Dictionary.net

of University

of University

Educational institutions providing facilities for teaching and research and authorized to grant academic degrees.

The first project of a university in America was made by the Virginia Company in 1619, when it made a grant of 10,000 acres of land for a university at Henrico. But the highest educational establishments of the colonial period were no more than colleges, and are more fitly treated under that title. Washington greatly desired the establishment of a national university, and left funds for that purpose, but his plan was never realized. The first true university, in the sense in which that term was used in Europe, was the University of Virginia, chartered in 1819 and opened in 1825. Since then several types of university have developed in the United States, viz., that which is a university in the sense of consisting of an aggregation of several schools, academic and professional, c.g., Harvard; the State universities, of which the University of Michigan was the first to attain eminence; and that which is occupied with advanced or post-graduate instruction primarily, such as Johns Hopkins and Clark Universities.