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( Université Catholique de Louvain)
The Université catholique de Louvain, sometimes known as UCL, is Belgium's largest French-speaking university, and a successor institution to the oldest university in the Low Countries. It is located in Louvain-la-Neuve and in Brussels. It has full university status. The Catholic University of Leuven, based in Leuven ("Louvain" in French), 30 km east of Brussels, provided lectures in French from 1835, and in Dutch from 1930. In 1968 the Dutch-language section became an independent Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, which remained in Leuven, while the French-speaking university was moved to a greenfield campus, Louvain-la-Neuve, 20 km south-east of Brussels, in a part of the country where French is the official language. This separation also entailed dividing existing library holdings between the two new universities. With the democratization of university education already stretching existing structures, plans to expand the French-speaking part of the university at a campus in Brussels or Wallonia had been quietly discussed from the early 1960s, but it had not been anticipated that the French-speaking section would become an entirely independent university and lose all its buildings and infrastructure in Leuven. The first stone of the new campus at Louvain-la-Neuve was laid in 1971, and the transfer of faculties to the new site was completed in 1979. While the main campus of Université catholique de Louvain is based at Louvain-la-Neuve, there is however a small campus in Brussels, in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, which until recently was called "Louvain-en-Woluwe" (the authorities of the UCL tend to prefer nowadays to refer to it as "UCL-Brussels"). This satellite campus hosts the faculty of medicine of the university.
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