On voting Sunday, 21st May 2000, a clear majority of the sovereign in the Canton of Lucerne voted to establish an own university. For long, tertiary education had been considerably underdeveloped.

The University of Lucerne officially began teaching on 1st October 2000. Since then, the professors of its four faculties, the Department of Health Sciences and Medicine, the Graduate Academy and the Academy of Continuing Education, have successfully trained several thousand students who would otherwise have received their academic training elsewhere. The Alma Mater Lucernensis developed astonishingly quickly into a permanent feature of the university landscape. In autumn 2020, it was exactly 20 years since the youngest university in Switzerland opened its doors. This is a good time to look back on its equally fascinating and idiosyncratic founding history and to take stock of the past.

The idea to make the University of Lucerne's historical path tangible with 20 listening posts along a route through the city of Lucerne, stemmed from former university president Bruno Staffelbach. Markus Ries and the authors were commissioned to design the concept and write the texts. For culturally interested strollers, we tried to tell informative, and if possible surprising stories about people associated with education rather than a classic institutional history. Many thanks to the authors who each contributed a text with their expertise:  Heidi Bossard-Borner, Hanns Fuchs, Peter Kamber, Manuel Menrath, Boris Previsic and Wolfgang Schatz.

Prof. Dr. Aram Mattioli, 21. Mai 2020