Universities with multicultural disrupted past: what meanings current students attribute to them?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15503/jecs20162.33.50Keywords:
University, Place meaning, Central-Eastern EuropeAbstract
The changing of pre-war borders of Central and Eastern Europe after WW II caused not only belonging of certain territories to definite countries but also the massive forced relocation of population from those territories. The total change of the population in the multicultural cities affected also institutions, such as universities by changing their staff, language, and national profile.
Nowadays, when modern universities are facing post-modernity challenges it is extremely difficult to talk about role, mission, and meaning of this institution, especially in the context of disrupted historical tradition. Look at the problem from the different perspective, from inside will show the tendencies of meanings current students of the universities with long but disrupted historical past attribute to their Alma maters. Are they aware of the presence of representatives of different national groups that created university community before WW II?
This article will present results of three studies conducted at three universities that changed their national profile after WWII: Vilnius University in Lithuania (formerly a Polish university), Lviv University in Ukraine (formerly a Polish university) and Wrocław University in Poland (formerly a German university). Both at Vilnius University and Lviv Universiy 150 university students participated in the study. At Wrocław University 152 university students participated in the study.
The present analysis will try to explore the variety of meanings current students of those three universities attribute to their place of study. It will try to show if current students are aware of the university’s complex history and, if they include/exclude historical meanings connected with representatives of the different national group? Also, it will look at the possible differences between meaning attribution and perception of the university past among representatives of these three universities. Lviv, Wrocław, and Vilnius Universities had similar historical traces, but currently, they are developed in three different independent countries with different cultural and historical politics which might have an influence on the perception of the place’s past (Lewicka, 2011)
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