Short history [top]
Today 150,000 graduates living all over the world are from the UCL, “Universit้ Catholique de Louvain”. Of these, some are or have been heads of state; many hold positions of responsibility on all the continents, in all disciplines and in all professions; all have in common the university ideal: to learn, to understand, to search, to serve.

This entire story began a long time ago. In the Middle Ages, only the Pope had the authority to create a university; indeed the very concept of a university had its origins in the Church. Thus it was at the request of Duke John IV of Brabant and of the Town of Louvain that Pope Martin V signed the bull founding the University of Louvain on 9 December 1425. The new University had three faculties: law, medicine and the arts; its first teachers came from Paris and Cologne. The Faculty of theology was added in 1432. The theologian and humanist Erasmus, the geographer Mercator and the anatomist Vesalius frequented the University in the XVIth century. Louvain attracted students from the four corners of Europe and became one of the foremost universities of the time.

The University's fortunes have followed the ups and downs of history: it was closed under French domination (1797), and forced to remain until 1817 when it reopened as a state university. After the foundation of the Kingdom of Belgium in 1830, the “Free“ Catholic University was re-established, first in Malines in 1834, and the following year in Louvain. A few decades later, it was bombed in the two world wars and its entire library was lost in the fire of 1914.

Later, it saw the consequences of the democratization of university studies. In the early 1960s under Rector Monsignor Van Wayenbergh, the number of students rose from 4,610 to 13,772.

But, the twentieth century has witnessed one of the major events in its history. In 1971, following pressure from the world of Flemish politics, which was hostile to a francophone university on Flemish soil, the “Universit้ catholique de Louvain” was split into two separate universities, a Dutch-speaking university which remained in Louvain (Leuven in Flemish) and a French-speaking university which moved almost all its departments to the Brabant Wallon, on the outskirts of Ottignies, to a new town symbolically named Louvain-la-Neuve. Between 1972 and 1979, nine faculties (schools) gradually moved to Louvain-la-Neuve. The Faculty of Medicine chose to move to Brussels (Woluwe-Saint-Lambert), in an area now known as ซ Louvain-en-Woluwe ป.

Louvain-la-Neuve today [top]
Louvain-la-Neuve, an unique example of a new town built in the 20th century. It’s a largely pedestrian town, a real example of modern architecture, designed with the objective of recreating the atmosphere of the ancient medieval towns, where the interactions between people are favoured by reduced distances from home to work or to school. But this town has already everything typical: busy centre, theatre, music, culture, green space, of course, an university and for a short time ago, a new shopping centre and a brand new cinema. Moreover, it gathers more than a hundred leading business and research centres in two science parks, creating nearly 4.000 jobs. Louvain-la-Neuve, a challenge successfully met in the eyes of some people, a ghost town according to others, but no one remains indifferent to this new town.

Nowadays, the UCL is the largest French-speaking University in Belgium: approximately 21.000 students, among them, almost half of all francophone university students and about 4000 foreign students representing all five continents. All these students are shared out between ten faculties, among them, the Applied Science Faculty.

The Applied Science Faculty trains, during five years, engineers whose ambition is to master the fundamental sciences sufficiently to develop their technical and industrial applications. They must increasingly take into account all aspects (in particular the ecological and social consequences) of their activities. For this reason the training of engineers at the UCL is one of the most thorough and advanced in Europe, by including technical projects linked to theoretical courses, for almost 25 years.