University of Zurich

• 1. Introduction

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  The University of Zurich opened its doors on the 29th of April 1833, not by royal decree or papal grant, but by an act of the Swiss state. That distinction made it the first university in Europe founded by a government rather than a monarch or the church. Its Latin name, a nod to the Roman settlement of Turicum, gestures at the deep past from which it grew. Three older colleges already existed in Zurich when the new university took shape: a faculty of theology tracing back to the Carolinum founded by the reformer Huldrych Zwingli in 1525, and existing faculties of law and medicine. A new faculty of philosophy was added to complete the institution. What kind of place would this new university become? One that sparked controversy before it had properly opened, that trained the women who broke into medicine decades before most of Europe, and that counts twelve Nobel Prize recipients among those who studied or taught within its walls.

• 2. The Strauss Affair

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  David Friedrich Strauss arrived in Zurich by reputation before he arrived in person, and that reputation nearly tore the young university apart. In 1839, the university appointed the German theologian to its Chair of Theology. Strauss had argued, controversially, that the miracles described in the Christian New Testament were not literal events but mythical retellings of ordinary happenings cast in supernatural terms. The appointment triggered a public outcry of such force that the authorities took an unusual step: they offered Strauss a pension before he had ever taught a single class. He was, in effect, retired before he began. The episode revealed something important about the tensions facing a state university trying to operate independently of church authority. The Carolinum, the theological college Zwingli had founded in the sixteenth century, still carried enormous symbolic weight. Paying a theologian to stay away rather than face the consequences of letting him speak was a compromise that satisfied almost no one, but it kept the university intact.

• 3. The Zurich Seven

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  Russia's Maria Kniazhnina was admitted to audit medicine classes at the University of Zurich in 1864, though she did not complete the course. The year after, another Russian student named Nadezhda Suslova began auditing the same classes. Suslova went further: she became a registered student and in 1867 graduated as a doctor of medicine. She was among the first seven women to earn medical degrees from the university, a group that came to be known as the Zurich Seven. The others were Frances Elizabeth Morgan from England, Louisa Atkins from England, Maria Bokova from Russia, Eliza Walker from Scotland, Susan Dimock from the United States, and Marie Vögtlin from Switzerland. The university had begun allowing women to attend philosophy lectures as early as 1847, which placed it well ahead of most European institutions. Anna Fischer-Dückelmann, who also studied at Zurich, became one of the first women to receive a medical degree in a German-speaking country. The question of where the Zurich Seven went after graduation, and what they built with their training, opens onto a much wider story about medicine, gender, and the limits of professional acceptance in the nineteenth century.

• 4. Einstein and the Nobel Laureates

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  Albert Einstein received his PhD from the University of Zurich's philosophical faculty in 1905 and returned in 1909 as an associate professor. In 2022, the original certificate confirming that degree was returned to the university. Einstein is one of twelve Nobel Prize recipients associated with the institution, a list that begins with Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who won the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for his discovery of X-rays, and runs through Erwin Schrödinger, who held a professorship at the university from 1921 to 1927 before winning the Physics prize in 1933. The chemist Albert Hofmann, discoverer of LSD-25, also studied and worked within the university's orbit. Jean Lindenmann, who lived from 1924 to 2015, co-discovered interferon at the university. The neurosurgeon Gazi Yaşargil served as professor and chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery from 1973 to 1993 and was named neurosurgery's man of the century for the period 1950-1999. Artur Avila, a professor at the Institut für Mathematik, holds the Fields Medal, the highest distinction in mathematics.

• 5. Campus and Collections

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  Karl Moser designed the new university buildings on Rämistrasse 71, and the institution moved into those premises in 1914. That site became the symbolic heart of a university that is, in practice, spread across the entire city. The main campuses sit in the city centre, at Irchelpark, and in Oerlikon. The Irchelpark campus had a long gestation: the faculty of science proposed it in 1962, construction of the first stage began in 1973, and the campus was inaugurated in 1979. A second construction phase ran from 1978 to 1983. That campus houses the Anthropologisches Museum and the cantonal Staatsarchiv Zürich. The university maintains over five million volumes through library access agreements that include the ETH-library and the Zurich Central Library. For years the university ran thirteen separate museums, from the Museum of Wax Moulages to the Zurich Herbaria. In 2024, the zoological, paleontological, anthropological, and botanical collections were folded into a single Natural History Museum of the University of Zurich.

• 6. Research Ethics and Rankings

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  In April 2025, researchers from the university's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences ran an experiment on Reddit's "Change my View" subreddit, using large language models to test whether they could shift users' opinions. The experiment was conducted without the informed consent of participants. Subreddit moderators complained to the university about impersonation of members of groups including LGBT people and sexual assault survivors. The researchers initially defended the study, saying it was "crucial to conduct a study of this kind" and that their activities had "done little harm." Reddit's Chief Legal Officer described the study as "deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level" and said the site had not known the experiment was happening. Reddit submitted legal demands to the university. The university then reversed course, announcing the research would not be published and that the faculty's Ethics Committee would adopt a stricter review process. That controversy sat alongside a separate 2024 investigation into an academic whose allegedly falsified research results were said to have led to preventable patient deaths at the University Hospital of Zurich. Also in 2024, the university voluntarily withdrew from the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, stating that the ranking led universities to prioritise publication volume over quality. Prior to that withdrawal, the university had regularly placed in the top hundred worldwide; the QS rankings placed it 91st overall and 56th in Medicine globally, making it the highest-ranked Swiss university in that field.

• 7. Collaboration and Reach

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  The University of Zurich holds the distinction of being the first university in Switzerland to offer a professorship for Gender Medicine, which it established in 2022. Research under that programme included investigations into how symptoms of cardiac arrest differ between men and women. In the fields of bioscience and finance, the university works closely with ETH Zurich, the Federal Institute for Technology. Shared initiatives between the two institutions include University Medicine Zurich, the Wyss Translational Center Zurich, and Life Science Zurich. The Department of Economics was ranked first in the German-speaking area by the Handelsblatt in 2017. In 2025, the university and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences jointly received the Geospatial World Excellence Award for Environmental and Social Impact for a project called "Spatial Sustainable Finance." The Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, added in 1901, is the second-oldest such faculty in the world, a quiet superlative that points to the university's long pattern of institutional firsts.