In this volume, Masaryk University presents its annual report of its activities in the calendar year 2001. The annual report gives information on the most pertinent aspects, and its scope meets the requirements set by the Schools of Higher Education Act for public schools of higher education.

Masaryk University began publishing its annual reports in 1995, several years before the publishing of annual reports became a mandatory obligation. The public can then judge not only the current situation of MU in 2001, but it can also trace its development trends in the period between 1994 and 2001 thanks to comparable methodologies used in the processing of the relevant data.

The number of students in accredited study programmes makes Masaryk University the second biggest school of higher education in the Czech Republic. An ever-growing number of applicants are seeking an opportunity to get higher education there. Their extent of their interest in attending MU courses can be documented by the fact the number of students that sat for entrance examinations in 2001 was higher than the total number of students attending all MU programmes of study at that time. The university's curriculum is based on a spectrum of disciplines taught at its faculties of Law, Arts, Science, Medicine, Education, Economics and Administration, Informatics and at the School of Social Studies. Based on the decision of Academic Senate of MU of 29 October 2001, the list of MU faculties was extended to include the ninth Faculty of Sports Studies.

In its activities, Masaryk University combines high requirements for original research in all of its disciplines with systematic efforts at creating the conditions for the broadest possible access to higher learning on a level corresponding to the capabilities of students and the demands placed on their qualifications by the employment market in a modern society. For that reason even in the environment that places several financial limitations in the way of a successful development of facilities of schools of higher education in the Czech Republic, Masaryk University has systematically extended its enrolment possibilities, and has also responded to the growing structure of study opportunities, especially in social disciplines. The transformation of the greater part of study programmes into structured Bachelor-Master studies and a systematic development of the content of thus conceived study programmes has made it possible to respond to the requirement for a mass character of higher education without the need for any compromises in the more elitist Master's, and even more so Doctorate, programmes of study.

T

he university as a whole has made a significant progress towards creating a truly open study environment for its students, thanks to which they can gain a genuinely university-like experience during their stay here, rather than experience limited to a single faculty only. These trends were positively mentioned in the evaluation report from the second visit of experts of the Salzburg Seminar in May 2001.

From the economic point of view, 2001 was an exceptionally demanding year for Masaryk University. The impact of financial restrictions was particularly marked in the increase in the numbers of students financed from subsidies of the Ministry of Education for instruction. The university adopted a new model of its budget construction that was to intended to provide the necessary stability in time, to reflect the development of spatial parameters of individual faculties in relation with the planned construction of the Bohunice university campus, and, at the same time, to provide for a stable financial basis in compliance with the prepared feasibility study for that capital investment project, and its subsequent operation. The financial performance of the university was in the black thanks to a combination of systemic measures in the school internal management and a significant contribution from tuition fees collected in new types of life-long education programmes offering the possibility of subsequently transferring the credits gained to accredited study programmes moved. This had not been the case in the years before, and it makes for a sound economic basis for the development of MU in the coming years. Plans for a long-term loan for the construction of the Bohunice university campus offered by the European Investment Bank for that development project of MU were successfully finalized in a close cooperation with EIB.