Though Bremen became a university city only recently, higher education in Bremen has a long tradition. The Bremen Latin School was upgraded to \"Gymnasium Academicum\" in 1584. 1610 it was transformed into \"Gymnasium Illustre\". Under Napoleonic rule in 1811 the institution of a \"French-Bremen University\" was considered. In 1971 the University of Bremen opened its doors.

The development of the University of Bremen can be divided up into steps of 10 to 12 years – foundation, restructuring, consolidation and profile building: at the beginning of the 1970s, the University was set up as a “science complex” before the city gates, a city oriented towards trade and seafaring that had no experience with restless academic minds, particularly not with leftist professors. University, business and the public in the region did not move closer together until the 1980s, through the foundation of the natural science and engineering departments, co-operation with the newly founded Alfred-Wegener Institute for Polar and Ocean Research in Bremerhaven (1980), through the development of the technology park (from 1988) and initial success in setting up collaborative research centres and in the acquisition of considerable amounts of external funds. The mathematics professor Jürgen Timm, elected in 1982, was largely responsible for this turnaround.

The result: increasingly higher levels in the research rankings, national recognition, a number of endowment professorships, the profiling of interdisciplinary scientific focuses and thus further – meanwhile nine – DFG sponsored collaborative research centres and, sensationally, the Research Center of Ocean Margins embedded in the earth sciences with the emphasis on Global Change in the Marine Realm; one of only three – initially – national research centers of the DFG (German Research Foundation).

From 1996 until 2001 the University of Bremen (along with six other universities in Germany) has been participating in a pilot scheme for structural reform of university administration, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. This project has improved the co-operation and communication between the university\'s administrations, teaching and research units. By the realization of a \"Notebook University\" the University of Bremen has become a leading University in the field of digital media teaching in Germany.

With the turn of the millennium, after an organisational development process of three years in which the university set itself goals for the development of its profile, this trend was continued: in respect of research this includes the promotion of junior scientists in structured graduate program, staff development programs for the great number of early-stage researchers entering the university as junior professors due to the exchange of generations in professorships. In teaching and studies, comprehensive evaluations provide proof of the momentum that the University of Bremen has been holding for a good 35 years now: a new admissions policy with specific admission requirements, the rapid conversion of courses of study to Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees.