FACULTY NEWS
FACULTY OF ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY CELEBRATES TH 10 ANNIVERSARY On 30 October 2023, the jubilee year started with an academic ceremony at the Rector’s Office of KU Leuven. There the participants looked back on a fruitful decade and looked ahead to a promising future in which educating engineers will become increasingly important not only technologically but also economically and socially.
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en years ago, KU Leuven gained a new engineering faculty, good for 6,000 students, 600 staff members and six campuses spread across Flanders. In his opening speech, Professor Bert Lauwers, dean of the faculty, called this moment a milestone in the university’s 600-year history. “KU Leuven enriched its impact with one of the most coveted degrees on the labour market and an extensive network at home and abroad. Each of the new campuses brought its own history and culture to the new constellation of a multi-campus faculty. Unity in diversity became the cornerstone of the policy. The faculty joined forces and organised intensive, cross-campus cooperation.” 4
Association The Faculty of Engineering Technology owes its creation to the integration of engineering programmes from six Flemish university colleges into KU Leuven. During the ceremony, Professor Lauwers paid tribute to the three pioneers who played a decisive role. “The mastermind of the operation ‘integration’ was then rector André Oosterlinck,” said the dean. “When European higher education was redrawn in Bologna, he was in the cockpit as a director of the Conference of European Rectors. He came up with the idea of integrating academic college courses into the university. And the structure that had to be set up for this also sprung from his brain: the associations around a
university.” The first director of the KU Leuven Association was Professor Frank Baert. He would later make himself very useful as academic director and rectoral integration advisor. “The leading lady of the integration was Professor Karen Maex, then vice-rector,” the dean continued. “She and with her Frank Baert saw the integration as an opportunity not to merge but to sharpen the profiles of the engineering courses. That was also the reason why KU Leuven did not absorb the newcomers into the existing engineering faculty but gave them the chance to form and build their own faculty.”
