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The word ‘holidays’ is nowhere more loaded than in education. Even at university, we are bombarded with questions like “are you on holiday again?” and “when do you start again?”. And to think that we look with envy at our colleagues beyond the Dutch boarders, where at summer breaks often lasts longer than over here.

Three months of ‘ of the Dog days’

There has always been something to do around holidays. In any case, they had to be fixed. In the first two centuries after its foundation, the city council did so, as Utrecht was a city university. Thus, ‘the vroedschap’ - the college of city administrators - determined that besides a summer and winter break, there should also be an Easter and a Whitsun holiday. And there also seems to have been a one-week moving holiday in October in those early years. The summer holiday was also known as the ‘holiday of . It initially lasted from mid-July to mid-August, but appeared to have been extended from 20 June to 21 September as early as 1806.

Whoever thought holidays have always been a pleasure for students, will be disappointed.

Horror winters meant long holidays

The winter holidays were set from 24 December to 1 February, after which the second semester started. Often those winter holidays were extended due to severe cold from the north. A boreal frigore, as it was called in the university-Latin of the time. That cold caused a horrida bruma: a horrible winter holiday. These were understandable decisions, but still the city council admonished professors to shorten summer and winter holidays, especially when summer holidays kept growing.

The holiday as a political intervention

However, extending the holidays could also be a political tool as a few centuries later proved. Fearing more protests would cause him problems with the German occupier, Rector Magnificus Louis van Vuuren announced an early Christmas holiday in 1942. He did so after students set fire to the Student Administration in the Academiegebouw in December 1942.

Holidays were not always a delight

In the first half of the nineteenth century, long holidays became the topic of fierce tirades in public opinion against universities. The prestige of universities had fallen to zero and one scandal after another made the newspapers. According to Professor of Philosophy Cornelis Opzoomer, this was partly due to the substandard professors, partly to the students: “people study badly and live badly”. In addition to that the general feeling was that holidays lasted far too long.

Anyone who thinks holidays were always a delight for students, will be disappointed. In stories in nineteenth-century student almanacs, you come across two views on holidays spent at home. The first is a confirmation of Opzoomer’s complaint: holidays are used to spend a few months really studying and make up for time lost through the year. A useful holiday expenditure, shall we say.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, universities’ long holidays became part of fierce tirades.

The second view is expressed pithily in a piece from 1850: “The devil invented the holiday”. Because during breaks, you had to ‘hang out with the Pipa’ (with Dad, that is) and have serious conversations about your degree programme. A few years later, someone complained in the almanac about the “distinguished visits” he had to make to his parents’ relatives and acquaintances.

Extinct student towns

It was not only students who left the city. Some full professors had country houses, where they spent their holidays. With the advent of railways, they also moved to foreign holiday resorts.

Besides, long summer holidays were also very convenient in the emerging conference culture of the nineteenth century. September was - and is - the conference month par excellence for that reason. As is often still the case today, university towns were deserted in summer, or as a Leiden physician put it, “the circulation has stopped, the heart has stopped beating”.

Student discounts at KLM

It takes a while before students stop going home all the time and start spending their summers independently. Between the two world wars, the international student movement takes off. In 1933, a nationwide Nederlandsch Bureau voor Buitenlandsche Studentenbetrekkingen (NBBS) is formed. Through the NBBS, Dutch students could meet international students who came to spend the summer here. Conversely, the bureau arranged foreign trips for Dutch students, even offering a discount on flying with KLM.

For decades, NBBS has been the organisation that took students abroad. An extensive in Sol, the magazine ‘for the Utrecht university community’ highlighted an infinite number of possible holiday destinations, from sailing and deep-sea fishing around the Balearic Islands to summer courses and work camps across Europe: fruit picking in Finland and lumbering in the Jura.

But all good things come to an end. College courses always start again in September anyway. More about that later. After the holidays...