The University of Warsaw: Foundation in 1816 and Early Teaching

The founding of the University of Warsaw in 1816 brought existing professional education together in a university. After the Napoleonic Wars, Kraków and its university were left outside the newly established Kingdom of Poland, making a higher-education center in Warsaw an urgent need. Stanisław Kostka Potocki, responsible for education, promoted the plan. The law school founded in 1808 and the medical school established in 1809 supplied teachers, courses, and organizational experience.

On November 19, 1816, Russian Emperor Alexander I, who was also king of Poland, signed the foundation charter in St. Petersburg. Dated both November 7 Old Style and November 19 New Style, it established a royal university in Warsaw with five faculties: Theology; Law and Administration; Medicine; Physics and Mathematics; and Sciences and Fine Arts. It placed the institution under a rector and faculty heads and granted it the right to award degrees. Treating the foundation date as the simultaneous start of all teaching would erase the preparations that followed.

References: [1] [2]

Initial organization was undertaken by a General Council chaired by Stanisław Staszic. Its responsibilities extended beyond arranging a ceremony to professors, supporting teaching facilities, student discipline, and funding. Jan Bandtkie and Jacek Dziarkowski, the heads of the existing law and medical schools, participated in drafting the statutes, bringing their experience into the new university structure.

Potocki signed provisional statutes on April 15, 1818, and the university held its formal inauguration on May 14. Wojciech Szwejkowski had already taken office as its first rector. Applicants had to produce proof of secondary-school graduation, and students could receive specially printed disciplinary rules at registration. The statutes were not regarded as immutable: the supervising authorities required problems encountered in practice to be collected as a basis for revision. Establishment, the beginning of classes, and inauguration were thus connected but distinct stages.

References: [1] [2]

The university’s principal premises were the Kazimierz Palace and surrounding buildings on Krakowskie Przedmieście, previously used for military education. Teaching did not wait for an entirely independent new campus. Rooms were allocated, repaired, and extended within existing spaces. Two wings built in 1816 housed professors and the supervising authorities’ offices respectively. Additional buildings for teaching and collections in the early 1820s provided more dedicated space for courses and objects.

The foundation charter entrusted the Government Commission for Religious Affairs and Public Education with housing the university, financing it from educational funds, and supervising it. Student fees also formed part of its income, but their expenditure remained subject to the supervising authorities. They supported teaching collections and facilities as well as heating, lighting, and staff allowances. This arrangement gave the university continuing resources while closely linking everyday teaching to administrative control.

References: [1] [2]

Medical instruction offers a concrete example of the new university’s use of existing institutions. When the medical school was incorporated, theoretical courses continued in the former Jesuit building, while clinical teaching relied on St. Roch’s Hospital. A university title did not automatically remedy shortages of space and funds. Teaching conditions changed only later, when clinical facilities moved into more suitable premises.

Drawing on the account of Tomorowicz, a teacher at the time, research in medical history describes training in internal medicine. Fifth-year students were assigned patients whom they examined under a professor’s supervision, assessing their condition and proposing treatment. They wrote case histories in Latin and reported developments during morning rounds; fourth-year students mainly observed their senior classmates. Knowledge was transmitted not only through lectures but through case records, graded participation, and correction by teachers at the bedside. These arrangements concerned a particular clinical course and cannot be generalized into a teaching system shared by every faculty.

References: [3]

The material requirements of fine-arts teaching had other sources. Plaster copies of sculptures from the former collection of King Stanisław August were purchased by the educational authorities and assigned to the relevant university faculty in 1817. Later moved from the palace to the Column Hall, they served students of drawing, sculpture, and architecture and were shown to a wider public. The casts made classical works located far away in Italy, France, and elsewhere available for repeated observation in the classroom.

The collection did not remain fixed after a single purchase. Teachers, custodians, and purchasing agents continued to contact European workshops and acquire additional models. Later researchers compared markings on the casts with archives and inventories to trace their places of manufacture and origins. Serving both as teaching tools and as art displays, the collection shows that the university’s intellectual exchanges depended on objects, purchasing networks, and custodial work as well as books and lecture halls.

References: [4]

Professors’ research also overlapped with the activities of the Warsaw Society of Friends of Science. Founded before the university, it included university teachers of medicine and pharmacy among its members. The society exchanged material through disciplinary meetings, public assemblies, and annual publications. Medical and pharmaceutical members presented papers, assessed collections and books, and participated in library and publishing work, creating channels of exchange beyond the classroom.

Ostrowska’s research cautions that overlapping membership does not prove that the society directly initiated every university activity. A firmer conclusion is that the same teachers lectured, wrote and translated textbooks, and participated in collective discussion and publication. Early Warsaw University is therefore best understood through its specific institutions: the foundation charter conferred organizational standing, provisional statutes regulated relations among teachers and students, funds and buildings sustained teaching, and hospitals, collections, and learned societies brought specialized knowledge into daily practice.

References: [1] [3] [4] [5]