THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STUDENT SOCIETIES IN THE CITY OF IASI DURING THE SECOND HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY. EUROPEAN MODELS AND LOCAL FORMS

Created in 1860, more by political reasons than as a response to the local intellectual market needs, the University of Iasi had a complicated evolution not only until 1864, when the new Law of Education recognizes and regulates the existence of two universities (of Iasi, and of Bucharest), but decades after. In the relatively provisional situation of the beginnings, the students of the Iasi University hesitated to build their own bodies, as they existed in civilized Europe. In fact, in an institution with no tradition and without successive generations of graduates, it was not possible to immediately develop an awareness of the body, and especially an associative spirit. The first attempt in this direction is due to a young man who had studied law in Vienna for a while and then entered the University of Iasi as an auditor in the academic year 1863-1864. The model was that of the Literary and Scientific Society of Romanian Students in Vienna, recently established in the capital city of Austria. Unfortunately, the attempt failed, just like the next one, of a "literary society", in 1870. Only in 1875 the students of Iasi succeeded in building their own association, under the name of "The Student's Club of the University of Iasi". The local specificity is given by the absence of associations like the fraternities (so popular in Germany and in other countries), where the focus is not on the side of patriotic, national and even scientific life, but on physical and cultural maturation of the novices. At the University of Iasi, the student associative spirit was consumed by an important mission: to raise the people's level of culture and civilization and to inoculate the national ideals, a goal that needed all the energy of the educated youth. Which was not, actually, a surprise, as the Romanian universities were not created as institutions designed to ensure balanced and disinterested knowledge, but as powerful weapons, perhaps the most significant ones, in the battle for the national evolution and prosperity.