Hanoi, University of

one of the largest higher educational institutions in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV). The university, which was founded in 1918 by the colonial authorities of French Indochina, had 623 students in the 1939–40 academic year. After the victory of the August Revolution of 1945 in Vietnam and the proclamation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the university was reorganized on democratic principles.

In 1954 and 1955 institutes of literature, medicine and pharmacology, pedagogy, and agriculture and forestry were formed from the university. In 1956 the University of Hanoi, now virtually a new institution, had faculties of biology, social sciences, physics and mathematics, and chemistry. In the 1976–77 academic year there were faculties of social sciences, law, physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, geology and geography, history, philology, and the Vietnamese language. In that year the university had more than 250 instructors and more than 4,000 students from the SRV and various foreign countries. The course of study is either four or five years. In 1976–77 the university’s library had more than 62,000 volumes. The laboratories are provided with modern equipment, made possible by contributions from the socialist countries.