All Fun and Games

The worst college campus riot until relatively recently erupted at mediaeval Oxford—the "town and gown" battle of 1354. Escalating from a tavern quarrel, the violence lasted for three days, involved dozens of townsmen and students, and ended with several dead and many injured. (source)

Prior to their game against Holy Cross on the afternoon of November 28, 1942, the Boston College Eagles football team made reservations for the entire squad to hold a victory party at the Terrace Room of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub that evening. Boston College, the best U.S. college football team that year, had an 8-0 record and had outscored their opponents 249-19. At the Cocoanut Grove that night, some satin decorations ignited, causing the worst nightclub fire in the history of the United States. A total of 491 people died, including everyone in the Terrace Room. However, none of the Eagles were there. The game should have been an easy win for Boston College, but they lost, 55-12, in one of the biggest upsets of modern times. The Eagles, defeated and depressed, cancelled their reservation, thus saving the lives of everyone on the team. (source)

Since 970 A.D., students of philosophy, Islamic law, history, and Arabic have gathered at Al Azhar, the beautiful and distinguished university in Cairo's old city. For many years it was the largest college in the world. Candidates for admission have traditionally faced a very challenging qualifying exam; entering students are required to recite the entire Koran (which is nearly as long as the New Testament).

Oxford University once had rules forbidding students from bringing bows and arrows to class.

Around the end of the fifteenth century, the University of Paris had fifty colleges and 20,000 students. (source)

Between the 12th and 16th centuries, perhaps the greatest university in the world was located in Timbuktu, in what is now Mali. Attendance at the university was as large as 25,000, and science, mathematics, and medicine were studied; the medical centre attracted the ill from great distances. Timbuktu's university was famous throughout Africa and Europe.

The word "dunce", meaning a dull-witted or ignorant person, comes from the name of John Duns Scotus (1265-1308), one of the greatest minds of his time. Scotus, born in Scotland, wrote treatises on grammar, logic, metaphysics, and theology. He was educated at Cambridge and Oxford and pursued his master's degree in theology at the University of Paris where, in 1303, he became embroiled in one of the most heated disputes of the day. France's King Philip IV had moved to tax the Church in order to finance his war with England; in response, Pope Boniface VIII threatened to excommunicate him. For supporting the pope, Duns Scotus was banished from France. He later assumed a university professorship in Cologne. The term "dunce" was coined two centuries later by people who disagreed with Scotus' teachings and his defence of the papacy. To them, any of his followers (a "Duns man" or "Dunce") was dull-witted, "incapable of scholarship and stupid". (source)

When Harvard University (called New College at the time) first opened in 1636, it was surrounded by a stockade for protection against wild animals and Native Americans.

Yale University, one of the top universities in the United States, is named after Elihu Yale, who never set foot in America after the age of three. In 1718, Cotton Mather, the ambassador for the college known at the time as the Collegiate School of Connecticut, approached Yale, then the retired governor of the East India Company, for a donation. Yale sent them religious books, a portrait of King George I, money, and goods that were sold for a significant sum, and, in gratitude for his donation, the college was re-named in his honour. (source)

In 1905 Albert Einstein wrote his famous Special Theory of Relativity. It was published in a scientific journal that same year, but took many years to gain general acceptance. In fact, it was not verified by actual experiment until 25 years later. Two years after that paper was published, Einstein wanted a job as assistant professor of mathematics. This job required the applicant to submit a thesis paper, so Einstein submitted his Special Theory of Relativity. The university rejected it.

Lord Byron kept a pet bear at Cambridge University because dogs were not allowed.

In 1987, Mike Hayes, of Rochelle, Illinois, came up with a novel idea to finance his college education. He wrote to Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene, asking him to request that each of his readers send a penny to Hayes. In under a month, Hayes had managed to raise over $23,000, much of it in pennies. (source)

In the United States, 55% of college students do not eventually graduate.

In the 2011–12 school year, 19.7 million students attended American universities and colleges. Out of those students, there were 11.2 million females, compared with only 8.5 million males. (source)

In the United States there are 1,655 community colleges, comprising 415 private institutions and 1,047 public institutions. (source)

By 1826, both Amherst College in Massachusetts and Bowdoin College in Maine had graduated a black man. The first black woman to graduate from a college in the United States graduated in 1862, from Oberlin College in Ohio. (source)

John Dalton, the discoverer of modern atomic theory, received a doctorate from Oxford University in 1832 and was presented to King William IV. For the occasion he was required to wear a scarlet robe. Wearing such a robe would be forbidden by Dalton's Quaker faith, but Dalton could not offend the King either. Fortunately Dalton was colourblind, and when the cloak was presented to him, he truthfully stated that it appeared grey to him. (source)

Before Isaac Newton could become Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a special ruling by the Crown was required; the monarch was head of the Church of England and Cambridge was a church school. It was ruled that Newton did not have to become a church member to assume the position. He delivered about eight lectures a year that were deemed to be rather poor. (source)

Gene Tunney, former heavyweight boxing champion, once lectured on Shakespeare at Yale. (source)

The first graduate student in what is now the United States was James Madison, who remained at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) for a year after graduating to study Hebrew in 1771. Madison later became President of the United States.

In 1939, George Bernard Dantzig, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, arrived late for a statistics class. He copied down the two problems on the board, assuming that they were the homework, and handed the problems in a few days later. Several weeks later, Dantzig was awakened by his statistics professor excitedly knocking at the door. It turned out that the two "homework" problems were in fact hitherto unsolved problems in statistics that he had managed to prove. (source)

The university in the United States with the largest number of students is the online campus of the University of Phoenix, with 380,232 students in 2009. The university with the largest enrolment worldwide is the Indira Gandhi National Open University, with 3.5 million students. (source)