Before they drifted apart, all the continents were one.
That’s the etymology of Pangaea – the supercontinent that existed before tectonic forces pulled the landmasses into their current scattered positions.
It’s also the name of KU Leuven’s intercultural meeting centre, where we spent this morning watching students drift in and out of a space explicitly designed to reverse that fragmentation.
We’d like to be a home away from home. But really for international students, we’d like to consider this as the living room of every international student.
That’s Lieve De Mey, who runs the centre.
The metaphor works harder than it first appears. KU Leuven has 60,000 students – the biggest university in Flanders – scattered across campuses and faculties that are themselves scattered across the city.
International students arrive from everywhere, drift into courses and residences, and unless something actively pulls them together, they stay apart. Pangaea is the something.
We’re mooching around Pangea on Day 4 of the Wonkhe SUs Rhineland study tour – 35 SU officers and staff from across the UK spending a week in Germany, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. Yesterday we crossed from Luxembourg into Belgium, visiting Liège and then Maastricht in the evening. Today we’re in Leuven before heading to Antwerp.
The mug is the membership
The first thing you notice at Pangaea is the mugs.
They’re everywhere – on tables, in hands, clustered around the coffee machine. Each year there’s a new design, a new colour. This year it’s green. For eight euros, you get the mug and free coffee and tea for the whole year. That’s your membership.
You see these mugs in the library, in the Learning Centre, everywhere on campus. It’s a connector. Students see other students with the same mug and they know – that person goes to Pangaea too.
About 1,600 students buy the mug each year. There’s a spike at the beginning of term, then another spike during exam season when caffeine needs outweigh social anxiety and students finally take the plunge.
It sounds almost too simple to work. But we’ve been on enough of these trips to recognise when something elegant is happening – the mug creates visibility, visibility creates recognition, recognition creates the possibility of connection. And eight euros is low enough that almost anyone can participate.
For students who don’t want to commit, there’s a charity mug – one euro deposit, bring it back and get your euro back. A UK SU wanting to build visible community markers could do worse than start with a mug.
The algorithm of belonging
Behind the mugs sits something more sophisticated. Pangaea runs one of the most structured peer matching programmes we’ve seen anywhere in Europe.
The buddy programme pairs local students with incoming international students – about 3,000 matches a year. This isn’t the casual “we’ll put you in touch with someone” approach. There’s an actual matching algorithm.
Students sign up through an ICT system the university built for them. They fill in gender, mother tongue, other languages, hobbies. Then Pangaea sets the match threshold – currently 80 per cent similarity – and pushes a button.
If you have an 80 per cent match, two people are matched, and then both of them have to say yes. If they don’t say yes within five days, it’s deleted and they’re back in again.
The weighting matters. Gender matching gets 90 per cent priority – if a student says they want to be matched with someone of the same sex, that’s the most important factor. After that, same study programme, because it’s more practical to bump into each other if you’re in the same building. Language – which is what local students often want most, a chance to practise with a native speaker – is deliberately weighted lower.
For us, the incoming student is the priority. The weaker person in the chain should feel comfortable.
If matches get stuck, they lower the threshold to 70 per cent. The last matches are the hardest – not because the people are difficult, but because the pool has thinned.
UK buddy schemes often launch with enthusiasm in September and fade by October. Pangaea runs regular buddy activities throughout the year, employs paid students to coordinate volunteers, and tracks whether matches are actually meeting.
We do our buddy kick-off, we give the names to student unions in each faculty, and then we hope they do something with it. We don’t really know what happens after. That’s honest.
The honesty is refreshing. Most buddy programmes claim success without measuring it. Pangaea knows it can’t track everything – but it builds structures that make connection more likely.
The living campus problem
The conversation keeps circling back to a fundamental problem – students go home at weekends.
On Friday night, you see all these students with their luggage heading for the railway station. And then on Sunday night, you see them all coming back. Except for the international students.
