The Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt University) was founded in 1914 as a Citizens' University, which means that while it was a State university of Prussia, it had been founded and financed by the wealthy and active liberal citizenry of Frankfurt am Main, a unique feature in German university history. It was named in 1932 after one of the most famous natives of Frankfurt, poet and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Today, the university has some 33,000 students.
The university has partly moved to its new campus at the former I.G. Farben Building (now named by some people as Poelzig-Bau after its architect Hans Poelzig), in Frankfurt's Westend district. The following departments can be found here:
Other departments that are currently located on the old campus will be moved to the Westend Campus in the coming years; the various departments of natural sciences reside at the Campus Riedberg; the department of medicine has its various buildings in southern Frankfurt at the Campus Niederrad.
In recent years the University turned its attention especially to law, history and economics. Therefore new Institutes as the ILF (Institute for Law and Finance) or the CFS (Center of Financial Studies). New buildings for law and economics at the new campus are under construction. One of the university's ambitions is to become Germany's best university for finance. Therefore Frankfurt University’s Goethe Business School developed a new MBA program in cooperation with Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
The University of Frankfurt has at times been considered liberal, or left-leaning, and has had a reputation for Jewish and Marxist scholarship (or even Jewish-Marxist). Thus, during Nazi times, "almost one third of its academics and many of its students were dismissed for racial and/or political reasons - more than at any other German university." (University homepage) It also played a major part of the German student riots of 1968.
The University of Frankfurt is historically best known for the Institute for Social Research (founded 1924), institutional home of the Frankfurt School, one of the most important 20th century schools of philosophy and social thought at all. Some of the most famous University of Frankfurt scholars are associated with this school, including Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin. Others include the sociologist Karl Mannheim, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, the philosophers of religion Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich, the psychologist Max Wertheimer, and the anthropologist Norbert Elias.
