The tUL was founded together by both the Universiteit Maastricht and the Limburgs Universitair Centrum, now Hasselt University as a way to co-operate better.
In 1998 a mixed Dutch/Belgian committee proposed the idea of an official transnational university, which got accepted by the Flemish government in 1999.
In 2001 the treaty was signed by the Dutch and Belgian minister of education officially instating the tUL as the first Belgian-Dutch transnational university.
The official number of students starting college in 2001 was at 526, 220 for Biomedical Sciences and 306 for Computer Science/Knowledge Engineering.
Also, there were issues concerning national differences (amongst others on the legal/financial division of responsibilities), and also on the Dutch side the tUL was considered a prestige/vanity project of former Maastricht University board chairman Karl Dittrich.