Expansion through Separation. The Linguistic Conflicts at the University of Leuven in the 1960s from a Medical History Perspective

This article rereads a well-known chapter in Belgium’s political history – the linguistic struggles that led to the splitting of the University of Leuven in 1968 – as a chapter in medical history. We argue that the particular circumstances in the medical field, such as the struggle for patients’ rights and the ideological competition over the implementation of new academic hospitals, accelerated ongoing disputes over language. We show that the logic of tying academic expansion to linguistic separation, which later underpinned the splitting of the university as a whole, was put into practice fi... Mehr ...