The story of Brussels University (ULB) is intimately bound up with the history of Belgium. In 1830, when the nine Belgian Provinces gained independence from the Kingdom of the Netherlands, there were already three state universities in the country, in Gent, Liege and Leuven. However, despite the fact that Brussels had been promoted to become the capital of the fledgling kingdom, it did not yet have its own university.

It was for this reason that, in 1831, a group of intellectuals and scientists decided to create a university for the city. They had the option of founding a state or a private university. With its three existing universities, the Belgian Government was not very keen to finance a fourth, but in 1834, the Catholic episcopacy decided to found the Catholic University of Malines and it was this that led to the necessary funds being liberated to develop the project.

The professional people and freemasons who had had the idea of creating a university in Brussels were spurred on to increase their efforts to finalise their project and on 20 November, 1834, the first academic year of the ULB was inaugurated.

The development of the ULB

The ULB had a mere 94 students when it was inaugurated in 1834. Today, it has some 18,000. The number of schools and faculties has also increased in response to the emergence of new disciplines and an ever-increasing number of specialisations. Today the ULB offers courses in all major disciplines, as well as managing several university hospitals and a number of scientific research parks.

In the early 1920s, the University moved from the centre of Brussels to the Commune of Ixelles in the south of Brussels and began building the Solbosch campus. This remains, even today, the main campus, housing most of the university faculties and all of its administrative offices.

During the 1960s, the ULB inaugurated a new campus, La Plaine, just under a kilometre from Solbosch, which houses some of the exact sciences such as the Institute of Pharmacy and the Science Faculty. The Plaine campus is also the location for the Victor Horta Institute of Architecture.

In 1970, the University began building the Erasmus university medical centre in Anderlecht. The Erasmus Hospital has now become the centre of a new campus, bearing its name, where the Faculties of Medicine and Public Health are located, as well as the Institute of Labour.

As a university resolutely open to the world, the ULB is involved in a significant number of international research projects, as well as the development of programmes abroad. Its researchers and teachers have been awarded three Nobel prizes: Jules Bordet (Nobel Prize for Medicine, 1919), Albert Claude (Nobel Prize for Medicine, 1974) and Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 1977). Other prestigious awards recognising research achievements at the ULB have included a number of Francqui Prizes, awarded during the last ten years to Eric Remacle and Paul Magnette, Marc Parmentier, Mathias Dewatripont, Etienne Pays, Gilbert Massart, Jacques Urbain, Mark Wilmet and François Englert, as well as a Fields Medal in recognition of the work of Pierre Deligne.

The ULB is a university of international stature and renowned as one of the most important and prestigious universities teaching in French.

Since 1836 the University libraries have been decentralised in order to respond to the growing demands of an ever-increasing student population. Today, the libraries have over two million books and periodicals disseminated across the various campuses, as well as a large number of specialised libraries within various faculties and departments.

The construction of the new social sciences library in 1994 provided the opportunity to equip all of the libraries with a network and a number of servers that enable teaching staff and students to have rapid and efficient on-line access to the catalogue of work, dozens of databases and more than 3,000 electronic journals across all of the academic disciplines.