Why the crisis?

Saturday March 1st the Paul VI Vatican assembly hall will host the VI European University Day promoted by Ccee (the Council of Europe’s Bishops Conferences). This year’s topic is “Europe and the Americas together to build the civilization of love”. The event will be satellite broadcasted to ten European cities (Toledo, Bucarest, Minsk…) and of the American continent (Mexico City, Havana, Aparecida, Loja…). On the eve of the meeting, while the echoes of the Pope’s missed visit to Rome’s “La Sapienza” university are still reverberating, we hereby introduce to a series of insights from the book “Why University. Reflections on the ethics of knowledge”, which on the occasion of the 100th issue of the tri-monthly magazine “Universitas” (published by Rui) produced an anthology of the essays published in its past 50 issues by European scholars. Amongst these, figures a contribution of the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.Co-responsibility of faith. “It isn’t truth which creates consensus. Rather than truth, consensus creates common rules. The majority determines what ought to be true and just. The means that law depends on the majority and on the current social values which are influenced by a number of factors”. The warning on the risks of “juridical positivism” had been voiced by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1999, in his address at Rome’s Lumsa University on the occasion of the conferment of a honoris causa degree in Law. The man who was to become Pope Benedict XVI, underlining the deep bond of faith and reason in guiding the right to truth and to the common good, concluded: “Christian faith respects the very nature of the State, especially the State of a pluralist society, but at the same time it is co-responsible for the visibility of the law’s very foundations and in ensuring that the State doesn’t remain without guidance, only exposed to inconstant trends”. A community of destiny. “ In our European continent in the past years we clearly failed. A good part of the crisis” of our universities “is due to the fact that we forgot that universities are a place of education and culture”, affirmed Nikolaus Lobkowicz, former rector of the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, according to whom university establishment will have a future if “we become aware of the fact that students are entrusted to us not only as people who train for a profession, but as youth seeking the meaning of life, and that together we form a small teacher-student destiny community” and a “coexistence of individuals” who “educate one another through a common culture”.Exchange and convertibility. “I firmly believe in two things – said Ralf Dahrendorf, rector of Oxford’s St.Anthony’s -: exchange, and what I define as ‘convertibility’, to use monetary term in its broader significance. By ‘exchange’ I intend that it should be possible, and in fact it is to be hoped for, especially for students but also for academics, to work in other systems and Countries for a given amount of time. Convertibility means that the result must be recognized also in other EU Countries. It doesn’t refer to an identical path, since “it is fully compatible with the different paths aiming at the same goal. It confirms the great value of diversity in Europe. The institution I am most proud of is the European Science Foundation”, whose research coordination is managed by Member States”, since in “Europe there are different paths for progress”. A thought reform. “All university reforms conceived until today rotated around the black hole that marks the need for teaching, which unluckily hasn’t been identified”. For Edgar Morin, sociologist at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, founder and director of the review Communications , the reform shouldn’t be aimed at identifying “which kind of intelligence must be changed”. It should stem from inside, “looking back at the sources of European thought”. Today, underlined Morin, “not only issues relating to man, nature and God need to be explored”, “we need to explore the elements leading to a solution of these thorny issues: this includes reason, which often isn’t just an abstract form of rationalization”. “Thought reform is a key social issue aiming at training citizens to face the problems of their times” enabling us “to curb the downfall of democracy which entails the expansion of category experts in all political sectors, gradually decreasing the citizens’ very skills”.