New President of AAU Will Strive for Equal Opportunities for Foreign Students in the Czech Republic

The new President of Anglo-American University (AAU) will be professor Jaroslav Miller. He will assume his role at AAU on August 1, 2021.

Prof. Mgr. Jaroslav Miller, M.A., Ph.D. comes to AAU from Palacky University in Olomouc, a highly research-focused institution, where he held the office of the President from 2014.

At AAU, he will take over from doc. Ing. Štěpán Müller, CSc., MBA, who has successfully led AAU through the pandemic.

Prof. Miller will be able to use his considerable experience of successfully leading a renowned university as well as his work at the Czech Rectors Conference, where he acted as Vice-Chairman, at AAU, a fully recognized Czech university with prestigious institutional American accreditation.

“Alongside further academic and research development, one of my priorities is to provide a wider range of postgraduate programs. I will strive to strengthen AAUs involvement with civil society and develop further beneficial partnerships between the university and important institutions and organizations both in the Czech Republic and abroad. In addition, I will continue my predecessor’s efforts to ensure that AAU’s foreign students, who make up the majority of the student body, can study in the Czech Republic and at AAU under the same conditions as Czech students.” said Miller.

He continues, “I realize that I am arriving to AAU at a difficult time, a time which has greatly impacted higher education especially those schools that heavily rely on open borders and freedom of movement. However, I believe that we will manage to return to the pre-pandemic volume of foreign students (current developments already confirm this trend) and hereby better contribute to the growing internationalization of Czech higher education as well as the exportation of high-quality Czech educational services to the wider world. Other factors aside, Czech education has an extremely high export potential, which is crucial for the future prosperity of the Czech Republic and the sustainability of public finances which have been highly affected by the pandemic. Without it, this road would be much longer and much more complicated.”

The Anglo-American University in Prague celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2020. It is one of the schools with the highest proportion of foreign teachers and students in the Czech Republic.

Four-fifths of them come from more than 80 countries worldwide. The language of instruction is English and AAU traditionally places great emphasis on individual teaching and real life experience from the first year of study.

Prof. Mgr. Jaroslav Miller, MA, PhD. obtained history and/or philology degrees at Palacky University in Olomouc (UPOL), at Central European University in Budapest, and at Oxford University (Lady Margaret Hall). He was the President of Palacky University from 2014 to 2021.

Prior to that, he founded a UPOL campus in Iraqi Kurdistan (2018) and also started the Civic University project (Občanská univerzita), which promotes values of freedom and democracy. Additionally, he participated in creating the well-respected university consortium AURORA – an alliance of 9 universities across Europe.

He is active in the field of academic research, especially in Urban Studies, History of Political Thought and the Intellectual History of Czech and Slovak Exile; he is the author of numerous monographs and scientific publications, for which he has received a number of international awards.

Professor Jaroslav Miller is the Czech ambassador of the Fulbright Program in the Czech Republic and a member of the distinguished German research foundation, Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. He is also an academic reviewer of outstanding research projects of the European Research Council in the field of humanities.