Emory University is a private doctoral university in metropolitan Atlanta, located in the Druid Hills section of unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, United States. The university was founded as Emory College in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia by the Methodist Episcopal Church and was named in honor of Methodist bishop John Emory. In 1915, the college relocated to metropolitan Atlanta and was rechartered as Emory University. The university is the second-oldest private institution of higher education in Georgia and among the fifty oldest private universities in the United States
Emory University has nine academic divisions: Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Oxford College, Goizueta Business School, Laney Graduate School, School of Law, School of Medicine, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Rollins School of Public Health, and the Candler School of Theology. Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Peking University in Beijing, China jointly administer the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. The university operates the Confucius Institute in Atlanta in partnership with Nanjing University. Emory has a growing faculty research partnership with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Emory University students come from all 50 states, 6 territories of the United States, and over 100 foreign countries.
Emory Healthcare is the largest healthcare system in the state of Georgia and comprises seven major hospitals, including the internationally renowned Emory University Hospital and Emory University Hospital Midtown. The university operates the Winship Cancer Institute, Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and many disease and vaccine research centers. Emory university is one of four institutions involved in the NIAID's Tuberculosis Research Units Program and is the leading coordinator of the U.S. Health Department's National Ebola Training and Education Center. The International Association of National Public Health Institutes is headquartered at the university and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Cancer Society are national affiliate institutions located adjacent to the campus. The university is partnered with the Carter Center.
Emory University is 18th among the list of colleges and universities in the United States by endowment, 21st among universities in the world by endowment, and 21st in U.S. News & World Report's 2016 National Universities Rankings. Emory University has a Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education status of R1: "highest research activity" and is cited for high scientific performance and citation impact in the CWTS Leiden Ranking. The National Science Foundation ranked the university 36th among academic institutions in the United States for research and development (R&D) expenditures. Emory University research is funded primarily by federal government agencies, namely the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 1995 Emory University was elected to the Association of American Universities, an association of the 62 leading research universities in the United States & Canada.
The University of Texas at Austin, informally UT Austin, UT, University of Texas, or Texas in sports contexts, is a public research university and the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. Founded in 1881 as "The University of Texas," its campus is in Austin, Texas—approximately 1 mile (1,600 m) from the Texas State Capitol. The institution has the fifth-largest single-campus enrollment in the nation, with over 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students and over 24,000 faculty and staff. The university has been labeled one of the "Public Ivies," a publicly funded university considered to provide a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.
UT Austin was inducted into the American Association of Universities in 1929, becoming only the third university in the American South to be elected. It is a major center for academic research, with research expenditures exceeding $550 million for the 2013–2014 school year. The university houses seven museums and seventeen libraries, including the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum and the Blanton Museum of Art, and operates various auxiliary research facilities, such as the J. J. Pickle Research Campus and the McDonald Observatory. Among university faculty are recipients of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, the Wolf Prize, the Emmy Award, and the National Medal of Science, as well as many other awards.
UT Austin student athletes compete as the Texas Longhorns and are members of the Big 12 Conference. Its Longhorn Network is unique in that it is the only sports network featuring the college sports of a single university. The Longhorns have won four NCAA Division I National Football Championships, six NCAA Division I National Baseball Championships and has claimed more titles in men's and women's sports than any other school in the Big 12 since the league was founded in 1996. Current and former UT Austin athletes have won 130 Olympic medals (73 gold, 37 silver, and 20 bronze), including 14 in Beijing in 2008 and 13 in London in 2012.
The first mention of a public university in Texas can be traced to the 1827 constitution for the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. Although Title 6, Article 217 of that Constitution promised to establish public education in the arts and sciences, no action was taken by the Mexican government. After Texas obtained its independence from Mexico in 1836, the Texas Congress adopted the Constitution of the Republic, which, under Section 5 of its General Provisions, stated "It shall be the duty of Congress, as soon as circumstances will permit, to provide, by law, a general system of education." On April 18, 1838, "An Act to Establish the University of Texas" was referred to a special committee of the Texas Congress, but was not reported back for further action. On January 26, 1839, the Texas Congress agreed to set aside fifty leagues of land (approx. 288,000 acres) towards the establishment of a publicly funded university. In addition, 40 acres (160,000 m2) in the new capital of Austin were reserved and designated "College Hill." (The term "Forty Acres" is colloquially used to refer to the University as a whole. The original forty acres is the area from Guadalupe to Speedway and 21st Street to 24th Street
In 1845, Texas was annexed into the United States. Interestingly, the state's Constitution of 1845 failed to mention the subject of higher education. On February 11, 1858, the Seventh Texas Legislature approved O.B. 102, an act to establish the University of Texas, which set aside $100,000 in United States bonds toward construction of the state's first publicly funded university (the $100,000 was an allocation from the $10 million the state received pursuant to the Compromise of 1850 and Texas' relinquishing claims to lands outside its present boundaries). In addition, the legislature designated land reserved for the encouragement of railroad construction toward the university's endowment. On January 31, 1860, the state legislature, wanting to avoid raising taxes, passed an act authorizing the money set aside for the University of Texas to be used for frontier defense in west Texas to protect settlers from Indian attacks. Texas' secession from the Union and the American Civil War delayed repayment of the borrowed monies. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, The University of Texas' endowment consisted of a little over $16,000 in warrants and nothing substantive had been done to organize the university's operations. This effort to establish a University was again mandated by Article 7, Section 10 of the Texas Constitution of 1876 which directed the legislature to "establish, organize and provide for the maintenance, support and direction of a university of the first class, to be located by a vote of the people of this State, and styled "The University of Texas." Additionally, Article 7, Section 11 of the 1876 Constitution established the Permanent University Fund, a sovereign wealth fund managed by the Board of Regents of the University of Texas and dedicated for the maintenance of the university. Because some state legislators perceived an extravagance in the construction of academic buildings of other universities, Article 7, Section 14 of the Constitution expressly prohibited the legislature from using the state's general revenue to fund construction of university buildings. Funds for constructing university buildings had to come from the university's endowment or from private gifts to the university, but operational expenses for the university could come from the state's general revenues.
