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Dear students and colleagues,
it is the natural cycle of the academic year that in September, nearly two thousand five hundred new freshmen regularly join our ranks. This year, however, is different in that among them are forty students from Ukraine who have fled the war in their country. They went through rigorous, intensive Czech language courses over the summer, fulfilled other requirements, and are now beginning their first semester of full-time study at our faculty. I would like to welcome them and wish our faculty would become their alma mater, just like the rest of us.
However, an unintended natural phenomenon in our faculty life is, unfortunately, the presence of a "crisis." After the pandemic, whose consequences we are still dealing with, came the geopolitical crisis of spring, which fortunately affected the daily life of the faculty minimally. However, it bound the strength and necessary energy of some of the faculty leadership and dean's offices. Now comes the energy crisis. Although no one can yet say what the arrival of winter will bring, no options for limiting the course of the fall semester are on the table at this time. And if it comes to that, we believe that the most we will see will be a restriction in the form of a free week at the end of the teaching part of the semester to devote to what everyone on the faculty needs - quiet reading.
However, the support of students affected by the war, coupled with other circumstances beyond our control as faculty, has led to considerable expenditure from the scholarship fund. This forces us to develop a savings plan for scholarship spending in 2023. The savings will include but are not limited to, merit scholarships. Their amount for the fall semester 2022 (i.e., paid in spring 2023) will be determined according to the current status of the scholarship fund. Still, it is already certain that the full amount of merit scholarships cannot be counted on. At the same time, we intend to use the saved funds to cover scholarships to avert the financial hardship of our students, whose number we expect to grow.
Thank you for your understanding, and I am confident that together we will get through these difficult times.
Josef Šaur
Vice-dean for Bachelors' and Masters' studies, Faculty of Arts MU
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