What is the Opening Ceremony?
The Academic Year Opening Ceremony is a solemn event held every year to start off the new academic year.
Where does it take place?
At the University of Valencia, this event has been held since its foundation in 1499, and takes place in the historic Paraninfo (Assembly Hall) in the founding building of the University of Valencia, currently the Cultural Centre ‘La Nau’, in the heart of the city of Valencia. The Paraninfo is an emblematic seventeenth-century space, renovated in the nineteenth century and adapted to the latest technologies.
What does this involve?
In the course of this act, a traditional ceremony is followed, so that the university teaching staff who have the degree of doctorate form an academic procession, ordered by the seniority of the UV centers, and closed by the Governing Council and the presidency of the act.
The University Orfeón Choir performs, at the beginning of the ceremony, the ‘Veni Creator hymn’, and the Master of Ceremonies gives way to the protocol of the act, which includes the reading of a summary of the official report from the previous academic year and a ‘master lecture’.
The ‘master lecture’ is an academic discourse that deals with a discipline of those cultivated at the University of Valencia, and is entrusted, each year and in rotation basis, to a center of the University of Valencia. This year it is up to the Faculty of Teacher Training, which has appointed the writer and professor of the Department of Language and Literature Education, prof. Dr. Josep Ballester-Roca. The master lecture that will open this academic year is entitled ‘How did Long John Silver not learn to read. The lecture is neither useful nor by chance’. Subsequently, this text will be published, following historical tradition, by Publicacions de la Universitat de València, the hundred-year-old publisher at the UV.
Following are the words of the presidency, made up of the Rector and the regional and municipal Authorities, which ends with the official declaration of the start of the academic year at the University of Valencia.
The academic anthem ’Gaudemus Igitur’, performed by the University Orfeón Choir, leads to the conclusion of the event, and to the departure of the Paraninfo's academic entourage.
See the full ceremony of the event.
This year, opening of the Valencian universities' academic year
Each university celebrates its opening ceremony according to its own ceremony, which is very similar between universities. In addition to the opening of the academic year of each university, every year the opening of the academic year of all the Valencian universities is held by the Most Honourable President of the Generalitat Valenciana.
In the Valencian case, the opening is held, on a rotating basis, at a public university, with the University of Valencia hosting this event this year.
Therefore, at the end of the words of the presidency (Rector of the University of Valencia and President of the Generalitat Valenciana) it will be the M.H. President who will proceed to declare the academic year open to all Valencian universities.
