Beginnings
The first meeting of students demanding independent Association took place on August 27, 1980 in Gdańsk. On September 2, the Temporary Founding Committee of the University of Gdańsk was founded, followed by similar bodies in other Polish cities, such as Warsaw, Poznań, and Kraków.
Between 18 and 19 October 1980, at the Warsaw University of Technology, a founding meeting of a newly created student organization took place, with 60 chapters, representing different Polish universities and colleges. It was there that the name Independent Students’ Association was approved. There were other suggestions for the name, such as Solidarity of the Association of Polish Students, but they did not gain popularity. During the meeting, it was decided that the NZS would be seated in Warsaw, also the National Founding Committee was established, with eleven members (among them Maciej Kuroń, and Piotr Bikont). The NZS was a follower of the late 1970s organization Student Committee of Solidarity, which had been created in 1977, after the murder of Stanislaw Pyjas.
In 1980, the Association was in some way a student equivalent of Solidarity, as it was created following the strikes of the so-called Polish August 1980. It gathered young people who wished to organize themselves independently of the Communist regime. They wanted democratization of Polish universities as well as respect for Polish patriotic traditions of fighting for independence. The NZS was an alternative to the official Polish Students' Association (ZSP), which was subordinated to the Polish United Workers' Party.
Read more about this topic: Independent Students' Union
Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“The frantic search of five-year-olds for friends can thus be seen to forecast the beginnings of a basic shift in the parent-child relationship, a shift which will occur gradually over many long years, and in which a child needs not only the support of child allies engaged in the same struggle but also the understanding of his parents.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)