Opening of the 2018 Academic Year

 
His Excellency Vice Grand Chancellor of the University, Father Emilio Arizmendi;

Illustrious Faculty of Professors;

Dear graduates and degree holders;

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.

 

At the door of the celebration of the University's Golden Jubilee... the long-awaited 2019 is just around the corner! I am addressing you, dear graduates and graduates, your families and also the professors, all those who have made today's ceremony possible. My congratulations to each one of you for the goal achieved and to your families who helped you to reach it, as well as to your professors who knew how to guide you to obtain it.

 

You, graduates and degree holders, constitute a new generation of professionals that we have tried to train not only with academic excellence but, above all, with solid foundations in values that are so necessary in our society today: honesty, hard work, loyalty, spirit of service... You, dear graduates, become our spearhead, our best ambassadors, the good pride that every parent has when they see their children succeed. Success that does not necessarily translate into economic terms (although they are also desirable), but goes far beyond the strictly material. You, dear young professionals, are called to serve our Region, Peru and society in general wherever you are.

 

Therefore, I would like to ask you: what memories do you take with you from these years that you have shared with us? What image will you keep of the University? Surely, that of a splendid campus, of demanding classes, of unparalleled friendships. Perhaps, you have even found here the person with whom you will share your entire life… But, today I would like us to reflect together on two themes that I formulate as questions and that you should have known or perceived closely: What does it mean to be a university student? What does it mean to be a university student?

 

There are some historical details that are relevant to answering these questions. Obviously, I will not go into many nuances, which would certainly be necessary in a class on the origin of universities, but I will mainly refer to some important milestones to answer the questions posed.

 

Specifically, I am referring to the appearance of the first two universities that emerged in the Middle Ages: Bologna in Italy and Paris in France. Perhaps you, dear graduates, and your families, are unaware of some of the characteristics of these ancient institutions.

 

The University of Bologna, founded in 1088, was quite unique. It emerged at a time when guilds or corporations had already emerged as groups of great influence in culture and the economy, bringing together workers dedicated to specific trades: shoemakers, bakers, wine makers, etc. These guilds were communities with a strong identity, founded on tradition and projected into everyday life. In these circumstances, in Bologna, located north of Rome, all the conditions were in place for a new “guild” to emerge. This city represented a crucial point for trade and for pilgrimages from northern Europe. The great heritage of Roman law and the positioning of cities after the fall of the Western Empire, as well as the presence of many law students who belonged to wealthy families, allowed them to create a corporation to distinguish themselves and, when necessary, confront the city and private professors. These students founded the first Estudio General (the name given to the University at the beginning) and, with it, defined a series of rights and privileges for this new guild. Among its first rules, some of which are still partially preserved today, the following stood out: the students designated the Rector, hired the professors for short periods, always annual, decided the working days, the vacations, etc.… These powers of the students of that time are something really unthinkable today, but it was possible in those medieval centuries that many define as dark and without freedom…

 

This example spread and was soon replicated in Paris, where many excellent professors moved… However, things did not happen the same as in Bologna. Along with the professors, there also came students with somewhat extravagant behavior, who abused the power that they had surely seen among the other students in Bologna. This led to the consolidation of another guild: that of the professors who, between clashes and fights, decided to carry out the first university strike that lasted no less than almost three years and that could only be dissolved by the intervention of an extremely powerful former student: Pope Gregory IX. This is how this Pope founded the second university strike in that city. General Studies of history. With this act, he granted this corporation of teachers a status academic, reinforced the following year by King Louis IX, who promised autonomy from political power. We thus find an institution whose mission (the search for truth) would be free from pressures, lobbies, and political decisions that could influence and corrupt its work.

 

But in both cases, although one might have the impression that students and teachers, each in their own guild, enjoyed unlimited freedom, we are faced precisely with the strength of that very institution: both the students' guild and the teachers' guild understood themselves as communities strongly anchored in tradition, in obedience to authority, with great respect for the sources of knowledge (philosophy and theology) and the main classical works, and with rules that students and teachers did not hesitate to defend with all their might since they were the ones that gave them the power to influence the cultural and social life of the place where they worked and lived and the moment they were going through.

