Princeton University

Princeton University is a vibrant community of scholarship and learning that stands in the nation's service and in the service of all nations. Chartered in 1746, Princeton is the fourth-oldest college in the United States. Princeton is an independent, coeducational, nondenominational institution that provides undergraduate and graduate instruction in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering.
As a world-renowned research university, Princeton seeks to achieve the highest levels of distinction in the discovery and transmission of knowledge and understanding. At the same time, Princeton is distinctive among research universities in its commitment to undergraduate teaching.
Today, more than 1,100 faculty members instruct approximately 5,000 undergraduate students and 2,500 graduate students. The University's generous financial aid program ensures that talented students from all economic backgrounds can afford a Princeton education.

The University of Chicago

In the beginning, an idea

“If the first faculty had met in a tent, this still would have been a great university,” said President Robert Maynard Hutchins, the University’s fifth president, in his 1929 inaugural address.
The first faculty assembled on Opening Day, 1892, were indeed an impressive bunch: lured from colleges all over the country, they had been drawn to Chicago by the idea of a community of great scholars. As Charles O. Whitman, who left Clark University to head the biology department at the new institution, enthusiastically put it, “The time has now come when we must recognize and live up to the necessity for greater organic unity among kindred sciences.”

‘Bran splinter new’

William Rainey Harper, the University’s first president, envisioned a university that was “‘bran splinter new,’ yet as solid as the ancient hills”—a modern research university, combining an English-style undergraduate college and a German-style graduate research institute. The University of Chicago fulfilled Harper’s dream, quickly becoming a national leader in higher education and research: an institution of scholars unafraid to cross boundaries, share ideas, and ask difficult questions.

A solid investment

Founded in 1890 by the American Baptist Education Society and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, the University’s land was donated by Marshall Field, owner of the legendary Chicago department store that bore his name. Rockefeller described the donation as “the best investment I ever made.”

Equal opportunity

Harper, a young Biblical scholar from Yale, incorporated into UChicago’s early charter a commitment to gender equality in both undergraduate and graduate education and, remarkably, considering the initial intention to found a Baptist institution, to an atmosphere of nonsectarianism. This commitment to an accepting environment and equal opportunity distinguished the University in its early years and holds firm today.

A leader in higher education

UChicago’s leadership was noted by Frederick Rudolph, professor of history at Williams College, who wrote in his 1962 study, The American College and University: A History, “No episode was more important in shaping the outlook and expectations of American higher education during those years than the founding of the University of Chicago, one of those events in American history that brought into focus the spirit of an age.”

Educational innovations

One of Harper’s curricular innovations was to run classes year-round, allowing students to graduate at whatever time of year they completed their studies. Appropriately enough, the first class was held on a Saturday at 8:30 a.m. Just as appropriately, Harper and the other faculty members had pulled a feverish all-nighter beforehand, unpacking and arranging desks, chairs, and tables in the newly constructed Cobb Hall.

Tradition and innovation

The first buildings copied the English Gothic style of architecture, complete with towers, spires, cloisters, and gargoyles. By 1910, UChicago had adopted more traditions, including a coat of arms that bore a phoenix emerging from the flames and a Latin motto, Crescat Scientia, Vita Excolatur (“Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.”).

Changing the face of higher education

During Robert Hutchins’s tenure as president, from 1929 to 1951, he established many of the undergraduate curricular innovations that UChicago is known for today. These included a curriculum dedicated specifically to interdisciplinary education, comprehensive examinations instead of course grades, courses focused on the study of original documents and classic works, and an emphasis on discussion, rather than lectures. While the Core curriculum has changed substantially since Hutchins’s time, original texts and small discussion sections remain a hallmark of a University of Chicago education.

