Een visie op de universiteit
(1985)–P. De Somer– Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
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The University in International LifeGa naar voetnoot*Ladies and Gentlemen,
Let me first of all thank you, Mr. President, for the honor of being invited to celebrate with you, your professors and your students, the 30th anniversary of the Kyung Hee University, the younger sister of my own institution, to which we are tied by so many links of personal friendship and scientific relations. I am very glad to be among you and to symbolize by my presence the strength of a cooperation by which we learned from each other aspects of life and mankind that we would otherwise ignore. Universities were born in the West. Like the cathedrals, they are a medieval invention, one of the greatest contributions of the Middle Ages to humanity. There are of course great differences between those communities of scholars and students in the fifteenth century: Bologna, Paris, Louvain and the ‘Redbricks’ of the 1970-ties in Asia, Africa, America or Europe, but the similarities are even more profound. Over the centuries and in different countries, universities have preserved a recognisable identity of pattern, not only in time, but also in space. This survival of identity is a sign that the university as a small institution, has adapted itself to the environment of each age and to a variety of cultural surroundings. Over and above their obvious functions to conserve and advance and transmit knowledge, they have, by adapting themselves to the scientific and technological revolutions of the last centuries, maintained the fundamental activities of the human mind, education and discovery. As new centers of the ‘knowledge industry’, they have been the most important factors of economic and social growth. At the same time they have resisted some of the disintegrating effects of modern technology. In an age which is being pressed into uniformity by mass-communication, mass-production and concepts such as manpower, inventions stand for the encouragement of variety, individuals and dissent. And in an age bedevilled by nationalism, universities have, through their dedication to science, become the chief trustees of the only truly supranational movement. It is important under the present circumstances to recall | |
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how important this function is in a world becoming more and more fragmented into national groups. The cement of the scientific community is not a common religion or a common language like in the Middle Ages, but a common way of thinking and a common stock of knowledge. Anyone with a scientific training is a member of this universal movement and he is welcome anywhere that subject is studied. There was something immensely moving in the picture of the medieval scholar arriving on foot at a distant university and being entertained there. The university might be in Italy and the scholar might have come from Scotland or the Netherlands. But he and his hosts spoke the same language and when they came to talk, each could assume that the other was familiar with the thoughts of the great philosophers and scholars of that time. Germans, Italians, Scots, Frenchmen or Dutchmen: they were all citizens of one common-wealth with no known frontiers. That was five-hundred years ago, but a similar moving sight can be seen every-day in thousands of places. Men who have never met before, Americans and Chinese, Africans, Dutch and Koreans, find themselves completely at home in a distant university: because they are scientists who share a common way of thinking and a common stock of knowledge. When scholars and scientists were rare curiosities, this supranational commonwealth of universities had no influence. But today when universities once more ‘sit at the loom of history’, when scholars and students are numbered not by their hundreds or thousands, but by the millions, this commonwealth of universities becomes one of the hopes for the world, a meeting ground for scientists, professional men, teachers, businessmen and artists alike. It is the only existing social institution where representatives of every scientific discipline live side by side in order to accomplish a very specific role which Hutchins describes in the following words: ‘Somewhere in this distracted world there have to be centers of understanding and criticism where representatives of the great intellectual disciplines and their students come together in a common effort to discover what light our intellectual community can shed over the major problems of modern man’. In order to fulfil this mission, they have to remain autonomous institutions and the independent observers of society, by stimulating an unbiased search for truth. It must be a place where new opinions can be freely formulated and propagated, even if they are a threat to vested interests. As an institution, universities are almost the incarnation of human liberty, their essential task is to question continually what has been accepted as established knowledge and values, on which a given civilisation is founded. | |
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Such independent and interconnected critical centers of learning are more indispensable than ever. This ‘academic playground’ acts as a necessary counterbalance to man's modern world of organisation charts, machinery and management pressures, where rank is accorded to one's efficiency and productivity rating. As an unbiased partner - almost an outsider - the university is in the best possible position to seek out and solve the problems humanity is facing, whereas others might be blinded by their day-to-day pre-occupation and activities. This contribution is feasible because of the university's double role: that of an institution dedicated to the education of our future intellectuals and that of an independent, non-committed and multidisciplinary center of research. In the universe of knowledge no boundaries exist; no human races, all men and all nations of men are free and equal. In this universe, universities have the great and unique responsibility to give form and substance to cooperation between scholars, scientists and disciplines and to direct this cooperation towards the ideal of the universality of knowledge. This may never be fully attained but universities enshrine the hope for it and must work patiently to achieve it. By their internal structure they are cooperative organisms and externally their antennae are turned like those of the communication satellites to the whole world of science and ideas - in all places and in all ages. Nothing is more natural or essential to universities than the exchange of knowledge and of contacts between those who have