Portal:Discworld/Article of the day/6

Article of the day

Unseen University coat-of-arms

The Unseen University (UU) is a school of wizardry in the Discworld city of Ankh-Morpork, staffed by a faculty composed of mostly indolent and inept old wizards. The official motto of UU is "Nunc Id Vides, Nunc Ne Vides", loosely translated as "Now you see it, now you don't". The unofficial motto is "η β π," or "Eta Beta Pi." (Eat A Better Pie). The university's name is a pun on the real-world Invisible College.

The coat of arms is a livre des sortilèges, attaché en cuivre, sur un chapeau pointu, on a field, azure. (That is: a book of magic spells, with copper clasps, over a pointed hat, on a blue background.) As usually rendered, the coat bears a strong resemblance to the coat of arms of the University of Oxford.

The University is centred around the 800-foot Tower of Art, out of which it grew; any further attempt at grasping its geography is close to pointless. Due to the high levels of background magic in the vicinity, a typical map of UU vaguely resembles an exploding chrysanthemum and is usually only valid for a day or so. This is also the cause of the various physical and biological anomalies that plague it. In some rooms the direction of gravity moves around as a day passes, and some rooms contain other rooms which contain the room you started with (especially problematic for a conga line). The University's gargoyles have taken on a life of their own (not that this is anything unusual for Discworld gargoyles in general), and both a colony of ants in the main university buildings and a flock of ravens roosting in the Tower of Art show unnatural intelligence and, for the ravens, an ability to speak. The fabric of the University is said to absorb knowledge, since all students enter university knowing absolutely everything, and leave admitting they know very little.