Masaryk University presents its sixth Annual Report on its activities in the past year, this time 1999. The structure of the Report corresponds to that of previous years, with minor modifications conforming to the requirements of Law No. 111/1998 on Schools of Higher Education.

Research and Development

The Academic Council held five sessions in 1999 and discussed 11 nominations to confer the degree of full professor, proposals to award honorary academic degrees and gold and silver medals, and proposals to accredit doctoral study programmes; furthermore, it discussed five nominations to confer the degree of associate professor, of which two were passed, and bestowed two degrees of Doctor of Mathematics and Physics.

The proportion of professors at MU is ten percent, that of associate professors 25 percent, senior lecturers I (with PhDs) 36 percent, senior lecturers II (without PhDs) 17 percent, and assistant lecturers four percent. The relatively high number of senior lecturers without doctor’s degrees continues to be worrying.

The overall number of doctoral students keeps growing; compared to previous years, their relative share by faculty remains the same as the percentage of full-time students. The ratio of graduates to the overall number of students keeps decreasing slightly and continues to be very unfavourable.

The Faculties began to carry out their research proposals funded by the scheme of institutional financing of research and development. Scientific co-operation with the Academy of Science of the Czech Republic, as well as other research centres, developed further. The total number of grants and the volume of finance have tended to grow, even though a certain saturation is apparent here, indicating reserves rather than limitations within MU’s capacity. The optimal proportion of investment and non-investment funds obtained from grants should be considered as well.

Teaching

A total of 33,037 applicants submitted applications to study at MU in 1999. The number of applications was again several times higher than the university’s capacities. The number of students kept growing at a pace characteristic of the whole of the 1990s, to reach a total of 18,785 at the end of 1999. The number of students per university employee has grown as well.

There are 572 foreign students at MU, which amounts to three percent of all full-time students. The number of foreign students has grown by 57 in the academic year 1999/2000 from the previous year.

To meet the increased demand, MU accredited new fields of study. The range of subjects was thus widened at the Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Arts, School of Social Studies, Faculty of Education, Faculty of Informatics and Faculty of Economics and Administration, while special support was given to interdisciplinary studies.

The Information System began to be used extensively, providing services to teachers and students as well as administration staff.

International Co-operation and Public Relations

The mobility of students in terms of travel abroad continued to increase, especially within the SOCRATES-ERASMUS programme, even though the number of Czech students making trips abroad was still higher than that of foreign students coming to study at MU.

For the first time, Masaryk University started to offer programmes taught in foreign languages to foreign students in the academic year 1999/2000 (three projects). In co-operation with the teachers of the University of Rennes, Czech students were offered a French-Czech educational programme under the title ‘European Public Administration’. The number of contracts with American universities has increased significantly.

The UNESCO Chair for Museology and World Heritage further developed relations with East-European universities.

The main problem in getting foreign students to study both on long-term and short-term programmes at MU is the insufficient scope of teaching (regular programmes as well as short courses) in foreign languages.

In 1999, Masaryk University, along with other Brno schools of higher education, celebrated the 80^th anniversary of its founding. The academic environment in Brno adopted the idea of mutual co-operation amongst the schools of higher learning as well as with the city authorities. This idea then materialized in a long-term integrative project entitled ‘Brno – City of Universities’.

Student Welfare and Publishing Activities

The University managed to better accommodate the demand for beds at its halls of residence: out of the total number of 14,191 full-time students, 30 percent were accommodated at the beginning of school year, which represents 71 percent of the total number of applicants. The quality of accommodation at the halls of residence has improved without there being a rise in the average hall fee. For 1999/2000, new unified criteria for the allocating of places at halls of residence were approved. The main criterion was the temporal distance between the student’s home address (as stated in the registry of the study department) and Brno. The secondary criterion was the student’s social background.

The number of people eating at refectories continues to fall, in spite of the fact that the quality of food seems to have improved. The number of meals served dropped by 13 percent compared to last year; this can be explained by the introduction of a new microchip card system whereby the number of portions is strictly compared to the number of people they are served to, something that is impossible to do in the food voucher system. By this means, a more effective control of the use of food subsidies was achieved.

