A winning card

Universities “more suited” to responding to the challenges of the “globalization of production” and the “diffusion of knowledge” are those “able to be very open to the world” and at the same testify to “a deep rooting in a national or regional history, culture and society”, said MICHEL WIEVIORKA , of the School of Higher Studies of the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris during the European meeting of university teachers promoted by the Council of the European Bishops’ Conferences in Rome (CCEE) (until 24 June). Theme of the meeting: “A new humanism for Europe. The role of the universities”. Here is the final part of Michel Wieviorka’s address. Today the social sciences are devoting a lot of discussion to democracy, its various forms, and the ways of renewing it. They distinguish, for example, representative democracy from participative democracy and from deliberative democracy. These concerns especially regard the universities. For the universities cannot operate merely in response to what the State dictates to them, from outside and from above, and what its administrators decide, depending on their various levels of autonomy. Universities must also concern themselves with the expectations of society and pose the wider question of the democratisation of access to knowledge and, even before that, the definition of the interests at stake in the production of knowledge. Numerous universities (or the actors within them, for instance trades-unionists) also devote their attention to the education of citizens or try to put into practice measures to permit the forging of links between science and society, between the production of knowledge and the hopes of the public, in the form of civic conferences, for example, or by opening themselves up to debates, or by creating departments and courses that take into account new social and cultural demands, and so on.The universities are now subject to the pressures of globalization and at the same time embody the hope for a better future for the young generations and for the countries in which they are situated. Today they find their greatest dynamism in the countries that, in their policy towards them, play the card of competition more than that of social justice, it itself too often conceived according to paralysing categories. Europe, ever since the early second century of the last millennium, at Bologna, at Paris, at Oxford, etc., invented the universities and, thanks to this long history, conferred on them the humanistic character that has as a whole always characterized them, certainly more than elsewhere. Universities have a fantastic card to play today, by promoting formulae of higher education or research able to maintain this humanistic spirit, though articulating it according to the needs of excellence and efficiency, by fostering social justice as well as competitiveness, and by recognizing the importance of the subjectivity of the players, while at the same constantly striving, as is right, to pose the question of the link between the way they function and democracy. Europe is certainly the region in the world that has as its disposal the best historical, institutional, cultural and economic trump cards to realise the humanistic universities of the future and not just those of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.