The University of Fribourg is a public university located in Fribourg, Switzerland.
The roots of the university can be traced back to 1580, when the notable Jesuit Peter Canisius founded the Collège Saint-Michel in the City of Fribourg.] In 1763, an Academy of law was founded by the state of Fribourg which formed the nucleus of the present Law Faculty.[4] The University of Fribourg was finally created in 1889 by an Act of the parliament of the Swiss Canton of Fribourg.
The University of Fribourg is Switzerland’s only bilingual university and offers full curricula in both French and German, two of Switzerland’s national languages. Students number about 10,000; there are about 200 tenured professors and 700 other academic teaching and research personnel. The Misericorde Campus, constructed between 1939–42, was designed by the architects Honegger and Dumas, students of Swiss architect Le Corbusier.
There are five faculties: Catholic theology, law, natural sciences, humanities, and economics & social sciences.
In 2005, the university inaugurated its Perolles 2 campus, to which the Faculty of Economics and Social Science relocated. The university has the third largest collection of Biblical antiquities in the world after the British Museum and the Cairo Museum. Fribourg has also developed FriMat, a centre of excellence in nanotechnology. As part of the BeNeFri association comprising the Universities of Berne, Neuchâtel and Fribourg, students at any one of these universities may take courses at another in the association and still receive credit at their home institution. The academic degrees were the Demi-Licence, Licence, DEA / DESS, Doctorate. The university now follows the requirements of the Bologna process.
The University of Fribourg launched for the 2009–2010 academic year a new postgraduate law programme, the Master of Laws in Cross-Cultural Business Practice (MLCBP), an LL.M taught entirely in English.