Ankara University is an institution that has identified and integrated the history and the mission of the Turkish Republic with its people. The establishment of Ankara University represented the substantiation of a different mission beyond obvious reasons, just as the establishment of the Turkish Republic, beyond being just a change in government, is a major social transformation to a system relying on modern science, modern democratic values and institutions.
The foundation of Ankara University was personally initiated by the great Atatürk, to form the basis of his principles and revolutionary ideas, to disseminate and to firmly establish these principles and ideas nationally, and to be the undaunted defender of these principles that express modernity, science and enlightenment.
The initial accomplishments of the new Republic in the area of higher education were
• in 1925 to open a new School of Law to educate jurists for a new restructuring of the law
• in 1933 to establish the Higher Institute of Agriculture to serve the farmers of Turkey
• in 1935 to open the Faculty of Humanities to gather data on the numerous Anatolian cultures and their richness, and to establish international linguistic and cultural ties
• in the same year, to open the doors of the School of Political Sciences, which had been training high-ranking public administrators under the name Mektebi Mülkiye since 1859, had been moved to Istanbul in 1936, and then to Ankara under Atatürk’s special order with the founding of the new Republic with Ankara as its capital
In addition to those institutions mentioned above, it was directed that the Faculties of Medicine and Science should also be added, with these faculties also founded by Atatürk, but postponed to the late 1940s because of breakout of the Second World War. These faculties operated separately and independently, but in 1946, Ankara University was officially established and folded into were the Faculties of Law (1925), Humanities (1935), Science (1943) and Medicine (1945).
In 1948 the University then incorporated the Faculties of Agriculture and of Veterinary Medicine which had composed the Higher Institute of Agriculture. Later in the Faculty of Divinity (1949), the School of Political Sciences (1950, later being name the Faculty of Political Sciences), and then the Faculty of Pharmacy (1960). The University then established the Faculty of Dentistry in 1963 first as a vocational school, and then a faculty in 1977. In 1965 the Faculties of Educational Sciences and of Communication became part of the University; the Faculty of Communication was essentially a re-structuring of the Vocational School of Press and Publication. In 2001 the Faculty of Engineering was established as a separate faculty after a re-organizational split from the Faculty of Science. The Faculty of Health Education which had started teaching in 1996, was named the Faculty of Health Sciences in 2007.