We toured the ancient heart of Poland’s oldest university, the Collegium Maius of Jagiellonian University. Founded in 1364, their students and faculty have made a few minor contributions to humanity over the year, like figuring out that the Earth revolves around the Sun (Nick “Helio” Copernicus) and, my personal favorite, creating liquid nitrogen.
Not that I would necessarily want to be a faculty member. True, you get to gather in cool meeting halls like this one, and maybe have your portrait added to the wall of fame. But for the first 500 years or so, faculty were expected to be celibate and eat all their meals together in silence, with only pithy sayings carved on their soup spoons to occupy their active minds. They did remove the celibacy requirement eventually, but in World War II the Nazis sent the entire faculty to concentration camps in a deliberate attempt to exterminate the Polish intellectual elite.
Today, UJ has over 52,000 students.
