Al-Qarawiyyin is recognized by UNESCO and Guinness as the world’s oldest running university.
Comment on It's always been women in STEM.
oce@jlai.lu 3 days agoThis Wikipedia page agrees with this comment: en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_oldest_universities_in…. It lists University of Bologna as the oldest one in continuous operation from 1180–1190.
shawn1122@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
drolex@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
That’s where the top boffins of the time invented spaghetti with tomato sauce, too!
Chee_Koala@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Not long after hops became really popular as a beer ingredients. Coincidence?
MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown@fedia.io 3 days ago
I mean…. It does and it doesn’t. Yes, al-Qarawiyyin was founded as a mosque. Yes, it became a “university” within the last 100 years. But there was a looong span of time between where it was an institution of higher learning not formally classified as a “university”
Paragraph 4 of the article you linked specifically notes that such institutions with mixed provenance were omitted from the list.
Basically it is the oldest educational institution that is currently a university, as opposed to the institution having operated under the university model for the longest time.