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 Universitat de València, 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 Universitat de València, 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 Universitat de València and is entrusted, each year and on a rotational basis, to a centre of the Universitat de València. This year it is up to the Faculty of Nursing and Podiatry, which has appointed the professor and Head of the Department of Nursing, Dr Julio Jorge Fernández Garrido. The master lecture that will open this academic year is entitled ‘New nurses for a new healthcare paradigm’. Subsequently, the lecture text will be published, according to 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 Universitat de València.
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.
