The University of Duisburg-Essen () is a public research university in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. In the 2019 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, the university was awarded 194th place in the world. It was originally founded in 1654 and re-established on 1 January 2003, as a merger of the Gerhard Mercator University of Duisburg and the university of Essen. It is based in both the cities of Duisburg and Essen, and a part of University Alliance Metropolis Ruhr.
With its 12 departments and around 40,000 students, the University of Duisburg-Essen is among the 10 largest German universities. Since 2014, research income has risen by 150 percent. Natural science and engineering are ranked within the top 10 in Germany, and the humanities are within the top 20 to 30. Especially, the physics field is ranked in the top 1 in Germany.
The university's origins date back to the 1555 decision of Duke Wilhelm V von Jülich-Kleve-Berg, to create a university for the unified duchies at the Lower Rhine. To this end, it was necessary to obtain a permission of the emperor and the pope. Although the permission of the pope was granted in 1564 and of the emperor in 1566, the university was founded about ninety years later in 1654, after the acquisition of the Duchy of Cleves by Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg. It opened on 14 October 1655 by Johannes Claudberg as their first rector. The university had four faculties: Theology, Medicine, Law and Arts. During its period of activity it was one of the central and leading universities of the western provinces of Prussia.
Only a few decades later the university was in competition with the much better equipped Dutch universities. Since only about one third of the population in the western provinces of Prussia were member of The Reformed Church, most Lutheran and Catholic citizens in the second half of the 18th century sent their sons to other universities.
The university declined rapidly and was closed on 18 October 1818, due to a Cabinet Order of Friedrich Wilhelm III. At the same time, the University of Bonn was founded. Large parts of the Duisburg University Library were relocated to Bonn and formed the basis of the newly formed Bonn Library. The sceptre of the University of Duisburg was given to the University of Bonn, where it is still located today.
In 1891, the Rheinisch-Westfälische Hüttenschule was relocated from Bochum to Duisburg. Subsequently, the school was transformed into the Königlich-PreuÃÂischen Maschinenbau- und Hüttenschule, and in 1938 was renamed to Public School of Engineering.
After a decision of the federal state government in 1960, the teacher training college of Kettwig was settled to Duisburg and was named Pedagogical University Ruhr. In 1968, the university was founded again in Duisburg, related to the old one, bearing the name: Comprehensive University of Duisburg. Initially only small, the university was developed rapidly in the 1970s up to about 15,000 students. In 1972 the Pedagogical University Ruhr and the Public School of Engineering, which was renamed in 1971 to University of applied sciences Duisburg. Other schools were also relocated to Duisburg. The University of Duisburg was then called Comprehensive University of Duisburg. In 1994 the university was renamed Gerhard Mercator University.
In 2003, Gerhard Mercator University merged with the University of Essen to form the University of Duisburg-Essen, which is today one of the largest universities in Germany with about 40,000 students.
The university was founded in 1972 as the comprehensive university of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It was deliberately established â like other new institutions founded at the same time â as a measure within the framework of the structural transformation of the Ruhr region from a coal and steel center to a service center.
The University of Essen (also known as the University of Essen-GH ) was built as a complex of buildings around a green campus on the northern edge of the city center, on a previously demolished part of the traditional working-class district of Segeroth, now Essen-Nordviertel. By locating it near the city center and in a working-class district, and by distributing student dormitories throughout the city, the aim was to achieve close integration of academics into the urban population.
The University Hospital Essen, located in the Holsterhausen district, was integrated into the newly founded university. The Essen Municipal Hospitals, founded in 1909, were transformed into a state university hospital on 1 October 1963, with an eye toward university establishment plans for the Ruhr region. The hospital was temporarily assigned to the Westphalian Wilhelms University of Münster as its second medical faculty, and teaching began in the winter semester of 1963/64. In 1967, the hospital was transferred as planned to the recently founded Ruhr University Bochum. With the second wave of university foundings in 1972, it finally became a founding component of the University of Essen. Essen was thus the only one of the newly founded universities of the 1970s and the only city in the Ruhr region to have a university hospital.
In 1972, the design department of the Folkwang University of the Arts was transferred to the University of Essen. In 2007, the design department was transferred from the merged University of Duisburg-Essen back to the Folkwang University of the Arts, which was renamed in 2010. The facilities remained on the Essen campus until further notice.
The Essen University of Education in the Rüttenscheid district was also integrated, and its buildings continued to be used, as were the University of Applied Sciences for Mechanical Engineering on Schützenbahn and the University of Applied Sciences for Civil Engineering in the Moltkeviertel district. The MoltkestraÃÂe site is no longer used by the university; instead, it houses a vocational college run by the city of Essen. While the buildings of the former University of Education have since been vacated and demolished (the last structure to be demolished is currently the former university's indoor swimming pool; as of January 2022), the Schützenbahn site remains part of the merged university.
Many of the original reform concepts from the founding period did not take effect as intended for various reasons or were not implemented at the university. Over the decades, the institution evolved in most respects into a typical university. The most successful of the university-wide reform ideas is considered to be the opening of the university to graduates of second-chance education programmes, many thousands of whom earned university degrees in Essen alone â with comparable success to high school graduates, as demonstrated by accompanying academic research.
The merger of the two previously independent universities was initially proposed jointly to the state government by the two rectorates of the universities in order to pool resources and leverage synergies. However, the discussion about the path to restructuring was contentious. Discussions with the state government regarding the legal framework were also frequently contentious, but the University of Duisburg consistently supported the merger; the University of Essen rejected it in the final stages of the discussion. The merger was finally enacted by law on 18 December 2002, by the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament, and Ministerial Director Heiner Kleffner was appointed as the founding commissioner. Lawsuits filed by the Essen rectorate against this law were dismissed by the Higher Administrative Court of Münster. During the founding phase of the new, merged university, there was intense debate about the allocation of subjects to the individual campuses.
