Ivory Tower and Open Windows: 1985-2003

In the early 1990s, the relocation of all faculties to the Heyendaal estate was completed, where a campus emerged in the greenery, which has been in constant development ever since. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics settled near the university. The decline in student numbers was reversed in the 1990s into a gradual increase; the number of professors and other lecturers kept pace. At the same time, bureaucratisation and the support apparatus in the form of secretariats and departments for Communications, Information and Communication Technology, and Teaching and Research Support increased sharply in size. The government-imposed entrenchment and narrowing of university education led to lamentations about the loss of intellectual and academic values. The 'achievements' of democratisation from the 1970s (the system of U-raad, faculty councils and departments) were scrapped in the mid-1990s. In terms of the internationalisation of both education and research, serious steps were taken with new fields of study (such as Germany Studies, European Cultural and Mentality History), the introduction of the Bachelor and Master structure, the set-up of international post-graduate courses, the connection to student exchange programmes and increasing cooperation in (inter)national research schools.