Leiden University

Leiden University

Universiteit Leiden
Latin: Academia Lugduno-Batava
Former names	Rijksuniversiteit Leiden
Motto	Libertatis Praesidium (Latin)
Motto in English	Bastion of Freedom
Type	Public research university
Established	8 February 1575[1]
Budget	€588 million (2016)[2]
Rector	Carel Stolker
Academic staff	1,352[3]
Administrative staff	1,142[3]
Students	26,900 (2017)[3]
Location	Leiden and The Hague, South Holland, Netherlands
Campus	Urban/College town
Colours	Leiden Blue[4]
Website	www.universiteitleiden.nl

Leiden University (abbreviated as LEI; Dutch: Universiteit Leiden), founded in the city of Leiden, is the oldest university in the Netherlands.^[5] The university was founded in 1575 by William, Prince of Orange, leader of the Dutch Revolt in the Eighty Years' War. The Dutch Royal Family and Leiden University have a close association: Queen Juliana, Queen Beatrix and King Willem-Alexander are former students. The university came into particular prominence during the Dutch Golden Age, when scholars from around Europe were attracted to the Dutch Republic due to its climate of intellectual tolerance and Leiden's international reputation. During this time Leiden was home to such figures as René Descartes, Rembrandt, Christiaan Huygens, Hugo Grotius, Baruch Spinoza and Baron d'Holbach.

Leiden University has seven faculties (six in Leiden and one in The Hague) and over 50 departments. The university is a member of the Coimbra Group, the Europaeum and the League of European Research Universities. Leiden University houses more than 40 national and international research institutes.

The University is associated with ten leaders and Prime Ministers of the Netherlands including the current Prime Minister Mark Rutte, nine foreign leaders, among them the 6th President of the United States John Quincy Adams, a Secretary General of NATO, a President of the International Court of Justice, a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and sixteen recipients of the Nobel Prize (including renowned physicists Albert Einstein^[6][7] and Enrico Fermi).

History[edit]

Foundation and early history[edit]

Founder of the university, William, Prince of Orange in the 16th century.

The Academy building of Leiden University in 1614.

Anatomical theatre Leiden.

In 1575, the emerging Dutch Republic did not have any universities in its northern heartland. The only other university in the Habsburg Netherlands was the University of Leuven in southern Leuven, firmly under Spanish control. The scientific renaissance had begun to highlight the importance of academic study, so Prince William founded the first Dutch university in Leiden, to give the Northern Netherlands an institution that could educate its citizens for religious purposes, but also to give the country and its government educated men in other fields.^[8] It is said the choice fell on Leiden as a reward for the heroic defence of Leiden against Spanish attacks in the previous year. Ironically, the name of Philip II of Spain, William's adversary, appears on the official foundation certificate, as he was still the de jure count of Holland. Philip II replied by forbidding any subject to study in Leiden. Originally located in the convent of St Barbara, the university moved to the Faliede Bagijn Church in 1577 (now the location of the University museum) and in 1581 to the convent of the White Nuns, a site which it still occupies, though the original building was destroyed by fire in 1616.^[8]

The presence within half a century of the date of its foundation of such scholars as Justus Lipsius, Joseph Scaliger, Franciscus Gomarus, Hugo Grotius, Jacobus Arminius, Daniel Heinsius and Gerhard Johann Vossius, rapidly made Leiden university into a highly regarded institution that attracted students from across Europe in the 17th century.^[9] Renowned philosopher Baruch Spinoza was based close to Leiden during this period and interacted with numerous scholars at the university. The learning and reputation of Jacobus Gronovius, Herman Boerhaave, Tiberius Hemsterhuis and David Ruhnken, among others, enabled Leiden to maintain its reputation for excellence down to the end of the 18th century.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Leiden University again became one of Europe's leading universities. At the world’s first university low-temperature laboratory, professor Heike Kamerlingh Onnes achieved temperatures of only one degree above absolute zero of −273 degrees Celsius. In 1908 he was also the first to succeed in liquifying helium and can be credited with the discovery of the superconductivity in metals.^[10]

Modern day[edit]

Leiden University Library in 1610

The University Library, which has more than 5.2 million books and fifty thousand journals, also has a number of internationally renowned special collections of western and oriental manuscripts, printed books, archives, prints, drawings, photographs, maps, and atlases. It houses the largest collections worldwide on Indonesia and the Caribbean. The research activities of the Scaliger Institute focus on these special collections and concentrate particularly on the various aspects of the transmission of knowledge and ideas through texts and images from antiquity to the present day.

