Research university

[3] Institutions of higher education that are not research universities or do not aspire to that designation, such as liberal arts colleges, instead place more emphasis on student instruction or other aspects of tertiary education, whereas research university faculty members, in contrast, are under more pressure to publish or perish.

[10] The concept of the research university first arose in early 19th-century Prussia in Germany, where Wilhelm von Humboldt championed his vision of Einheit von Lehre und Forschung (the unity of teaching and research), as a means of producing an education that focused on the main areas of knowledge, including the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, rather than on the previous goals of the university education, which was to develop an understanding of truth, beauty, and goodness.

[14] At Johns Hopkins, president Daniel Coit Gilman led the development of the American research university[1] by setting high standards for recruiting faculty and admitting students, and insisting that faculty members had to commit to both teaching and research.

[17] Most importantly, Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, and Princeton (along with Birmingham and Cambridge in the UK) directly participated in the creation of the first nuclear weapons (the Manhattan Project).

[28][29] Having one or more universities based on the American model (including the use of English as a lingua franca) is a badge of "social progress and modernity" for the contemporary nation-state.

"[31] During that same timeframe, several wealthy petrostates in the Persian Gulf region subsidized the creation of local branches of American universities.

The region with the highest number was Europe, with 39.8%, followed by Asia/Pacific with 26.7%, the US and Canada with 15.6%, Latin America with 10.8%, and the Middle East and Africa with 7%.