Professor Łucjan Krause, a long-term head of the Department of Physics of the University of Windsor died on July 4, 2022 in Windsor, Ontario in Canada. He was an outstanding Polish-Canadian physicist, who made important contributions to the atomic, molecular and optical physics. Born in Poznań on January 8, 1928, as a scout and Home Army soldier (nickname “Leonidas”), he took part in the Warsaw Uprising and after its failure was sent to a POW camp in Bergen-Belsen, in Germany. In 1951 after graduating from King’s College University of London, he emigrated to Canada, where he began his studies of physics at the University of Toronto. In 1955 he obtained in Toronto the PhD degree in physics under the supervision of Professor Harry Welsh in Raman spectroscopy of gases. Then for three years he worked as an associate professor of physics at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s. In 1958 he accepted an invitation from the University of Windsor and became a head of its Department of Physics. In Windsor, Krause created a vibrant scientific centre in which he developed research program in experimental studies of inelastic atomic collisions. The main attention was focused on the excitation energy transfer between colliding atoms, the quenching of fluorescence radiation by molecular gases and, more recently, on laser spectroscopy of metal excimers. In 1963 he initiated the cooperation with Professor Aleksander Jabłoński, head of the Chair of Experimental Physics of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Thanks to this cooperation numerous physicists, first from Toruń and later from other Polish scientific centers – as postdoctoral fellows – participated in experiments with the use of advanced laser equipment, not available in Poland at that time. In this way, Łucjan Krause contributed significantly to the development of physics in Poland. In order to pay tribute to his effort and devotion, in 1983 the Senate of Nicolaus Copernicus University awarded Professor Łucjan Krause a doctor honoris causa degree.

The aim of the article is depiction of the scientific cooperation between historians from Szczecin and Greifswald which is continuously developed in the beginning of the 21st century. The cooperation based primary on the DAAD guest professorship of Prof. Joerg Hackemann at the Institute for History and International Relationships at the University of Szczecin, lectures held by Prof. Lutz Oberdörfer from Greifswald, workshops at the EMAU lead by Dr. Paweł Migdalski, various research projects presented there by Dr. Rafał Simiński and Dr. Tomasz Ślepowroński. To mention be in this context the activity of Prof. Włodzimierz Stępiński and Prof. Jan M. Piskorski in the German scientific life and their participation at many debates and historical conferences. The rich contacts between the historians from both Pomeranian universities are referred to in a new and original form of a Szczecin–Gryfino postgraduate programme, started in the 21st century by the Institute for History and International Relationships at the University of Szczecin and Historisches Institut Ernst Moritz Arndt Universität Greifswald. Within this undertaking two meetings of postgraduates took place where their scientific output was presented: on the 3rd/4th November 2010 in Szczecin and on the 26th/28th Mai 2011 in Greifswald. This initiative is for young researchers of importance – it allows their development outside of the only one, native research milieu. Unfortunately, the project of postgraduates from Szczecin and Greifswald is one of only few initiatives within the Polish-German historical neighbourhood.

The consciousness of a crisis of university inclines towards its reformation. In the thinking about its revival it is necessary to take into account the archetypical idea behind university, traditions to date, contemporary conditions and visions of the future. It is also getting indispensable to take into consideration such values that ought to steer the development of university in the framework of global civilization. The tasks of university are as follows: 1) to conduct research in striving for truth in the conditions of autonomy and freedom, as well as responsibility for the present day and the future of man; 2) to educate students, which introduces them in the world of science and life, as well as teaches them to be responsible; 3) to practice public science which is present in debates undertaking to solve vital social problems. The academic community and its elites should defend the conception of university against the dictate of their political and economic counterparts who attempt to impose the idea of an entrepreneurial university which produces a utilitarian knowledge and “human principles”.

The Bill defines a requirement which are base of the academic teacher periodic evaluation. The question about criteria, conditions, and instrumentality in the evaluation process should be asked. The investigation was conducted based on 32 evaluation sheets used in 22 Polish universities. As a result the characteristics of the sheets and their construction were displayed. The occupied position or the scientific degree of employee determines the disproportion in the scope of assessment conditions. Another results show main domain which are considered during evaluation of teacher activity. A scientific category of university turned out significant for the scope of an attention paid to these domains. The evaluation sheets were arranged in a typology on the base of their characteristics.

