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Masaryk University is a Czech higher education institution based in Brno, which bears the name of Tomáš Masaryk. It was established in January 1919, shortly after the creation of independent Czechoslovakia.[1]
Foundation
The founding of the university was preceded by decades of efforts by Czech society to obtain a second centre of national education and culture. At the beginning stood Tomáš Masaryk, who from the 1880s stressed that the only Czech university of the time needed competition within the national framework. Pushing through a second Czech university became for many years one of the priorities of his political activity. For decades this demand was voiced both in the parliament in Vienna and in the Moravian Diet in Brno.[1]
In Moravia the movement followed a campaign that sought the restoration of the old Moravian university, abolished in the middle of the 19th century. Its seat was to be the provincial capital Brno, but it was the question of location that thwarted all attempts up to 1918. Brno was bilingual, and the Germans there, who dominated the city politically, feared a weakening of their positions. The disputes ended in street clashes during the so-called Volkstag at the beginning of October 1905.[1]
The Czech university in Brno was created by the law of 28 January 1919 with four faculties: law, medicine, science and arts. From the beginning it bore Masaryk's name. Its first rector, in 1919–1920, was Karel Engliš.[1]
Interwar period
The professorial bodies consisted mostly of younger scholars who had been trained at the university in Prague and partly at the Czech technical university in Brno. According to the university's archive, a high level was soon reached in a number of fields. The faculty of law proved especially successful; there the internationally known Brno school of law arose, based on the normative theory of law. František Weyr contributed most to its development in the first generation. Karel Engliš, who elaborated his teleological theory of national economy, also worked at the faculty.[1]
Later development
According to the university's website, the structure and facilities of the school changed in the following decades:[2]
In 1952 a faculty of pharmacy was established at the university; in 1960 it was moved to Bratislava, and on 1 July 2020 it was restored at Masaryk University. In 2004 construction began on the university campus in Bohunice, where pavilions are to be built that will house a large part of the faculties of medicine and science, the entire faculty of sports studies and the research institute CEITEC. In the same year the Jesuit college in Telč became university property and was turned into the Univerzitní centrum Telč; students had first studied there in 2002.[2]
In 2006 the university opened the Gregor Mendel scientific station on James Ross Island near the Antarctic Peninsula, which serves, for example, to study climate change. Since 2007 it has managed the Mendel Museum, since 2013 the Scala cinema has been part of it, and in 2014 the Central European Institute of Technology CEITEC was opened. Since 2005, extensive reconstructions have been under way with the help of European funds and the state budget, for example of the science faculty complex on Kotlářská, the building of the faculty of social studies on Joštova, or the arts faculty complex on Arne Nováka Street.[2]
In 2019 the university celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding and introduced a new visual style. In 2022 it marked 200 years since the birth of Gregor Mendel, among other things with a presentation at the world exhibition in Dubai (EXPO 2020) and the international Mendel Genetics Conference, attended by almost 400 experts.[2]