Coordinates: 49°24′37″N 8°42′23″E / 49.41028°N 8.70639°E / 49.41028; 8.70639
The Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (Heidelberg University, Ruperto Carola) is a public research university located in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Founded in 1386, it is the oldest university in Germany and was the third university established in the Holy Roman Empire. Heidelberg has been a coeducational institution since 1899. Today the university consists of twelve faculties and offers degree programmes at undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels in some 100 disciplines. It is a German Excellence University, as well as a founding member of the League of European Research Universities and the Coimbra Group.
Rupert I, Elector Palatine established the university when Heidelberg was the capital of the Electoral Palatinate. Consequently, it served as a centre for theologians and law experts from throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Matriculation rates declined with the Thirty Years' War, and the university did not overcome its fiscal and intellectual crises until the early 19th century. Subsequently, the institution once again became a hub for independent thinkers, and developed into a "stronghold of humanism", and a centre of democratic thinking. At this time, Heidelberg served as a role model for the implementation of graduate schools at American universities. However, the university lost many of its dissident professors and was marked a NSDAP university during the Nazi era (between 1933 and 1945). It later underwent an extensive denazification after World War II—Heidelberg serving as one of the main scenes of the left-wing student protests in Germany in the 1970s.
Modern scientific psychiatry, psychopharmacology, psychiatric genetics, environmental physics, and modern sociology were introduced as scientific disciplines by Heidelberg faculty. The university has an emphasis on research and has been associated with 55 Nobel Prize laureates. It is consistently ranked among Europe's top overall universities, and is an international education venue for doctoral students, with approximately 1,000 doctorates successfully completed every year, and with more than one third of the doctoral students coming from abroad. International students from some 130 countries account for more than 20 percent of the entire student body. Heidelberg comprises two major campuses: one in Heidelberg's Old Town and another in the Neuenheimer Feld quarter on the outskirts of the city. The university's noted alumni include eleven domestic and foreign Heads of State or Heads of Government.
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“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
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