Changes of university should not be a result of administrators’ and university managers’ decisions (as a top-down approach), but of initiatives caused by academic community. These engaged initiatives may take a different forms – associations, foundations, membership in academic committees, as well as different kinds of new social movements. An example of such a social movement are Obywatele Nauki (the Citizens of Science). Its members are young (usually post-docs), as well as more experienced scholars, who – despite the fact of achieving scientific and academic success – are working for the common good and the good of the university seen as an important social institution. Thus the Citizens of Science propose and encourage other scholars to seek constructive and parallel solutions, that, on the one hand, will respect the cultural, social, economic roots building the identity of the university, and, on the other hand, that will have will to use the vitality of young academic. There are three main possibilities of interpretation of the activity of the movement. First of all, these are the modern conceptions of social movements (Gorlach, Mooney 2008; Krzeminski 2013; Sztompka 2010; Żuk 2001; Touraine 2010, 2011, 2013), analyzing measures in the dimension of macro, meso and microstructure. Another important interpretation path is a reference to the history of Social Solidarity Movement (Touraine 2010, 2011, 2013; Ost 2007; Staniszkis 2010; Koczanowicz 2009). The third possibility of interpretive is theory of performative democracy (Matynia 2008; Austin 1993; Searl 1980, 1987), which is a particular dimension of public life, what creates an alternative to the undemocratic, unjust practices of power.

The text analyses the documentation of the periodic evaluation of academic teachers at 22 Polish universities with the faculties of Pedagogy, shows the conditions of this evaluation and characterises its procedure. The content analysis reveals what issues in the internal regulatory documents establish the periodic evaluation of academic teachers and its procedure, as well as the extent to which they are represented in these documents. In order to fully describe the regulations and to explore the differences among the universities in the area of teacher evaluation, the authors used a statistical analysis. The results show a wide variation of the elements that are included in the internal documents regulating the periodic evaluation of academic teachers. The authors refer to the contemporary press and media discussion on the condition of universities and the directions of their development. They interpret the findings referring also to the contemporary perception of a university as an enterprise as well as to strong bureaucracy at the universities and its adverse impact on their evaluation system.

The article discusses the problem of counteracting academic promotion won on the basis of apparent achievements. Attention was drawn to the growing problem of so-called “Slovak habilitation and degrees”, to the pedagogical promotion of persons from outside of pedagogy that is not justified by achievements of good quality, but is based on popular science publications, to the phenomenon of softening and ignoring negative reviews and the reviewers’ tendency to mitigate the final conclusions of their opinions. Some ways to prevent promotional pathology are also recommended as worth using in academic practices.

In building speech recognition based applications, robustness to different noisy background condition is an important challenge. In this paper bimodal approach is proposed to improve the robustness of Hindi speech recognition system. Also an importance of different types of visual features is studied for audio visual automatic speech recognition (AVASR) system under diverse noisy audio conditions. Four sets of visual feature based on Two-Dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform feature (2D-DCT), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Two-Dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transform followed by DCT (2D-DWT- DCT) and Two-Dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transform followed by PCA (2D-DWT-PCA) are reported. The audio features are extracted using Mel Frequency Cepstral coefficients (MFCC) followed by static and dynamic feature. Overall, 48 features, i.e. 39 audio features and 9 visual features are used for measuring the performance of the AVASR system. Also, the performance of the AVASR using noisy speech signal generated by using NOISEX database is evaluated for different Signal to Noise ratio (SNR: 30 dB to −10 dB) using Aligarh Muslim University Audio Visual (AMUAV) Hindi corpus. AMUAV corpus is Hindi continuous speech high quality audio visual databases of Hindi sentences spoken by different subjects.

The University Reform of 1918 was a renewal movement for universities, aimed at their democratization and modernization, initiated by student activities at the National University of Cordoba. Student movements took on a continental dimension and led to many changes in Latin American universities, especially in the field of autonomy and representation of students in university bodies. The introduction of university autonomy has had a profound impact not only on the functioning of the higher education system in Latin America, but also on other areas of social and political life in the region in the following decades. The article presents the Cordoba University Reform from a historical perspective and attempts to evaluate achievements in the implementation of its ideas in the today’s system of higher education in Latin America.

The paper presents historical concepts and paradigms of the institution of university as well as its present and future models.

As a starting point, the origin, structure and function of the medieval university are discussed; then, four basic concepts of university formed in the 19th century are given, namely the German model of Wilhelm Humboldt and Johann Fichte, the English model of Cardinal Newman, the American model formed aft er foundation of the John Hopkins University and the French model – the Napoleonic model ofuniversity.

What follows is an analysis of the changes and evolution of universities in the 20th century. It is indicated that the essence of today’s university is composed of the following activities: didactics, research and professional training. A great significance of general and formal education is also emphasized. Th e priority is given to practising basic disciplines at universities and the significance of the humanities for general education of students, including philosophy, theology and ethics is stressed.