In 1999, Masaryk University Press published 279 titles of a non-periodical character, which represents a slight decrease compared to previous years; 53.4 percent (149) were teaching texts and 46.6 percent (130) were scholarly publications. Masaryk University Press printed 59 percent (165) of the titles, while external printing houses produced 41 percent (114). Eighty-nine percent of the income of Masaryk University Press came from its main activities while the remaining eleven percent was acquired from secondary economic activities.

The activities of the MU Consultancy Centre focused on providing career-related, legal and psychological counselling services. Psychological counselling was provided to 92 clients, career and study counselling to 760 clients.

Management

On 1^st January, 1999, Masaryk University became a public school of higher learning. The new management of the University was faced with the necessity of solving a number of legislative and property-related legal problems and it had to adopt a new system of funding based on subsidies.

New sources of finance (not coming out of the state budget) were extensively sought; the main agent in this was the newly established Board of Directors of Masaryk University. Relations between the University and the Faculties had to be defined anew.

The main priority in the strategic development of the university continued to be the building of the new Masaryk University Campus in Brno-Bohunice. Extensive negotiations were held with the Municipal Council of the City of Brno as well as the Ministry of Education, both with its relevant departments and on a supra-departmental level.

The management tackled the problem of redistributing financial resources within Masaryk University. In spite of all its efforts and determination, the school suffered an accounting loss of operational funds amounting to CZK 3.8 million. However, if the final sums involved in the year 1999 are compared (total proceeds reached the sum of 1,177 billion, while costs amounted to 1,181 billion), the loss is negligible and was covered by financial resources from the reserve fund.

The loss in the sphere of main activities reached CZK 29 million. This fact attests to the necessity of firmly negotiating with the Ministry of Education about changes in its subsidizing policies. Universities such as MU suffer financial losses in an obsolete system for the normative financing of faculties with a low-cost factor. The founding of two new faculties, whose character cannot be described as duplicating present capacities (the Faculty of Informatics and School of Social Studies), was not taken into consideration. Furthermore, these disciplines are in great demand on the labour market and their graduates represent an export commodity.

A major factor influencing running costs is a growth in depreciation, which has become a part of the subsidies of education and correspondingly lowers the amount of finance available for covering running costs, especially at universities involved in large investment grants and which are developing their infrastructure.

Academic Senate

The Academic Senate of Masaryk University was mainly involved in putting the Law on Schools of Higher Education (No. 111/98) into practice.

‘A Long-term Outlook for Masaryk University to the Year 2005’ was amended and then unanimously approved at the beginning of November.

A session of the extended Rector’s Advisory Board (including the representatives of the Academic Senate of MU), held in Šlapanice, discussed the economic problems of MU in the next year.

MU Archives

Masaryk University Archives kept 26 so-called administrative funds, 97 personal funds of leading scientists and 41 archive funds of associations, academic societies and social organizations whose activities were related to those of Masaryk University. An organic part of the archives are ten historical collections.

Centre for the Further Education

This department offers 159 accredited courses to schools via the university-wide subject catalogue. Last year, 457 seminar days were held, with 5,886 participants.

Based on a contract with the Czech School Inspection Board, the Centre organized a series of courses for the Board’s employees. All of these, meaning 300 inspectors, took part in nine three-day courses.

The Centre continued to co-operate with its foreign partners in the methodology of foreign language teaching, management and in the training of so-called moderators involved in the further education of teachers in the regions.

Department of Foreign Languages

In the seven sections of the Department, teachers and foreign lecturers focus on special features of professional language and the teaching of academic skills in English, German, French, Spanish and Russian.

In 1997, the Department of Foreign Languages was accepted as a member CERCLES, an international organization of language departments; the Centre is the co-ordinator of a forthcoming TESOL Teacher Education programme at Masaryk University and co-operates extensively with the British Council.

Department of Physical Education

The Department provides physical education courses at the faculties via its faculty departments. The Department is the only guarantor of the activities of the University Sports Club ‘University Brno’.