The 1876 Constitution also revoked the endowment of the railroad lands of the Act of 1858 but dedicated 1,000,000 acres (4,000 km2) of land, along with other property appropriated for the university, to the Permanent University Fund. This was greatly to the detriment of the university as the lands granted the university by the Constitution of 1876 represented less than 5% of the value of the lands granted to the university under the Act of 1858 (the lands close to the railroads were quite valuable while the lands granted the university were in far west Texas, distant from sources of transportation and water). The more valuable lands reverted to the fund to support general education in the state (the Special School Fund). On April 10, 1883, the legislature supplemented the Permanent University Fund with another 1,000,000 acres of land in west Texas previously granted to the Texas and Pacific Railroad but returned to the state as seemingly too worthless to even survey. The legislature additionally appropriated $256,272.57 to repay the funds taken from the university in 1860 to pay for frontier defense and for transfers to the state's General Fund in 1861 and 1862. The 1883 grant of land increased the land in the Permanent University Fund to almost 2.2 million acres. Under the Act of 1858, the university was entitled to just over 1,000 acres of land for every mile of railroad built in the state. Had the original 1858 grant of land not been revoked by the 1876 Constitution, by 1883 the university lands would have totaled 3.2 million acres, so the 1883 grant was to restore lands taken from the university by the 1876 Constitution, not an act of munificence.
On March 30, 1881, the legislature set forth the structure and organization of the university and called for an election to establish its location. By popular election on September 6, 1881, Austin (with 30,913 votes) was chosen as the site of the main university. Galveston, having come in second in the election (20,741 votes) was designated the location of the medical department (Houston was third with 12,586 votes). On November 17, 1882, on the original "College Hill," an official ceremony was held to commemorate the laying of the cornerstone of the Old Main building. University President Ashbel Smith, presiding over the ceremony prophetically proclaimed "Texas holds embedded in its earth rocks and minerals which now lie idle because unknown, resources of incalculable industrial utility, of wealth and power. Smite the earth, smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." The University of Texas officially opened its doors on September 15, 1883.
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (U of I, University of Illinois, UIUC, or simply Illinois) is a public research-intensive university in the U.S. state of Illinois. As a land-grant university, it is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system. The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (founded, 1867) is the state's second oldest public university, after Illinois State University, and a founding member of the Big Ten Conference. It is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified as a RU/VH Research University under the Carnegie Classification system which denotes very high research activities. The campus library system possesses the second-largest university library in the United States after Harvard University.
The university comprises 17 colleges that offer more than 150 programs of study. Additionally, the university operates an extension[9] that serves 2.7 million registrants per year around the state of Illinois and beyond. The campus holds 647 buildings on 4,552 acres (1,842 ha)[10] in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana (together known as Champaign–Urbana); its annual operating budget in 2011 was over $1.7 billion
. The main research and academic facilities are divided almost evenly between the twin cities of Urbana and Champaign. The College of Agriculture, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences' research fields stretch south from Urbana and Champaign into Savoy and Champaign County. The university maintains formal gardens and a conference center in nearby Monticello at Allerton Park. Four main quads compose the center of the university and are arranged from north to south. The Beckman Quadrangle and the John Bardeen Quadrangle occupy the center of the Engineering Campus. Boneyard Creek flows through the John Bardeen Quadrangle, paralleling Green Street. The Beckman Quadrangle is primarily composed of research units and laboratories, and features a large solar calendar consisting of an obelisk and several copper fountains. The Main Quadrangle and South Quadrangle follow immediately after the John Bardeen Quad. The former makes up a large part of the Liberal Arts and Sciences portion of the campus, while the latter comprises many of the buildings of the College of ACES spread across the campus map
The campus is known for its landscape and architecture, as well as distinctive landmarks. It was identified as one of 50 college or university 'works of art' by T.A. Gaines in his book The Campus as a Work of Art. The campus also has a number of buildings and sites on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places including Harker Hall, Astronomical Observatory, Louise Freer Hall, The Main Library, The Experimental Dairy Farm Historic District, and Morrow Plots. U of I's Willard Airport is one of the few airports owned by an educational institution
The University offers more than 150 undergraduate and 100 graduate and professional programs in over 15 academic units. In 2015, the University announced its expansion to include an engineering-based medical program, which would be the first new college created in Urbana-Champaign in over 60 years. The university also offers Undergraduate students the opportunity for graduation honors. University Honors is an academic distinction awarded to the highest achieving students. To earn the distinction, students must have a cumulative grade point average of a 3.5/4.0 within the academic year of their graduation and rank within the top 3% of their graduating class. Their names are inscribed on a Bronze Tablet that hangs in the Main Library.
Several scholar opportunities include "James Scholars" where undergraduate students invited to pursue a specialized course of study for no less than two years of their undergraduate course work, "Chancellor's Scholars" where undergraduate students are invited to participate in the Campus Honors Program (only 125 members admitted per year), and "Senior 100 Honorary", which recognizes graduates for achievements in leadership, academics and campus involvement throughout their undergraduate education.
The Leadership Certificate is a multi-semester structured program which aims to develop students' leadership skills through different kinds of curricula and programs