The author is warning us against single-discipline education in a situation when all contemporary problems, whether economic, political, social, ethical or technical, can only be solved on the interdisciplinary basis via cooperation of experts in different fields. The gap between visions of the world shaped by natural sciences and the humanities should be gradually bridged. To this end, a paradigm of the future university is put forward. The paradigm should provide for cultivation of the values derived from the Classical University rooted in the Greco-Roman and Christian tradition, mathematical exactness of scientific research and quality professional training of the Positivist University, as well as the ecological and holistic vision and education of the youth, in a spirit of tolerance of the Postmodern University.

The paradigm of the university of the future should encompass three significant elements, i.e. the mission of a contemporary academic school, the conditions in which it is functioning and the rules it should follow. The paper indicates that, though destined to an ongoing change, the mission of universities for centuries has featured the same components, namely intellectual and ethical education of the youth and scientific research. The contemporary university should act as “the eyes of the world” that perceive its main problems and provide guidance in solving them.

The contemporary university must duly take into account the external conditions, namely globalisation, multiculturalism, ecological threats, rapid communications and technological progress, a growth of negative social phenomena such crime, moral degradation and terrorism; a growing infl uence of the media on life of societies, anti-intellectualism, relativism and radical individualism triggered by the Post-modem era. The rules that a contemporary academic school should act in accordance with are given as follows: a quest for the highest standards in didactics, research and other activities; full freedom of scientifi c research; a focus on discovering the truth and sharing it with others; ethical responsibility of scholars and university professors; the spirit of duty in education; forming amicable and stable academic communities; partnership in cooperation with other scholars and universities; aiming at the integration of Christian knowledge and faith.

The paper ends with a citation from Pope John Paul’s II. address to the chancellors of all Polish academic schools in 1997, in which he stressed the role of ethical sensitivity of scholars today, owing to which the bond may be maintained both between the True and the Good and the freedom of scientific research and ethical responsibility for its outcomes.

Cartography is the study and practice of making maps. Although originally defined for Earth, the term is also a perfect description of the aims of the VIPERS team, whose members include Polish astronomers.

Measuring cosmic distances is one of the most important, fascinating and difficult challenges facing astronomers today. The objective is not just to identify the distances between objects in space – such distances are also key to finding out how our Universe is structured and how it evolves. They also evidence the amount of energy emitted by objects and makes it possible to determine their nature.

In 2014 the Jagiellonian University celebrated its 650th anniversary. The description of the university’s history on the jubilee website, however, makes no mention of the first female students – even though it was the first Polish university to welcome women.

I have been asked to give a thought on the University. It is arranged in a sequence of “past – yesterday – today”, to which I will occasionally refer. It will not, however, constitute a rigid scheme governing this talk. The inspiration for these thoughts was specified by the question “what perception of the University I imbibed in my family home, how I later confronted this with my own practice or «experience» of the University, how I look at it from the perspective of the experience I have had and from observing the changes taking place.”

The University of Krakow was founded twice, in 1364 and 1400. The jubilees of these two foundations were celebrated in 1864, 1900, 1964, 2000 and 2014. The paper present the role of university jubilees in the development of critical studies on the history of the University of Krakow until the end of the 18th century. The author analyses both the achievements and weaknesses of Polish university historiography, and shows the perspectives for its future development.

The paper presents two competing perceptions of the modern university: the economic and the humanistic. While the economic approach has numerous and potent advocates in the modern, rationalized world, those opting for the humanist approach have to struggle for attention and understanding. The author aims to highlight the conflict between the two seemingly contradictory visions of the university in her sociological commentary about the debate over the importance of the humanities in Poland and worldwide. There exists, however, a kind of ontological meta-frame which allows the rhetoric of a ‘factory of knowledge’ and a ‘temple of knowledge’ to be accommodated. It consists in thinking of universities in universalistic categories, which should be the concern of the state as it seeks Poland’s civilizational advance—in the full meaning of the phrase.

Der Autor antwortet auf die moderne Einwände gegen das Heimatrecht der Theologie in der Universitas litterarum (Peter Hünermann). Es geht um bleibende säkulare Anfragen, um pragmatische und postmodernistische Einwände und nicht zulezt um Bekenntnis- und Magisterium Ecclesiae-gebundenheit der Theologie.

After 1989 the cooperation between catholic theological departaments and the secular academies was standarized. The rules of cooperation between seminaries and theological departaments, existing either in ecclesiastical universities or in the state-controlled ones, were also circumscribed. The aim of this collaboration is to gain the academic degrees by the prospective priests.

The Author of an article recalls the legal rules, that regulate this cooperation and points the chances of it. Th anks to the collaboration, the seminary is raising academic qualifications of employees, and the students are being educated by the university standards.

The university gains an unique group of students, whose spiritual and moral formation, may be an example for a modern graduate in theology. Moreover, throughout affiliating seminaries to the theological departaments, the university has chance to benefit of the rich seminary archives and libraries, and to examine the great architectural, musical and painting treasures, concentrated in diocesancities.

