Brabant (Province)

In Tilburg’s very first anniversary address (1929), entitled “Poor Brabant,” its then Rector Magnificus Goossens went into the province’s deplorable history. Or, as historian Bornewasser put it in his historiography, “its closing line, ‘the lessons from the past preserve their value for the present,’ was typical of Goossens, who was a militant administrator and, having to make ends meet, was critical of The Hague.” By contemporary standards, Goossens’s historical representation was a one-sided version, but he defended “our Brabant people” with great relish. Goossens was a historian and was referring to the disadvantaged position that had plagued the province for centuries, also in the field of education.

A catholic university

When, in the early 20th century, Holland had seven institutions for higher education, the three southern provinces together had none. The province of North-Brabant, therefore, had been very keen to have such an institution within its provincial borders and funded the new Business School to the amount of 15,000 guilders a year right up to the Second World War. This made the province the second-biggest funder, after the Tilburg local council. The Brabant Chambers of Commerce also did their bit, feeling that the training of senior business management was to be done nowhere else but in “their own” Catholic south. Though provincial funding came to an end after the War, when the national government took over, relations between the University and the province remained strong in several respects. Right up to the present day, most students are from the Brabant region, with Limburg and Zeeland being the runners-up. At other universities too, the student intake remains mainly regional. And even in these times of internationalization, the influx of EU (mainly German) students tends to concentrate in the border-region universities.

KUB

In 1986, the name of the then Catholic College of Tilburg changed into the Catholic University of Brabant (KUB). This not only served to bypass a nasty abbreviation matter but also highlighted the University’s long-standing relations with the province. A year after that, the province’s name became a prominent battle cry in University protests against impending cutbacks, as in: “Brabant is fighting for its University.” Another name change in 2002 ‒ into Tilburg University ‒ caused the provincial reference to be dropped. While the province is inclined to insist that it has no formal part to play in higher education matters, it has entered into several alliances. The Economic-Technological Institute of North-Brabant (ETIN), for example, was linked to the University for a long time, and since 1999 the province has participated in the University-allied Telos Center, which aims to monitor and evaluate sustainable development in the province of Brabant following the Brabant 2050 Manifesto. In the field of healthcare, the province is involved in initiatives such as the Brabant Medical School and Tranzo. In the context of the Brabant Heritage Academy, the province endows two chairs: Culture in Brabant (Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld) and Diversity in Language and Culture (Jos Swanenberg). The three-volume historiography entitled The History of North-Brabant appeared in 1997 edited by Professor Harry van den Eerenbeemt.

Jheronimus Bosch

The province has made an exceptionally large contribution to the Jheronymus Academy of Data Science (JADS) in Den Bosch, allocating 20 million euros to its establishment together with the Den Bosch local council. The JADS is where the Universities of Eindhoven and Tilburg work so closely together that it is commonly considered to be the forerunner of a single Brabant university. This is a wish that has been expressed more often at the provincial government headquarters, as when the Brabant medical faculty floundered.