Firsts in athletics

In addition, Hutchins is famously remembered for another bold decision. With its emphasis on academics and research, it’s easy to forget that UChicago was a founding member of the Big Ten Conference. The University’s first athletic director, Amos Alonzo Stagg, was also the first tenured coach in the nation, holding the position of Associate Professor and Director of the Department of Physical Culture and Athletics. And in 1935, senior Jay Berwanger was awarded the first Heisman Trophy (which is proudly displayed today in the Ratner Athletic Center on campus). Just four years later, however, Hutchins abolished the football team, citing the need to focus on academics rather than athletics. Varsity football was not reinstated until 1969.

Evolution and growth

In the early 1950s, Hyde Park, once a solidly middle-class neighborhood, began to decline. In response, UChicago became a major sponsor of an urban renewal effort for Hyde Park, which profoundly affected both the neighborhood’s architecture and street plan. As just one example, in 1952, 55th Street had 22 taverns; today, the street features extra-wide lanes for automobile traffic, the twin towers of University Park Condominiums (I. M. Pei, 1961) and one bar, the Woodlawn Tap.

The modern era

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the University began to add modern buildings to the formerly all-Gothic campus. These included the Laird Bell Law Quadrangle (Eero Saarinen, 1959) and the School of Social Service Administration (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1965). In 1963, the University acquired the Robie House, built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1909. By 1970, the Regenstein Library—at seven stories, and almost a block square, the largest building on campus by far—occupied the site of Old Stagg Field.
UChicago experienced its share of student unrest during the 1960s, beginning in 1962, when students occupied President George Beadle’s office in a protest over the University’s off-campus rental policies. In 1969, more than 400 students, angry about the dismissal of a popular professor, occupied the Administration Building for two weeks
In 1978, Hanna Gray, Professor of History, was appointed President of the University, becoming the first woman to serve as president of a major research university. During Gray’s tenure, both undergraduate and graduate enrollment increased, and a new science quadrangle was completed.

Chicago’s second century

In the 1990s, controversy returned to campus—but this time, the point of contention was the undergraduate curriculum. After a long discussion process that received national attention, the new curriculum was announced in 1998. While continuing the dedication to interdisciplinary general education, the new curriculum included a new emphasis on foreign language acquisition and expanded international and cross-cultural study opportunities.

Uniting the sciences

Today, under the leadership of Robert J. Zimmer, the University’s 13th president, UChicago continues to evolve. Gothic architecture has made room for modern gems like the Charles M. Harper Center, home to the Graduate School of Business, and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. And the 400,000-square-foot Gordon Center for Integrative Science, which opened in 2006, can house 800 scientists, researchers, and students.

National laboratories

But amid this physical change, UChicago’s interdisciplinary approach to world-changing research and an insatiable commitment to inquiry continue, demonstrated in its partnerships with the Argonne and Fermi national laboratories, its world-class Medical Center, its tradition of accomplishment in economic research, its dedication to social services and community growth, and the many accomplishments of its faculty, researchers, and students.

Continuing the tradition

Harper articulated his hope and vision for the University of Chicago at the very first faculty meeting in 1892, saying: “The question before us is how to become one in spirit, not necessarily in opinion.”
The University’s commitment to answering that question—and many others—continues to guide it today.
As President Zimmer said in his address at UChicago’s 487^th convocation, “If we take ourselves back to the University in its early years, we would find many major differences from what we observe today…And yet, many of us connected to this university feel that we might just as easily have been there—that going back to the University in its early days, or in fact at any time since its inception, we would know unmistakably that we were at the University of Chicago.
“Why is this? The University of Chicago, from its very inception, has been driven by a singular focus on inquiry…with a firm belief in the value of open, rigorous, and intense inquiry and a common understanding that this must be the defining feature of this university. Everything about the University of Chicago that we recognize as distinctive flows from this commitment.”

University of Oxford

Welcome to the University of Oxford. People from all walks of life and all parts of the world have been visiting us for nine centuries and we are delighted that via this website you are joining that long tradition. Oxford was the first University in the English-speaking world. Our aim is to remain at the forefront of centres of learning, teaching and research. 

