After more than 160 years, the Theological University of Kampen moves to Utrecht. The university therefore opts for a city “with a more vibrant student life”.
From September next year, the first students of the Theological University (TU) in Utrecht will start. The move was not completed until three years later, reports RTV Utrecht. In total there will be about 150 students and thirty employees on the Plompetorengracht in the heart of Utrecht.
The move of the Reformed theology school, where pastors are mainly trained, did not come out of the blue. As early as 1992, TU Delft considered leaving Kampen for the first time. Students find the city on the IJssel less and less attractive. After the art academy, the last university of applied sciences also disappeared from Kampen. “Students of the TU now only meet each other in the nightlife”, said board member Pim Boven in May 2020 at RTV East.
A far-reaching collaboration between the Theological Universities in Kampen and Apeldoorn was previously considered to form a new Reformed Theological University. Even then, Utrecht was considered as a location. But that plan worked in 2017 spoke because the TU in Kampen feared that the churches would then have less to say.
Now TU Kampen is moving on its own. There are also financial motives. For example, the maintenance and renovation of the old building in Kampen costs more money than the rent and possible new construction of a building in Utrecht. The TU also expects a lot from collaboration with other educational institutions in Utrecht.
It is the other way around. In a moving special of the TU, the well-known professor Beatrice de Graaf of Utrecht University sees “a wonderful bridge between the fields of religious studies and philosophy on the one hand offered by Utrecht University and theology on the other hand that TU will bring Kampen back to the city of Voetius.”
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