Rector's speech: Dies Natalis ceremony

Speech by Rector Albert CORHAY, on the occasion of the University of Liège's Dies Natalis ceremony, September 25, 2017.

A university that stands the test of time and territory

B

y this Dies Natalis , our University is now 200 years old. Let's not deny ourselves the pleasure, and above all, let's take a little time, give time to time, to celebrate the event as it should be.

More than an obviousness, there's a kind of insolence here. That of the inexorable passage of time.

Let me explain.

Nothing can save us from the torments of old age and the relentless passing of the years. Except the time we decide to live in for what it is. Together, then, I propose to inhabit this present time to celebrate the bicentenary of the University of Liège.

For some, like physicist and philosopher of science Etienne Klein, time neither passes nor succeeds itself. It is "time". It cannot be taken or lost. We're the ones who talk about it, we're the ones who move through it. We are the ones who may feel we are losing it. It passes neither too quickly nor too slowly. It is time. But in the end, it's nothing in itself, without the people who occupy it and inhabit it, live in it, work in it, study in it, love in it. And die.

In this regard, Philippe Claudel, in his novel L'Arbre du pays Toraja, had this lovely phrase, " we never cease to construct ourselves in the face of the passage of time, inventing stratagems, machines, feelings, decoys to try to play with it a little, to betray it, to redouble it, to extend or accelerate it, to suspend or dissolve it like sugar at the bottom of a cup."

Anthony Giddens postulated that, in traditional societies, time did not really exist outside societies. Not that it was absent. Far from it. On the contrary, it was completely immersed in the world of everyday practices. It was with the emergence of modern and even industrial societies that time became external to social practices. It was used to scale and measure human activities, to quantify them, and even to finance or pay for them, thanks to clocks, watches, calendars, timetables, time clocks and so on.

It literally posed a problem for industrial societies, becoming - even today - the subject of issues, conflicts and negotiations around working hours, vacations, paid leave, pensions and so on. This emergence of a time external to people, companies and their activities is not without effects on our approach to the world, for it carries with it another, more challenging thesis: that of a decoupling between present, past and future. A decoupling that has occurred over the centuries.

I

n this respect, I once asked myself an incongruous question about this bicentenary. What were those who lit the fires of our Alma Mater on September 25, 1817 thinking? Were they thinking of those who would succeed them two centuries later? Were they aware of the mission that lay before them, when they probably never imagined that they would one day be Belgians? We obviously won't have the answer to this question, and our colleague Professor Philippe Raxhon has in any case confirmed that we have few traces of the event. But the question nevertheless seems pertinent.

Societies, you know, have complex relationships with time. They combine and articulate the past, present and future differently, depending on their own era. Some societies, for example, have tended to focus on the past to shed light on the future. Modernity is about to break with this pattern, with a singular acceleration of time. The past gradually became incomprehensible, the present an enigma and the future unpredictable.

After the Revolution of 1789, this movement accelerated even further, leading Alexis de Tocqueville, in his famous book De la démocratie en Amérique , to write the now-famous phrase: "The past no longer illuminates the future, the mind walks in darkness". The year was 1835, 18 years after the founding of our University.

Later still, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, we would see the rise of an omnipresent time that specialists like François Hartog would describe as "presentism". Entirely focused on the present and present events, time is supported by a growing fascination with history in progress, a history in the making, told through the press, photos, news and current events.

And, finally, isn't wondering how our predecessors would have answered the questions we're asking ourselves, and which they probably weren't asking themselves, also a purely presentist expectation?

I believe that what we have tried to do through the celebration of this bicentenary, and what we will continue to do throughout this year, is precisely the opposite of this presentist approach, or rather, this presentist temporality.

We've sought to delve deep into our roots, questioning them and discovering many original and delightful facets that we'd never even imagined. We have never stopped looking to our past, thanks to the sustained collaboration of our fellow historians, who have written an extraordinary book tracing our history. But we have also decided to look resolutely to the future.

Firstly, the exhibition at the Gare des Guillemins entitled "J'aurai 20 ans en 2030" (I'll be 20 in 2030), organized by Europa 50 in collaboration with the University of Liège, which looks ahead to the sciences, the world and mankind in the coming decades. And remember, we launched our bicentenary festivities on March 9 by sealing a time capsule on the Agora esplanade at Sart-Tilman. The time capsule was created by students from Masters programs in Political Science and Geography, who examined the future of our democracies as part of their foresight course. In 2030, these same students will be invited to open the capsule alongside students from the future to compare their work and points of view. In a way, our vision of the future, that of today's students, will be that of the past for the future students of 2030.

Looking to the future will give us the opportunity to bring together different temporalities in a future present. It seems to me that this is an opportunity to be seized. It's an opportunity to remind ourselves of the role of universities, whose traditions and grasp of reality, as well as their capacity for innovation and anticipation, mean that they must situate their actions in the depths of time, tirelessly questioning past, present and future.

Contrary to popular belief, it's not easy. As Michel Foucault has clearly shown, in the modern, presentist context in which we live, a permanent culture of danger brings us back to the everyday, to a present that's already here. We have left behind the great dreams and fears, the great myths that gave meaning to the world and humanity, to enter a world of ordinary catastrophes, dangers and daily threats.

Today, risk has become the dominant form of danger, revealing a contemporary individual who is constantly worried. Here are a few recent examples. The latest issue of Imagine magazine devotes a very interesting dossier to the theme of the collapse of the world, which is increasingly troubling our contemporaries, around global warming, the degradation of our ecosystem, the multiplication of natural disasters, not to mention terrorist attacks and nuclear risks. We have gone so far in exhausting our planet that, for many of us, it seems difficult, if not impossible, to turn back. This is what we call irreversibility.