In co-operation with the Sports Club, the Department organized a number of important sports events: the International Academic Championship of the Czech Republic as part of the UNI/FIS European Cup in Alpine Skiing, the Academic Championship of the Czech Republic in Classical Skiing, and academic championships of the Czech Republic in table tennis, golf, karate and sport aerobics.

Institute of Computer Science

The Institute of Computer Science was mainly involved in expanding the external Internet presentation of Masaryk University. It developed and ran MU’s internal economic system and librarian information services.

MU operates the main connection point of the TEN 155 network to the Brno Academic Computer Network (BAPS). In co-operation with VUT Brno (Brno Technical University), it administers 45 kilometres of optical cables that form the basis of the metropolitan spine connecting the institutions of the Brno schools of higher education and the Academy of Sciences. To further improve BAPS, the optical cable network was substantially extended to connect the MU Bohunice campus.

The Institute houses the main servers related to the Supercomputer Centre, especially the SGI Origin 2000 supercomputer, the SGI InfiniteReality2 Onyx2 graphic processor, and the SGI Power Challenge XL supercomputer.

International Institute for Political Studies

The International Institute of Political Science focuses on organizing seminars and conferences, publishing periodicals and professional journals and carrying out research projects on the following topics: ‘Regions in the Czech Republic in Cross-Border Co-operation’, ‘The Czech Republic and Its Neighbours in the Process of Integration (Parts I and II)’, ‘Current Changes in the Czech Constitution’, ‘Minority Politics in Post-communist Countries’ and ‘Central Europe in Transformation’.

The Institute publishes the quarterly ‘Journal of Political Science’ (Politologický časopis) and opened another year of a two-monthly monitoring under the title ‘Politics in the Czech Republic’. It publishes a new multi-language web magazine called ‘Central European Studies in Political Science’. Besides publishing regular periodicals, the Institute started two new series entitled ‘Studies’ and ‘Monographs’.

Institute of Strategic Studies

The Institute of Strategic Studies takes part in a larger project entitled ‘The Central European Forum for Security and Co-operation’ involving, besides Masaryk University, the University of Dresden and Jagellon University Cracow. In the middle of last year, the Institute began to publish the bulletin ‘Analyses and Studies’.

The Institute pays due attention to the acquisition of additional funds and support from sources outside the University.

Masaryk University Information System

The development of the Masaryk University Information System (is.muni.cz) began in December 1998. The first applications for testing were available to a limited number of users in January 1999. Officially, the Information System came into operation on 1^st March, 1999. At the end of 1999, the system was used by almost 12,000 active users.

The Information System project enjoys a high priority at MU; it creates an integrated environment for the electronic administration of the credit system of study and other activities.

In the first phase, fully functional accounts for all employees and students were created and all operations with personal data and entries in the system were integrated within it (350 duplicated entries were removed, as well as the ambiguous birth registration number identification). Importantly, the system can be accessed from the Internet, with encrypted data transfers. About 20 percent of accesses were made from networks outside MU, mass complex operations (course registrations at the large faculties) amounted to 90 percent.

Faculties of Masaryk University

Each of the eight faculties of Masaryk University strove to modernize their teaching and enlarge the range of study programmes they offer, increase the number of students, acquire further financial resources, and last but not least, extend their contacts with foreign universities.

The most dynamic development was noted at the youngest faculty, i.e. the School of Social Studies, which entered the second year of its existence. This trend is likely to continue in the next few years.

The Faculty of Informatics continued its long-term co-operation with foreign universities and laboratories.

With both these faculties, the main problem remains the current policy of acquiring enough finance from the Ministry of Education to cover the growth in the number of university students, which has so far ignored our applications for exemption from its all-too-stringent policies.

The last of the ‘younger’ faculties of Masaryk University, i.e. the Faculty of Economics and Administration, placed an emphasis on the problems involved in training Czech administration workers for the entry of the Czech Republic into the European Union.

The Faculty of Science continues to be the ‘flagship’ of Masaryk University, both concerning the volume of grants received and the scope of research activities.

The Faculty of Medicine can be characterized in a similar way; furthermore, it opened new bachelor’s study programmes and courses.

The Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Education managed to increase student and teacher mobility substantially.

The Faculty of Law examined the possibility of teaching in English successfully, offering a course in international refugee law.