Dazzling Statistics? On the University Expansion in Flanders and the Need for Research into the History of Education that Transcends Quantifying Sociology

Abstract

The Kortrijk Campus of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where I have concentrated my professional activities since 2004, owes its existence to the university expansion of the 1960s (Casselman, 1984). In 1964 a report was signed by more than a hundred Flemish intellectuals – primarily CVP partisans (the then Christian People’s Party, which was strong in West Flanders) – it was stated that ‘in order to enhance the quality of university education as much as possible and in order to increase the number of university graduates to the full extent that the reserves of the intellectual potential of the nation permit’ a geographic spreading of the ‘university candidatures’ (the university undergraduate structure at the time) was necessary. This would not only reduce the deficit in university recruiting (in West Flemish districts among others) but also the social retardation that accompanied it. Building on the then favourable demographic projections, the same source predicted that the number of Belgian university students – in the 1962–1963 academic year no more than 32,607 (of whom 25,733 were men) – would increase till the end of the decade by almost 50% (Ruimere kansen, 1964, p. 12). However, everyone did not recognize the need for university expansion. In particular, leftist intellectuals, who, of course, did not oppose the democratization of university education, were not in favour of expansion. They felt that it would extend the sphere of influence of the Leuven Catholic University in regions such as West Flanders, which at the time was (and still is) an important recruitment area for the (State) University of Ghent (De Clerck, 1975, 1985). This position was to a large extent shared by the freethinking circles of the Free University of Brussels (Gerlo, 1989, pp. 183–184). In Antwerp, where the Socialist mayor argued for a pluralistic and democratic community university (Craeybeckx, 1962, 1969), the situation was somewhat different. Back in the 1950s there had been strong hopes for the installation of a new state university, partially as a counterweight for the centuries-long presence of the Jesuits in higher education (Lenders, 2002, pp. 182–183).

Die Messung selbst konturiert nur einen neuen Datenraum, der erst aus seinem Bezug auf das zu Bemessende interpretierbar wird (…) Sie ist nicht einfach das verkürzte Experiment oder die Rohform dessen, was dann die induktiven Verfahren der Naturwissenschaften als objektiv zu kodifizieren meinen

(Breidbach, 2005, p. 186)