 

As I have pointed out, the first name of the University, as we know it now, was that of General Studies where I study, I will study means effort, perseverance… The student and professor guilds were not alien to intellectual work, carried out with a passion for the truth, with honesty to seek and defend it, with loyalty to the Alma Mater to accept an academic lifestyle that – well lived – gives the institution prestige, authority (not necessarily power) and also presence in society. The academic discovered his work from the beginning, as a precious gem within a community of great intellectual value. However, a short time later, the new name –Universities – was gaining ground.

 

At this point, it is pertinent to recall the questions we had initially asked ourselves: What does it mean to be a university student? What does it mean to be a university?

 

The word university comes from the word universe: whole, everything. Today we would say “global”. The University was born in the Middle Ages as a desire for globalization of knowledge, in a profound sense: as a source and author of social and cultural changes, as an institution that seeks and promotes truth from all fields of knowledge, as a group of people who act in the service of society and who represent a species that is almost extinct: the one that is committed to “non-profit” work.

 

It is clear that being a university student means belonging to a secular institution, of great influence, which represented a break in the educational moulds of the time. But this institution responds to a model – that of community, guild, corporation – that today has returned with force, in important authors such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, also called communitarians. In effect, individualism and the desire for absolute freedom, so typical of our times, have revealed the deficit of its anthropological model. It is necessary to recover it, because we are not selfish, autonomous and independent individuals. We are social beings, in need of others and with limits inherent to our nature. Also in the professional field. The academic, the university student, is not alien to these anthropological notes. He is not a super-wise man or a super-genius. He could be and we want him to be, as long as he recognises that his exceptional knowledge and also his achievements in research are the fruit of the wealth of a community that is strengthened when it is united and when no one is a loose verse.

 

Reflecting on the identity of the University is not a task of archaeology but of biology. We are dealing with a living institution, with eleven centuries of prominence, open to change and with sufficient resources – as history shows – to face revolutions, economic and cultural crises, wars, dictatorships, ideologies of all kinds and all kinds of human threats.

 

That the University is a living institution means not only that it vivifies society, but that it receives from its members and its ideology the lifeblood that allows it to make its own –metabolize– all the concerns of the environment and influence all human realities to seek the material and immaterial well-being that every person desires.

 

And the academic, the university professor, is a protagonist of this living organism. He is not a simple employee, nor a bureaucrat, nor a businessman, nor even – when this is the case – a boss. A university professor is someone who brings life to the institution with his example, with his teaching, with his research, with his commitment to the ideals and with a magnanimous spirit that leads him to work with his colleagues and students in an environment of interdisciplinarity.

 

In order for the professor to carry out this mission, I would like to analyse the characteristics that a university professor should have, perhaps in a less academic way:

 

• The university professor is a defender of freedom, understood in its most genuine sense: as an exercise that is not arbitrary but directed towards the common good. We have just seen: the University was born as an institution that desired a healthy autonomy, which would distance it from the political powers that threatened it, but which – as a living organism – could not live without the oxygen of the university body: the student body or the professors.
• The professor identifies with the mission of the University: to seek the truth to enrich the broad field of knowledge and to transmit it to his colleagues and students.
• The professor is a global trainer, since he trains other professors, students, and researchers. The university professor not only transmits knowledge but, above all, forms the ethical dimension that every person embodies.
• The teacher is a revolutionary: he is not satisfied with what he has learned and studied, but always seeks more and wants to raise his expectations in order to innovate.
• The professor is a nonconformist who wants to refute with his knowledge, his science and his reason the ideologies that demean the dignity of the person.
• The professor is a hero who always defends the truth, even more so when it is threatened; and, in his own life, he embodies transcendent values, in times of turbulence and corruption.
• The professor is a dreamer who knows that happiness can only be found when it is sought for others. That is why he gets involved in projects of social significance, to help others.
• The teacher is a wise man who forms and radiates wisdom around him, so as not to be carried away by ephemeral fashions.
• He is also a romantic who recognizes the value of the past and, at the same time, he is an enlightened person who believes in the progress of knowledge and the future.

