Dear wir-readers, dear alumni of Freie Universität,

This year we are celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of our university - and there will be a very special cinematic highlight to go with it: a document of its founding and construction phase, a black-and-white film from 1963 that the Ernst Reuter Society has had restored together with the university archives of Freie Universität. In this film, we see how buildings are created that have become trademarks, for example, the Henry Ford Building with its large glass facades as built symbols of transparency, democracy, and academic freedom, as the head of the archive, Dr. Birgit Rehse, explains.

Democracy, transparency, and academic freedom, these founding values of Freie Universität are also the values of the modern research university, whose development Prof. Dr. William C. Kirby traced from its beginnings in 19th century Berlin through Harvard University to Freie Universität. His very instructive and exciting book "Empires of Ideas. Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China," he, an honorary doctor of our university since 2006, presented in December 2022 - in the Henry Ford Building, of course.

Feryad Fazil Omar is also committed to democracy, transparency and academic freedom. The Kurdish human rights activist, literary scholar, writer, and former Kurdish lecturer at Freie Universität received the Federal Cross of Merit in December 2022 in the 'Rostlaube,' another architectural icon on the Dahlem campus. On behalf of the Ernst Reuter Society, I also supported this honor, as you can read in the portrait about Feryad Fazil Omar.

Transparency and scientific freedom are also concerns of our veterinary medicine, to which the cover story is dedicated. Its author, Stefanie Hardick, unfolds a panorama of the diversity of this discipline at Freie Universität. In the process, it becomes clear not only what impressive diversity the Department of Veterinary Medicine derives from freedom of science, but also what it has committed itself to: to transparency in dealing with animal experiments, for example, and to an ethical approach to laboratory animals in accordance with the 3R principles of replacement, reduction, and refinement - in other words, to the replacement of animal experiments with alternative methods wherever possible, and to as few laboratory animals and animal suffering as possible. These goals have also been set by Dr. Carola Fischer-Tenhagen, who as a private lecturer trains the next generation of veterinarians at Freie Universität and trains and supervises laboratory animals at the "Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung" (Federal Institute for Risk Assessment). Read more in the interview.

Transparency, academic freedom, and democracy: The articles in this issue of our magazine show that the founding values of Freie Universität still determine its everyday life today.

I hope you enjoy reading!

Peter Lange