Opening of the 2015 Academic Year

 

The search for truth is not usually easy, mainly because it requires going against the grain, breaking patterns, overthrowing trends... This search does not remain within the scientific field. It extends to the person in all his or her integrity.

His Excellency Vice Grand Chancellor of the University, Father Emilio Arizmendi;
Mgtr. Reynaldo Hilbck Guzmán, Governor of the Piura Region;
Dr. Oscar Miranda Martino, Provincial Mayor of Piura;
Dr. Juan Carlos Checkley Soria, President of the Superior Court of Piura;
Dr. Edmundo Rodriguez Frias, President of the Chamber of Commerce and Production of Piura;

Distinguished academic, civil, military authorities, teaching staff,

Graduates, students, parents, ladies and gentlemen:

On April 7, 1969, outdoors, as today, but in front of an incipient stage of the main building, the first opening ceremony of the academic year of the University was held, in a welcoming and family atmosphere, which revived the best academic tradition. A few days later, on the 29th, with 97 students and nine professors, classes began. Today, the number of students, professors and workers of the University has multiplied; the carob trees, too. There are more buildings, but the atmosphere remains familiar and welcoming. And the climate of friendship and respect, as well as academic demands, remain.

However, there is one big difference with that ceremony: you, dear graduates! You are the link in a great chain that cannot be broken and you reflect the best fruit of our institution. Therefore, my congratulations to each one of you, because your graduation clearly shows the effort of everyone: of you, the graduates, who knew how to overcome no small obstacles; of your families, who also contributed an undoubtedly arduous effort; of the teachers, who were close guides on the path of their students; and of all the administrative and service personnel, who collaborated in taking care of the necessary environment for the good development of the activities.

I encourage you to continue forward with enthusiasm, knowing full well that this mission accomplished is only the beginning of a new challenge. In the years to come, there will be more achievements, but also difficulties, which I am sure you will be able to face with courage and optimism.

And that future, which is very promising for you, is the one that the University is also looking to. For this reason, I would like to refer, especially, to the mission of the UDEP that today, 46 years later, maintains its vigor and validity: the search for truth and the integral formation of students and professors based on a Christian vision of man and society. The University assumed that mission from its origins and pursues it now without doubts, without fear. All of this, with a clear objective that is a logical consequence of the above: service.

The search for truth is not usually easy, mainly because it requires going against the grain, breaking patterns, overthrowing trends... This search does not stop at the scientific field. It extends to the person in all his or her integrity. Therefore, the capacity to educate others, typical of our professors, is directly related to our capacity to serve from the university: it is open, respectful, supportive and welcoming, and fundamentally depends on the improvement of three dimensions:

Knowing how to serve and train others. This requires preparation, study, knowledge of what you want to transmit and of the person and their motivations for learning. (…) Let us not forget that we train people who will transform the world with their professional and human actions.

Knowing how to serve and train others. This requires preparation, study, knowledge of what you want to transmit and of the person and their motivations for learning. It is not enough to be learned. It is necessary to train in pedagogical action, to seek a deeper knowledge of oneself to enhance talents and put them at the service of society. Let us not forget that we train people who will transform the world with their professional and human actions.

A second dimension leads us to value what we do. To see things in their proper perspective and to value interpersonal relationships appropriately and objectively. Objective criteria, innovation and spontaneity are fundamental elements that should lead to formative human relationships, putting the improvement of the person above the norm. This improvement is the true value of our work. If a norm or procedure prevents this process of personal improvement, it must be reconsidered.

Loving what one does is, without a doubt, the most important dimension of the ability to serve. One must want to serve and love while serving. When motivations are strictly intrinsic (knowing more to improve) or extrinsic (if I know more I can earn more or work becomes easier, etc.), although these motivations are perfectly valid, they are not enough. It is necessary to have motivations on a transcendent level. The great legacy and challenge of a university professor is to expand the frontier of knowledge, to have the admiration and recognition of his peers and, above all, the gratitude and affection of all his students who are, in part, the reflection or result of his teachings, of his training.

