The University of Zurich: Foundation and Early Operations

Planning the University of Zurich formed part of liberal educational reforms in the 1830s. Education councillor Johann Caspar von Orelli, court president Friedrich Ludwig Keller, and mayor Conrad Melchior Hirzel were important promoters. Carlo Moos’s historical study places the foundation alongside reorganization of elementary education, the cantonal secondary school, and teacher-training institutions.

The Education Act of September 28, 1832, established the university’s legal foundation, while the opening ceremony took place in Zurich’s Grossmünster on April 29, 1833. Existing local institutions for theological, medical, and political education supplied personnel and intellectual resources. Foundation therefore involved more than a ceremony: it incorporated dispersed higher-level teaching organizations into a new cantonal education system.

References: [1] [2]

The new university had faculties and an academic Senate. Sebastian Brändli’s formal research report notes that the 1832 law made the four deans and all full professors members of the Senate, but this did not give them independent control over every university matter. The Education Council selected a rector from the professors for a two-year term, subject to cantonal government approval.

The Senate supervised students and advised the Education Council on teaching, collections, and other matters. In turn, the council had to consult the professors before establishing lasting teaching and disciplinary rules. Early Zurich thus developed professorial self-government under cantonal supervision: academic judgment had an institutional place, but final administrative authority was not wholly inside the university.

References: [3]

State provision did not give every teacher equal security. Besides salaried professors, the new institution relied on Privatdozenten, qualified university lecturers who did not automatically receive fixed salaries. Drawing on regulations and archives, Christian Koller explains that the 1832 education law allowed them to collect fees from their students. Income from teaching was therefore closely tied to enrollment in their courses.

This arrangement expanded courses with relatively little fixed expenditure but left lecturers bearing the risk of attracting no students. Some local lecturers also worked as schoolteachers, physicians, or lawyers, with university instruction forming one part of their professional lives. For exiled scholars, however, lecture fees could determine basic subsistence. Founding finance must therefore be considered not only through cantonal appropriations but also through how teachers sustained their work.

References: [4]

The annual report submitted in 1834 by the first rector, Lorenz Oken, recorded 161 students enrolled in summer 1833: sixteen in theology, twenty-six in law, ninety-eight in medicine, and twenty-one in philosophy. Medicine had a conspicuous share, and the initial institution was far smaller than the comprehensive university that later developed.

The report carefully distinguished advertised courses from those actually attended. Keller taught Zurich civil procedure and exercises in oral proceedings, Johann Lucas Schönlein provided clinical medicine, and Oken taught natural history. These records show that breadth on a course list did not mean every course operated. Professional training and academic lectures required actual participation by teachers and students.

References: [5]

The new university used hospitals, laboratory facilities at the cantonal secondary school, and the natural history society’s collections. Its report also records professors and Privatdozenten contributing four and two silver crowns respectively toward a university library, with the canton adding eighty-seven. Revisions to the original report clarify that these were not compulsory annual contributions and should not be represented as fixed levies.

The university announced its establishment in Latin to forty-eight universities. By the report’s date, twelve had replied, and exchanges of scholarly publications had begun. Academic mobility mattered too. Koller uses the example of German jurist Joseph Schauberg, who arrived in Zurich in 1833, to show how political exile intersected with the new university’s Privatdozent system, bringing criminal-law scholarship and outside academic connections into local classrooms.

References: [5] [4]

The university’s liberal origins also generated conflict. In 1839, political authorities promoted the appointment of theologian David Friedrich Strauss, controversial for his Life of Jesus. Moos notes that opinion within the theological faculty was divided and that alternative arrangements proposed by professors failed to prevent escalation. Strauss was pensioned off before taking up his post.

Zurich’s political upheaval that year harmed the university, and enrollment fell below one hundred in winter 1841–1842. The founders’ institution survived, but its early experience shows that freedom in research and teaching required stable finance, workable organization, and social support. Political determination to establish a university alone could not guarantee smooth operations.

References: [1] [2] [3]