ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT, MARY ROBINSON, AT THE ADAM MICKIEWICZ UNIVERSITY, POZNAN
ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT, MARY ROBINSON, AT THE ADAM MICKIEWICZ UNIVERSITY, POZNAN, ON 24TH JUNE, 1994
I am greatly honoured to receive the recognition of this university and deeply moved by the warmth of your reception. The honour is all the greater because I know that it is not given lightly or in a purely symbolic fashion but on the basis of an appraisal by scholars of the one to be honoured.
Since coming to Poland, I have had a sense of being in familiar territory. This may reflect how much we have in common: our similar historical experience as the tides of history flowed over our peoples and submerged each of us; our resilience in face of adversity; and, above all, the values we share. Today in this University, this sense is stronger still, for I am conscious that the community of scholarship knows no frontiers and no strangers, and that among the many values we share is a common heritage of learning which helps to define what it is to be European.
Of the many crimes our divided continent has suffered in this century, one of the most insidious and destructive was the attempt to block the free exchange of ideas between our peoples. I say "attempt" because it did not wholly succeed. Institutions such as yours kept learning alive through dark times; and ideas, intangible but powerful in their effects, seeped through, and flowed around the walls which those who feared freedom had built to keep them out.
Today the prospect of a new Europe has opened before us. Our writers and our universities are called on to revise the atlas of our civilisation, to draw together again what had been sundered for a time; and to define values for a new century. In this endeavour, we must insist that our children will never again be schooled in hate or fear or distrust. We must teach them with clarity and passion and with a sense of urgency, for we have witnessed the fragility of our inheritance.
We will need, in particular, to be clear about the relationship of the intellectual, the writer, the university to society. I have always been concerned about that relationship and it may be that this is what led me from the academic to the political life though I have been careful to keep links with both. On the one hand I reflect that for centuries the work of scholarship has survived the passing of kings, tyrants, wars and plagues. It had done so with difficulty it is true; and through the courage and fortitude of scholars, some of whom have suffered in consequence. But it has survived. And yet, I ask you, important as is the freedom of scholarship, is it enough? Can we concern ourselves solely with academic freedom and not be concerned with freedom itself?
I have also often wondered about our role as educators. Is it enough to teach law, if we are not also concerned with questions of justice? What value is a study of philosophy, if it is not informed by ethical considerations? How can we be obsessed with logic or with the intricacies of language and have no regard for truth or the meaning of words? Are our students to be taught to be mouthpieces of orthodoxy or critics of the system? Let us be very certain of our answers to these questions in the coming years and let us be conscious that our answers may define the future of our continent.
Above all, let us be confident in the value of what we do. There are constant calls for relevance, for the provision of marketable skills for our young people, for greater respect for market forces. I do not deny that the university curriculum must be relevant to the needs of society but let us be quite clear what those needs are. We live in a time of unprecedented change; we are witnessing a very revolution in the way we communicate and process information. What our society will need are balanced, rounded individuals who can think for themselves and who have strong analytical skills.
But if we are not to be overwhelmed by change we will need above all, the support of certain lasting values which the University, more than any other institution in society, is committed to uphold and promote: the free inter play of argument and discussion; a critical approach to the orthodoxy of the times; a passion for truth; and freedom to express the ideas which emerge from the restless questioning surge of the human intellect.
Let us be quite unambiguous about his. It is right that we should take account of market forces but in our marketplace our primary concern must always be the competition of ideas. Our medium of exchange is more valuable than silver for it is an alloy of all the subtle forms of argument and communication that we have devised. Our capital is more precious than gold because it is human capital and is beyond price. We have not striven to defeat the manifestation of one form of barbarism in our continent for it to be replaced by another.
It is right that our universities should seek to be relevant to the needs of society. But what society most needs, whether it realises it or not, is a continuous constructive but critical judgement from within. So the University and the writer will have to continue to assert the right to stand at a tangent to the rest of society, to take an oblique but engaged view. In society's own interest we ask for the freedom to be critical in analysis; dispassionate in the search for knowledge but passionate in its defence.
There is much cause for optimism. Opportunities for travel and new means of communication unknown to previous generations diminish of borders and shrink the size of our continent. The European Union has initiated imaginative schemes such as Erasmus and Tempus to encourage the mobility of our students. Exchanges of students and scholars are at unprecedented levels. In the interplay of ideas we will reintegrate our continent and build a new Europe. Poland, I suspect, has a particular role to play in this process situated at the very heart of the once-divided continent, it can be a bridge between east and west and repair the divisions our intellectual life has suffered over the past fifty years.
In one of his poems, my countryman Seamus Heaney has written of the "Republic of Conscience" whose sacred symbol is a stylised boat:
"The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,
The hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye"
In the new Europe we create together, let our academics claim dual citizenship and be also members of the republic of conscience: we need to listen carefully, we need to write bravely, we need to be ready to speak out and we need to be ever-vigilant. In our new republic let our anthem be the "Incantation" of a Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz:
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we can write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope....
For more than two thousand years in Europe, beacons of reason have been lit against the darkness of chaos and anarchy. Today in our universities those beacons form a constellation which illuminates our continent. We are the guardians of the flame. Let us guard it well.