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The foundation of a university often reflects the preoccupations of its age, reaching back to theological roots in medieval times, and later meeting the needs of nineteenth century empires for administrators with a rounded education or those of the emerging professional and industrial classes for a highly trained workforce and for research, particularly in science and engineering. Humanistic ideals and academic freedom were embodied as core elements in most cases. Such institutions, with more than a century behind them, have become part of a much larger population of universities as the expectations of and demands for a graduate education drove a global era of expansion and massification. While the core concept of a university remains recognisable almost anywhere that the term is used, substantial differentiation nonetheless exists. This differentiation may lie in the nature of the student population, the focus of the curriculum, the degree of research intensity, the form of governance, financial viability, scale of activity, the degree of autonomy and the extent to which it is embedded in one or more locations. More recently, as rankings and other forms of assessment have entered the picture, the level of ambition of an institution has also become a distinguishing factor.