LUC The hagUe ProfiLe 1

WeLCome from the dean
Dear Students,
2 LUC The hagUe ProfiLe LUC The hagUe ProfiLe 3
July 2012
Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun … or when you’re so busy that you don’t
have time to notice anything other than what you’re doing? It hardly seems possible
that I’m writing this note to introduce the third year of Leiden University
College; I can recall very clearly being asked to write something for the first
student handbook, and I can remember the sudden shock of being asked to write
for the second. On those occasions, I was embroiled in thoughts about what LUC
would become, about its promise and about the potentials of our new students
to make our college into something truly special. And now I find myself looking
back on all the incredible accomplishments of the last couple of years: the
students and staff of LUC have worked astonishingly hard and given so much of
themselves for this adventure. They’ve all been so busy and having so much fun
that I can imagine they’ve hardly noticed the passage of time at all. And yet here
we sit at a moment of completion; our first cohort of students are now entering
their final year and will be looking forward to becoming LUC’s first graduating
class next summer. For them, I’m sure, this realization will come as something
of a shock, as life beyond our little community beckons them out into the world.
Wasn’t it only last week that we cut the ribbons and opened the college at Lange
Voorhout 44?
I’m very proud to be sitting here in the summer of 2012, able to look back at the
growing list of accomplishments at LUC. In the last academic year, staff and
students have built on the successes and remedied some of the omissions of the
previous year: Fortuna has gone from strength to strength, reading groups have
flourished, performing arts have bloomed, new courses and even majors have been
developed, involvement with charities has continued. I’m pleased to see how students
still (and increasingly) strive to take responsibility for their own educations,
holding each other and the college officers to account through the Staff Student
Committee. And it has been wonderful to see so many LUC students jetting off
around the world for semesters abroad in Asia, Australia, elsewhere in Europe,
and in North America. For the first time, LUC ran a number of summer courses
this year, enabling some students to take a field school in Ecuador, others to join
an artistic activism school in New York, and still others to engage in a journalism