University of St Andrews

Based on Wikipedia: University of St Andrews

In 1410, a ragtag band of scholars stumbled into a windswept Scottish fishing town, refugees twice over. They'd fled Paris when the Catholic Church tore itself in two, with rival popes hurling excommunications at each other from Rome and Avignon. Then they'd fled Oxford and Cambridge when the endless wars between England and Scotland made those universities hostile territory for anyone with a Scottish accent. What they built in St Andrews would outlast the schism, the wars, and most of the institutions that had expelled them.

The University of St Andrews is the third-oldest university in the English-speaking world. Only Oxford and Cambridge came before it. Let that sink in for a moment.

Harvard, that venerable pillar of American higher education, wouldn't exist for another two centuries. When the founding scholars of St Andrews gathered to debate theology and philosophy in 1410, the printing press hadn't been invented. Columbus's great-great-grandparents hadn't been born. The Ottoman Empire was still expanding. And yet here was this tiny institution on Scotland's eastern coast, granting degrees and shaping minds.

A University Born from Chaos

The Great Western Schism of 1378 to 1417 was one of the strangest episodes in Christian history. For nearly four decades, the Catholic Church had two popes—sometimes three—each claiming to be the one true successor to Saint Peter, each excommunicating the others and their followers. France backed the Avignon pope. England backed the Roman pope. Scotland, perpetually at war with England, naturally sided with whoever England opposed.

This seemingly abstract theological dispute had concrete consequences for Scottish scholars. The University of Paris, medieval Europe's intellectual powerhouse, became hostile territory. Oxford and Cambridge were out of the question—you don't study at your enemy's universities during wartime. Scottish students needed somewhere to go.

Henry Wardlaw, Bishop of St Andrews, saw an opportunity. In February 1412, he granted a charter to the small community of Augustinian teachers who had gathered in his town. Then he did something clever: he petitioned the Avignon Pope Benedict XIII—the pope Scotland recognized—to elevate this teaching society into a full university. Benedict, always eager to expand his influence against his Roman rival, agreed.

On August 28, 1413, the papal bulls arrived. St Andrews was officially a university.

There's delicious irony here. The Avignon papacy would collapse within a few years, condemned by the Council of Constance as illegitimate. Benedict XIII himself would die in 1423, still claiming to be pope, recognized by almost no one. But the university he authorized kept right on existing, long after the schism that created it faded into footnotes.

The Medieval Colleges

Like Oxford and Cambridge, St Andrews organized itself into colleges—semi-independent institutions where students lived, ate, and received much of their instruction. The college system created tight-knit communities within the larger university, each with its own traditions, chapel, and character.

St John's College came first in 1418, founded for theology and arts. Then St Salvator's in 1450, established by Bishop James Kennedy with money that might otherwise have gone to ransom the king—James I of Scotland had been held captive by the English, and Kennedy had been saving up. When James returned through other means, Kennedy redirected the funds to education. St Salvator's Chapel, built during this period, still stands today, its medieval stonework hosting university services six centuries later.

St Leonard's College arrived in 1511, founded by Archbishop Alexander Stewart with a more austere, monastic vision. Stewart wanted his college to be stricter, more contemplative than its predecessors. The students wore habits. The rules were demanding.

The final medieval foundation was St Mary's College in 1538, though it was really a refounding of St John's under a new name. Cardinal James Beaton created it specifically to combat the Protestant Reformation then spreading across Europe. He wanted a bastion of traditional Catholic teaching, a fortress of orthodoxy in an increasingly heretical world.

It didn't work. Within twenty-two years, Scotland had formally broken with Rome. St Mary's pivoted completely, transforming from a defender of Catholicism into a training ground for Protestant ministers. The buildings remained the same. The theology reversed entirely.

Centuries of Struggle

The university's early centuries were not a steady march of progress. They were a lurching struggle for survival.

Scotland in the 1600s and 1700s was poor, politically unstable, and wracked by religious conflict. The country changed official churches multiple times. Civil wars erupted. The union with England in 1707 shifted the political center of gravity south to London. None of this was good for a small university in a remote coastal town.

By 1747, St Andrews was in such desperate financial straits that it had to dissolve St Leonard's College entirely, merging its staff and assets into St Salvator's. The combined institution became the "United College of St Salvator and St Leonard"—a bureaucratic name for an act of consolidation born from poverty.

When the famous English writer Samuel Johnson visited in 1773, he found a university "pining in decay and struggling for life." Fewer than one hundred students wandered its medieval corridors. Johnson, never one to soften his opinions, thought the place was dying.

He was almost right. But not quite.

The Women Who Changed Everything

The nineteenth century brought pressure on universities across Britain to admit women. Oxford and Cambridge resisted fiercely—Cambridge wouldn't grant women full degrees until 1948. St Andrews found a middle path that was, for its time, remarkably progressive.

