Prencipe: 'Luiss increasingly international, innovative and interdisciplinary'

Which one?

The entire western population, and the Italian population in particular, is becoming increasingly long-lived. A boy a girl is born now has a 50% chance of living to be 105 years old. Generation Z boys and girls have a 50 per cent chance of living to be 100 years old. So they will have careers of 60, 70 years. So we have to teach them what they have to learn. Here this exogenous structural feature has very heavy implications for universities and the idea of learning to unlearn becomes fundamental. If I have to work for 70 years, I have to be able to give up elements of knowledge and methods in order to learn others. I have to be conpsavole that I will have to review my toolbox and leave it semi-empty.

We can define its mandate as that of the three 'I's' with internationalisation and innovation together with interdisciplinarity.

Luiss has the advantage of having international already in its acronym: Free International University of Social Studies. It really has become so if we consider that foreign students have risen from 2% in 2018 to 10% in 2024. If we only consider first-year matriculates, the percentage rises to 30 per cent.
There is also a rational motivation here. It is not internationalisation for its own sake or fashionable. Because, as colleagues from other disciplines tell us, those who manage to have all-round experiences in other cultures not only manage to understand and value them, but also manage to understand and value their own culture in a different context. As we understand it at Luiss, internationalisation, like interdisciplinarity, is also a declination of the concept of diversity. This also goes in the direction of forming leaders. The leader of the future must be able to work in multicultural contexts, and you certainly do not learn this aspect in books. You learn it in an international context and the Luiss campus today has over 100 nationalities in terms of student population and almost 40 nationalities in terms of teaching staff. There are more than a thousand international students. The international courses boast 30% non-Italian students. This percentage reaches 50% in the second year when Erasmus students arrive. We have over 300 collaborations with as many universities. So being present, living, studying in an international context allows me to be able to appreciate other cultures. Luiss courses are even more international than the Luiss context itself.

In what sense? .

We have 300 international collaborations and 70 double or triple degrees. These students not only experience an international campus, but also have the opportunity to go to a context called Georgetown university or King's college London or even Sciences Po Paris and experience another institutional culture. Our double and triple degrees are deliberately structured not on other Luiss campuses but on the campus of Sciences Po Paris or the University of Gothenburg. So the boys and girls are exposed to other cultures, other languages, other teaching methods. We have made Luiss a three-D reality, which stands for three diversities. If you want to train the ruling class today, you cannot fail to be international, and in your toolbox you cannot fail to have interdisciplinary elements. If I have a degree in economics but I don't know the language of the artificial intelligence expert, how can I collaborate with him or value his contribution? So there is also the question of knowing how to work together with others. Beyond soft skills at the end of my university course, it is a matter of cognition, of attitude, of posture. The relational dimension has to be materialised. It is no longer the long life learning of 40 years ago. Internationalisation is diversity education through a clear and precise strategy. First, internationalisation at home and then the possibility of offering students opportunities to train in another cultural, linguistic and institutional context. I have just been to Shanghai to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Luiss' first double degree with Fudan University. When I became rector we had about 20 structured partnerships, now we have 70 and we have added triple degrees: Ace, the first 'triple degree' programme in Business Administration in collaboration with Renmin University of China in Beijing and George Washington University in Washington D.C. or EUTribe, which stands for European Triple Bachelor's Degree in Economics and Business, with Frankfurt's Goethe University and the Solvay School of Economics & Management of the Universitè libre de Bruxelles. And, speaking of the future, we are finalising two more triple degrees. One in PPI with King's college in London and George Wahingotn university in Washington and the other we are negotiating will be Rome, Vienna and Helsinki in Business administration.

Let's come to the third diversity that characterised his term. Diversity as innovation, which also means inviting a Nobel Prize winner to speak to students. How many have you hosted during your term?

