University of Copenhagen

• 1. Introduction

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  The University of Copenhagen owns and operates research stations not just across Denmark, but two of them in Greenland. It runs 122 separate research centres, a clutch of museums, botanical gardens both inside and outside the Danish capital, and a hospital conglomerate stitched together with the public hospitals of two regions. This is a public research university in Copenhagen, founded in 1479. It is the second-oldest university in Scandinavia, behind only Uppsala. But its age is the least surprising thing about it. How does an institution that began with a papal bull and a king's decree end up described, centuries later, as an absolute monarchy? Why did it once dissolve entirely, only to be reborn under a different king? And what kind of place can claim ten Nobel laureates, a Turing Award winner, a president of the United Nations General Assembly, and at least 24 prime ministers of Denmark among the people who passed through its doors? The answers begin in Rome, with a queen's visit and a pope's permission.

• 2. A Bull And A Decree

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  In 1475, Christian I of Denmark received a papal bull from Pope Sixtus IV, granting permission to establish a university in Denmark. The bull was issued on the 19th of June 1475, the result of a visit to Rome by the king's wife, Dorothea of Brandenburg, Queen of Denmark. Royal will, not just papal approval, gave the university its actual shape.

  On the 4th of October 1478, Christian I issued a royal decree that officially established the University of Copenhagen and set down the rules and laws governing it. The decree named magistar Peder Albertsen as vice chancellor, handing him the task of employing learned scholars and building the first four faculties: theology, law, medicine and philosophy. The university opened formally on the 1st of June 1479.

  The decree did something more unusual than simply fund a school. It made the university an autonomous institution with a great degree of juridical freedom. The university was to be administered without royal interference, and it was not subject to the usual laws governing the Danish people. That independence, granted at the very beginning, is worth holding onto, because the story of who controls the university would swing violently in the opposite direction five centuries later.

• 3. Dissolved And Reborn

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  Around 1531, the University of Copenhagen ceased to exist, dissolved as Protestantism spread through Denmark. The institution that reopened was, in a real sense, a second university. King Christian III re-established it in 1537, after the Lutheran Reformation, and brought in Johannes Bugenhagen from Wittenberg to take up a chair of theology and draw up a new University Charter. That Charter was issued in 1539.

  The rebuilt university slowly invented the modern idea of the qualifying exam. Between 1675 and 1788, it introduced degree examinations one faculty at a time. Theology required an examination starting in 1675, law followed in 1736, and by 1788 every faculty demanded an examination before it would issue a degree.

  The physical university nearly vanished again in 1807, when most of its buildings were heavily damaged during the British bombardment of Copenhagen. Recovery brought a building boom. By 1836 a new main building was inaugurated, and construction continued to the end of the century. The University Library, now part of the Royal Library, the Zoological Museum, the Geological Museum, the Botanic Garden with its greenhouses, and the Technical College all date from this stretch of expansion.

• 4. Reshaping The Faculties

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  Between 1842 and 1850, the university's faculties were taken apart and rebuilt. In 1842, the University Faculty of Medicine merged with the Academy of Surgeons to form the Faculty of Medical Science. In 1848, the Faculty of Law was reorganised into the Faculty of Jurisprudence and Political Science. In 1850, the Faculty of Mathematics and Science was split off from the Faculty of Philosophy.

  The student body changed as well as the structure. The first female student was enrolled in 1877. In 1845 and 1862, Copenhagen co-hosted Nordic student meetings with Lund University.

  The most dramatic growth came much later. Between 1960 and 1980, the university swelled from around 6,000 students to about 26,000, with employee numbers rising to match. New buildings from this period include a new Zoological Museum, the Hans Christian Ørsted and August Krogh Institutes, the campus centre on Amager Island, and the Panum Institute.

  The restructuring did not stop with bricks. In 1993, the law departments broke off from the Faculty of Social Sciences to form a separate Faculty of Law. In 1994, the university named environmental studies, north-south relations, and biotechnology as areas of special priority. By 1999, the student population exceeded 35,000, prompting the appointment of additional professors and staff.

• 5. Who Rules The University

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  In 1970, a new university statute democratised the management of the institution. It was modified in 1973 and then applied to all higher education institutions in Denmark. For a time, faculty, staff and students had a real voice in how the place was run.

