Scotland's oldest university was chartered by a pope most of Europe rejected
St Andrews became a university on 28 August 1413 through papal bulls from Benedict XIII, the Avignon claimant during the Great Schism whom history now counts as an antipope. Its founders were Augustinian clergy who had been pushed out of Paris by that schism and out of Oxford and Cambridge by war with England.
Those scholars began teaching divinity, logic, philosophy and law in the town in 1410, and Bishop Henry Wardlaw granted them a charter before persuading Benedict to raise the school to university status. King James I confirmed it in 1432. Only Oxford and Cambridge are older among universities in the English-speaking world.
Colleges followed over the next century: St Salvator's, founded by Bishop James Kennedy in 1450, and St Leonard's in 1511, which Archbishop Alexander Stewart meant to be almost monastic. Cardinal James Beaton refounded an earlier college as St Mary's in 1538 to defend Catholic teaching against the Reformation, but after Scotland broke with Rome in 1560 it trained Protestant clergy instead, and it has taught theology alone since 1579. St Salvator's Chapel and St Mary's quadrangle from that era are still in use.
Hard times came in the 17th and 18th centuries. A financial crisis in 1747 forced St Leonard's to merge into St Salvator's, creating United College. When Samuel Johnson visited in 1773 there were fewer than 100 students, and he judged the place to be wasting away and fighting to survive.
In 1876 the senate opened a route for women: a correspondence qualification called the Lady Literate in Arts, requiring passes in five subjects at ordinary level and one at honours, taken from home over as many years as needed. Today students from more than 145 nationalities fill the town, keeping up customs like Raisin Weekend and the May Dip, and in term time over a third of the town's residents study or work at the university.
Source: University of St Andrews
