Established before the state of Belgium itself, the university was founded by the Dutch King William I in 1817, when the region was incorporated into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands after the fall of First French Empire.

In 1991, it was granted major autonomy and changed its name accordingly from State University of Ghent (Dutch: Rijksuniversiteit Gent, abbreviated as RUG) to its current designation.

The foundation of universities in Ghent, Liege, and Leuven that year – by the Dutch King William I – was part of a larger policy to stimulate academic lag across the southern provinces of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (which would later become Belgium).

[citation needed] The original four faculties comprised Humanities (Letters), Law, Medicine, and Science, with the language of instruction being Latin.

Friedrich August Kekulé unraveled the structure of benzene at Ghent and Adolf von Baeyer (Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer), a student of August Kekulé, made contributions to organic chemistry.

[3] In 1903, the Flemish politician Lodewijk De Raet led a successful campaign to begin instruction in Dutch, and the first courses were begun in 1906.

Moritz von Bissing, the German Governor-General of occupied Belgium sought to make the territory easier to govern by exploiting the pre-war linguistic division.

The occupying German administration set up the first Dutch-speaking university in Belgium in Ghent under the name Vlaamsche Hoogeschool (Flemish Institute of Higher Learning).

In the postwar period, Ghent University became a much larger institution, following the government policy of democratizing higher education in Flanders during the 1950s and 1960s.

In the 1960s, there were several student demonstrations at Ghent University, notably around the Blandijn site, which houses the Faculty of Arts & Philosophy.

Ghent University had a program founded by Andre Vlerick in 1953, then called Centre for Productivity Studies and Research.

Inside Belgium, Ghent University supports the Belgian Co-ordinated Collections of Micro-organisms and the Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie.