Stockholm University (SU) was founded in 1878, following the establishments of Karolinska Institutet (KI, 1810) and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH, 1827). Other higher educational institutes (HEIs) were also being established at around the same time in Stockholm, leading to a landscape of a multitude of HEIs each covering one academic speciality with SU being the only one having multiple faculties. The Swedish government, as well as many within the academic community, wanted Stockholm's HEIs to join forces as a single university in the early-to-mid-1950s. However, due to a set of unexpected events during the spring of 1954, the process never came to a completion. Thus, there is no medical faculty at SU; this is instead a separate university. Likewise, there is no engineering faculty at SU. The main campuses of the three universities, SU (multi-faculty), KI (medical faculty) and KTH (engineering faculty), reside within a small distance of each other, only a few kilometres, and can essentially be considered to share the same campus area.
Internationally, the three universities SU, KI and KTH often act as a single entity – called the Stockholm Trio – with the collaboration agreement with Tokyo University being a case in point since it was specifically looking for a partnership with a top-10 university in the world. Thus, from an international perspective, it makes sense to view the Trio as the single entity it was supposed to be already far more than half a century ago.