Oxford’s remarkable global appeal continues to grow. Students from more than a hundred and forty countries and territories make up a student population of over twenty thousand. Over a third comes from outside the United Kingdom.
But it is not just longevity and global reach that mark Oxford out and give the University its special character. There is also our distinctive college and tutorial system which underpins a culture of close academic supervision and careful personal support for our outstanding students. Our colleges and halls of which there are more than forty also help to foster the intense interdisciplinary approach that inspires much of the outstanding research achievement of the University and makes Oxford a leader in so many fields. It is an approach especially suited to confronting many of the hugely complex challenges that face us all. That is why we believe that the greater we can make Oxford, the greater its contribution to the well-being of the world you and I share.

University College London

Since 1826, the Faculty of Laws at UCL has thrived on the great traditions of legal education. It is now one of the world’s leading law schools. The Faculty is based at Bentham House, in the heart of London's Bloomsbury district, only a short walk from the main UCL law library and campus. Facilities at Bentham House include many teaching rooms, a courtroom for moots, a spacious student lounge, a coffee bar and two computer cluster rooms. For graduate students and senior academic visitors, the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, with its superb research library and seminar rooms, is a short walk away in Russell Square.

Our Research

The Faculty of Laws at UCL has a world-class reputation for research. In the UK government 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), Laws is placed joint 1st in the UK for the proportion of its research activity in the top two star categories (75% 4*/3*). Our exceptional research not only enhances the quality of our teaching and the supervision we give our research students, but contributes to the solution of global challenges while shaping policy and the practice of law.

Our People

UCL Laws has a student body comprising over 550 undergraduate, 480 taught graduate students and 50 research students. The Faculty has some 65 academic staff, many visiting professors and distinguished judicial and other visiting academic staff. It provides some of the finest research-led Laws learning in the world.

Studying in the centre of London

We see our London base as a positive opportunity to draw on the resources of a city that is the UK's centre of government, law, commerce, finance and culture. Leading judges and lawyers teach in our classrooms and judge our moots (mock trials). Students have a unique opportunity to enter the courtrooms nearby and to meet their future employers when they come to our various lectures or social events.
London's facilities for study and leisure cannot be matched by any other city in Britain. The British Library and the British Museum are close by and other great museums and art galleries (the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate and the National Gallery) are within minutes by underground. UCL students have the best of both worlds: all the fun and fulfilment of a bustling, busy city, with the availability of pastoral peace and tranquility close at hand.