The state government hoped that the merger would save costs and create larger departments at single locations by consolidating the range of subjects, with sufficient potential for specialization and effective participation in international scientific discourse. After the end of the founding phase, only one of the four major subject groups (humanities/social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, and medicine) is actually concentrated at one location:
Medicine remained at the Essen University Hospital. All teacher training programmes, with the exception of a few vocational specialisations, now take place in Essen, while departments such as physics have moved to Duisburg. According to a decision by the university governing bodies, however, sociology and political science still belong to the "Technical University" profile of the Duisburg campus; civil engineering, although part of the Faculty of Engineering whose programmes are primarily offered at the Duisburg campus, remains at the Essen campus. Furthermore, computer science and economics programmes continue to be offered concurrently at both campuses. Depending on their chosen combination of subjects, this may mean that students have to commute between the two locations; for this purpose, an hourly shuttle bus service has been established.
The university library is represented at both locations; its holdings are currently distributed across six specialized libraries.
The university formally has no registered office. During the merger, the state did not specify which city would become the university's headquarters. The university itself has also avoided designating a location since then. According to the Gelsenkirchen Administrative Court, in a case concerning tuition fees, no legal proceedings can be conducted against the university without a designated location, even though Essen was specified as the place of jurisdiction in the founding charter.
In March 2007 the three universities of Bochum, Dortmund and Duisburg-Essen founded the University Alliance Metropolis Ruhr, which now includes more than 120,00 students and 1,300 professors and is modelled after the University of California system.
In May 2018, the three members of the University Alliance Metropolis Ruhr launched the Research Academy Ruhr (RAR), an inter- and university overarching programme for the development and support of young scientists. The programme is funded by the State of North Rhine-Westfalia (NRW) and the Mercator Research Centre Ruhr (MERCUR) with â¬800,000 over the next four years and an additional â¬1 million being added by the three participating members of the University Alliance.
The university has two main campus locations in Duisburg and Essen.
The University of Duisburg-Essen today has twelve faculties, listed below:
The NRW School of Governance is a central institution within the Institute for Political science and was founded in 2006 under the direction of Karl-Rudolf Korte.
It aims, through research and teaching, to promote the scientifically sound understanding of political processes (in North Rhine-Westphalia).
It does so by educating and training students in three main programmes:
and also through the use of various other education modules.
The university has a Confucius Institute.
it is the German university with the largest number of Chinese international students. Overall, it has a 16% composition of international students. The majority of such students are enrolled as engineering or economics majors.
The University of Duisburg-Essen awards the Mercator-Professur to individuals who are well known for their social and scientific engagement. So far, recipients of the Mercator-Professur have been:
Further professors include Jette Joop, Kai Krause and Bruce Ames.
The institution of the poet in residence is not missing at any university in the US. In Germany, the University of Duisburg-Essen was the first and, for a long time, only university that followed the American example and brought contemporary authors to the university as guest lecturers for readings and seminars. In 1975, Martin Walser was the first poet in residence to hold his poetics lectures in Essen.
Since the summer semester 2000, the following personalities have worked as poet in residence at the University of Essen (later Duisburg-Essen):
Earlier poets in residence (since the winter semester 1975/76) include Jurek Becker, Wilhelm Genazino, Günter Grass, Günter Herburger, Rolf Hochhuth, Heinar Kipphardt, Cees Nooteboom, Peter Rühmkorf, Martin Walser and .
The university is part of the ERASMUS exchange programme.
The university also cooperates with several other international institutions of higher education.
Besides the main partnering universities, various faculty of the University Essen-Duisburg also cooperate with international universities and specific faculties or programmes (click "show" to expand).
As part of the University Alliance Metropolis Ruhr network the university is involved in running three liaison offices in Moscow, New York City and São Paulo. The offices aim to foster international academic exchange between the local and Ruhr area and are responsible for their respective continents.
The university is also part of the AURORA Network of European universities.
The university is part of the IS:link (Information Systems Student Exchange Network), the VDAC (Verband der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Clubs / Federation of German-American Clubs e.V.) and offers the internationally oriented, doctoral programme "ARUS â Advanced Research in Urban Systems", which is based on previous academic achievements in selected fields within the Joint Centre "Urban Systems".
In the QS World University Rankings for 2024, the institution placed between 771 and 780 globally, corresponding to the 42nd rank nationally. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings for 2023 positioned the university in the 251âÂÂ300 bracket worldwide, and between 27th and 32nd place within the national context. The ARWU World ranking for 2023 listed the university within the 301âÂÂ400 tier globally, and between the 20th and 24th rank nationally.
Measured by the number of top managers in the German economy, University of Duisburg-Essen ranked 15th in 2019.
In May 2018 the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung (CHE â Center for Higher Education Development) rankings placed the university in the top ranks in different categories and fields, like the Physics department for seminar and lecture content and Biology, Computer Science, Math, Medicine and Sports for excellent programmes and support in the early stages of starting at Essen-Duisburg.
In the European Commission-funded U-Multirank system the university as a whole was ranked as "excellent" in the research categories "External research income", "Top cited publications", "Post-doc positions", in the knowledge transfer categories "Income from private sources", "Spin-offs" and "Publications cited in patents". In the category international orientation Essen-Duisburg was rated "excellent" for their "International academic staff".
Notable alumni of the university include: