When Napoleon fell, the great powers stitched the southern Low Countries onto the northern ones and called the result the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. King William I inherited a problem: the southern provinces, the future Belgium, had been starved of higher education under French rule. His solution, in 1817, was to found three universities at once - in Ghent, in Liege, and in Leuven. Ghent opened its doors on 9 October 1817 with sixteen professors and a hundred and ninety students. The four original faculties were Humanities, Law, Medicine, and Science. The language was Latin. The first rector was a man named Jean Charles van Rotterdam, and the university held its inaugural ceremony in the throne room of the Ghent city hall, the Prince of Orange presiding. Thirteen years later Belgium would revolt against William's rule, but the university stayed.

After the Belgian Revolution of 1830, French replaced Latin as the language of instruction. For most of the 19th century, Ghent was a French-language university in a Dutch-speaking city. The friction was constant. In 1903, the Flemish politician Lodewijk De Raet led a successful campaign for Dutch instruction, and the first courses in Dutch began in 1906. During the First World War the issue exploded. Ghent University closed in 1914 because faculty and students refused to teach or learn under German occupation. In 1916, the German governor-general Moritz von Bissing imposed a Dutch-language reopening - the so-called Vlaamsche Hoogeschool, immediately and bitterly nicknamed the Von Bissing University by the Belgians who refused to accept it. After the war it was abolished. French returned. But the question would not stay buried. In 1923, Cabinet Minister Pierre Nolf proposed full Dutch instruction; it took until 1930 to make it law. August Vermeylen became the first rector of the first Dutch-language university in Belgian history. The Boekentoren - the Book Tower designed by Henry van de Velde to hold the library - was built in the same era as a kind of physical answer to the same question.

The alumni list reads like a roll call of how a small country contributed to the 20th century. Leo Baekeland, who invented Bakelite and so opened the plastic age, graduated from Ghent. So did Robert Cailliau, who co-invented the World Wide Web with Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. So did Dries Buytaert, who built Drupal. The Nobel laureates include Maurice Maeterlinck in literature, Corneille Heymans in medicine, and George de Hevesy and Adolf von Baeyer in chemistry. Erwin Schrodinger taught here as a visiting scholar. Marc Van Montagu pioneered plant biotechnology in Ghent labs. Jacques Rogge graduated in medicine and went on to lead the International Olympic Committee. Yaakov Dori, first chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces and later president of the Technion, took his degree at Ghent. So did Helene Mallebrancke, the first female Belgian civil engineer to graduate from the university, who was killed as a Resistance member in 1940. And Sidonie Verhelst, the first woman ever admitted as a student here, enrolled in 1882 in science and pharmacology.

Today UGent is Belgium's second-largest university, with about forty-four thousand students and fifteen thousand staff distributed across eleven faculties and more than a hundred and thirty departments. The library, housed in the Boekentoren on the Blandijnberg, holds nearly three million volumes; among its treasures is Papyrus 30, an early Greek New Testament manuscript. The university operates the Ghent University Hospital, one of the largest in Belgium, and partners with KU Leuven on the Vlerick Business School. There is a Global Campus in Songdo, South Korea, and exchange programs reach every continent except Antarctica. UGent consistently ranks in the world's top hundred universities. In 2025, the current rector is Petra De Sutter - a parliamentarian and former deputy prime minister of Belgium, the first openly transgender minister anywhere in Europe, now leading the institution William I founded two centuries ago.

Ghent's university buildings are not gathered into a single campus - they are scattered across the city, woven into the old fabric. The Aula on the Voldersstraat. The Boekentoren rising from the Blandijnberg. The medical campus around the hospital. The science buildings further out. From the air the city itself is the landmark: the three towers - Saint Nicholas, the Belfry, Saint Bavo - line up along a north-south axis through the medieval core. The Boekentoren is the fourth tower, modernist and concrete, anchoring the university's southern presence and visible from a long way off.