It occurs to me that of the original Ivy League schools, all of them are still around and very well regarded (to varying extents) and it’s rare to find a university that was well thought of back in the day to not be very well thought of today. Contrast this with corporations where you had titans of industry fall to a husk of themselves in just a few decades, it seems like universities are uniquely hard to kill once they reach a certain level of prestige.
What were some of the most prestigious universities, either in the US or globally, that actually went out of business for whatever reason? If there were a US News or Times World University ranking of 1900 or 1800 or 1700, which of the universities that topped this list back then would be non-existant now or have fallen the most in ranking?
The University of Timbuktu was once one of the most prestigious centers of learning in the world. It looks like it fell after a conquest of the land it was in, followed by political disagreements with the new rulers.
There were several closures/re-purposing of German universities after world wars.
The most famous of which, IMHO, was the University of Königsberg. Some really top Mathematicians there. The area was annexed by the Soviet Union after WWII and that was that.
The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Universität was also well known. Given it was in Alsace-Lorraine it had been previously been a French institution, then a German one, then a French one again after WWI under the name of University of Strassbourg. Same location, different name, significant changes in personnel.
The University of Breslau was pretty good. Had a large library (destroyed during and after the war for the most part) Dirichlet and Kirchhoff lectured there. Outside of the site and maybe a few rebuilt structures the University of Wrocław has nothing to do with it.
I know nothing about the University of Paris other than it was a medieval college and that I hadn’t heard about it in modern times. According to Wikipedia, it has been split up, so it loses points for not being totally shut down, but it gains points for having been very prestigious (the only other thing I know about it is that it used to be a highly-regarded authority on ecclesiastical matters.)
Another “not exactly what was asked” response, but recently we were driving around my kids’ homes in Denver and decided to check out an impressive old building sitting out in the middle of a field. We discovered Westminster University. Never attained its goal of challenging the Ivies, but did give the suburb of Westminster its name.
Now houses KPOF radio station - with the POF standing for “Pillar of Fire.” I’m no fan of organized religion, but if I were, I think I would be tempted to lean towards one with an apocalyptic name such as that!
I had no idea they were that widespread. I’ve driven passed their main compound countless times. I lived close by during the era of clock radios and their signal drowned out so much that I usually woke up to their station. The sect was started by Alma Bridwell White who was a real racist piece of shit. Sounds like something out of the deepest part of the Bible Belt but it’s right here in Central Jersey.
UMIST was the neighboring university to my alma mater in Manchester (North of England not New Hampshire). It was a well known technical university that had been around since the 1800s
It was absorbed by the University of Manchester (my alma mater) in 2004
Prestigious is possibly a stretch. The joke when I was at uni was that Manchester invented the computer and the atom* UMIST invented Vimto**.
* - Turing, Rutherford and Bohr all worked at Manchester ** - a soft drink invented at UMIST during the temperance movement
If we’re talking about mergers, the Sheffield Scientific School was merged into Yale in 1945. And because, I assume, it was already named, it’s still referred to as the Sheffield School of Science. It’s the only school of Yale that has a name
I did a rabbit-hole dive a while back into the Pillar of Fire denomination. It doesn’t have many members, but it was an offshoot of the original Methodists.
Anyway, quite a few faltering Midwestern colleges went belly-up after a Japanese corporation called Teikyo bought them up. Westmar College in LeMars, Iowa (near Sioux City) and Marycrest College, a Catholic liberal arts school in Davenport, IA that started out as a women-only institution, went bye-bye this way. Both campuses were purchased, most likely by their cities, and I do know that the former dorms at Marycrest have been converted into EXTREMELY substandard senior housing. I think Westmar has fared a bit better.
Iowa Wesleyan College in Mount Pleasant finally shut its doors in 2023, after many years of financial challenges. Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois is also transitioning, bit by bit, from the Macomb campus (and there’s not much else to that town) to the Moline, Illinois campus.
In the late 1990s, the University of Iowa abruptly shut down its dental hygiene program, which didn’t make a lot of sense because they do have a college of dentistry. I heard several stories about why, all of them centering around that college’s dean. They ranged everywhere from “She was incredibly awful, and because she had tenure, the only way they could get rid of her was to shut the college down” to “Men in power will do anything to get rid of women in power” and most likely, the truth is somewhere in the middle. (This was before dental schools were graduating majority female classes, although it was heading in that direction.) The program has not reopened.