The main quadrangle at the University of Sydney has a quiet authority to it. The long hallways, the sandstone gothic architecture, and the weight of almost 175 years on every surface don’t make it feel like a place that’s trying to prove itself. It seems like a place that has been there before.
The University of Sydney was the first university in Australia and all of Oceania. It was founded in 1850, which is something that no other school on the continent can say. That would be enough for most institutions to stand on its own. But the age of USYD isn’t the only thing that makes it interesting. It has always stood for that.
William Wentworth, a legislator from Cambridge who believed, perhaps unusually for his time, that everyone should be able to go to college, made the main argument for founding the university. Not just the rich. Not just men. Not just people who go to the right church. The idea wasn’t taken up until he pushed it twice. That persistence is interesting; the university was founded on a fight for access, and that seems to have become a part of its essence.
A lot of universities around the world didn’t let women in until 1881. Sydney was one of the first to do so. Two women, Mary Elizabeth Brown and Isola Florence Thompson, were the first women to get bachelor’s degrees from the school in 1885. Thompson kept going and got his master’s degree two years later. It wasn’t just a matter of meaning; these were structural choices that set the tone.
That’s the only word for the long list of famous people who have been here. Eight Australian prime ministers have studied here, including Anthony Albanese, who is now Prime Minister. Five Nobel laureates and two Crafoord laureates have either graduated from or taught at the university. 110 Rhodes Scholars have graduated from the school. You can walk down those sandstone hallways and feel the weight of all that history, even if you don’t mean to.
What might not be as clear is how the university has dealt with tensions within itself over the years. In the late 1960s, arguments over Marxism and feminism classes turned into more public fights, protests, and arguments that newspapers were sent to cover. The disagreement caused the philosophy department to split into two separate units in the end. It serves as a reminder that colleges and universities are not fixed buildings. For better or worse, they are ongoing debates about what knowledge is for.
The University of Sydney is now ranked second in Australia by the QS World Rankings 2025 and first in the world by the QS Sustainability Rankings for the impact of education. It stays a part of international groups like the Association of Pacific Rim Universities and the Group of Eight, which is made up of Australia’s top research universities. It is said to have the biggest student exchange program in Australia. It links students with more than 260 partner schools around the world. On campus, there are more than 270 groups and clubs. To really understand how big it is, you have to be inside it.
If you look into the history of this institution, you get the sense that it hasn’t had a single most important laureate or prime minister. It was the first point that said excellence and access don’t have to be at odds with each other. He said that in the 1840s, and the university has tried to live up to that, but only sometimes. It’s a good question to ask whether it always works. It has been tried for 175 years, which is not nothing.
It’s not true that the University of Sydney is the loudest college in the world. It doesn’t get as much attention as some American or British universities do. But it has given the world an unfairly large number of the people who have helped shape a nation, and it keeps doing that quietly but steadily.
