Its academic offerings range from the bachelor to the doctoral level with 70 undergraduate programs and 19 graduate degrees including 71 specializations in the basic disciplines and professional fields.

[11] A year later (1901) the institution was moved to an area previously occupied by farmland immediately north of the town of Río Piedras, today part of the municipality of San Juan.

[11] On March 12, 1903, under the administration of the Public Instruction Commissioner, Samuel McCune Lindsay, the 2nd Legislative Assembly approved a law creating the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, transferring all the funding of the Insular Normal School there.

Due to the scarcity of teachers in the island, most of these students were appointed by the Department of Public Instruction to teach at schools without having finished four years of college.

Among the students in that class were Carlota Matienzo, Isabel Andréu, Loaíza Cordero, Marina Roviro, and Juan Herrero.

The university was the site of social upheaval during the 1960s and 1970s, when nationalist students protested for civil rights, against the war in Vietnam, for the independence of Puerto Rico, and to expel the ROTC from the campus.

[15] Right below the tower there is a monument to the nations of the Americas portraying the coats of arms of all American states within a bronze circle, as a symbol of the Panamerican Union.

In 1908 the architectural firm of Clark, Howe and Homer designed a new façade for the Model School in the California Mission Style.

In 1924 the Chicago firm of urbanists Bennett, Parsons and Frost were contacted to design a master plan for the future development of the university.

However, from the 1940s onward a new architectural paradigm, which discarded historical vocabularies and incorporated attitudes learned from Germany and from the studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, stemmed from German émigré Henry Klumb.

For 20 years Klumb was sole architect for the University of Puerto Rico, designing buildings for the campuses at Río Piedras and Mayagüez until in 1966.

At that time chancellor Jaime Benítez assigned the design of the General Studies Building to the architectural firm of Toro & Ferrer.

The system comprises eighteen specialized and general libraries, with holdings totaling more than 4,000,000 items,[citation needed] access to which may be gained through the university's online catalog[where?].

Other services include Dial Order, DIALOG, microfilming, reproduction of photographs, library instruction and orientation, lectures, and exhibits.

As a member of Internet2 and the Internet, the university enjoys instant communication with institutions all over the world for the purposes of correspondence and information access.

Improvements to existing telecommunications infrastructure include the installation of structured cabling in campus buildings and fiber optics as a means of interconnecting them.

Currently, campus buildings are configured to ATM (155Mbits / s) and Gigabit Ethernet interfacing equipment, providing greater capacity to transfer video, voice and data.

The campus is capable of offering video conferencing over ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), or via the Internet in H.323 format.

Since its establishment, the museum has actively contributed to the growth of Puerto Rican cultural life by holding art, historical, and anthropological exhibits and sponsoring lectures, seminars, publications, and workshops–to the benefit of both the academic and the general communities.

Its members participate on the institutional processes, establishing academic rules and collaborating with other organisms of the University of Puerto Rico system.

It plans, coordinates, evaluates and supervises labors related with different administrative and operative processes, but over all, they ensure quality services that have a positive aspect on student life, teaching and learning scenarios, investigation areas, labor areas of conformities, according to the Campus mission and the Public Administration that commands the university.

In 1965, Puerto Rican architect Jesús Eduardo Amaral, was selected as an executive consultant and given the responsibility to establish the school.

Proposals were submitted to UPR's Río Piedras Chancellor Jaime Benítez and finally in 1966, the School was officially recognized by the Council of Superior Education.

Within the university's system, the college has the particularity of being constituted as a multi- and interdisciplinary one, wherein three great sections of knowledge converge: Humanities (including Vernacular Spanish, its literary and linguistic components), Social Sciences and Natural Sciences, and English for Academic Purposes, including its literary and linguistic components.

It has various investigation centers, as well as seminars, specialized libraries in fine arts, philosophy, music and English, and publishes several educational magazines.

The college offers graduate studies in the Departments of: rehabilitation counselling, public administration, social work, economics, sociology and psychology.

The University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras is a founding member of the island-wide Inter-University Athletic League (LAI) and participates in all of the sports included in that organization.

[40] The university is also a member of the NCAA Division II as an Independent and competes in five men's and women's intercollegiate varsity sports: basketball, cross country, outdoor track, tennis, and volleyball.

[41] One of the most enriching aspects of student life in Río Piedras is the vast number of cultural and social events organized by the university.

Cultural Activities, run by the dean of students, is the central agency at Río Piedras that plans and sponsors major events on and off campus.