Forbidden areas on campus: Cora Boele has a story about almost every object from the university’s history

A room that makes you feel like traveling back in time. This is one of the feelings you get when entering the historical cabinet at Erasmus University in the basement of the Theil building. The room, which is closed to the public and barely sees any students, holds hundreds of items that have been kept in shape for decades.

Few people know the university better than her. Cora Boele had been working at the university for more than two decades as a communication advisor and in the university library and retired in 2020 – technically. Still, she is at her old workplace regularly. Since 2009, Boele was in charge of the historical cabinet on campus, a place that holds university-related objects that go all the way back to 1913, and very few people get to see.

Closets full of Nobel laureat Tinbergen’s honorary doctorates and togas, boxes with gifts that the university got over the years form study associations and partner universities, posters of the many anniversaries that the uni celebrated, and dozens and dozens of useless knick-knacks that have the university’s logo slapped onto them. This is only a fraction of what you can see when you first enter the room that is described as the historical cabinet. About twenty square meters are packed with all kinds of items from every decade of the past hundred years. Opening any of the closets can hold surprises. While one might hold a selection of tote bags Erasmus University designed over the years, others hold pictures of the first student exchanges, or unique historic treasures.

Boele puts on protective gloves and unlocks a specific closet. She points at a black-and-white picture hanging on a wall, which shows a previous university building that was located at the Pieter de Hoochweg in the west of Rotterdam, and takes a pen out of a box. Cora explains that the pen has been used two times: once by queen Wilhelmina for the opening of the previous building in 1916, and once by queen Juliana when campus Woudestein was opened in the 70s. The pen is in very good shape and has an important historic value for Erasmus University. Cora laughingly says: “This is only one of my top ten items.”

Every item holds its own story. A bright orange hat is part of the bequest of Professor Tinbergen, the only professor at Erasmus to ever hold a Nobel Prize, and reminds of his honorary doctorate in Madrid. Association merchandise shows for how long associations have been active at Erasmus, trying to get new members. An old Quod Novum, the newspaper predecessor of Erasmus Magazine, gives insights into the current affairs of previous times. Still, new pieces are added to the collection every year, so that in the future, people can equally look back on the events of the current time. Boele, who knows the stories about most of the items but not all of them, is still very interested in the collection, including the upcoming ones: “History is always fascinating! And after all, our history is not that old.”