On the other hand, new expectations are emerging: to provide sufficient resources to improve health, to extend the limits of illness and old age, and even to eliminate death. We speak of "augmented man", "man 2.0" or transhumanism, as if to deny our own limitations and weaknesses.

Is there no alternative to denial or resignation?

"Whoever speaks of happiness has sad eyes", wrote Aragon in Le Roman inachevé. On the contrary, recognition of our own fragility, of our profound finitude as human beings, is essential if we are to think about our relationship with the world and act differently, responsibly and courageously.

Acting differently must lead us to question the role of a university in the ^21st century. Indeed, the university must teach us to reconnect with the depths of time, to cultivate knowledge and a taste for knowledge, so as to anchor ourselves fully in our times, without denying the past or fearing the future, whereas modernity has, on the contrary, accustomed us to cultivating fears and dangers.

Ibelieve that these two centuries of history are something to be proud of. They enable us to understand who we are, what founded us, what makes us special, and to look to the future.

Over 200 years, we have built a university community rich in the diversity of its outlooks, its approaches and the fields of research in which it excels. Our Charter of Values is based on this plural identity. It is also expressed in our new visual identity, which says what we are all about. And finally, it is what motivated our decision to move from ULg to ULiège.

We are the University of Liège! We were indeed born Academica leodiensis. But reinforcing the Liège character of our acronym not only reveals our unwavering attachment to our metropolis. It's the expression of a desire for our University to come down from its ivory tower, to reinvest in the City, its City, to embrace the twists and turns, crossroads and contrasts of this southern city so close to the north. Of course, the University of Liège is no longer simply - and wisely - located in the city center, along the Meuse: it is spread out over a completely different territory, in a completely different landscape.

The territory I'm talking about here is not to be understood as a finite, limited space or perimeter, in the conventional sense of the term. The territory I'm talking about is a network! And I'd like to make two important points in this regard.

Firstly, this network is a bundle of institutional responses in terms of education, research and citizenship. It's made up of human resources, financial resources, interconnected buildings, web connections, networks of contacts between faculties, research centers and universities. It's made up of knowledge that circulates and is exchanged, citizen debates, words, laws, decrees - in short, of all those resources that connect us and help us move beyond the usual, agreed-upon notion of territory.

O

ur territory is both here and elsewhere. Both near and far. Both regional and international. This territory, or rather this territoriality, calls for action and positioning on the part of our University, which has made strong choices in its recent strategic plan. This plan, like a matrix, aims to redeploy our action, that of a University on the move at the heart of changing societies, a University ready to position itself in the face of challenges such as economic globalization, digitization, the emergence of new professions and the reshaping of the university landscape at the level of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation and worldwide.

To meet these local challenges, the University has chosen to equip itself with new tools, platforms for exchange and innovation: E-learning center, FabLab, newsroom, citizen initiative platform, open spaces, SPOCs, MOOCs, international partnership development platforms, amphitheater of the future, student living spaces in the heart of the city, new faculty of education, collective structure for lifelong learning geared towards the professions of the future.

I can't - and I apologize to those involved - list here all the investment measures that will make our university stand out as a player in an ever-renewed territoriality at the heart of the Liège metropolis, at the heart of Wallonia and at the heart of Europe.

A second point to make clear. The network I'm talking about has nothing to do with the old philosophical networks. The network I'm talking about goes beyond that pillar reality, and if we fail to understand the need to rethink our collaborations on a renewed basis, then we will have failed.

I've had many opportunities to express my views on this subject in the press and on the radio, in the context of the announced merger between UCL and Saint-Louis. Although three rectors spoke out against the merger, they in no way constituted a secular front or "slingshot". On the contrary, we argued in favor of going beyond this logic of pillars, by advocating open, pluralistic geographical collaborations, in the spirit of the landscape decree.

Iwould like to remind you of one fundamental point. Whatever the Organizing Authority, higher education is financed by the French Community of Belgium. In this respect, all higher education institutions are public players, even if some of them have private status. And I would counter the simplistic argument that competition leads to healthy emulation between institutions and encourages excellence with a simple analysis of our past. Increased competition has only impoverished us all, and thus had a negative effect on the quality of higher education and research.

The competition between institutions has gone on long enough. We must become the public players of a renewed territoriality, with a public mission of education and research. Our universities, institutes of higher education, schools of the arts and institutions for social advancement have a duty to offer quality higher education to as many people as possible, while adapting it to the needs of society. This can only be achieved by working together, sharing our programs and knowledge.

Dear Minister,

Fellow Rectors and Vice-Rectors,

Dear colleagues,

Ladies and Gentlemen

Through this bicentenary celebration and this tireless questioning of our relationship with time, we can serenely affirm that the University is more than ever facing fabulous and very real challenges in the face of the territory, its environment and the people who live there.

We will rise to these challenges! But it will require determination, strength, vision and courage. We can't do it without drawing on our deepest roots, without looking as far ahead as possible, without anchoring ourselves at the heart of this renewed territoriality around our knowledge, our techniques, our culture, our capacity for innovation and creativity, and our confidence in a dense and responsive civil society.

Our University is two centuries old. A University that has stood the test of time and of the world.

Let's wish it a bright future.

Pr Albert CORHAY
Rector of the University of Liège