A faculty is more than just a location and its academic achievements. That certainly applies to the School of Business and Economics, which has now changed buildings four times and names about as often. The DNA of the faculty is in its people. Like the professors who once sent students to FEBO for a croquette. Or the students of the 1970s who fanatically distributed Marxist posters in several areas of the faculty. Seventy-five years after its founding, the faculty however stands tall. Because even if the building has had some necessary renovations, the foundation proves to be rock solid.

The founding

"The founding of the faculty was different from what most people think." It is the first thing that both university historian Ab Flipse and emeritus professor of Monetary Economics Hans Visser say when we talk to them about the founding of the faculty. They are referring to the – even by university standards – long run-up to the establishment of the faculty. The first plans for an economics faculty were already in place in 1938 – no less than ten years before it was actually founded. In 1938, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam had the Faculty of Law, Theology, Arts & Philosophy, and Mathematics and Physics. However, in order to meet the government's requirement to be a so-called full university, it was necessary to add a fifth faculty in the short term. After all, VU Amsterdam had been legally recognised since 1905, which meant that it had to meet the requirements of the government. Partly because an economics faculty was simply cheaper than a medical one, but also because there was a realisation that society was increasingly in need of economists, a committee began to make plans for an economics faculty in the late 1930s. The name that is constantly mentioned in the committee's letters and memos as the designated person to lead the faculty is not the later well-known Jelle Zijlstra, Z.W. Sneller or Folkert de Roos, but - probably unknown to many - Jan Ridder. In the late 1930s, Jan Ridder was a promising economist, a prominent financial official at the Department of Finance and related to the ideas of VU Amsterdam. Moreover, he felt that his former employer, the Netherlands School of Economics in Rotterdam (the predecessor of Erasmus University), "lacked any form of direction and foundation". Ridder wanted to take an example from Catholic Tilburg, where economists asked themselves fundamental questions about the application of economic theory and what influence it has on the image of humanity: "There is a fresh wind blowing there and enthusiasm reigning." At VU Amsterdam, that would, of course, need to happen from a Calvinist point of view. All this made Ridder the perfect man to lay the foundation for the brand-new faculty. The Second World War temporarily threw a spanner in the works, but after the liberation in 1945 the plans could be taken out of the drawer again. The committee still saw Jan Ridder as a possible figurehead of the new faculty. Although he turned down an appointment in 1944 to focus on the reconstruction of the Netherlands, a professorship by special appointment seemed to be an option. A fatal plane crash in 1946 at Schiphol Airport in which Ridder lost his life, meant however that new thought had to be given to who could shape the Faculty of Economics. That turned out to be far from simple. The economics faculty may have wanted to take a radically different course than, for example, Rotterdam, but the prominent candidates of the time, even if they were Reformed themselves, did not necessarily seem to agree with the 'dual profile' that was sought: "professionally seen as an expert; in terms of worldview, a strict adherence to the Reformed faith was closely observed." The start of the faculty

In the end, the choice fell on the still very young and inexperienced 29-year-old Jelle Zijlstra as one of the first professors to be appointed. Together with Professor Z.W. Sneller and F.L. van Muiswinkel – both also brought from Rotterdam – it was up to them to set up the new faculty. And in 1948 the time had finally come: no less than 10 years after the first plans, the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences was officially launched.

The run-up had had its obstacles, but even once the faculty was established, there was friction between Zijlstra, Sneller, Van Muiswinkel, Folkert de Roos, who was recruited in 1949, and the board of VU Amsterdam at the time. Because while Ridder could fully identify with the Calvinist ideal of science, the newly appointed professors thought that was nonsense, to put it bluntly. After all, economists use the same concepts, the same calculation methods, the same methodology in every school, according to the professors. In the faculty magazine Economic Bulletin, Professor J.G. Knol summed it up succinctly on the occasion of the faculty's 40th anniversary: "According to the governing bodies, the faculty also had to make a valuable contribution to the architectural criticism of society and the power dynamics within it.'" On the other hand, there were the professors at the time whose views Professor Knol echoed as follows: "Theoretical economics is value-free and must remain so." The tug-of-war would continue in the years that followed, and both sides would likely say that a compromise was never quite reached.

Moving into the Koningslaan

Of course, a new faculty needed a new building. At the end of the 1940s, VU Amsterdam was spread across the canal belt and Amsterdam-Zuid, and a suitable accommodation was sought. Until then, the brand-new faculty was temporarily housed in the chemistry laboratory at De Lairessestraat 174. "The story goes that all economics students went home at the end of the day with clothes full of chemical smells, so that when Professor Zijlstra came home after a long day at work and the train journey back to Rotterdam, his wife sniffed and remarked that he smelled," says university historian Ab Flipse.

Fortunately, she didn't have to breathe in the chemical fumes for long. In 1949 the time had come: after a renovation of a double villa on the corner of Koningslaan and Emmalaan, the new economics faculty got its own building: Koningslaan 31-33. The just under one hundred students (one of whom was a woman) moved into the building – some literally as accommodation. The caretaker of the building, G. Bouma, got his own little place there and it was even used as a pied à terre by Professor Sneller. The caretaker Bouma was also a kind of confidant for both students and teachers, according to Flipse: "Because he lived there, he naturally took care of all kinds of things. Students who grumbled about lecturers, lecturers who in turn checked with him to find out what those students thought of them." In other words, a kind of informal precursor to the current evaluations.

Remarkably, even then, VU Amsterdam was an attraction for students who were the first in their family to go to university. Emeritus Professor Hans Visser, who has been associated with VU Amsterdam for almost fifty years now, was one such student. He remembers his open day in the early 1960s well. "I didn’t look anywhere else," he says. "I just knew, this is where I wanted to be."