Prague Journal

Sunday, July 3, 2005

Eva and I left Prague on the 7:00am bus to go to Brno for the WACRA conference. Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic, and the largest in the region of Moravia (Prague is in Bohemia). WACRA (World Association for Case Method Research and Application) was started in 1984 when its founder and director, Hans Klein, was a professor at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass. Hans claims to be a native of Czechlovakia (he is from Austria), but came to the US for post-graduate (MBA and DBA) studies. He still lives in Massachusetts and teaches accounting and finance part time at Babson College. WACRA’s purpose is to spread case method research and teaching beyond US boundaries, but it functions largely as a professional-conference travel club.
This year’s conference host is Mendel University of Agriculture and Forestry in Brno, the oldest institution providing agriculture and forestry studies in the Czech lands. It was established in 1919 as the University of Agriculture in Brno and it maintained this name till 1994. Currently, Mendel University is divided into four faculties. The Faculty of Agronomy, the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology, and the Faculty of Business and Economics are all located in Brno. The Faculty of Horticulture is located in Lednice. The university gets is name, of course from Gregor Mendel, the famous Augustinian monk and horticulturist who cross-bred peas in attempt to create hybrid strains. Later known as Mendel’s Laws, his famous principles of hereditary transmission were to revolutionize the cultivation of plants and the breeding of domesticated animals in the twentieth century. Mendel’s name marked not only the beginning of genetics as a scientific discipline in its own right but also the beginning of the systematic use of mathematics, quantified measurements and applied statistics in biology.
Mendel was born on (approximately) July 20, 1822 in Hyncice, northern Moravia (then Austrian Silesia) to farmers, Anton and Rosina. Mendel studied mathematics, physics, philology, theoretical and practical philosophy and ethics at the Institute of Philosophy in Olomouc from 1840-1843 and joined the Augustinian Abbey of St. Thomas in Brno as a novice in 1843. In 1846 Mendel completed a course in agricultural studies, apple and wine growing, at the (Brno) Institute of Theology, and was ordained as a priest the following year. Between 1851 and 1853, Mendel studied physics, mathematics and natural history and attended courses in “Experimental Physics,” “Anatomy and Physiology of Plants,” and in “Practical lessons in using the microscope” at the University of Vienna. Between 1854 and 1864, Mendel carried out experiments on garden peas in the abbey garden. He lectured on “Experiments in Plant Hybrids” at the February and March meetings of the Natural Science Society (Brno) in 1865. In 1866, Mendel published his lecture, a work that was to establish him as “the father of genetics.” In 1868, Mendel became abbot after Abbot Cyrill Franz Napp, his benefactor and mentor, who had died in 1867. In 1872, Mendel was awarded the Cross of the Royal and Imperial Order of Franz Joseph I, and he became Director of the Mortgage Bank of Moravia (Brno) in 1881. Mendel died on January 6, 1884. He was buried three days later in the Central Cemetery in Brno. His obituary in the Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Ackerbaues, der Natur- und Landeskunde 1884, No. 1, said: “his experiments with plant hybrids opened a new era.”
Eva and I arrived at the main station in Brno at 9:30a.m. and took the tram to Mendel University, arriving just in time for the session to start at 10:00am. The morning session was crammed—too many cases to discuss in too little time—and few of the participants had received appropriate materials, but we managed to add enough value to the novice casewriters in the session that people seemed to leave happy. After lunch, we were taken by bus to the hotel to check in and rest before dinner, which was back at the university. The dinner was preceded by folk songs from groups representing various countries, not in any planned format—almost as a spontaneous songfest. Over half the crowd has been at these conferences before, so it was almost like a reunion—similar to the Western Academy of Management crowd that goes to the international conferences every other year. After dinner, Martin and Jirka and Eva and I walked back to the hotel—a nice break from sitting in stuffy rooms all day—and went to the bar at the top of the hotel for drinks and conversation.
Meanwhile, in France, Lance Armstrong stuck to the main pack and finished in 63rd place (with no time lost) during the second stage of the Tour de France that was won by Belgium's Tom Boonen. Lance finished in the same time as Boonen and kept his second place standing. American David Zabriskie retained the yellow jersey as the leader. Exciting!

posted by JWinn @ 11:19 PM