‘Humboldt’ in Belgium: Rhetoric on the German University Model

Abstract

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the German university was hailed in Belgium, as elsewhere, as a model institution, existing solely to serve pure scholarship, with professors and students who gave and attended courses in complete freedom, without barriers between the faculties, or indeed between individual universities. This chapter shows that how Wilhelm von Humboldt in particular and the German university model in general have functioned as rhetoric instruments whenever university education was discussed in Belgium from the mid nineteenth century onwards. It focuses on the search for the origins of German supremacy and late nineteenth-century attempts to deal with it; the direct impact of German educational administration in the First World War through the establishment of the Dutch-speaking Von Bissing University in Ghent; and finally the increasingly common use of the name of Humboldt as a merely rhetorical instrument in recent years. Keywords: Belgium; Dutch; German university model; Wilhelm von Humboldt