30 years IHI Zittau: 1st episode

Establishing a trinational university experiment

Only Liberec had succeeded: on the Czech side of the Neisse Euroregion, a medium-sized technical university had emerged from the industrial schools that had grown out of the textile industry and shaped the region, and it had eventually also developed economics and natural sciences. The Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences, on the other hand, lost its partial right to award doctorates from GDR times and had to settle for an existence as a university of applied sciences. And in Jelenia Góra, Poland, university offshoots of the Wroclaw universities were, so to speak, "remote-controlled".
This was the decisive impetus for the universities organized in the ACC to tackle a joint reestablishment: The Euroregion was to receive a university location with all academic rights, where the neighbors could rediscover each other and learn to understand each other together as Central Europeans. Following the example and advice of the Franco-German University, the Free State of Saxony passed a law on April 10, 1992, which provided for the establishment of a university "German-Polish-Czechoslovak" institution.
This completely new experiment in higher education was jointly governed by representatives of the five founding universities (Zittau/Görlitz, TU Freiberg, TU Liberec, Business Academy O. Lange Wroclaw and Silesian TU Gliwice): A kind of mini-EU at a time when Poland and the Czech Republic were still decades away from joining!
And at the same time a kind of "pre-Bologna space": the students of the partner universities were initially to complete two-year basic courses at their home universities, and then be delegated to the joint institution as the best of their cohorts for a three-year pan-European advanced diploma. A revolutionary idea at the time, it virtually anticipated the Bachelor/Master system with its mobility through ECTS and ERASMUS!
One after the other, the study programs Environmental Process Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Business Administration and Social Sciences were established at IHI Zittau. The directors Markert and Löhr were formative in this phase.