In 1876, the university senate created something called the Lady Literate in Arts examination, or LLA. It wasn't a full degree—men received the Master of Arts, women received a diploma—but it was real education at something close to degree level. Women had to pass five subjects at ordinary level and one at honors.

The genius of the LLA was its flexibility. Women didn't have to physically attend the university. They could study by correspondence, taking as many years as they needed, getting examined by local educators wherever they lived. This opened St Andrews to women across Britain and beyond, women who couldn't have uprooted their lives to move to a Scottish fishing town.

Then came the Universities Scotland Act of 1889, which made it legally possible for Scottish universities to admit women on equal terms with men. St Andrews moved quickly. By 1892, the university was being praised for "taking the lead in opening its classes to women."

Agnes Forbes Blackadder enrolled that same year. On March 29, 1895, she became the first woman to graduate from St Andrews with the same Master of Arts degree that men received. The glass ceiling hadn't shattered, but a significant crack had appeared.

The Dundee Experiment

St Andrews' curriculum in the nineteenth century remained stubbornly traditional: classical languages, divinity, philosophy. The practical sciences transforming other universities—chemistry, engineering, medicine—barely registered. The university was prestigious but increasingly irrelevant to the industrial economy reshaping Britain.

The solution was a satellite campus. In 1883, St Andrews established a university college in Dundee, about twelve miles away. This new institution would focus on exactly what St Andrews lacked: science, medicine, professional training. The arrangement seemed logical. It was also a disaster waiting to happen.

The two institutions never meshed comfortably. Dundee wanted autonomy. St Andrews wanted control. Students shuttled between campuses. Administrators bickered. By 1894, academic journals were writing about "The Quarrel between St Andrews and Dundee." The marriage lasted over eighty years, but it was rarely happy.

In 1967, the divorce finally came. Queen's College Dundee—as the Dundee campus had become known—broke away to form the independent University of Dundee. St Andrews lost its medical school, its law faculty, its engineering program. It went from being a comprehensive university to being something smaller and more focused.

Some saw this as a catastrophe. In retrospect, it may have been a gift. St Andrews emerged from the split with a clearer identity: a compact, intimate university focused on arts, sciences, and pure research. The constraints became strengths.

The American Invasion

Here's a fact that would have astonished Samuel Johnson: the University of St Andrews now educates more American students than any other British university. About one in six undergraduates comes from the United States. Students from all fifty states and most Canadian provinces study here.

The American connection has deep roots. James Wilson attended St Andrews in the eighteenth century before signing the Declaration of Independence and helping write the Constitution. Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-American steel magnate who became one of history's greatest philanthropists, served as the university's Rector in 1901. Edward Harkness, another American industrialist, funded the construction of St Salvator's Hall in 1930.

But active recruitment of American students only began in 1984. Since then, the numbers have grown steadily. The reasons are partly financial—St Andrews costs far less than elite American universities—but also cultural. The university offers something American higher education largely can't: six centuries of tradition, ancient stone buildings, academic gowns worn to class, a town where a third of the population belongs to the university.

British media have taken to calling St Andrews a "mini-Nantucket," a reference to the preppy Massachusetts island popular with wealthy East Coast families. The characterization isn't entirely fair—the student body is genuinely international, drawing from over 145 countries—but it captures something real about the university's appeal to a certain kind of American student seeking an experience that feels older and more storied than anything available back home.

The Royal Romance

In September 2001, a nervous eighteen-year-old arrived at St Andrews to study art history. His name was William Windsor, though most people knew him as Prince William, second in line to the British throne.

The university had experience with royalty—various minor princes and aristocrats had studied there over the centuries—but nothing like this. William was the most famous teenager in Britain, the son of the beloved and recently deceased Princess Diana, the future king.

St Andrews handled it with characteristic Scottish understatement. William was assigned to St Salvator's Hall like any other first-year student. He attended lectures. He joined clubs. He was, by most accounts, treated as relatively normal by his classmates, who had agreed to an informal pact not to sell stories about him to the tabloids.

He also met a fellow student named Catherine Middleton.

They became friends. Then more than friends. Then, in 2010, engaged. Then, in 2011, married in Westminster Abbey before two billion television viewers worldwide. Catherine became the Duchess of Cambridge, and later the Princess of Wales.

It's the most famous romance in the university's six-century history. Every year, it draws applications from students hoping to find their own fairy tale among the medieval spires. The university itself maintains a dignified silence about its role as royal matchmaker, but the enrollment numbers speak for themselves.

Traditions That Refuse to Die

St Andrews students participate in rituals that would seem bizarre anywhere else.