With this paper we try to contribute to the debate on the nature of research intensive universities and the chances to create this type of institution in Poland. Research universities are presented as elite, flagship institutions for educating students mostly at the doctoral level and to produce the bulk of the research output. Examples of world-class research intensive universities from various countries are presented. It is shown that intensified competition among universities exists to prove their performance through global university league tables or ranking exercises and it is discussed whether Poland is at the stage to create at least one such institution playing important role in that competition. We argue that the establishment of a University of the Polish Academy of Sciences could be a solution. This University stands to become a unique research institution in Poland and one of very few establishments of its type in Central and Eastern Europe. The University will conduct scientific research and provide programs of the highest standard, exploiting the research and teaching potential of the PAS institutes as well as the competence and experience of members of the Academy's corporation. It is intended as a higher education institution with a decentralized organizational structure, based on the PAS research institutes. The University of the Polish Academy of Sciences will have a quality-boosting impact on the PAS institutes as well as initiate their consolidation and reorganization in the field of teaching.

The study is aimed to quantify the effects of social noise exposure (personal music players (PMP), events with high noise exposure) and the exposure to the other environmental noise sources in the selected sample of Slovak university students. The validated ICBEN methodology was used to assess noise annoyance. The measurement of ambient noise levels was done using hand-held sound level analyzer. There were 526 university students (143 males and 383 females, average age 23±2.2) enrolled into the study so far, 192 in the exposed housing facility to road traffic noise and 326 in the control housing facility in Bratislava. The social noise exposure was quantified and followed according to the authorized methodology of the study Ohrkan. From the total sample 416 (79.4%) students reported the use of PMP in the last week for the average time of 314 minutes. There was a significant difference in PMP use between the exposed (85.34%) and the control group (76.31%) (p = 0.01). Among PMP users 28.1% exceeded the LAV (lower action value for industry = 80 dB). The results showed the importance of road traffic and the social noise as well and the need for prevention and intervention in these vulnerable groups.

The paper develops the implicit as well as explicit meaning which evokes Stanisław Lem’s concept of the Body and the Corporality portrayed in the novel Return from the Stars. Moreover, Lem’s novel about an astronaut Hal Bregg and his return on Earth is analysed. In this novel author uses the idea of Einstein’s twin paradox. Hal Bergg—the stereotype of masculinity—is confronted with decadent and egalitarian society, which may be refers to the reunion masculinity with femininity. Such storyline shows the multidimensionality of the issue of Corporality, and presents the Body as a epistemological metaphor of modernism and postmodernism. In addition, the Body is depicted in the Return of the Stars as a figure of a mask and a costume. Furthermore, the Body in Lem’s novel is also interpreted as part of the Universe—as the boundary between what is temporary and what is infinite and transcendent.

The author of the article is aimed at reconstructing the concept of academic freedom as a base of university existence, regarding both its didactic and research function. The author takes into account various definitions of academic freedom and analyzes areas and dimensions, especially its institutional (university) and individual (professor) level. He reconstructs also controversies which are exposed in discussions on academic freedom and arguments regarding its limitations. He considers the phenomenon of actuarial policy and various forms of academic competition. He puts question: does the concept of academic freedom can be still vivid in the time of growing commercialization of didactits and research functions of contemporary university as well as its growing dependance on economy and politics?

In the Act on Revitalization of 9 October 2015, for the first time in Poland, the legal act introduced the necessity to apply the principles of universal design (Article 3 paragraph 2 point 3). The practice of investment processes in crisis areas shows that the requirements set out in the Act are not properly implemented. Regeneration processes require attention to improve the quality of life of residents. The article presents issues related to the implementation of universal design principles during revitalization processes. There is a noticeable lack of interest in this issue despite the fact that it is one of the three tasks set before local governments in the Revitalization Act, after social participation and support for people at risk of exclusion in the area of housing. The reasons for this state should be seen in a small knowledge of the issue, deficiencies in the educational process of designers and poor control on the part of local governments and central authorities. This is due to conservation conditions, which often misinterpret the right to protect cultural heritage. The self-government as its own task should guarantee the possibility of using the positive effects of the revitalization process, in particular the implementation of residents’ rights to an independent and dignifi ed life, which is required by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The Medical Simulation Center at the Medical University of Białystok was created as part of a broader project. Throughout Poland there are 12 such centers, and each with a somewhat different concept. The common denominator is that they help medical, nursing, and obstetrics students test their knowledge and skills in practice. The Medical Simulation Center in Białystok boasts a sizeable set of simulation facilities, including an operating room, ambulance, emergency ward, labor ward, and nurse’s station. The technicians devise scenarios for students to enable them to practice reacting to specific cases. All the facilities are equipped with state-of-the-art audio-video equipment to record lessons for later review and analysis.