Yale University

Yale’s roots can be traced back to the 1640s, when colonial clergymen led an effort to establish a college in New Haven to preserve the tradition of European liberal education in the New World. This vision was fulfilled in 1701, when the charter was granted for a school “wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts and Sciences [and] through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State.” In 1718 the school was renamed “Yale College” in gratitude to the Welsh merchant Elihu Yale, who had donated the proceeds from the sale of nine bales of goods together with 417 books and a portrait of King George I.
Yale College survived the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) intact and, by the end of its first hundred years, had grown rapidly. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought the establishment of the graduate and professional schools that would make Yale a true university. The Yale School of Medicine was chartered in 1810, followed by the Divinity School in 1822, the Law School in 1824, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1847 (which, in 1861, awarded the first Ph.D. in the United States), followed by the schools of Art in 1869, Music in 1894, Forestry & Environmental Studies in 1900, Nursing in 1923, Drama in 1955, Architecture in 1972, and Management in 1974.
International students have made their way to Yale since the 1830s, when the first Latin American student enrolled. The first Chinese citizen to earn a degree at a Western college or university came to Yale in 1850. Today, international students make up nearly 9 percent of the undergraduate student body, and 16 percent of all students at the University. Yale’s distinguished faculty includes many who have been trained or educated abroad and many whose fields of research have a global emphasis; and international studies and exchanges play an increasingly important role in the Yale College curriculum. The University began admitting women students at the graduate level in 1869, and as undergraduates in 1969.
Yale College was transformed, beginning in the early 1930s, by the establishment of residential colleges. Taking medieval English universities such as Oxford and Cambridge as its model, this distinctive system divides the undergraduate population into twelve separate communities of approximately 450 members each, thereby enabling Yale to offer its students both the intimacy of a small college environment and the vast resources of a major research university. Each college surrounds a courtyard and occupies up to a full city block, providing a congenial community where residents live, eat, socialize, and pursue a variety of academic and extracurricular activities. Each college has a master and dean, as well as a number of resident faculty members known as fellows, and each has its own dining hall, library, seminar rooms, recreation lounges, and other facilities.
Today, Yale has matured into one of the world’s great universities. Its 11,000 students come from all fifty American states and from 108 countries. The 3,200-member faculty is a richly diverse group of men and women who are leaders in their respective fields. The central campus now covers 310 acres (125 hectares) stretching from the School of Nursing in downtown New Haven to tree-shaded residential neighborhoods around the Divinity School. Yale’s 260 buildings include contributions from distinguished architects of every period in its history. Styles range from New England Colonial to High Victorian Gothic, from Moorish Revival to contemporary. Yale’s buildings, towers, lawns, courtyards, walkways, gates, and arches comprise what one architecture critic has called “the most beautiful urban campus in America.” Yale's West Campus, located 7 miles west of downtown New Haven on 136 acres, was acquired in 2007 and includes 1.6 million square feet of research, office, and warehouse space that provides opportunities to enhance the University’s medical and scientific research and other academic programs. The University also maintains over 600 acres (243 hectares) of athletic fields and natural preserves just a short bus ride from the center of town.

Assumption University

Sedes Sapientiae : The Seat of Wisdom

It is a tradition handed down for centuries that Christians venerate the Mother of Christ as "the Seat of Wisdom". (Sedes Sapientiae)

According to Christian belief, Christ is the wisdom seated on the Throne. This implies, on the one hand, that the Mother of Christ is the Dwelling Place of the Supreme Wisdom of all science.

On the other hand, the university is the Alma Mater, or our Mother who is also the "Dwelling Place of Knowledge". In this context, "Assumption" which, besides its religious meaning in glorification of the Mother of Christ, has yet another meaning in Thai, namely" the Abode of Abiding Knowledge" Rightly, "Assumption University" is the Seat of Wisdom. 

The Assumption University has adopted the Ashoka Tree as its symbol. The Ashoka Tree has as its scientific name "Polyalthea longifolia Benth & Hook. f. var. pandurata" of a Anonanceae Family, a native plant of India and Sri Lanka. The Rationale behind the choice of the Ashoka Tree

The reasons why the University has taken it as its symbol are the following:

1. The Ashoka Tree is an ever-green tree. This fact signifies freshness, coolness, and constancy, unwavering with the turning of seasons and the changes of time. Thus, it means that the University is determined to fulfill its mission, giving emphasis to academic excellence together with quality and virtues.
2. The Ashoka Tree has a most beautiful form, majestically tall, like a stupa.
3. The Ashoka Tree is a tree with a beneficial name, because it derives from an Indian word "Ashok", after the name of King Ashok, the Great, the most well known king during Buddha's time, full of wisdom both in the secular and religious realms.
4. Lastly, it is the tree first brought from India into Thailand in 1957 by the St.Gabriel Foundation of Thailand, patrons of this university (by Bro. John Mary). This first tree was planted in the compound of St. Gabriel's College, and the Forestry Department of Thailand named it "St. Gabriel Ashoka" on 15 th December 1969. Botanic Features of the Ashoka Tree

The Ashoka Tree is an ever green tree, of narrow-top can form and majestically tall. The bark is grey; its color becomes darker near the extreme top of the trunk, covered with leaves from the bottom to the top, so thick that the trunk's characteristics can hardly be clearly visible. Its leaves are lanceolate, about 0.5-0.7 inches wide, and 4-9 inches long. The widest part of the leaf is near the base; its rim is smooth, but twisted into a tide-like form. Its flower is white greenish shade, without odor, about 1.5-1.75 inches wide. Its fruit is ellipsoid, about 0.5 inches wide and 0.75 inches long, with smooth shiny skin; its color turns yellow, red, then finally black, when it is ripe. Normally, the ripening of the fruit OCCURS between July and August every year. 

