The establishment of a university in the city of Nijmegen goes far back. The first
University of Nijmegen was founded in 1655 as the
Kwartierlijke Academie van Nijmegen. Students developed their skills in the traditional fields of theology, medicine and law. Although the university had its successes, the
Kwartierlijke Academie terminated around 1680. The university was unable to recover from successive outbreaks of the
plague and the
French invasion of the Netherlands in 1672. After several attempts to establish a new university in Nijmegen, the current Radboud University Nijmegen was established in 1923 under the name (Catholic University of Nijmegen). It was founded by the
Saint Radboud Foundation, a network of
bishops that wished to
emancipate Catholic intellectuals in the Netherlands. At the time, Dutch Roman Catholics were disadvantaged and occupied almost no higher posts in governmental and scientific institutions. The establishment of a university was seen as a possible stepping stone for these individuals. walks with the new
professors to Saint Ignatius' Church.|231x231px When the Catholic University of Nijmegen was founded, every student automatically became part of student corporation N.S.V. Carolus Magnus
nl], named after the Frankish king,
Charlemagne, who used to reside in Nijmegen in the Middle Ages. This organization was set up to speak for student needs and to organize an annual
induction ceremony. It also aimed at attaining the same status as other corporations in the well-known Dutch student cities of
Leiden,
Delft and
Groningen. To the horror of the Catholic University's management, Carolus Magnus also pursued the same
liberal elitist character as these other corporations. Still, it continued developing and students eagerly participated. In the 1920s it produced its own
sociëteiten: male students became part of Gentleman's Roland Society (1928) and female students joined the Ladies Society Lumen Ducet (1929). Some students of these
sociëteiten banded together in smaller communities called
disputen.
University in times of war The first years after the establishment of 1923 were quite successful for the Catholic University of Nijmegen, but during the
Second World War the young university encountered serious difficulties. Many prominent members were lost, among them the anti-Nazi professors
Robert Regout and
Titus Brandsma who were deported to
Dachau concentration camp and died there. As the war progressed, the university was more severely curtailed in its freedoms. The German Sicherheitsdienst (security service) removed so-called "anti-German works" from the university library. In addition, professors could only be appointed after approval by the Nazi Department of Education, Science and Cultural Protection. Such measures aimed at eventually eliminating religious institutions of higher education. There would be no place for a Catholic university in a Nazified Netherlands. In March and April 1943, the conflict with the Nazi occupying forces reached a boiling point. The occupiers demanded that all students in the Netherlands sign a declaration of loyalty. If they did not, they were not allowed to continue their studies and had to work in Germany as forced laborers. However, students in Nijmegen showed to be resistant to the German demands. At the risk of his own life, law student Jozef van Hövelleven launched a widespread campaign to get as many students as possible not to sign. The university's
rector magnificus at that time, Bernard Hermesdorf, decided to show solidarity with students like Jozef van Hövell. As the only Dutch rector in the Netherlands he refused, for "reasons of principle", to distribute pre-printed loyalty statements to his students. Although heroic, Hermesdorf's refusal led to extreme anger among the occupying Nazi forces. On 5 May 1943, the Germans demanded all Nijmegen's non-signatories of the loyalty statement to report to
Ommen within 24 hours to be put to work in Germany. If they did not, their families would be held responsible. These circumstances left rector magnificus Bernard Hermesdorf with no choice but to close the doors of the university as of 11 April 1943, pending better times. Eventually, only 83 students decided to report to the Germans in Ommen. Most of the students went into hiding, scattered across the Netherlands. The great spider in the web during that time was university moderator Bernard van Ogtrop, who traveled all over the country to visit students from Nijmegen in hiding. He wrote circulars, took care of a wide-ranging correspondence, and ran a parcel service and thus managed to keep many people's spirits up. The university was closed, but thanks to Van Ogtrop it continued to exist, if only in the minds of the students.
1945–2000 When the war ended in 1945, the university infrastructure had been largely destroyed, but students still returned to their
alma mater in dribs and drabs. Classes officially resumed again in March 1946, but because many university buildings had been bombed during the war, a dire need for new facilities existed. With the purchase of the Heyendaal estate, the university got its own campus in a green setting less than a fifteen-minute bike ride from the Nijmegen city center. In 1951, the Faculty of Medical Sciences was the first faculty to move to Heyendaal. Soon, other faculties followed. By 1988, all faculties had moved to Heyendaal. The move to a new campus also with a rise in students attending the Catholic University of Nijmegen. Since the end of the war, student numbers steadily rose from 3,000 in 1960 to 15,000 in 1980. The period between 1960 and 1975 is often generally described as the "Age of Student Unrest". Not only did the student population in Nijmegen rise exponentially, it had also become more diverse, left-leaning and less elitist. Next to that, the
hippie movement had reached the city which caused many students to desire a more
democratic student life. Umbrella organization Carolus Magnus became increasingly bloated and lost connection with the members of
sociëteiten and
disputen that began to operate more independently. It was not the beloved corporation it used to be and students criticized the mandatory membership of Carolus Magnus. Therefore, the organization slowly became more concerned with administrative duties than organizing community activities. In 1966 Carolus Magnus ceased to exist in its traditional sense. From that moment on, students were free to choose which association they joined and which not. In the 1980s and 1990s many other kinds of student associations were established in Nijmegen, including
evangelical-Christian association Navigators,
egalitarian association Ovum Novum, and
alternative student association Karpe Noktum
. 2000–present As an indication of its evolving relationship with the
Bishops' Conference of the Netherlands and to appear less sectarian, the university's executive council changed the university's name in 2004 to the Radboud University Nijmegen after
Saint Radboud of Utrecht, a medieval bishop. Tensions continued between the university's executive council and the bishops' conference over the secularizing direction of the university. The repeated nomination of non-Catholics and non-practicing Catholics to the executive council, which the bishops' conference would not approve, exacerbated tensions. In response to a decision to open a Transgender Care Center at the university's medical center, the bishops' conference revoked the designation
Catholic from the university in November 2020. Accordingly, the university lost its eligibility to receive church subsidies and its right to identify as Roman Catholic. The university appealed to the Holy See, and in November 2022 the pope's
Dicastery for Culture and Education ruled that the bishops' conference could remove the designation "Catholic" from the executive council but not from the university as a whole. == Faculties ==