 

A university with a teaching staff made up of people of this character is the one that best reflects the real dimension of the university institution and the one that will be best prepared to face the future challenges of its existence. This is the teaching staff that we want to promote at the University now that we are going to celebrate our first 50 years of life. Furthermore, as we know, a teaching staff with the characteristics described, in a brief and perhaps incomplete way, is the one that started this university with an audacity that we may never be able to know but that we can be grateful for.

 

Surely now, you, brand new graduates of the University of Piura, are asking yourselves, and what role do we have to play from now on?

 

Although five, six or seven years may seem like a long time, they are not. But it should be enough time for these classrooms to reaffirm the values that your parents and school teachers surely instilled in each of you. Many of the characteristics that we have previously mentioned for university teachers must be embodied by you, although in a slightly different way and in a different environment. You too are called to be: explorers and defenders of the truth, supportive when you teach (with your actions and your example) and humble when you must listen and learn; wise and always dissatisfied with what you know; strong and capable of confronting ideological trends with reason; dreamers who realize that happiness is found in the common good and not in individual good, and bold in projecting yourself into the future. I hope that we have been able to give you testimony of these traits during these university years of cultured coexistence.

 

We are not unaware that the path ahead of you may not be easy, and that you may even have to make many changes, but we trust in you, in your professional and human qualities, just as you and your parents entrusted us with your education, even though we have probably not always achieved our goals and you have surely noticed more than once that there are aspects in which we still need to improve. We are not perfect: we know it; no one is. But we are also aware that at the University of Piura you receive something more than a diploma –an excellent diploma, by the way– and that you will represent us in the best way in the broad professional world that lies ahead, embodying one word: coherence. Peru needs women and men of one piece.

 

On June 12th we will begin the celebrations for the Golden Anniversary of the University of Piura, commemorating the 50 years since the promulgation of the law approved by the Parliament of that time, which authorized the operation of our university. We might think that with the Golden Anniversary a new page is opened in the history of the University. This is not the case; in reality, we write it every day, because in each class, in each investigation, in each tutorial, in each place on campus that our workers take care of with special care, a new line is written: these are the small battles that we fight to demand punctuality and attention in the classrooms, order, cleanliness, mutual respect and many other virtues of those who form our university community, which complement our history. Each one of these battles fought are not our victories –of the professors, I mean– but of everyone: also of our administrative and service personnel, who give us every day a clean, harmonious and unique campus, where an adequate university activity can be developed. Working at this university, which is not for profit and has a clear objective of serving society, in any position, requires a vocation and as such it extends to all times, inside and outside our facilities. There is no time to give up on our responsibilities, there should be no time for anonymity. We may seem to be dreamers, but we must act with commitment.

 

In order for this project, called the University of Piura, to follow the path forged by the first generations of professors who began this adventure, we must look to the future with great hope. This was the message of Pope Francis during his unforgettable visit to our “sanctified” land. We need to acquire an optimistic attitude, full of faith and with the most Christian virtue: charity that leads to unity. I repeat: we are a living organism and we must vivify it daily, at all times. Let us recover the great lights of the origin of the university institution, which already in the Middle Ages understood so well the value of a corporation with an identity, a mission, values, a personality and an authority that is lived as a service.

 

To this end, we count on each and every one of you, dear graduates, to continue and increase the prestige of your Alma Mater by always seeking to serve society. The search for this excellence is not selfish. Quite the contrary: prestige, as the Founder of this University, Saint Josemaría Escrivá, said, is the way to place Christ at the summit of all human activities.

 

Dear graduates, dear professors, dear families present at this event: I could go on at length, but it has already been a night full of messages, memories and emotions. I once again congratulate our graduates and graduates, as well as their families, wishing them success in the new stage that they begin today. And I encourage you not to disengage and to always be close, now as Alumni of the University, even more so on the occasion of the various celebrations that will take place around the golden anniversary of our university. Remember, this will always be your home: your Alma Mater. And the doors will always remain open to everyone. It is our wish and we also want it to become a reality.

 

I declare the 2018 Academic Year of the University of Piura inaugurated

Thank you so much.