Sydney already had a college, albeit a small one, when New South Wales Legislative Council member William Wentworth proposed expanding Sydney College into an institution more inclusive. A liberal arts education should not be limited to an elite few, he argued, but should “enable child of every class, to become great and useful in the destinies of his country … whether they are disciples of Moses, of Jesus, of Mahomed, of Vishnu, or of Buddha.” That spirit of inclusiveness informed Wentworth’s founding of the continent’s first and oldest university.

On this day, October 11, in 1852, the University of Sydney, in Australia, was inaugurated. Although limited to boys initially, it opened to female graduates as well starting in the 1880s.

Twenty-four boys passed the school’s first ever matriculation exams, on Greek, Latin, arithmetic and Euclidean geometry. Five of them were just 15 years old at the time, and four more were 16, and most had come from private schools, as was typical at the time. More recently the student body had more than 32,000 undergraduates and 16,000 graduate students, studying among curricula of sixteen different university schools.