The Nobel Prize winner for Economics, Thomas J. Sargent, has just returned as part of the Luiss welcome lecture series that, in light of the idea of interdisciplinarity, we will also have Nobel Prize winners for literature and peace. We have also launched the Luiss research day, which will be held on 24 June and will be a moment of visibility for Luiss research in an area that also includes the involvement of Jean Tirole of the University of Toulouse. We have launched an internal call for participation addressed to all Luiss researchers or research groups to host a key note speech. We received 16 proposals. Among them were five Nobel Prize winners. A colleague from the Economics area won, who will bring Jean Tirole. We imagine it as a showcase moment for research in one area and we will repeat it every year. Still on the subject of innvoation, we have introduced a new enquiry-based educational model, especially for master's degrees, with the idea of making students the protagonists of their training and career path. The traditional lecture, which is based on the transmissive approach to knowledge, is the least effective way of teaching or learning. At the centre of our model is not the teacher but the student and acquiring knowledge is not receiving information passively, it is cogenerating knowledge. That is why we are gradually abandoning the idea of transmissive teaching, given that lectures will always be there, to embrace the educational model of enquiry, of investigation. He or she must not only acquire information, but must get into the posture of being able to generate knowledge in turn, under the supervision of the professor or lecturer.

Or external testimonials.

Exactly. This is the real point. Forty years ago Guido Carli said he wanted a different university, one that was not an ivory tower. A university open to other players in civil society. In the beginning, Luiss Guido Carli had a limited teaching staff, there were many professionals. In recent years we have strengthened the teaching staff and evolved the concept of testimony. Understood as the presence of the manager, entrepreneur, diplomat or journalist who co-designs an exponential learning laboratory with the lecturer. With this educational model, students produce knowledge obviously on the basis of a series of indications from the professor or lecturer, but above all by asking the company or international organisation to bring a challenge to the classroom that must be solved. So the group must first frame the problem, know how to ask the question and then find solutions based on the skills they have developed during their master's degree. For the past three to four years, we have organised a final event to present the solutions to these challenges, held on 31 May and called Luiss Unleash, where students can unleash their potential through a poster session. The winner is decided by a mixed business and academia jury. This year's key note is by Eric Mazur, professor of theoretical and applied physics at Harvard, who 20 years ago revolutionised the way theoretical physics is taught by working on student-centredness. The English literature speaks of act learning, to indicate the student's ability to learn the lesson but also to master a concept or demonstration. My colleagues in mathematics think that this can only be done in the social sciences. Erica Mazur is a legend. I met him in Miami where he did a key note explaining what he has been doing for 20 years. We chose him to illustrate what he does in theoretical physics and to show that it cannot only be done in management or social sciences.

Looking ahead, what challenges do you see for the university system?

I see higher education institutions, including Luiss, having to face increasingly liquid challenges, to quote Zygmunt Bauman. Just as we have abandoned the idea that universities were the only areas where knowledge was developed, we have to get used to the thought that there could be the "3+2", the "3+1", the "2+0.5+0.5" and the places where this knowledge is generated could be universities, collaborative contexts, real, digital. We are moving towards a dimension of flexibility in which the concept, the context, the tools are increasingly varied. The point is to understand and be aware that the role of the university will be increasingly challenging and complex because there are structural elements of our society that have changed radically in recent years. When I learnt to go to the classroom in England I was told that the attention span was 20 minutes, but this is no longer the case. And not only for digital natives. With a further aggravation, and I come to artificial intelligence. We have shared guidelines that perhaps need to be reviewed on a monthly basis whereby students can use it as long as they declare it. But we educators are also faced with a challenge. Why should a student come to the classroom if he or she already has all the answers with Chat gpt or can listen to a lecture on YouTube? We have to make full use of one of the pivotal differentiating elements of the role of us teachers. That is called autonomy. I am free to teach where I want and where I can and then assess the student. I have to make sure, remembering the Latin motto of Luiss ("Hic nulla fluat cuius non meminisse velis"), that the moments spent in this context and in this university are unforgettable in a different way each time.