In a chapel on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal in Amsterdam, in the first week of January 1632, two scholars did something that would change the intellectual life of the Netherlands. Gerardus Vossius, a renowned scholar from Leiden, Universiteit Van Amsterdam diploma, Replica a Universiteit Van Amsterdam degree online. delivered his inaugural lecture “On the usefulness of history.” The next day, his colleague Caspar Barlaeus delivered his famous oration on the “wise merchant,” Mercator Sapiens.
The city council had offered Vossius an annual salary of 2,600 guilders—making him the best-paid professor in the Dutch Republic—to secure his services. For the next two years, the chapel, which had once been part of a convent, was often full. Students and visitors came from far and wide to hear them.
What began with two scholars and a handful of students in a converted chapel has become one of the largest research universities in Europe—and an institution that has managed to be both deeply local and genuinely global for nearly four centuries.
The Athenaeum Illustre was never a typical university. How long to buy Universiteit Van Amsterdam certificate? It was established by the city of Amsterdam, not by the church or the crown, and it was funded by the same mercantile elite that built the Dutch Golden Age.
Barlaeus’s inaugural lecture was an ode to the city government, which had the wisdom to bring together successful tradesmanship and philosophy in a single institution. That bond between the university and the city would remain strong for centuries.
The institution remained small for most of its first two centuries—at its largest, no more than 250 students and eight teachers. #Universiteit Van Amsterdam diploma, #Universiteit Van Amsterdam certificate. It was officially recognised as an institution of higher education in 1815, but it was not until the Higher Education Act of 1876 that the municipality was allowed to promote it to the status of a university. In 1877, the Athenaeum Illustre became the Gemeentelijke Universiteit van Amsterdam—the Municipal University—and received the right to confer doctoral degrees.
It was the city council that appointed professors, and the mayor presided over the university administration. Because the Amsterdam city council was noted for its progressive politics, this arrangement guaranteed a large degree of intellectual freedom.
The university remained municipal until 1961, when the national government took over financial responsibility, and it finally became the Universiteit van Amsterdam.
