We have our own University.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Members of the academic community of the University of Silesia.
Readers of Życie Literackie could read in issue No. 42 of 1968 that ‘what would one day become a historic date—and it certainly will—was unfolding amid the simplest of activities. It was accompanied by the smell of paint and the voices of hurried—and therefore somewhat irritated—women. And to continue along this highroad of associations, this University, too, is the product of the simplest of actions—of ideas and decisions that were, in their own logic, so transparent that today, now that the University of Silesia is an established fact, they seem to us the only possible, obvious, and inevitable course of events. We tend to believe that things could not have unfolded otherwise.’ (Zbigniew Kwiatkowski, ŚLĄSK sprawił sobie UNIWERSYTET).
With more than half a century of hindsight, we readily embrace this conviction, for it is difficult to imagine a world without the University of Silesia. What makes this account of the University’s inauguration particularly touching is the juxtaposition reports from the final stages of construction with the deeply held conviction that our University was a necessity.
I, in turn, embrace the view today that thinking and acting in the simplest and most transparent of ways reinforce the necessity of the University. At the age of profound uncertainty, when lies, disinformation, and technological simulation of the truth undermine our trust in individual reason and experience, the importance and responsibility of universities grows. Our greatest challenge today is to become indifferent to the truth. It is a certain state of mind that arises from a sense of helplessness that grips a person and engulfs them in the chaos and disrupting noise of information. What we need is the voice of reassuring clarity offered by genuine knowledge, created and upheld by real people living and working in real spaces, open to all. That is the necessity of the University today.
What I want to wish all of us who continue the work of our predecessors and students is that we draw strength, a sense of purpose and pride from the fact that we have our University!
Yours faithfully,
Prof. Ryszard Koziołek
Rector of University of Silesia in Katowice
Prof. Ryszard Koziołek, Rector of the University of Silesia in Katowice / Photo by Julia Agnieszka Szymala