Knowing how to do things, valuing what you do, loving what you do… Decisive actions to grow coherently as a University. Indeed, today, as we begin the journey of the last five years to reach the Golden Anniversary, we see that, in these past years, we have grown: since that April 7, 1969, we have more courses, more professors, more students and graduates. But I cannot help but ask myself: do we have the ideal conditions to carry out our mission?

It is undeniable how much has been achieved in so few years. The University has created, in the middle of the desert, a unique space for its mission; however, we still have goals to meet, and that, therefore, require comprehensive growth in which infrastructure is a good ally.

In this mission of seeking the truth and committing ourselves to it, knowing and loving what we do, we cannot ignore either the infrastructure or the main tasks of the university professor, summarized in three key verbs: seeking, spreading and living the truth.

In this mission of seeking the truth and committing ourselves to it, knowing and loving what we do, we cannot ignore either the infrastructure or the main tasks of the university professor, summarized in three key verbs: seeking, spreading and living the truth.

Traditionally – as we have just heard – the university institution has been the birthplace of culture. But the cultivation of truth does not end with its discovery. It must be transmitted, so that a wealth of knowledge is created that translates into art, institutions, history. Therefore, the various spaces of a university must be conducive to forming and transmitting this healthy concern for knowledge and culture. The new times we live in, and those that are approaching, demand that there be new spaces to accommodate more students who benefit from the development of knowledge and academic excellence that we seek to provide to all.

For this reason, I wanted to announce to you – dear graduates, students, professors and friends – that the University has taken on the challenge of building, during this year 2015, the new headquarters of the Faculty of Economics and Business and Engineering Sciences, whose classrooms will also house many of the students who come to Piura under the Beca 18 model. It is an avant-garde building, designed by excellent Peruvian architects – Sandra Barclay and Jean Pierre Crousse – who have achieved a harmonious space, which transcends the classrooms themselves, to facilitate the teacher-student relationship, mitigating the conditions typical of our beloved Piuran land: mainly, the heat, the occasional rain and the wind. God willing, this building will be inaugurated in March 2016. It will be the first milestone of an important growth, in this five-year period towards 2019.

But we know that it is not enough to spread the truth. From the beginning, our work has been characterized by teaching coherence in life with values inspired by Christianity: the truth is not only sought and spread, but, above all, it is learned to live. The University, which has always provided the means to grow in values, sees that the time has come for another bold decision: the construction of a central university chapel, which can be a reference for this coherence in life for the entire academic community.

Anyone who has attended the university knows that the activities carried out by the Chaplaincy contribute to this formation. In this sense, the chapel will be a space for reflection, in the heart of our campus, which will invite us to encounter God and ourselves, and which will welcome the families of our students, friends and workers, in the celebrations of the UDEP. It is not just another project, but a key initiative, because in the words of Saint Josemaría: “A University from which religion is absent is an incomplete University: because it ignores a fundamental dimension of the human person, which does not exclude —but rather demands— the other dimensions.”

This project will also be emblematic, not only because of the generous space it will have on campus, but also because it is the first one carried out by the professors of our recent Architecture program.

There is another relevant aspect of university life that I would like to refer to, and that is that we must not only spread the truth through teaching, or teach how to live it coherently, but we must also encourage among our teachers and students the desire to leave a mark, or better yet, a "vestige", a word implicit in an activity with great academic roots: research.

For this reason, the emblematic project of our upcoming Golden Wedding will be, precisely, a new headquarters for the Library, understood above all as a Learning Center, which will facilitate new study methodologies, also open to other researchers from different universities and the city of Piura.

Indeed, our professors and students, as well as our graduates, who have grown along with our carob trees, require a place to develop their knowledge, taking into account the new forms of study, based on discussion and work groups; in connections with professors from other universities, and with access to high-quality scientific material via the Internet, etc. For this reason, the emblematic project of our upcoming Golden Wedding will be, precisely, a new headquarters for the Library, understood above all as a Learning Center, which will facilitate new study methodologies, also open to other researchers from different universities and to the city of Piura.

