It is now hard to imagine that Circumflex – today a traditional student association with hazing rituals and beer nights – once revolved mainly around poetry readings and film screenings. Its first members, in 1971, came from Maastricht’s art institutions, including the Academy of the Arts, the Conservatoire and the Jan van Eyck Academy. That began to shift in 1974, when the first Medicine students arrived in the city. “We aimed for a broad membership base – a place for everyone, that was the philosophy”, Sjef Tilly, chair of the first board (“a bunch of idealists”), later recalled in Observant. The Association of the Five Art Institutions was renamed Circumflex, “after the diacritic – the ‘little hat’ – that stands for ‘overarching’”. Membership quickly grew to six or seven hundred members. “There was very little for students at the time.”
"A monkey's name"
That all changed with the official founding of the university in 1976. A “Koördinatie Kommissie” (Coordination Committee) was set up, soon shortened to “KoKo”, for active students at the brand-new institution to help decide all sorts of things, from canteen food to party planning. In 1978, it became independent and soon it moved into its own building. The founding board suggested a name change to “Diogenes”, but it never caught on – KoKo had already stuck. “We thought it was awful. It sounded like a monkey’s name”, its first chair, Paul Zwietering, admitted years later in Observant. There was little rivalry at first: “Most people were also members of Circumflex.” Finding a clear identity, however, wasn’t easy. “We absolutely didn’t want to become an elite club”, said Zwietering. “When other faculties were established in Maastricht, we had discussions about it. Law and Economics students are just different from Medicine students.”
Need for traditions
Not everyone agreed. Marcel Herpers, initially a KoKo member – and, notably, a Medicine student himself – felt something was missing. The associations, he argued, were “loose sand”; he felt “a need for continuity, traditions, a place that felt like a second home”. In 1981 he founded Tragos, inspired by traditional student fraternities elsewhere in the Netherlands. Its success didn’t go unnoticed at Circumflex. “By the mid-eighties, their chair was no longer wearing wool socks, but suddenly showing up in a three-piece suit”, Herpers recalled in Observant during the university’s 25th anniversary in 2001. In the same edition of the newspaper, the Circumflex board gave a slightly different explanation for going down a more traditional path: the association had no permanent home in the early 1980s, so “core members felt a need for more cohesion and traditions”.
Astronaut on a plane
Meanwhile, interest in a student sports club was picking up. The rowing club Saurus was founded in 1983, although “nobody really had any rowing experience”, recalled the secretary of the first official board, Hera Lichtenbeld, in 2001. “Most of our boats were second-hand, bought for next to nothing or donated.” To spread the word in Dutch rowing circles, the board drove around the country in a white Lada. The fact that they had “a relatively large number of women members went down well with other clubs, which mostly had male members”. In May 1985, large numbers of visiting rowers came to Maastricht for the opening of Saurus’s own boathouse by astronaut and keen rower Wubbo Ockels, who dropped the keys by parachute from a small plane. It put the club firmly on the map. As its focus broadened to include social life, Saurus went on to become one of the “Big Four” of Maastricht’s student associations.