The town of Leuven has been the seat of four universities, with the first one established in 1425. Since then, the organisation has been abolished and refounded multiple times.
Old University of Leuven The Old University of Leuven (or
Studium Generale Lovaniense) was founded in 1425 by Duke
John IV of Brabant, the civil authorities of Brabant, as well as the municipal administration of the city of Leuven, despite the initial opposition of the chapter of Sint-Pieter. For centuries, the university flourished due to the presence of famous scholars and professors, such as Adriaan Florenszoon Boeyens (
Pope Adrian VI),
Desiderius Erasmus,
Johannes Molanus,
Juan Luís Vives,
Andreas Vesalius and
Gerardus Mercator. After the French Revolution, the university was formally integrated into the French Republic when the Holy Roman Emperor, Francis I, ceded then
Austrian Netherlands to France by the
Treaty of Campo Formio signed on 17 October 1797. A law dating to 1793, which mandated that all universities in France be closed, came into effect. The old University of Leuven was abolished by decree of the
Département of the Dyle on October 25, 1797.
State University of Leuven A few years after
French rule came to an end, when Belgium was part of the
United Kingdom of the Netherlands, king
William I of the Netherlands in 1817 founded a secular university in Leuven, the
State University of Leuven, where many professors of the Old University of Leuven taught. This university was abolished in 1835.
Catholic University , purchased by the
Catholic University of Leuven in 1921. The
Catholic University of Leuven was founded in 1834 in
Mechelen by the bishops of Belgium, after an official
Papal Brief of
Pope Gregory XVI. This new Catholic university stayed only briefly in Mechelen, as the bishops already moved the university headquarters to
Leuven on 1 December 1835, where it took the name Catholic University of Leuven. This occurred after the closure of the
State University of Leuven in 1835, where many professors of the Old University of Leuven had taught. KU Leuven is generally (but controversially) identified as a continuation of the older institution; controversy lays in the fact that this link to the Old University cannot be maintained from a purely juridical perspective as the Old University was suppressed under French rule. In its statutes, KU Leuven officially declares against the rulings of the Court of Cassation and the Cour d'Appel, to be the continuation of the
Studium Generale Lovaniense established in 1425, and together with
UCLouvain it sets out to celebrate its 600th anniversary in 2025. The original establishment during medieval times and subsequent re-foundation at a later period represents a fate shared by the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) with several other well-known European universities that experienced the upheavals of revolutionary times. In 1920, the Catholic University of Leuven for the first time admitted female students, lagging some 40 years behind the Belgian universities of Brussels, Liège and Ghent.
Present-day university In 1968, tensions between the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking communities led to the
splitting of the bilingual
Catholic University of Leuven into two "sister" universities, with the Dutch-language university becoming a fully functioning independent institution in Leuven in 1970, and the
Université catholique de Louvain departing to a newly built greenfield campus site in the French-speaking part of Belgium. KU Leuven's first rector after the split was
Pieter De Somer. In 1972, the university set up a separate entity, Leuven Research & Development (LRD), to support industrial and commercial applications of university research. It has led to numerous spin-offs, such as the technology company Metris, and manages tens of millions of euros in investments and venture capital. The university's electronic learning environment, TOLEDO, which started in September 2001, was gradually developed into the central electronic learning environment at the KUL. The word is an acronym for
TOetsen en LEren Doeltreffend Ondersteunen (English: "effectively supporting testing and learning"). It is the collective name for a number of commercial software programs and tools, such as
Blackboard. The project offers the Question Mark Perception assignment software to all institution members and has implemented the
Ariadne KPS to reuse digital learning objects inside the Blackboard environment. On 11 July 2002, the KU Leuven became the dominant institution in the "KU Leuven Association" (see below). KU Leuven is a member of the
Coimbra Group (a network of leading European universities) as well as of the
LERU Group (League of European Research Universities). Since November 2014, KU Leuven's Faculty of Economics and Business is accredited by
European Quality Improvement System, which is a leading accreditation system specializing in higher education institutions of management and business administration. As of academic year of 2012–2013, the university held Erasmus contracts with 434 European establishments. It also had 22 central bilateral agreements in 8 countries: the United States, China, South Africa, Japan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Vietnam, Poland, and the Netherlands. The vast majority of international EU students came from the Netherlands, while most non-EU ones come from China. Even though the university is financially independent from the Catholic Church, representatives from the
Catholic Archdiocese of Mechelen–Brussels sit on the Board of Trustees, and are yielded chairmanship powers and veto powers in certain decisions. In December 2011, the university changed its official name to KU Leuven in all official communications and branding. While its legal name remains to be Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the university uses its short name or acronym, KU Leuven, in all communications, including academic research publications. In 2018, a student of African origin,
Sanda Dia, died during a cruel hazing ritual to enter the
Reuzegom fraternity. The perpetrators, whose parents mostly belong to the upper class, are being prosecuted, but were so far only lightly sanctioned by the university authorities. As a consequence of these events, which attracted international media coverage, the institution received criticism as to how it handled the matter. In 2023, 18 students were fined 400 Euros and community service for their involvement in the death and the degrading treatment. Historically, the
Catholic University of Leuven has been a major contributor to the development of Catholic theology. The university is dedicated to
Mary, the mother of Jesus, under her traditional attribute as "
Seat of Wisdom", and organizes an annual celebration on
2 February in her honour. On that day, the university also awards its
honorary doctorates. The neo-Gothic seal created in 1909 and used by the university shows the medieval statue
Our Lady of Leuven in a
vesica piscis shape. The version used by KU Leuven dates from the 1990s and features the date 1425 in
Times New Roman. == Campus ==