Leiden Observatory of the university.

In 2005 the manuscript of Einstein on the quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas (the Einstein-Bose condensation) was discovered in one of Leiden's libraries.^[11]

The portraits of many famous professors since the earliest days hang in the university aula, one of the most memorable places, as Niebuhr called it, in the history of science.^{[citation needed]}

In 2012 Leiden entered into a strategic alliance with Delft University of Technology and Erasmus University Rotterdam in order for the universities to increase the quality of their research and teaching. The university is also the unofficial home of the Bilderberg Group, a meeting of high-level political and economic figures from North America and Europe.

Location and buildings[edit]

The Academy building of Leiden University in modern days

The university has no central campus; its buildings are spread over the city. Some buildings, like the Gravensteen, are very old, while buildings like Lipsius and Gorlaeus are much more modern.^[12]

Among the institutions affiliated with the university are The KITLV or Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (founded in 1851), the observatory 1633; the natural history museum, with a very complete anatomical cabinet; the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (National Museum of Antiquities), with specially valuable Egyptian and Indian departments; a museum of Dutch antiquities from the earliest times; and three ethnographical museums, of which the nucleus was Philipp Franz von Siebold's Japanese collections. The anatomical and pathological laboratories of the university are modern, and the museums of geology and mineralogy have been restored.

The Hortus Botanicus (botanical garden) is the oldest botanical garden in the Netherlands, and one of the oldest in the world. Plants from all over the world have been carefully cultivated here by experts for more than four centuries. The Clusius garden (a reconstruction), the 18th century Orangery with its monumental tub plants, the rare collection of historical trees hundreds of years old, the Japanese Siebold Memorial Museum symbolising the historical link between East and West, the tropical greenhouses with their world class plant collections, and the central square and Conservatory exhibiting exotic plants from South Africa and southern Europe.

Campus The Hague[edit]

In 1999, the university has also expanded to The Hague which has become home to Leiden University College The Hague, a liberal arts and sciences college. It occupies a number of buildings in the historic centre of the city including a college building in Lange Voorhout.

Here, the University offers academic courses in the fields of law, political science, public administration and medicine. Six of the seven faculties of Leiden University are now active in The Hague. The Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs was established in 2011, together with the University College, and one of the largest programmes of the Faculty of Humanities, International Studies.

Organisation[edit]

The Leiden University Medical Centre

Entrance of Gorlaeus building of the Faculty of Science

Huygens and Oort Buildings of the Faculty of Science

Faculty of Law

The university is divided into seven major faculties which offer approximately 50 undergraduate degree programmes and over 100 graduate programmes.

• Archaeology
• Governance and Global Affairs
• Humanities
• Law
• Medicine / LUMC
• Science
• Social and Behavioural sciences

Academic profile[edit]

Undergraduate studies[edit]

Most of the university's departments offer their own degree programme(s). Undergraduate programmes lead to either a B.A., B.Sc. or LL.B. degree. Other degrees, such as the B.Eng. or B.F.A., are not awarded at Leiden University.

Graduate studies[edit]

Students can choose from a range of graduate programmes. Most of the above-mentioned undergraduate programmes can be continued with either a general or a specialised graduate program. Leiden University offers more than 100 graduate programs leading to either MA, MSc, MPhil, or LLM degrees. The MPhil is the most advanced graduate degree and is awarded by select departments of the university (mostly in the fields of Arts, Social Sciences, Archeology, Philosophy, and Theology). Admission to these programmes is highly selective and primarily aimed at those students opting for an academic career or before going into law or medicine. Traditionally, the MPhil degree enabled its holder to teach at the university levels as an associate professor. The MPhil degree is also common in elite universities in the UK (Oxford and Cambridge), and the Ivy League in the United States.

