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The University of Groningen has a long academic tradition extending back to 1614,
which makes Groningen the oldest university in the Netherlands after Leiden. Many
very talented people in a variety of disciplines have studied or worked at the university
during the 390 years of its existence, including a Nobel Prize winner, the first female
University student in the Netherlands and the first female lecturer, the first Dutch
astronaut and the first president of the European Bank. They share their academic
roots with more than 200,000 other people who have attended the University of Groningen
as students, lecturers or research workers. The young University of Groningen was
already an outstanding example of an international community in the seventeenth century.
Almost half of the students and lecturers came from outside the Netherlands – the
first Rector Magnificus, Ubbo Emmius, was German, for instance – but at the same time
there was already a close relationship between the university and the city and the
surrounding region. The founding of the university – at that time still a college
of higher education – was an initiative taken by the Regional Assembly of the city
of Groningen and the Ommelanden, or surrounding region. There were four faculties
– Theology, Law, Medicine and Philosophy. The first 75 years of its existence were
very fruitful for the university with about 100 students enrolling every year. The
development of the university came to a standstill at the end of the seventeenth and
during the eighteenth century because of theological differences of opinion, a difficult
relationship with the Regional Assembly and political problems that included the siege
of the city by ‘Bommen Berend’ in 1672. On average two to three hundred students were
registered with the university at any one time during this period. Petrus Camper,
though, was a shining academic example during the second half of the eighteenth century
and was famous far beyond the city limits as an anatomist, a fighter against rinderpest
and the founder of the first outpatient’s clinic for surgical medicine. Opportunities
and threats followed on each other’s heels during the nineteenth century. In 1815,
at the same time as Leiden and Utrecht, the university gained recognition as a national
college of higher education, but this was followed by discussions about closure. The
situation improved markedly when a new main university building, the Academiegebouw,
was constructed in 1850, a building that was largely financed by the people of Groningen.
This made the fire that completely destroyed this building in 1906 even more poignant.
In the meantime, the Higher Education Act of 1876 had radically improved the position
of the university, which was renamed the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RUG). Teaching
now took place in Dutch as well as in Latin and the University was given a research
as well as an educational duty. This laid the foundations for the present research
university. The University of Groningen developed apace during the first decades of
the twentieth century. The number of faculties and courses grew steadily while the
number of students showed an explosive growth. When the university celebrated its
first 300 years in 1914 there were 611 registered students; this had already grown
to 1000 by 1924. After a drop back during the Depression, and in particular during
the Second World War, the number of students grew rapidly from 1945 to reach 20,000
in 1994. At the present time there are about 21,000 students registered at the University
of Groningen with the number of foreign students again growing steadily, and following
the tradition set by the first Rector Magnificus, the number of German students and
researchers has grown strongly in recent years.
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