  That experiment was undone deliberately. The 2003 university reforms reversed the democratisation. The revised Danish university law removed faculty, staff and students from the decision process, creating a top-down control structure that has been described as absolute monarchy, since leaders are granted extensive powers while being appointed exclusively by higher levels in the organization.

  The present chain of command reflects that design. The university is governed by a board of 11 members, with 6 recruited from outside the university forming the majority, 2 appointed by the scientific staff, 1 by the administrative staff, and 2 by the students. The board appoints the rector, the prorector and the director. The rector appoints the deans, and the deans appoint the heads of 50 departments. There is no faculty senate, and faculty play no part in choosing the rector, deans, or department heads. Elected Academic Boards at faculty level advise the deans, but the governing body, managing an annual budget of about DKK 8.9 billion, holds the power.

• 6. A University Across The City

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  Three larger campuses now hold much of what was once scattered across the inner city. In May 2006, the university announced plans to leave many of its old buildings in central Copenhagen, an area that had been home to the university for more than 500 years. The aim was a bigger, more concentrated and modern student environment, savings on rent and maintenance, and easier interdisciplinary cooperation. The Departments of Political Science and Sociology, for example, now share facilities at the Center for Health and Society and can pool resources more easily.

  That center, known as CSS, opened in 2005 in central Copenhagen, housing the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Institute of Public Health, which had previously been spread around the city. The university today runs four main campus areas: North Campus, City Campus, South Campus, and Frederiksberg Campus, with additional facilities at Taastrup on the western outskirts and in Helsingør, Hørsholm and Nødebo.

  Mergers reshaped the map as much as relocations did. In January 2007, the university merged with the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University and the Danish University of Pharmaceutical Science, which became the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences. In January 2012, the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the veterinary third of the Faculty of Life Sciences merged with the Faculty of Health Sciences to form the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, while the remaining two thirds of Life Sciences folded into the Faculty of Science.

• 7. Seals And Symbols

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  The oldest known seal of the university dates from a letter of 1531, and it depicts Saint Peter holding a key and a book. Around him runs the text Sigillum universitatis studii haffnensis. That seal belonged to the first university, the one that would soon dissolve.

  When Christian III re-established the institution in 1537, it received a new seal showing the king himself with crown, sceptre, and globus cruciger, set above a crowned coat of arms split between halved versions of the arms of Denmark and Norway. Its text recorded that the seal belonged to the university reestablished by King Christian III.

  The current seal, made in 2000, closely resembles that 1537 design, but the heraldry has shifted. Since 1820, when the reference to Norway was removed, the crowned shield has shown only the coat of arms of Denmark. Its text reads Sigillum Universitatis Hafniensis, Fundatæ 1479, Reformatæ 1537, recording the seal of the University of Copenhagen, founded 1479 and reformed 1537. Each of the university's six faculties carries a seal of its own.

• 8. The People Who Passed Through

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  Tycho Brahe, born in 1546, produced the first scientific documentation of supernovas and mentored Johannes Kepler. He is one strand of a remarkable scientific lineage that runs through the university's alumni. Ole Rømer, born in 1644, made the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light. Hans Christian Ørsted, born in 1777, discovered electromagnetism. Inge Lehmann, born in 1888, discovered the Earth's inner core.

  The medical and chemical breakthroughs are just as dense. Thomas Bartholin discovered the lymphatic system, and Nicholas Steno pioneered both anatomy and geology. Hans Christian Gram, born in 1853, invented Gram staining, while Wilhelm Johannsen first coined the word gene in its modern usage, and S. P. L. Sørensen introduced the concept of pH. Niels Bohr, born in 1885, contributed to the atomic model and quantum mechanics and won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922; his son Aage Bohr later won the same prize in 1975.

  The university also shaped Danish public life and thought. Søren Kierkegaard, born in 1813, is called the father of existentialism. Mogens Lykketoft served as the 70th President of the United Nations General Assembly. The roll of Danish prime ministers who studied here runs from Anders Sandøe Ørsted through Mette Frederiksen, prime minister of Denmark from 2019. Peter Naur, born in 1928, won the Turing Award in 2005, a reminder that this institution born from a papal bull still produces the people who define entire fields.