Case Western Reserve University comprises eight schools that offer more than 100 undergraduate programs and about 160 graduate and professional options across fields in STEM, medicine, arts, and the humanities.

[13]: 422  That town, about 30 miles southeast of Cleveland, had been an antislavery center from the beginning: its founder, David Hudson, was against slavery, and founding trustee Owen Brown was a noted abolitionist who secured the location for the college.

Along with Presbyterian influences of its founding, the school's origins were strongly though briefly associated with the pre-Civil War abolitionist movement;[14] the abolition of slavery was the dominant topic on campus in 1831.

"[29] On May 9, 2003, the 2003 Case Western Reserve University shooting occurred when Biswanath Halder entered the Peter B. Lewis Building of the Weatherhead School of Management where he then killed graduate student Norman Wallace and wounded two professors.

[citation needed] In 2007, the university's board of trustees approved a shift back to giving equal weight to "Case" and "Western Reserve".

[33] A 2020 United States presidential debate, the first of two, was held at the Samson Pavilion of the Health Education Campus (HEC), shared by the Cleveland Clinic.

Since 2016, the top fields for graduating CWRU undergraduate students have been engineering, nursing, research and science, accounting and financial services, and information technology.

The Michelson–Morley interferometer experiment was conducted in 1887 in the basement of a campus dormitory by Albert A. Michelson of Case School of Applied Science and Edward W. Morley of Western Reserve University.

[60] Also in 2018, The Hollywood Reporter ranked CWRU's Department of Theater Master of Fine Arts program with the Cleveland Play House as 18th in the English-speaking world.

The recognition follows Case Western Reserve's first five-star ranking on the Campus Pride Index, a detailed survey of universities' policies, services and institutional support for LGBT individuals.

[9] Following is a partial list of major contributions made by faculty, staff, and students at Case Western Reserve since 1887:[citation needed] Today, the university operates several facilities off campus for scientific research.

Subsequently, Ernest Yeager carried out pioneering studies on ultrasound electrodeposition and oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), which is directly relevant for H2-O2 fuel cells and batteries that use air electrodes such as zinc-air, iron-air, etc.

Some notable achievements involve the work on ultrasound electrochemistry, oxygen reduction fundamentals, boron-doped diamond electrodes, in-situ electrochemical spectroscopy, polybenzimidazole (PBI) membranes for high-temperature fuel cells (HT-PEM), methanol fuel cells, iron-based flow batteries, metal deposition studies, dendrite modeling and electrochemical sensors.

[82][83] Larry Sears is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at CWRU and the founder of Hexagram, Inc. (now ACLARA Wireless Technologies).

Popular with students, Downtown Cleveland, Ohio City, Legacy Village, and Shaker Square are all a short driving distance or accessible by RTA.

Denison Hall serves as a rehearsal, practice, and teaching space for the music students and school ensembles, and is attached to Wade Commons.

Project Logos, under ARPA contract, was begun within the department on a DEC System-10 (later converted to TENEX (BBN) in conjunction with connection to the ARPANET) to develop a computer-aided computer design system.

This system consisted in a distributed, networked, graphics environment, a control and data flow designer and logic (both hardware and software) analyzer.

[95] There was a perception that this award was obtained through partially false or inaccurate information submitted for the survey,[96] and the university did not appear at all on the 2000 Most Wired College list (which included 100 institutions).

The Mistletoe, Juniper, and Magnolia residential colleges were established when the "First Year Experience" system was introduced, and Cedar was created in the fall of 2005 to accommodate a large influx of new students.

The areas of focus for each college are – Cedar: visual and performing arts; Mistletoe: service leadership; Juniper: multiculturalism and Magnolia: sustainability.

Starting as security only, the university expanded the role of protective services to include sworn officers who have arrest power and carry firearms.

On top of routine duties such as fingerprinting, traffic control, and bicycle registration, police and security also conduct investigations, undercover operations, and community outreach.

Additionally, the dispatch center can send RAVE notifications and manages CWRU Shield, a mobile application allowing video, image, and text tips, safety checks, and viewing emergency procedures.

Covering University Circle, CWRU EMS is run solely by undergraduates volunteers, who provides free basic life support level treatment and transport to local hospitals.

CWRU EMS provides both emergency rescue operations, medical standby services, and free community outreach programs such as Stop the Bleed (STB).

All 19 varsity teams wear a commemorative patch on their uniforms honoring Case alumnus, M. Frank Rudy, inventor of the Nike air-sole.

From 2006 to 2010 the women's cross country team earned 8 individual All-American Titles, including current professional marathoner Esther Erb.

Notable alumni include John Charles Cutler, former surgeon general who violated human rights and led to deaths in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Terre Haute prison experiments, and the syphilis experiments in Guatemala; Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, Hollywood movie directors, Paul Buchheit, creator and lead developer of Gmail; Craig Newmark, billionaire founder of Craigslist; Peter Tippett, developer of the anti-virus software Vaccine, which Symantec purchased and turned into the popular Norton AntiVirus; Francis E. Sweeney the main suspect from the Cleveland Torso Murders also was a Case Alumnus.

Other notable alumni include Larry Hurtado, New Testament scholar; Harvey Hilbert, a zen master, psychologist and expert on post-Vietnam stress syndrome; Peter Sterling, neuroscientist and co-founder of the concept of allostasis; Ogiame Atuwatse III, Tsola Emiko the 21st Olu of Warri – a historic monarch of the Itsekiri people in Nigeria's Delta region, and Donald Knuth, a leading expert on computer algorithms and creator of the TeX typesetting system.