This project is being developed with the advice of experts in library architecture and has also been commissioned to the Barclay & Crousse studio. The first advances they have provided us with confirm our decision to work with them.

Both the Chapel project and the new Library represent the first major challenge for the nascent Office of Institutional Relations and Strategic Projects, which has set out to finance them, thanks to the collaboration of many people and institutions that share our mission.

Our campus, after almost 50 years and without disregarding the previous buildings, will be renovated with intelligent, ecological infrastructure and great architectural quality. We will offer the city and the region of Piura new spaces to host cultural, academic and religious activities. We are firmly convinced that these projects will not only be emblematic for our university community but also for the entire region and the country.

These are our dreams for the coming years and we want you to dream with us so that we can share the joy of seeing them come true. They embody the central ideas of our philosophy: the central role of reason, with all the light provided by experience and previous scientific achievements; and that of faith, which illuminates human truth and provides the means to ensure a coherent life, so necessary today.

One last digression or application of the above. Our university has not succumbed to the temptation to eliminate God from our curricula, and even less from our lives. Nietzsche made this attempt when he proclaimed, in a well-known phrase, the “death of God.” But perhaps less well-known is another famous phrase by one of his disciples who understood his teacher very well: the death of God is necessarily followed by “the death of man.”

In our University, on the contrary, we want to materialize this commitment to human life, to its dignity, to its absolute value, placing God on the horizon, in the place where He belongs: that is, not in the experimental chain of a scientific project, but in the life - in the mind, in the heart - of the scientist who carries it out.

Along these lines, the University does not remain aloof from crucial issues that affect society at its core, such as the debate on the family. Society is in crisis because the family is in crisis. But while many denounce signs of social decomposition such as violence and corruption, some insist on finding solutions that, rather than resolving, aggravate the situation. Could it be that we have neglected the family, the vital cell of society, allowing it to become ill and no longer enliven the lives of its members? Should we not support the great challenge of recovering its authenticity, its original definition and rebuild it so that it enlivens and restores peace, first among its members and then in society? There are many ways, but from the university we can and must also help to discover them.

We want this commitment to human life, to human dignity, to human absolute value, to be realized, placing God on the horizon, in His proper place: that is, not in the experimental chain of a scientific project, but in the life – in the mind, in the heart – of the scientist who carries it out.

The Institute of Family Sciences, which has just turned 10, is carrying out high-impact research to demonstrate, with data, the influence of the family context on the maturation of adolescents. As well as these studies, from other faculties (I am thinking not only of Law, Humanities or Education, but also of Business, Engineering, Communication or Architecture), we must strive to recover the value of the family unit and of human life in all its moments and circumstances… Only when respect for others is learned and taught within the family, whatever their deficits and handicaps, will there be respect among its members and, therefore, also in society.

Looking back, we can see these same concerns in the first professors who came to the University to undertake this academic adventure that we now see become a reality. Thanks to this past, we continue to look to the future with optimism, passion and immense hope. This vision is what our Grand Chancellor encouraged us to take on during his last visit in 2010: we must become “a University of global significance,” he told us.

Dear graduates, I hope that, in the competitive world you will face, you will make these words your own: know, value and love what you do. I wish you much success in your path. I congratulate you again for the degree you have obtained and I invite you to continue being part of the UDEP family, through Alumni, the graduates office, and to see your alma mater on this campus or in Lima. I encourage you, above all, to never cease in your search for the truth, to live it with coherence.

Finally, I would like to take advantage of this moment, of special academic relevance, to greet all the members of the Faculty of Law, which is celebrating 25 years of academic life, and the Chamber of Commerce of Piura, which will celebrate 124 years tomorrow.

Congratulations to everyone!

I declare the 2015 Academic Year inaugurated.

Thank you so much!