History

On December 1, 1594, Alessandro Valignano SJ founded the University College of Saint Paul in Macau, the first Western university in East Asia. The University was succeeded in the middle of the 18th century by the Royal Seminary of Saint Joseph, which, like Saint Paul, educated ecclesiastical and lay students. Saint Joseph was discontinued as a place of learning in the late 1960s, mostly due to the political uncertainties of the times. The students were sent to institutions of higher learning in other places, especially in Portugal.

In the 1990s, the then President of the Portuguese Republic, MárioSoares, asked the Rector of the Catholic University of Portugal to re-establish the university in Macau. This happened in 1996 through the Catholic Foundation for Higher Education, created for this purpose and constituted by the Diocese of Macau and the Catholic University of Portugal. The Instituto Inter-Universitário de Macau (IIUM), the chosen designation, was founded as a university, with the authority to confer undergraduate and graduate degrees, and with its own rector. The Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, the Magnum Chancellor of the Catholic University of Portugal, assumed the Chancellorship of the university in Macau.
 

On December 1, 2009, exactly 415 years after the establishment of Saint Paul, the university re-assumed an earlier designation and became the University of Saint Joseph (Executive Order Nº 64/2009).