There's Raisin Weekend, held every November, when first-year students are "adopted" by older students who serve as academic parents. The freshers give their academic parents a bottle of wine. In return, they receive a "raisin receipt"—traditionally written in Latin on any surface the academic parents choose. Then comes Raisin Monday, when the first-year students gather in St Salvator's Quad for a massive foam fight, armed with shaving cream and silly string, dressed in costumes their academic parents have chosen for them.

There's the May Dip, when students plunge into the North Sea at dawn on the first of May to celebrate the end of the spring semester—and, according to tradition, to wash away the bad luck of stepping on the initials PH embedded in the cobblestones outside St Salvator's Chapel. Those initials mark the spot where Patrick Hamilton, a Protestant reformer, was burned at the stake in 1528. Stepping on them supposedly curses you academically unless you take the freezing May swim.

And there's the academic dress. St Andrews students still wear the distinctive red gowns to class—scarlet for undergraduates studying arts, black for postgraduates, variations for different faculties and years. Most British universities abandoned academic dress for daily wear generations ago. St Andrews kept it.

These traditions might seem like quaint relics, but they serve a purpose. They bind students together across generations, creating shared experiences that connect a first-year student in 2024 to one from 1924 or 1824. They make the university feel like something more than a credential factory. They make it feel like a community with a memory.

What St Andrews Is Now

Today, the University of St Andrews is one of the most selective institutions in Britain. Only Oxford and Cambridge have lower acceptance rates. Entry requirements, measured by the standardized UCAS tariff that British universities use, are the highest in the country.

About nine thousand students study here, roughly a third of them postgraduates. The university is organized into eighteen academic schools grouped into four faculties. Philosophy, international relations, physics, and computer science consistently rank among the best in Britain. The divinity school, descendant of those original medieval theology courses, remains one of the oldest and most respected in the English-speaking world.

Five Nobel laureates have connections to St Andrews—three in chemistry, two in medicine. The list of notable alumni includes not just royalty but prime ministers' advisors, Olympic gold medalists, intelligence chiefs, diplomats, and at least one signer of the American Declaration of Independence.

The town itself remains inseparable from the university. With a population of around seventeen thousand, St Andrews is small enough that the academic community dominates. Walk down any street during term time and you'll hear dozens of accents—American, English, German, Chinese, Nigerian—mixed with the local Scottish. The medieval street plan survives largely intact. The ruins of the cathedral and castle, destroyed during the Reformation, still stand as reminders of how much has changed and how much hasn't.

The Oldest Game

No discussion of St Andrews is complete without mentioning golf. The Old Course, which winds along the coastline just north of town, is considered the birthplace of the sport—or at least its spiritual home. Golf has been played on these links since at least the fifteenth century, making it roughly contemporaneous with the university itself.

The Royal and Ancient Golf Club, founded in 1754, still governs the rules of golf worldwide along with the United States Golf Association. Bobby Jones, one of the greatest golfers in history, was made a Freeman of St Andrews in 1958—only the second American so honored, after Benjamin Franklin in 1759. A scholarship program between St Andrews and Emory University now bears Jones's name.

Students and townspeople have the right to play the Old Course, a privilege guarded jealously. On Sundays, the course closes to golf entirely and opens to the public as a park—you can walk your dog across fairways where the world's best golfers compete for the Open Championship.

It's a fitting metaphor for the town and its university: ancient traditions adapted to modern purposes, exclusive institutions that somehow remain accessible, a place where the past and present coexist in ways that feel natural rather than forced.

Six Centuries and Counting

In 2013, Hillary Clinton came to St Andrews to mark the university's six hundredth anniversary. She received an honorary doctorate and delivered a graduation address praising the institution for training so many Americans who later worked for her at the State Department.

Six hundred years. It's almost impossible to grasp. When St Andrews was founded, the Black Death was still a living memory. The Hundred Years' War raged between England and France. China was ruled by the Ming Dynasty. The Aztec Empire was at its height.

Every one of those powers and civilizations has vanished. St Andrews remains.

Not unchanged, of course. The university that once trained Catholic priests now trains computer scientists. The institution that once banned women now has more female than male students. The school that Samuel Johnson thought was dying now turns away vastly more applicants than it accepts.

But there's something continuous beneath all the changes. Students still gather in the same quadrangles, worship in the same chapels, walk the same cobblestone streets. They participate in traditions that connect them to generations of predecessors. They become part of something older than any individual life, something that will outlast them as it has outlasted so many others.

That's what those desperate scholars fleeing Paris and Oxford built in 1410. Not just a university, but a thread of continuity stretching across six centuries, surviving schisms and wars and revolutions and social transformations, adapting but enduring, always enduring.

The refugees from the Great Western Schism chose their location well. The winds off the North Sea are cold, but St Andrews abides.