Returning to the model of the university as a mission

It is almost always the case that the university model adopted by a country, whatever it may be, indirectly becomes its portrait, becomes a mirror in which to find resources and flaws, and plays a crucial role in the outcomes of a society. Rethinking the relationship between research and teaching, reflecting on what value to give to knowledge in relation to the younger generations is a noble but infrequent exercise, at times even considered a non-functional frill because it would take time away from more useful activities - the famous 'having to do' imposed by the performative vocation that characterises our age - and therefore viewed with a certain suspicion, despite the widespread conviction that not stopping to think is a huge mistake in any epistemic context. In the past, excellent thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Henry Newman, Ernest Renan, Benedetto Croce and Ortega y Gasset had dedicated themselves to this type of speculation, heterogeneous profiles, uncomfortable in relation to the apparatuses and often even on the margins with respect to the lines of debate, but precisely for this reason original voices to listen to, as Stefano Jossa does in this small but precious book, Dell'università. Una storia di idee (Quodlibet, pp. 112, euro 12), which courageously lays bare the structural crisis of a system. Jossa's aim is to reconstruct what determined in modern Europe the need to establish universities according to the democratic principle of knowledge for all and how much of these original criteria has remained alive today. We must immediately clear the field, as Jossa does. Little or nothing has remained alive because, as a result of the radical paradigm shift that has taken place in recent decades, the corporate-university model has ineluctably gained the upper hand over the university model romantically inspired by the values of study freed from any pragmatic temptation. In short, the 'economist' university ('which manages what exists', says Jossa, 'aims to make money, conceives of professors as employees, turns students into workers and aims, in the end, to be nothing more than a cog in the capitalist system') has won by far over the 'missionary' university ('which develops knowledge, opens the mind, encourages confrontation, guarantees success, improves society as a whole and promotes, in essence, a better world'). One does not need direct experience in the field to verify how true this analysis is in the light of a feeling of loss that does not necessarily have to turn into a nostalgic attitude. We have lost our compass, no doubt about it. We have confused form for substance. It seems that more urgent than knowledge is the bureaucratic envelope that permeates it. The goal of educating young people to think, in short, has been undermined by the primacy of bureaucratic efficiency, which has become a veritable fetish, the faceless god that dominates from an unreachable place and has transformed the Italian university from a workshop of ideas - the same ones that are evoked in the subtitle - into a mindless, obtusely Fordist assembly line. "If the university is no longer a place of intellectual freedom, because it is geared towards production, which automatically discards everything it perceives as useless," Jossa reflects in one of the most lucid points of his reasoning; "if the professor is no longer a competent enthusiast of the subject, but only the vehicle of a transmission of purely technical know-how; if the student is the object rather than the subject of education, because he or she "must know certain things"; the loser is society as a whole, which will have at its disposal good little soldiers capable of carrying out an order, but deprived of any critical capacity and personal awareness'. The most disquieting fact is that this is probably where the objective of western societies, once destined for opulence and now also affected by multiple systemic crises, lies: instead of training people with a critical spirit, they numb the conscience of young people by asking them to comply with numerical tables of credits, as if reading Dante's Commedia or Plato's The Republic were measurable in days hours minutes. Thus setting aside what an Alfa Romeo slogan a few years ago pointed out: 'without heart we would only be machines'.