After the end of the university

(Italian version) [1]

In 1931 Mussolini asked the Italian academics to swear allegiance to the Fascist regime. Only a dozen of them – out of 1600 – refused to subdue. The best minds were already abroad: Piero Sraffa was teaching in Cambridge as an exile, and scholars like Enrico Fermi who were working on the most advanced frontiers of physics were already in the US.
Something similar is happening today in this country where twice in a century totalitarian barbarism has found its political shape. While Berlusconi government is destroying the public school and the University, the academic class is not less coward than it was in 1931.

Italian media populism is no more isolated in Europe. Hungary, Finland, even France are more and more polluted by the anti-cultural barbarism. But the aggression against autonomy of knowledge is not a remnant of ancient fascisms: it is perfectly consistent with the neoliberal politics of submission of the education system to the economic dogmas, and to the interests of financial capitalism.
Media populism and neoliberal ferocity go very well together. Ignorance and right wing parties elections victory feed reciprocally. When the right wing parties win the elections their main occupation is destroying public education and spread media conformism. And in turn ignorance and conformism help the right wing parties to win elections.

According to the legend, nine centuries ago in the city of Bologna the first European University was founded. The raise of the University was linked with the liberation from the theological dogmas. Autonomy is not only a political or juridical feature of the University, but the essential mark of knowledge. Without autonomy knowledge is nothing but propaganda, dogma.

Bologna is also where the European governments decided in 1999 to end autonomy of knowledge, and therefore to extinguish University. During the zero-zero decade research and learning have been submitted to the economic dogmas of competition profit and endless growth. Then, in the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008 a true dismantling of the public University has began.
In the Bologna Chart – a text signed by the Ministries of Education of the European countries – the formal subordination of teaching researching and learning to the new dogma of Neoliberal economy has been officially asserted. During the following decade the process of privatization of educational structures has been advanced, but the destruction of public school entered a final phase after the financial crisis of 2008. In place of the public system of education many agencies of transmission if fractal cellular de-personalized know how proliferate. Their mission is the formation of flexible subjects who enter and exit from the recombinant process of production, and suffer the ferocious rules of precarious exploitation. The movements of students and searchers that have exploded at the end of the year 2010 have strongly criticized the dictatorship of ignorance, but they have not been able to stop demolishers.

Moving from the understanding that University is dead, European School for Social Imagination aims to reestablish the conditions for autonomy of knowledge and self organization of precarious cognitive workers.
The School is emerging in a extra-territorial space, away from the Italian barbarity and away from the European neoliberal dogmatism, and its first task is a re-imagination of the European mission.
After 1945 the mission of the Union was peace and overcoming the traditional divide between German Romanticism and French Enlightenment.
In the 80s the mission of the Union was the unification of East and West, and the overcoming of the
dictatorship of the Soviet Empire.

Now what? Now the mission of the Union seems to be only the dogmatic assertion of the primacy of the Economic dogmas on knowledge, science and technology. No wonder if Nazis rise in the national elections of many European countries, as any imagination of European future seems drowned.

In 1087 the University was created as a place for the elaboration of technical, juridical conceptual features of the bourgeois society. Today autonomy of knowledge is condition for the creation of the new forms that European society will build, in order to come out from misery and depression, legacy of financial dictatorship.

This is the intention of SCEPSI [2]. An ambitious intention, indeed. But only courage and ambition can brave  barbarity.

In the name of Pyrrhon from Elis, enemy of any dogma.