O filme não discute nada sobre a Universidade, ao qual o Professor Moriarty é afiliado, nem dá pistas para verificar isso.
Mesmo nos livros de Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle não divulgou o nome da universidade, mas apenas se refere a ele como um matemático, o que o torna professor de matemática. Em O problema final , Doyle, brevemente se refere à universidade como "uma das nossas universidades menores", mas nunca dá o nome da universidade.
He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it, he won the mathematical chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumors gathered round him in the University town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his chair and come down to London. He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city... —Holmes, "The Final Problem"
The smaller university was claimed to be one of the colleges, which later made University of Leeds in an article published in 1989 in New Scientist. The article needs subscription to read the entire content, and unfortunately the first paragraph which is free for access, has nothing to say about the reasoning which the author of the article uses to determine the aforementioned college.
Em Sherlock Holmes: A Biografia Não Autorizada , que foi publicada em 2006, e é uma novela não-canônica de pastiche de Sherlock Holmes, o autor refere-se à Universidade como Universidade de Durham . No entanto, esta é a sua opinião. Arthur Conan Doyle, nunca divulgou a Universidade.