The University of Antwerp is younger than most of its students’ parents. It exists in its present form only since October 2003, when three institutions merged, and it now has 24,827 students and 7,276 staff by its own count of June 2026. Its roots go back to 1852 and its finest building to 1516, and in 2025, for the first time, it opened the academic year with a procession through the streets.

Three institutions and a merger

The story starts with commerce, which in Antwerp is no surprise. In 1852 the Jesuits founded the Sint-Ignatius institute, and in the same period the city gained two commercial schools, a state one, the Rijkshandelshogeschool, and the Jesuits’ Sint-Ignatius Handelshogeschool. In 1902 the Jesuits began teaching at university level as the École supérieure de Commerce. By 1959 the Sint-Ignatius school was offering first degrees in arts, law and political and social sciences as well.

University status came in 1965. The Jesuit school became UFSIA, the Universitaire Faculteiten Sint-Ignatius te Antwerpen. The state school became RUCA, the Rijksuniversitair Centrum Antwerpen, built around the old commercial school, the Koloniale Hogeschool and the institute for translators and interpreters, and housed in the former colonial college buildings near Middelheim Park with the support of the mayor, Lode Craeybeckx. RUCA added medicine and the first years of science. In 1971 a third institution, UIA, was founded to teach master’s and doctoral programmes, and the university hospital UZA was founded around the same time. UIA was the experimental one: it introduced trimesters, a credit system, fewer lectures and more self-study.

For thirty years the three ran as a confederation, first in 1973 and on a legal footing from 1995. They merged in October 2003, under rector Francis Van Loon, who served from 2000 to 2008. Alain Verschoren, a mathematician who had taken his master’s and doctorate at the university, followed until 2016, then the lawyer and historian Herman Van Goethem for two terms until 2024. In 2013 and 2014 the university absorbed programmes from the city’s colleges: product development and architecture into a Faculty of Design Sciences, engineering into a Faculty of Applied Engineering, and translation and interpreting into the Faculty of Arts. The current rector, the fourth of the merged university, is Herwig Leirs, in office since 1 September 2024.

A mayor’s house and a convent

The university is spread over six campuses: three in the city centre, the Stadscampus, Mutsaard and Paardenmarkt, and Drie Eiken in Wilrijk, Middelheim and Groenenborger to the south. The one worth walking to is the Stadscampus on Prinsstraat, and its centrepiece is the Hof van Liere. Aert van Liere, mayor of Antwerp, had it built in 1516 in Brabantine Gothic; the design is attributed to Dominicus de Waghemaeckere. After his death the city let it to a Milanese banking family and then to the English Nation, the guild of English merchants, which left after the Spanish Fury of 1576. The Jesuits, who had opened a school in Antwerp in 1575, turned it into a boarding school. When the pope dissolved their order, it became a military academy and then a military hospital. Its tower, taller than what stands now, came down in 1660.

The Jesuits of the commercial school came back in 1929 and restored a badly damaged building. UFSIA bought it in 1988 and renovated the wings around the courtyard, whose west side, with a gallery of five three-lobed arches, is the oldest part. Since 2007 the Hof van Liere has held the Universiteitsclub restaurant, and since 2009 ten conference rooms, named after Antwerp figures and visitors from Pieter Gillis to Thomas Gresham and Albrecht Dürer. A few streets away, on Lange Sint-Annastraat, the university took over the 1887 convent of the Grauwzusters, the grey sisters who came to Antwerp in the 17th century to nurse plague victims, after the last sister left in 1999. The architects Van Broeck and Meuwissen kept the facade almost unchanged, glazed the courtyard, turned the cellars into a graduation hall and restored the chapel as a concert room.

That is the university at its best. It kept a mayor’s palace of 1516 and a convent of 1887 in the middle of town and filled them with students, and the streets around Prinsstraat, down to the beguinage behind its wall on Rodestraat, are better for it.

The numbers

Of the 24,827 students, 11,272 are on bachelor’s programmes, 6,433 on master’s and 2,563 are doctoral candidates, and 2,258 come on exchange. The staff of 7,276 includes 926 professors and 3,899 researchers. There are nine faculties and 154 programmes, 35 of them taught in English, and the university produces about 4,510 scientific publications and 350 doctorates a year. It has 45 active spin-offs and more than 80,000 alumni, among them Dries Buytaert, who created the Drupal publishing software. With about 25,000 students and 7,000 staff from 134 nationalities, it is the third-largest university in Flanders.

Town and gown

Leirs gave his opening speech of 2025, sixty years after university status, the title “University and Society: United?!”, and built it on the old English pairing of town and gown, the mayor and the rector. “The university is not an ivory tower,” he said. He cited a 2017 study for the Flemish Interuniversity Council that found a return of €12 for every euro the government puts into university teaching and research, and he complained that funding had not kept pace with student numbers, adding that recent cuts had withdrawn the money for its Institute of Development Policy. His request to politicians was direct: “give universities enough oxygen.” The same year the university started a joint bachelor’s degree in Urban Sustainability Studies with partners in the YUFE alliance, whose students study at three universities.

For visitors the practical points are simple. The Stadscampus courtyards sit at Prinsstraat 13, the Hof van Liere rooms and the Grauwzusters chapel are hired out for conferences and concerts, and the University of Antwerp’s own website lists its campuses, events and public lectures.

The Hof van Liere was built for a mayor in 1516. Five centuries on, the rector is still asking the authorities for oxygen.