History
The first Nijmegen University was founded in 1655 and terminated around 1680. The Radboud University Nijmegen was established in 1923 as the Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, or Catholic University of Nijmegen, and started out with 27 professors and 189 students. The university was founded because the Roman Catholic community wanted its own university. At the time, Roman Catholics in the Netherlands were disadvantaged and occupied almost no higher posts in government. After fierce competition with the cities of Den Bosch, Tilburg, The Hague and Maastricht, Nijmegen was chosen as the city to house the university. The subsequent Second World War hit the university hard. Many prominent members were lost, among them professors Robert Regout and Titus Brandsma. They were deported to Dachau concentration camp. In 1943, rector Hermesdorf refused to cooperate with the Germans. On February 22, 1944, the university lost many buildings in a bombardment. Classes resumed in March 1945. Since then, student numbers rose steadily from 3,000 in 1960 to 15,000 in 1980.
In 2004, the university changed its name to Radboud University Nijmegen, after Saint Radboud, a bishop who lived around 900.
Read more about this topic: Radboud University Nijmegen
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—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
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“Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)