Dear colleagues, students,
These days it is precisely one hundred years since regular teaching began at our faculty. You may be wondering why this happened only in the autumn of 1921, two years after the founding of the university and the faculty. As we can read, for example, in the publication Calendar of Masaryk University (2019), the delay was due to a lack of teaching space. These were eventually found only in the buildings of the city orphanage on Falkensteiner Street (today's buildings A and B1 on Gorky Street). However, their takeover was not without protests from the orphanage representatives, who "tried to prevent the move through appeals and petitions, which they also addressed to President Masaryk." The situation was also complicated by the Directorate of State Railways, whose "employees were entitled to the harvest from the local pears, and when preparations for the construction of the desperately absent Rector's Office (today's Building C) began in 1922 in the garden of the former orphanage, they opposed it and even threatened legal action, in the name of their claim to the fruit crop. The provincial administration was so taken aback by their move that the cutting down of the pear trees - and thus the construction of the rectorate - had to wait several months for the harvest."
In hindsight, we look back on such stories as the "pear affair" with a smile. However, they testify to us that the beginnings of the new faculty were not at all easy. That makes it all the more necessary to pay tribute to the generations of our predecessors who have contributed to the fact that we can study, teach and professionally research a wide range of disciplines on a modern campus.
So we certainly have much to look forward to, and we would be delighted to have you celebrate with us - especially when we can finally meet in person again, not only in the classroom but also outside of it.
On behalf of the Department of External Relations FA MU and the editors of the faculty newsletter Jana Horáková, Ondřej Krajtl, Petr Sucháček and Tomáš Weissar
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