administrative division of the Canton's Department of Education into an autonomous legal entity with its own defined competencies. A further amendment in summer 2010 gave the University Board of Directors the right to choose its own ordinary professors and maintain accounts separate from the state. The Bologna Declaration reshaped the academic architecture as well, introducing ECTS credits and the familiar bachelor's-master's framework. The university used that period of restructuring to set strategic research priorities, with climate research among the most prominent, and to encourage cooperation across institutions. By 2024, the student body had reached 19,608, with women making up 60 percent of the total.

• 6. Research That Reaches Beyond Bern

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  Hans Oeschger was a physicist at the University of Bern whose ice core analyses helped lay the foundations of modern climate science. His work gave the institution part of its identity as a place where environmental research carries unusual weight. The Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, named for him, has sent researchers to serve as co-chairs, coordinating lead authors, and lead authors on all the assessment reports published so far by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Physics Institute contributed instruments and expertise to the first flight to the Moon and continues to carry out experiments and supply apparatus for NASA and ESA missions on a regular basis. The Center for Space and Habitability led the European CHEOPS project, a space telescope designed to study the formation of planets outside our solar system, with a planned launch window in October to November 2019. The World Trade Institute manages research and education focused on global economic governance, including sustainability policy. And the ARTORG Center conducts biomedical engineering research, including work on artificial organs. Together these centres reflect an institution that has consistently punched above its size in fields where the questions are large and the timelines are long.

• 7. Pioneering Faculty and Alumni

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  Gabriel Gustav Valentin holds a distinction that is easy to overlook: he was the first Jewish professor elected to a chair at a German-speaking university. Theodor Oskar Rubeli was co-responsible for founding the first faculty of veterinary medicine in the world. Max Weber taught economics at Bern. The Vetsuisse Faculty, created in 2006 through a merger of the veterinary medicine faculties of the Universities of Bern and Zurich, carries forward a tradition rooted in that founding. Among its alumni, Sir Paul Nurse studied at Bern before going on to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001. The university also holds a specific distinction in the field of theatre studies: it is the only institution in Switzerland offering a theatre studies course that allows students to major in dance at the master's level. The Master in Applied Economic Analysis it offers is the only university-level program in Switzerland focused on applied economic analysis. These specific niches sit alongside the broader range of some 39 bachelor, 71 master, and 69 advanced study programs that make up the full curriculum.