The Vrije Universiteit Brussel is a Flemish university located in Brussels, Belgium. It has two campuses referred to as Etterbeek and Jette. The university is organised into 8 schools (Dutch: faculteiten) that accomplish the three central missions of the university: education, research, and service to the community. The schools cover a broad range of fields of knowledge including the natural sciences, classics, life sciences, social sciences, humanities, and engineering.
The university provides bachelor, master, and doctoral education to about 9,000 undergraduate and 1,000 graduate students. It is also a strongly research-oriented institute, which has led to its top-214 position among universities worldwide.
The Vrije Universiteit Brussel was formed by the splitting in 1970 of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, which was founded in 1834 by the Flemish-Brussels lawyer Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen. He wanted to establish a university independent from state and church, where academic freedom would be prevalent. Accordingly, the university is pluralistic—it is open to all students on the basis of equality regardless of their ideological, political, cultural or social background—and it is managed using democratic structures.
