A faculty is a division within a university comprising one subject area, or a number of related subject areas (for the North American usage, referring to academic staff, see below). The concept of a university with different faculties for different subjects dates back to Al-Azhar University, which had individual faculties for a Madrasah, such as theological seminary, Islamic law and jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, Islamic astronomy, early Islamic philosophy, and logic in Islamic philosophy.

The medieval University of Paris, which served as a model for most of the later medieval universities in Europe, had four faculties: the Faculties of Theology, Law, Medicine, and finally the Faculty of Arts, which every student had to graduate from in order to continue his training in one of the other three, sometimes known as the higher faculties. The privilege to establish these four faculties was usually part of all medieval charters for universities, but not every university could in reality do so.

The Faculty of Arts took its name from the seven liberal arts: the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy). In German (and Scandinavian) universities this faculty has more often been known as the Faculty of Philosophy. The degree of Magister Artium (Master of Arts) derives its name from the Faculty of Arts, while the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) originates within German education and derives its name from the German name of the Arts faculty.

The number of faculties has usually multiplied in modern universities, both through subdivisions of the traditional four faculties, and through the absorption of academic disciplines which have developed within originally vocational schools, in areas such as engineering or agriculture.