The entire shield is surmounted by the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire because Nijmegen was once home to Frankish King Charlemagne.

Underneath the coat of arms one finds the university's motto "In Dei Nomine Feliciter",[7] meaning "happily in the name of God".

It was founded by the Saint Radboud Foundation, a network of bishops that wished to emancipate Catholic intellectuals in the Netherlands.

Carolus Magnus [nl], named after the Frankish king, Charlemagne, who used to reside in Nijmegen in the Middle Ages.

To the horror of the Catholic University's management, Carolus Magnus also pursued the same liberal elitist character as these other corporations.

Many prominent members were lost, among them the anti-Nazi professors Robert Regout and Titus Brandsma who were deported to Dachau concentration camp and died there.

The university's rector magnificus at that time, Bernard Hermesdorf, decided to show solidarity with students like Jozef van Hövell.

As the only Dutch rector in the Netherlands he refused, for "reasons of principle", to distribute pre-printed loyalty statements to his students.

On 5 May 1943, the Germans demanded all Nijmegen's non-signatories of the loyalty statement to report to Ommen within 24 hours to be put to work in Germany.

These circumstances left rector magnificus Bernard Hermesdorf with no choice but to close the doors of the university as of 11 April 1943, pending better times.

The great spider in the web during that time was university moderator Bernard van Ogtrop, who traveled all over the country to visit students from Nijmegen in hiding.

He wrote circulars, took care of a wide-ranging correspondence, and ran a parcel service and thus managed to keep many people's spirits up.

When the war ended in 1945, the university infrastructure had been largely destroyed, but students still returned to their alma mater in dribs and drabs.

Classes officially resumed again in March 1946, but because many university buildings had been bombed during the war, a dire need for new facilities existed.

With the purchase of the Heyendaal estate, the university got its own campus in a green setting less than a fifteen-minute bike ride from the Nijmegen city center.

Umbrella organization Carolus Magnus became increasingly bloated and lost connection with the members of sociëteiten and disputen that began to operate more independently.

The repeated nomination of non-Catholics and non-practicing Catholics to the executive council, which the bishops' conference would not approve, exacerbated tensions.

The campus is located in the southern Heyendaal estate of Nijmegen and houses 7 faculties that conduct teaching and research.

In addition to these faculties, the campus also hosts the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, a world class research centre devoted to the understanding of human language and communication.

At the south end of the campus next to the Radboud Sports Centre (RSC), one finds the Erasmus Tower which houses the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Theology and Religion.

The Erasmus Tower and the RSC border the Elinor Ostrom building, which is home to the School of Management and also encompasses the political sciences and economics faculty staff.

On the other side of the Erasmus Tower, a number of general lecture halls is located along with the campus pub and bookshop.

In the most southern part of the campus, the monumental Jesuit Berchmanianum monastery can be found which houses the university's general services staff and will serve as its auditorium.

[10] There are nine bachelor's programs taught fully in English: American Studies, Artificial Intelligence, Biology, Chemistry, Computing Science, International Economics & Business, International Business Administration, English Language and Culture, Philosophy, Politics and Society and Molecular Life Sciences.

Faculty members Anne Cutler (1999), Henk Barendregt (2002), Peter Hagoort (2005), Theo Rasing (2008), Heino Falcke (2011), Mike Jetten (2012), Ieke Moerdijk (2012), Mikhail Katsnelson (2013), Wilhelm Huck (2016) and Klaas Landsman (2022) won the Spinoza Prize.