This creates three different universities in one: the weekday university, busy and connected; the weekend university, emptied of Belgian students, where international students suddenly find themselves alone; and the holiday university, where non-EU students who can’t afford to fly home stay on while everyone else disappears.
Pangaea programmes for all three – weekend cycling trips, holiday activities, cultural events in the gaps when the institution assumes everyone has somewhere else to be.
UK SUs with high commuter populations know this problem intimately. Programming deliberately for the times when the loneliest students are most alone would be one response.
The STUVO system
Pangaea sits within KU Leuven’s “Stuvo” – studentenvoorzieningen – the student services function that every Flemish higher education institution is required by law to organise and fund.
The legal basis is the Codex Hoger Onderwijs, Flanders’ higher education code, which codifies the 2012 studentenvoorzieningen decree. It doesn’t just permit student services – it mandates them.
Every university and hogeschool (university of applied science) must establish a STUVO organisation covering six domains: social and financial support, mental health provision, study skills, housing advice, mobility support, and culture and sport.
The decree also requires earmarked public funding calculated per student, a formal governance structure where half the council members are elected students, and annual reporting on how the money is spent across the six domains. Universities can’t quietly redirect STUVO money to other priorities – it’s ring-fenced.
The infrastructure for student welfare exists independently of whether any particular university leadership happens to care about it. It’s not dependent on the enthusiasm of a pro-vice-chancellor or the lobbying skills of a student president. It’s just there.
KU Leuven’s Stuvo team includes 11 paid staff just in the “social cohesion” portfolio – the bit that runs Pangaea and peer support programmes. A UK SU wanting to make a case for dedicated belonging infrastructure might find the Flemish model useful ammunition.
The kringen and the integration gap
Belgium has two language communities with completely different student representation systems – and we visited both yesterday and today.
In Leuven, in Flanders, student life runs through “kringen” – faculty-based student associations that organise social activities and participate in policy-making. There’s an umbrella body called LOKO that coordinates across faculties. The model is cultural as much as political.
The problem is that kringen are very Flemish. They operate in Dutch. Their traditions – and there are a lot of traditions – assume a shared cultural context that international students don’t have.
Some kringen have a lot of international students, like economics and business – no problem. Some study programmes don’t have any international students at all. So the integration challenge varies enormously.
The solution has been to build parallel infrastructure. International student associations recognised through LOKO. A Commission Erasmus. ESN Leuven as part of the Erasmus Student Network. Pangaea as a physical space where international students can find each other regardless of faculty.
The house across the street
Meanwhile in Liège, in French-speaking Belgium, the whole model is different.
The Fédé – formally the Fédération des Étudiants de l’Université de Liège – operates under the “decree participation” that governs student representation in the French-speaking community.
Every institution has to have a student council with seven mandated missions – represent students, defend interests, encourage participation, ensure information flow, inform about rights, train representatives, and designate reps to various commissions.
Sixty elected students sit on the council. Eleven of them form the board of directors. Just two full-time employees – Louis and Marie – do the operational work.
What makes Fédé unusual is its physical independence. When the student council was created 30 years ago, students wanted to be genuinely separate from the university. They found a house across the street and moved in. Tariq, one of the two co-presidents:
The university should legally give us a room within the university. But they don’t. So we have another house, and they don’t participate in the cost.
It sounds like a complaint, but it isn’t entirely. Being legally and physically outside the university has shaped the organisation’s culture.
We are very independent from them, and that’s maybe why we keep our independence every year. It’s in our tradition here to remain a bit proud.
Fédé isn’t alone in the Liège student ecosystem. Alongside it sits La Maison des Étudiants – a separate ASBL established in 1920, making it over a century old.
Where Fédé handles representation and advocacy, La Maison focuses on fostering student life and providing physical spaces. It’s the infrastructure arm – managing venues, supporting activities, creating the conditions for student culture to happen.
