WHAT ARE UNIVERSITIES FOR?

Ben Okri: The university of the future will do that which today’s university does not do: teach young people the art of self-knowledge, of self-discovery to become masters of their own lives. There’s nothing more important.

June 23, London. Closing yesterday after three days of passionate debate, the Times-sponsored conference organized by Goodenough College and the Institute of Ideas. An entire session, moderated by editor John O’Leary, was dedicated to the attempt to give a response to one of the most crucial questions of our time: what are universities for?

We are so used to talk about them; to send our children; to work, study and teach there, that we take for granted the answer to this thorny question – core of the academic mission and perhaps the future of our civilization. The Minister of Education of the British government, Charles Clark, in his speech underlined the urgency of making clarity on this theme. Writers, philosophers, educators, politicians and deans participated. Noteworthy were the speeches of Gordon Graham, professor of Philosophy at the Aberdeen University and Ben Okri, Nigerian writer and poet educated at Cambridge. According to Okri, the university should do the only thing it doesn’t: teach young people the art of self-knowledge. There’s nothing else more important in education.

The accusation towards the university education system and, in general, all western higher-level education is heavy. According to the results of the Times conference, the universities take the precious live potential of young minds and transform them, the students, into “job fillers,” people who simply fill a role, people with an employee- mentality worried about nothing more than finding a job and surviving.

The accusation isn’t new. As far as our country is concerned, premonitions and warnings aren’t missing. The Confindustria, in its last year-end report defined the university “in destruction,” and from the pages of “The Opinion,” in the last few months, with open letters to the Minister more than once we’ve accused the deplorable state in which Italian university education has reduced itself – provincial and too theoretic, with campuses reduced to mental gyms and none other than downright squalid exam houses. The universities, born to be forges of integral men, schools for individuals, conditions of survival for every civilization, are reduced to schools of dependence, factories that produce an employee species, afraid and unprepared men and women; Unprepared not only because they have no idea of what happens in the real world, but above all because they don’t know who they are.

But if Italy is crying, America isn’t laughing. Already a few years ago from the other side of the Atlantic, Boston, signs of alarm were sent in a government inquiry concerning the quality of instruction at Harvard University. Its conclusion is heavy as lead, “ we entrust our young people to Harvard and get back “men with hearts of stone.” The bitter conclusion is that, despite scientific and material progress, we’re behind in respect to the marvelous project of the Academy and of Plato’s “dream.” That school model, those higher education institutes that much later in medieval times would be called universities, were schools of thought born around a master, presuming closeness with his disciples in enchanting places chosen for the magic of their history near water sources or rivers. Not by chance the Academies were near the Cefiso, the High School, east of the campus, was nestled between the waters of the Eridano and the Cinosarge, to the south of the city where the cynic Antistene taught, was near the Ilisso; Water, besides being a symbol of life and conscience, was used for ablution. In these schools the culture of the body and the spirit were two profiles of the same reality – indivisible.

But once the roots were cut with the ideal Greek model, the values which inspired their birth dried up and the university, became its own opposite without even changing its name. Modern campuses reduced to institutions with a soul are to the real universities and the Inquisition is the primitive Christianity. Students and families accept all this with calm desperation. If on one side the Conference just concluded in London was valorous enough to declare “the Art of self-discovery” as the central element in the education of the future, its useless looking through the acts for the answer to the question, “But how?” How could the actual universities ever transform themselves in Socratic schools? Which divine finger will inscribe on the eardrums of modern campuses the eternal Delphic motto: Know Thyself? With which programs, methods and docents? In the twilight of the western academic panorama there is only one light that can orient the lone wayfarer who as Diogene searched for the individual, a university with a soul where the formation of the person is at the center of every activity and self-knowledge is in top priority.

It’s the European School of Economics, which has recently celebrated at the Lucca Campus the tenth Philosophy Day, the celebration of creativity and philosophy, where students coming from all the Italian and European ESE campuses and have presented reflections and ideas about every aspect of life. As far as we can see this is the only case in which the philosophical research and self-study are for each student an integral part of the academic program, at the heart of economic and international finance studies. Along these lines, next Monday , June 30th, at Rome, Emma Rothshild, wife of Nobel Prize for Economy Martha Sen, will present her volume entitled, “Economic Sentiments.” On the trail of Adam Smith and Condorcet this work on the individual and sentiment, the values and motivations of the soul and the causes of human action and of the same economy.

Returning to the Times Convention – it concluded with the announcement of the Writing Prize. Palgrave Macmillan and Times hold a competition and invite a 2000-word essay on the theme “What are Universities for?” First Prize 2000 Pounds and publication in THES, the Times’s Higher Education Supplement. Good luck and good work to those who participate!