The Pieter de la Court-building, the main building of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

Doctorate programmes[edit]

In addition, most departments, affiliated (research) institutes or faculties offer doctorate programmes or positions, leading to the PhD degree. Most of the PhD programmes offered by the university are concentrated in several research schools or institutes.

Research schools and affiliated institutes[edit]

Research building of the Leiden University Medical Centre

logo of the Leiden academy, founded in 2008.

Leiden University has more than 50 research and graduate schools and institutes. Some of them are fully affiliated with one faculty of the university, while others are interfaculty institutes or even interuniversity institutes.

Rankings and reputation[edit]

Notable alumni and professors[edit]

Of the eighty-nine Spinozapremie (the highest scientific award of The Netherlands), twenty-two were granted to professors of the Universiteit Leiden. Literary historian Frits van Oostrom was the first professor of Leiden to be granted the Spinoza award for his work on developing the NLCM centre (Dutch literature and culture in the Middle Ages) into a top research centre. Other Spinozapremie winners are linguists Frederik Kortlandt and Pieter Muysken, mathematician Hendrik Lenstra, physicists Carlo Beenakker, Jan Zaanen and Dirk Bouwmeester, astromers Ewine van Dishoeck, Marijn Franx and Alexander Tielens, transplantation biologist Els Goulmy, clinical epidemiologist Frits Rosendaal, pedagogue Marinus van IJzendoorn, archeologists Wil Roebroeks and Corinne Hofman, neurologist Michel Ferrari, classicist Ineke Sluiter, social psychologist Naomi Ellemers, statistician Aad van der Vaart, cognitive psychologist Eveline Crone, Rector of The Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education Carolus Johannes Reinecke, physicist Michel Orrit, organisation psychologist Carsten de Dreu.^[24] Among other leading professors are Wim Blockmans, professor of Medieval History, and Willem Adelaar, professor of Amerindian Languages.

Nobel laureates[edit]

Kamerlingh Onnes was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1913. Three other professors received the Nobel Prize for their research performed at Universiteit Leiden: Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Pieter Zeeman received the Nobel Prize for their pioneering work in the field of optical and electronic phenomena, and the physiologist Willem Einthoven for his invention of the string galvanometer, which among other things, enabled the development of electrocardiography.

Nobel laureates associated with Leiden include: the physicists Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi and Paul Ehrenfest, the Arabist and Islam expert Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, the law expert Cornelis van Vollenhoven and historian Johan Huizinga, all during the 1920s and 1930s.

Also, Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, Johannes Diderik van der Waals, Tobias Asser, Albert Szent-Györgyi, Igor Tamm, Jan Tinbergen, Nikolaas Tinbergen, Tjalling Koopmans, Nicolaas Bloembergen and Niels Jerne.^[25]

See also[edit]

• Leiden school
• Leiden University College The Hague
• List of early modern universities in Europe
• List of rectores magnifici of Leiden University

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Otterspeer, Willem (2008). The Bastion of Liberty. Leiden University Today and Yesterday. Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 978-90-8728-030-7.  Online version: The Bastion of Liberty - (Open Access)
• Willem Otterspeer: Good, gratifying and renowned. A concise history of Leiden University. Transl. by John R.J. Eyck. Leiden, 2015. ISBN 978-90-8728-235-6
• Th. Lunsingh Scheurleer & G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes (ed.) (1975). Leiden University in the seventeenth century: an exchange of learning. ISBN 90-04-04267-9. CS1 maint: Extra text: authors list (link)
• Heinz Schneppen: Niederländische Universitäten und deutsches Geistesleben. Von der Gründung der Universität Leiden bis ins späte 18. Jahrhundert, Münster 1960. Neue Münstersche Beiträge zur Geschichtsforschung Bd. 6

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Leiden University.

• (in English) Official website
• (in Dutch) Official website

Coordinates: 52°09′22″N 4°29′13″E / 52.156071°N 4.486949°E / 52.156071; 4.486949