The purpose of this paper is to elucidate how academic geography was established in Dutch universities and how it developed since 1877. The Royal Dutch Geographical Society, founded in 1873 in Amsterdam, played an important role in establishing chairs in geography at universities, mainly for training high school geography teachers. In 1877, Cornelius Kan was appointed the first professor of human geography and physical geography at the Communal University of Amsterdam. The separation of physical and human geography at Dutch universities had been a specific feature of Dutch academic geography since he retired in 1907. In 1908, the Dutch government set up a geography department at Utrecht University. Since then until the early 1970s, Dutch academic human geography consisted of the Amsterdam school of sociography and the Utrecht school of human geography. Dutch geographers refer to Human Geography as Sociale Geografie as a result of a compromise between the two schools of human geography in Amsterdam and Utrecht. The dispute between the Amsterdam school and the Utrecht school was resolved until a new generation of geographers took over during the early 1970s. However, they have responded to the restructuring of the university research system by adopting a new research funding method and research evaluation following budget cuts since the 1980s. Subsequently, the landscape of geographical research changed from individual projects to large collaborative programs under pressure to increase output and capture research funds. The human geography departments of Utrecht, Amsterdam, Groningen, and Radboud also cooperated in many ways, for instance, in a new geographical publication, Nederlandse Geografische Studies (NGS), and in the foundation of national graduate research schools, NETHUR and CERES. The national graduate schools have led to a tendency towards more mainstream geographical research. A large majority of Dutch geographical research on the Netherlands has been urban oriented since the early 1960s. Randstad Holland, as the Dutch metropolis, is the main field for studying the built environment, geography of economic actors, and socio-cultural spatial behavior of inhabitants. These research areas have formed the mainstream of Dutch human geography and the approach to applied research. The research evaluation committee of NETHUR concluded that research programs, both urban geography at the University of Amsterdam and economic evolutionary geography at the University of Utrecht, are in strong internationally competitive positions. Both political geography at the University of Amsterdam and cartography/GIS at the University of Utrecht and ITC are other major players. Recent trends against the mainstream are due to the appointment of a foreign geographer as chair and senior researcher at a Dutch university.