History of Stanford

The Birth of the University

In 1876, former California Governor Leland Stanford purchased 650 acres of Rancho San Francisquito for a country home and began the development of his famous Palo Alto Stock Farm. He later bought adjoining properties totaling more than 8,000 acres. The little town that was beginning to emerge near the land took the name Palo Alto (tall tree) after a giant California redwood on the bank of San Francisquito Creek. The tree itself is still there and would later become the university's symbol and centerpiece of its official seal.
Leland Stanford, who grew up and studied law in New York, moved West after the gold rush and, like many of his wealthy contemporaries, made his fortune in the railroads. He was a leader of the Republican Party, governor of California and later a U.S. senator. He and Jane had one son, who died of typhoid fever in 1884 when the family was traveling in Italy. Leland Jr. was just 15. Within weeks of his death, the Stanfords decided that, because they no longer could do anything for their own child, "the children of California shall be our children." They quickly set about to find a lasting way to memorialize their beloved son.
The Stanfords considered several possibilities – a university, a technical school, a museum. While on the East Coast, they visited Harvard, MIT, Cornell and Johns Hopkins to seek advice on starting a new university in California. (See note regarding accounts of the Stanfords visit with Harvard President Charles W. Eliot.) Ultimately, they decided to establish two institutions in Leland Junior's name - the University and a museum. From the outset they made some untraditional choices: the university would be coeducational, in a time when most were all-male; non-denominational, when most were associated with a religious organization; and avowedly practical, producing "cultured and useful citizens."
On October 1, 1891, Stanford University opened its doors after six years of planning and building. The prediction of a New York newspaper that Stanford professors would "lecture in marble halls to empty benches" was quickly disproved. The first student body consisted of 555 men and women, and the original faculty of 15 was expanded to 49 for the second year. The university’s first president was David Starr Jordan, a graduate of Cornell, who left his post as president of Indiana University to join the adventure out West.
The Stanfords engaged Frederick Law Olmsted, the famed landscape architect who created New York’s Central Park, to design the physical plan for the university. The collaboration was contentious, but finally resulted in an organization of quadrangles on an east-west axis. Today, as Stanford continues to expand, the university’s architects attempt to respect those original university plans.

Harvard University

Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders in many disciplines who make a difference globally. Harvard faculty are engaged with teaching and research to push the boundaries of human knowledge. For students who are excited to investigate the biggest issues of the 21st century, Harvard offers an unparalleled student experience and a generous financial aid program, with over $160 million awarded to more than 60% of our undergraduate students. The University has twelve degree-granting Schools in addition to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, offering a truly global education.
Established in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. The University, which is based in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, has an enrollment of over 20,000 degree candidates, including undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. Harvard has more than 360,000 alumni around the world.

Stamford

Thailand’s truly international University
Stamford is the international university which located in Bangkok, Thailand’s capital city, as well as in Hua-Hin, a popular resort destination with an international population, STIU is dedicated to the promotion of cultural understanding and academic excellence.
STIU is rare among traditional Asian schools for encouraging critical and creative thinking and in its use of varying methodologies in the classrooms, which makes the classes truly student-centered as well as learning-centered.
STIU students come from over 30 countries throughout the world and are representative of a large variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. They are known for their independent spirits and creative contributions towards building a more tolerant world. Stamford has recently become a partner of the Laureate International Universities network to enhance global resources and opportunities for students.