knowledge and those who are searching for it. International cooperation is thus both the extension and the condition of their intellectual life. Cooperation on a worldwide base is not without problems and the world is not a paradise for universities. ‘Knowledge is power’ expresses one of the greatest hopes for humanity's future, but at the same time a difficult ambiguity in university life. There is a malediction hidden in the tree of knowledge and universities must worry as they gather its fruit. Their knowledge draws them closer and closer to the centers of power and in the end into the world of politics. At one time pure knowledge perhaps had its own kind of innocence, but this seems irrevocably lost as far as our universities are concerned. Whatever they do, they are more and more involved in power-structures and cannot escape. And so they are flattered, but at the same time mistrusted, courted but at the same time regarded with suspicion, by those political and economic forces which seek to seize them under their own control. Universities today are inextricably involved in the power relations of international life. The pursuit of knowledge in the modern world needs vaster and vaster resources and the famous saying can now be reversed: | |
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‘Power is knowledge, and the consequences are felt in every direction’. Knowledge which is power and power which brings more and more knowledge are in danger of being concentrated in a few rich countries that can afford to pay for it. Everyone can see the danger when the distribution of essential food or oil or mineral resources are depending on a few countries and can recognize that this can become an instrument of political pressure. The manipulation of knowledge as a monopoly of some would be more monstruous still. Universities could be manipulated in such a distribution of rationed knowledge and become induced in the tactics of governments and economic agencies which seek to control international cooperation and dominate the sources of wealth. Universities must help to prevent this happening. They must consciously strive to avoid distortions of their work by defending their own true purposes, their duty to promote open cooperation, their task of free research and critical examination and, if need be, of protest. Rather than allowing university cooperation to become exploited for political purposes, they must create an area of ‘political life’ in the world deliberately directed towards the development of an international community of universities, itself a service to mankind in general. For this it is important for them to measure what they wish to do, and what they can do, in cooperation with each other. For more than two centuries, and in a certain sense since the origin of universities in the Middle Ages, the universe of modern science and higher education has been dominated by Western culture. Even to-day universities all over the world remain dependent on the scientific acquisitions and didactic methods of the West. It is only a recent phenomenon that the new nations try to promote a greater identification with the cultural values of their own community and to establish new links between their culture and the universal culture of their universities. Higher education has to reconcile the acquisition of modern science with the cultural richness of each country: secular traditions, languages, religions, local customs, popular arts and skills, in a word all this wisdom, which has been accumulated during centuries and which has given to each nation its own particular visage. In the course of history, the West has failed to recognize that there is a patrimony proper to each community of men, that there is a plurality of cultures and a gradation of different values dependent on the particular way people have learned to express their thoughts, to work, to worship their religion, to legislate, to practice science and to perform acts. During the last decade the importance of a new type of co-existence based on a plurality of cultures | |
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has been recognized. This recognition and the mutual respect of the disparities between human collectivities will lead to the realisation of a large community enriched by the existence, as composing parts, of small individually animated groups. We have to make mutual efforts to open the East and the West to the great traditions and the prodigious richness of European and Asian culture. The cooperation and contacts between both our universities are a small contribution to this ambitious program. You can learn much from us and we can learn much from you. By the exchange of professors and students, by common research projects, we must try to surpass the immediate horizons of our own cultural environment and disclose for ourselves the universal culture of mankind. I hope that our cooperation will be a test-case and an example for other similar initiatives. I hope that it will expand and I wish to all of you that the following years should be as successful as the past thirty years. As a remembrance for the following generations that I was here to celebrate with you this thirtieth anniversary, our university sends you the following address written on parchment, the way Academics used for centuries to confer their titles of nobility.
(Zie fotocopie van het hulde-adres op volgende bladzijde.) | |
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The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven sends greeting to The Kyung Hee UniversityOn the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the kyung hee university's foundation, the katholieke universiteit leuven which was founded in 1425, offers her younger sister her heartfelt congratulation and her best wishes for future prosperity.
May your university, which has in so few years accomplished so much, develop her academic research and her educational task with ever growing vigour and ever increasing success.
May her members, professors and students alike, pursue their career in peace, happiness and mutual esteem. In particular we pay homage to the man who has infused this noble institution with his spirit, her founder president young seek choue, my dear friend, under whose dynamic guidance and inspired leadership this university has secured her position among the academies of the world, in accordance with her device ‘peace, welfare and security for mankind through education’.
The katholieke universiteit leuven is proud of the co-operation and friendship with the kyung hee university and her great leader. all hail to you.
seoul, 18th may 1979
[vignet]
prof. dr. p. de somer rector of the katholieke universiteit leuven |
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