Summary: | WE have heard about "free" school before. What about a "free" university? Here, the word "free" carries a far deeper intellectual notion than the superficial idea of higher education as a commodity or a traded service with a hefty price tag. A good illustration, perhaps, is the Free University of Brussels or Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Established in the early 1800s, it was "independently" set up by a number of provinces that broke away from the Kingdom of the Netherlands which formed the Belgian state in 1830. Then, they were already three state universities in the country at Ghent, Liege and Leuven, but none in Brussels, though it had been promoted to the rank of capital city.
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