Abstract
Pieter Dhondt, The lost campaign for one single university in Belgium, 1814-1835After the defeat of Napoleon and the disappearance of the existing institutions for higher education, the struggle for a university flared up between a number of Belgian cities. Countless pamphlets were published in quick succession; many defended the establishment of one single university, others argued that several institutions should be set up. All of them supported the idea of a university in their own city. Few people were satisfied with the autocratic decision of Wilhelm I in 1816 to establish three state universities. Towards the end of the 1820s the issue came up again. The establishment of free universities after the revolution added an ideological component to the debate. It was only in 1835 that an agreement was finally reached on the number of universities and their location. The compromise was far from clear and, as had been the case fifteen years earlier, those advocating the concentration of all intellectual and financial resources into one singleinstitution had lost their case.
Highlights
In de Zuidelijke Nederlanden bestonden in die periode slechts enkele gefragmenteerde instellingen voor hoger onderwijs, waarvan er niet meer dan een paar de val van Napoleon zouden overleven
De tegenstanders van het verspreiden van het intellectueel en financieel kapitaal over meerdere universiteiten, hadden in 1830 evenmin gedacht dat ze hun strijd voor één universiteit andermaal, net als in 1816, zouden verliezen
51 De volgende leden maakten deel uit van de commissie: Désiré Arnould, secretaris-inspecteur van de Leuvense rijksuniversiteit; Belpaire, oud-schoolinspecteur en griffier van de handelsrechtbank in Antwerpen; Cauchie, leraar mineralogie in het atheneum van Namen; Jean Gérard Joseph Ernst, hoogleraar aan de Luikse faculteit rechten; Charles Lecocq, lid van het nationaal congres en oudschoolinspecteur en Adolphe Quetelet, hoogleraar aan het Brusselse Musée des sciences et des lettres
Summary
Idées sur l’instruction publique dans le Royaume des Pays-Bas (Brussel, 1829). Ed., ‘Documents d’archives concernant les origines de l’Université libre de Belgique. 1831 et 1834’, Handelingen van de Koninklijke commissie voor geschiedenis, CLXIII (1997) 207, 220-223
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