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Leuven University: a quick overview of 600 years of history |
Leuven University, established in 1425, had become a top university in Europe by the 16th century.
Erasmus, for instance, Europe’s leading light of the sixteenth century,
with a Master’s from Paris and a Doctorate from Turin, came to Leuven after his
stint as a professor at Cambridge, and co-founded Leuven’s Trilingual College for Bible
studies. Mercator, whose algorithm for projecting the globe into a flat map still is
today’s standard, studied and later worked here. His math professor and initial fellow-map-maker,
Gemma Frisius, invented triangulation here. But Frisius was also interested in medicine; he and
Vesalius, one of the founders of modern medicine, used to go body-snatching from Leuven’s
gallows to get material for dissection and study. (Both were fined for this.) Nicholas Crane
writes that, by the mid-1500s,
… the “Belgian Athens” had risen so fast that it could already outbid every university on the continent
for professors. Only Paris could compete in terms of numbers and prestige. […] The classics
lectures at the Collegium Trilingue had drawn—according to Erasmus—3,000 students in one year.
Students undertook transcontinental treks to matriculate […]. They came from Portugal and Spain,
Italy, Hungary, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, Scotland and Ireland, even France. The greatest
number came from England. To peripatetic humanists like Erasmus and the Spanish philosopher
Juan Luis Vives (who’d left Paris disgusted by its scholasticism) Louvain was the hub of
Northern humanism. Even the Italians were having to concede that there was life north of the Alps.
“Nobody”, Erasmus had written, “could graduate from Louvain without knowledge, manners and age”.
(Crane, N., Mercator, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 2002, p 38.)
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The university was briefly closed down under France’s revolutionary rule, but reopened in 1835.
Leuven suffered badly from (especially) WW 1. The torching of the university’s ancient,
precious library, along with 1300 private houses,
was universally decried as unforgivable. The 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty explicitly states that Leuven was to be
rebuilt “more beautiful than it ever was”, and 100s of US universities or colleges donated books and cash for
the new library (picture, left). You can find their names engraved into the massive stone columns of the
outer gallery.
But also spiritually Leuven rose from its ashes. By the 1700-1800s, we hate to admit,
Leuven University had become a sleepy and conservative institution. But after
WW1 the US Commission for the Relief of Belgium, originally set up by Herbert Hoover to deal with
the war famine, was converted into a scholarship foundation financing Master or PhD studies in the US.
Hundreds of Leuven’s professors were trained there and came back with new cutting-edge abilities
and a culture of research.
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The revitalized K.U.Leuven currently offers education covering undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral studies,
in fields as far apart as archaeology and human genetics, or philosophy and solid state physics.
It has extensive research facilities, libraries, facilities for language teaching, and a
student body that is unusually diversified both internationally and across scientific fields.
For example, there are over 100 international graduate programmes; 13% of Leuven’s 29,000 students
are international, not even counting the 1000 “Erasmus” exchange students. For graduate and PhD
programmes international enrollment even is 25%. The 2005 World Economic Forum rated Belgium the world’s
third for quality of education, and KU Leuven ranks at or near the top within the country. In terms of
research output, EU reports always place us in the top-12 among European universities, irrespective of
how one weighs faculties and articles. Not surprisingly, then, Leuven is one of the twelve members of the
League of European Research Universities (LERU)—we actually host the League’s secretariat, and our
current Rector (President), André Oosterlinck, chairs the League during the coming year.
Leuven is also a founding member of the Coimbra forum, a club of “old” universities.
The university itself employs 7500, the medical school and its hospital also 7000, and IMEC, the
semiconductor-design research lab, another 3000. The university has generated about 60
spin-offs in recent years, directly employing 3,000 people. Total employment, including the
circle of supplying firms at the Leuven Research Park and the Arenberg Research Park,
rises to 15,000.
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