The division of labour is deliberate. Representation stays independent, kept separate from the practical business of running spaces and services. Two organisations, complementary missions, both rooted in a tradition of student self-organisation that predates most UK students’ unions.
Unifestival
The circles come together once a year for Unifestival – and “festival” undersells it.
Every first Thursday of October, the Sart Tilman campus transforms into a music and cultural event drawing over 20,000 people. Three stages, more than 25 artists, food trucks, bars, and every student circle represented. Admission is free.
The festival started in 2007 when a group of students, inspired by ULB’s Nocturne event in Brussels, decided to create something similar for Liège. Nearly two decades later, the organising committee remains entirely student-run. They work year-round, unpaid, to make it happen.
It’s a scale of student-led cultural production that most UK campuses don’t attempt. The closest equivalents – summer balls, freshers’ weeks – tend to be ticketed, professionally produced, or both. Unifestival is neither.
The relationship that improved
Three years ago, the relationship between Fédé and the university administration was poor. Emails went unanswered. Now it’s functional, even collaborative.
Before, when we sent them an email, they wouldn’t answer. Now we can have appointments. We can discuss with them.
The university paid for renovations to Fédé’s kitchen – not because they had to, but because the relationship had improved enough to ask.
It’s not a regulated basis. We have to negotiate every time we want money.
That negotiation is exhausting. But it’s also a sign that the university has started to see Fédé as worth negotiating with. The current fight is about space – Fédé wants rooms on all four campuses, places where they can be visible beyond their single house. The university is saturated with demand for space. But they’re talking about it, which is further than they got before.
Across the border
An hour north, in Maastricht, the model shifts again.
The Netherlands runs on “medezeggenschap” – co-determination – where students and staff are represented in elected councils that have formal powers to engage with executive decision-makers. The University Council at Maastricht has 20 members, half students, half staff, with monthly meetings with the Executive Board.
Rather than the SU’s own election being the big thing, this university election is the university’s major “democratic moment”. The most recent University Council student elections ran 19–22 May 2025, with six lists competing for ten student seats.
- NovUM ran on five pillars: internationalism, education (timetabling, electives, teaching quality), well-being (mental health provision, flexibility on attendance), sustainability, and housing.
- DOPE emphasised student well-being, responsible AI integration in education, and improved access to learning materials.
- Lex-Motus foregrounded cheaper food, transparency around learning analytics and Canvas log-data, and more student involvement in major decisions – including the idea of a central student adviser.
- KAN positioned itself around inclusivity and sustainability, plus study spaces and curriculum modernisation.
- Lijst voor Nederland ran on Dutch language policy – more Dutch-taught provision, compulsory Dutch language courses within English-taught programmes – plus changes to assessment practices.
- Voxis was a single-candidate list focused on student-staff connections.
The results: DOPE won five seats, NovUM won four, Lex-Motus won one. KAN and the single-candidate lists won no University Council seats. Across the full set of councils (University Council plus faculty councils), NovUM remained the only list represented in all councils, while KAN dropped out of the University Council entirely.
Cheaper food, learning analytics transparency, AI integration – these are specific, operational demands rather than abstract principles. UK course reps running on platforms this concrete would be unusual.
Four pillars, seven thousand members
But the really distinctive part of Dutch student life isn’t the governance – it’s the ecosystem of study associations.
SCOPE Maastricht is the study association for the School of Business and Economics, claiming over 7,000 members – past and active – which would make it one of the largest student organisations in Europe.
We have four pillars: academic, career, social, and development.
That’s one of the 37 board members taking a study break this year.
The career pillar alone is substantial. Maastricht Business Days is billed as the biggest recruitment event in the city – twice a year, dozens of companies, students matched to workshops and dinners and interviews. SCOPE runs 13 trips a year to cities across Europe, visiting companies in specific sectors: Stuttgart for operations, Frankfurt for banking, Copenhagen for sustainability.
