Middelburg had wanted a university for almost five hundred years. William of Orange briefly considered it as the site of the first Dutch university in 1575 before settling on Leiden, and Zeeland had gone without one ever since. The whole province, geographically isolated by water and bypassed by the rail and industry booms that built Utrecht and Amsterdam, simply did not get the institution it had been promised. Hans Adriaansens, a sociologist who grew up in Middelburg, became fascinated with American liberal arts education during his 1980 to 1981 year as a visiting professor at Smith College in Massachusetts. He brought the idea back to the Netherlands, founded University College Utrecht in 1998 as the first liberal arts college in the country, and then turned to his hometown. The Roosevelt Academy, as it was first called, opened in August 2004 in the former city hall, a Gothic building completed in 1452 that the city had recently vacated for newer offices on the Kanaalweg.

The name was deliberate. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt all traced their American line back to Zeeland through Claes Maartensz van Rosenvelt, who emigrated in the seventeenth century. Naming the new college after the family was both a piece of local pride and a clean signal of what the institution wanted to be: international, residential, intensive, and devoted to the broad civic education the Roosevelts themselves embodied. The academic buildings on the small campus took the family's first names. The new wing of the city hall became Franklin. Adjacent buildings became Theodore and Eleanor. In 2020 a building acquired for the new Engineering Department was named Anne, after Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, granddaughter of Franklin and Eleanor and chair of the Roosevelt Institute. The student common house, Elliott, took the name of Eleanor Roosevelt's father.

The college admits about two hundred students each year from five to six hundred applicants. Roughly half are Dutch and half are international. Average class size is twenty-one. After their first year, students declare a major in one of four departments: Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Science, or, since 2019, Engineering. The Pre-Medical program lets students pursue biomedical and life science coursework that prepares them for Dutch medical master's degrees. The Music Performance program lets them combine an academic major with conservatory-style performance courses. After three years they graduate with an Utrecht University Honors Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science, because UCR is technically an honors college of Utrecht University and Utrecht awards the degrees. Students live in one of four residential halls scattered through Middelburg, each housing between a hundred and two hundred undergraduates.

Academic ceremonies follow a path through the city itself. At convocation each fall and at graduation in spring, a procession of professors and dignitaries in academic dress walks from the medieval city hall to the New Church inside the Middelburg Abbey complex, where the formal events are held. Graduation moves outdoors to the Abbey Square when the weather agrees. Every five years the college celebrates Dies Natalis, the anniversary of its founding. Every year UCR students race dragon boats against students from HZ University of Applied Sciences in an event called King of the Channel, paddling the length of the canal that runs between Middelburg and Vlissingen, the same water Michiel de Ruyter learned to sail on. The student rowing association Odin runs trainings on the same canal. The choir performs at academic ceremonies and at church services through the year. An outdoor classroom called Metamorfose Lokaal, opened in 2017 to mark the 400th anniversary of the birth in Middelburg of the entomologist and painter Jan Goedart, hosts open-air lectures whenever the Zeeland weather cooperates.

In early 2025 the college went through the hardest stretch of its short history. Enrollment had fallen below targets and proposed Dutch government funding cuts projected a future shortfall of roughly two million euros a year. UCR announced cuts of more than twenty-five percent of staff and a curriculum overhaul that eliminated several humanities and social science programs in favor of business and data science clusters. Students struck. Faculty, alumni, and parents protested. The dismissal of anthropology professor John T. Friedman, after twenty-one years at the college, became an international story; Friedman kept teaching in the streets of Middelburg and the videos went viral, drawing tens of millions of views and a global argument about the future of liberal arts. Professor Gerda Andringa was appointed dean in April 2025 to implement the new structure. The college that began as a quiet act of historical bookkeeping is still arguing, very publicly, about what it should be.