The university also stresses a focus on interdisciplinary research, helped by the architecture, which encloses all faculties in one great structure.

The main building, which houses all the faculties and institutes, as well as the large library, is a functional concrete structure, typical of the 1960s.

It works with commercial system suppliers to meet the needs of academic libraries—collaborations that have resulted in developments such as BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), by which metadata is collected from scientific repository servers and indexed, along with data from selected web sites and data collections, using the Solr framework.

The German Center for Higher Education Development Excellence Ranking, which measures academic performance of European graduate programs in biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics, placed Bielefeld in the excellence group for mathematics.

[citation needed] Bielefeld University was one of the centers of student protests in the fight against the introduction of tuition fees.

In its session of 12 July 2006, the university senate decided to introduce tuition fees of €500 per semester, beginning in 2007.

The cost of the damage, mainly due to the replacement of thousands of locks, was estimated at over a million euros.