This is student-organised careers infrastructure at genuine scale, and it’s revenue-generating – the company relationships that fund trips also fund everything else SCOPE does. UK course-based societies could learn from it.
Board members get about 350 euros a month from the university as compensation for taking a year out to run the organisation. Not enough to live on, but recognition that full-time volunteering has costs.
The non-traditional association
While SCOPE serves one faculty, KoKo (also known as S.V. KoKo) serves everyone – and has been doing so since 1976.
The name comes from “Koördinatie Kommissie” – it started as a coordination committee for medical students. Fifty years later, it’s the largest non-traditional student association in Maastricht, with around 450 members and its own clubhouse called de Botermijn.
“Non-traditional” means no hazing, everyone who walks through the door treated as equal regardless of year, a deliberate rejection of the hierarchy that characterises some Dutch student life:
We value that everybody, the first time they come through our doors, are equal to each other.
KoKo has eight disputen – internal sub-groups, three for men and five for women, each taking in new members each year. Wednesday nights are dispuut nights: dinner, activity, then drinks with other disputen. Structured socialising where the structure creates belonging.
The association is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year – their tenth lustrum. Beach party in April, the annual carnival event, the regular programme of open parties.
The transgressive behaviour problem
Dutch student associations have faced renewed scrutiny recently. In January 2025, Maastricht University asked all associations to stop activities for prospective members following reports of transgressive behaviour.
In April, the university cut ties entirely with two of the major associations after incidents during introduction activities and failures to report in time.
KoKo and other non-traditional associations weren’t implicated. But they operate under the same code of conduct, with defined requirements around programme disclosure, complaints processes, incident reporting, and escalation.
We have a sober person always. We have bystander training. Our bartenders are really our eyes.
The code includes sanctions up to suspension of the university’s relationship and withdrawal of financial support to board members. After the previous incidents, everyone knows these aren’t theoretical.
The oral exam culture
Back in Belgium, oral exams are normal – especially in later years of study. You draw a question from a pile, prepare briefly, then explain it to the examiner.
I think it’s very useful to see how well you know what you’re speaking of. With ChatGPT, you can write whatever you want without really mastering your topic. Oral exams show whether you can actually engage.
The consensus among students we met was that oral exams are harder but fairer. You can’t hide behind polished prose that someone else might have helped write. You have to actually know your stuff.
UK assessment reform discussions rarely mention oral examination – despite the obvious advantages in an era of generative AI. If the goal is to assess whether students have genuinely learned, making them explain it out loud is a fairly robust solution. Something for academic officers and course reps to raise, perhaps.
Meanwhile Fédé’s current campaign is against tuition fee increases. Fees in French-speaking Belgium are rising from 800 euros to 1,200 euros – a 50 per cent jump.
We are organising information sessions open to students to come and ask questions and to suggest ideas for more actions.
The weaker person in the chain
Three countries in two days. Three completely different systems for student representation and support.
In Flanders, STUVO creates mandated democratic involvement in student welfare, while kringen and voluntary associations handle community and representation. In French-speaking Belgium, the decree participation creates mandated representative councils with defined missions and public funding, complemented by century-old institutions like La Maison des Étudiants. In the Netherlands, co-determination gives students formal seats at decision-making tables, while study associations create parallel ecosystems of careers, community, and belonging.
Each system offers transferable ideas. The mug-as-membership model could be replicated by any UK SU wanting to build visible community markers. The buddy matching algorithm could be built with existing university IT capacity. The STUVO governance requirement – half the council being elected students – could be applied to UK student services. SCOPE’s four-pillar model could transform how course-based societies think about their scope.
Unifestival shows what student-led cultural production can achieve at scale. And the oral exam tradition offers an answer to AI-driven assessment anxiety.
We’re heading to Antwerp now, where the focus shifts to students’ role in the city. Tot ziens from the Belgian-Dutch border.
