A warm welcome to my very dear colleagues, our distinguished guests and, of course, our students.

It is my very special honour and a great pleasure to see you all here today. It makes me happy and proud that this occasion marks ten full years of our work on building something which, for us and many others, seemed at the outset to be a fiction, an impossible and challenging mission, a somewhat irrational decision and a utopian idea. However, regardless of this general impression and experience, in the depths of our souls we believed that it was possible and worth our personal investment.

After ten years of selfless dedication on the part of all our staff, and indeed the wholehearted support of our families, founders, students and friends in the business world, finally we can see the outlines of this virtual idea beginning to take shape. And today we can say we are at last a faculty where together we build an institution of quality.

It is unfortunate that we live in a time and place in which quality and success have been pushed into the background as undesirable values disturbing the common, established and, above all, familiar order. This attitude cannot lead to prosperity and a better life. Since we are dealing with young people who have placed their faith in us and who have made the decision to grow up with us, quality as an aspiration towards betterment has become our fundamental value, the measure of what we do and what we want to do in the future.

In our daily work, we need and want to keep proving to ourselves and to others that this is not just a nice phrase, but something in which we profoundly believe and to which we are utterly committed. This path we have chosen will ensure that we:

• select the best teachers, outstanding professionals, ready to take part in continual learning themselves, the teachers who are, above all, good people and colleagues;
• offer some of our best students the chance to learn how to work as teaching assistants and assistant lecturers because they themselves will soon be faced with high expectations and high standards in their further education and work with students;
• award scholarships, praise and support to high achievers, and see to it that they have the opportunity to participate in research and teaching as junior teacher assistants;
• engage some of the best teachers from other universities in the country and abroad; the willingness of their home universities to cooperate with our institution is the kind of recognition we value highly. In view of this, we decided to join the Union University which shares similar values, and which in my deepest belief, has the potential to develop a quality uniquely its own.

For us, the practical aspects of quality mean the following:

• publishing magazines, textbooks and monographs, to be reviewed by experts of distinction in their various fields;
• opportunity for our students to be educated by accomplished practitioners who will provide them with knowledge they themselves will be able to apply in future;
• keeping watchwords such as expertise and knowledge at the forefront of our minds; it is for this reason that we hold and will be holding numerous forums to which experienced and proficient guest speakers will be invited to discuss social issues of current interest;
• arranging conferences attended by as many eminent scholars as possible from the country and abroad;
• applying for projects that focus on a scientific examination of current and complex social problems. We are exceptionally pleased that this interdisciplinary approach to research has been recognised as a quality of our Faculty and supported by the Provincial Secretariat for Science and Technological Development;
• cooperation with numerous institutions, courts, clinics, health centres, prison units, gerontological institutions, social welfare centres, private agencies and flourishing companies, where our students may gain practical experience and restore their belief that successful business is possible in the country that is Serbia. It is an opportunity for them to demonstrate motivation and knowledge, thereby opening the door to employment on the one hand, and for companies to acquire young and qualified personnel on the other.

If we are at all uncertain as to how to define quality, I think these examples provide the best answer to that question. We are particularly honoured to cooperate with a large number of primary schools, secondary schools and pre-schools, which in a spirit of openness and care for the future of their students, have opened their doors to us for numerous activities. In this way, we have begun working together to build a system of education. Contrary to slow, frequent and incomplete reforms, and according to my deepest beliefs, this kind of cooperation is a prerequisite for improving education in general. Over the past ten years, we have also made numerous friends in the business world who are our trusted associates in financial matters, advocacy, printing, and the maintenance of our premises. The credit for this goes to our non-teaching staff, whose work consistently accompanies our educational and academic activities.

I should also mention that, for us, quality also means having a good time and enjoying good music on good occasions, and in a good company. And so it should, day by day, year by year, decade by decade...

The journey from when we set out to build our new standards of work and a new quality of life has been a long one.

Perhaps there is still a long way to go before we reach these goals, and then again, perhaps not? The answer to that question will make itself felt ten years from now and will come from our associates, our students, their parents, the companies that employ our alumni and from ourselves, together with all of you present here today.

Thank you.

Dean of the Faculty:
Prof. Mirjana Francesko, PhD

Novi Sad, February 2016