On 1 October 2024, Professor Patrizia Nanz delivered the Yves Mény Annual Lecture at the Robert Schuman Centre, titled 'Reflexive communities: the role of universities in today's world'.
She began by stating that universities are at the receiving end of political, social, and economic pressures. Over the last decades, repeated ‘attacks’ on their autonomy have urged them to reinvent and often isolate themselves, but these defensive reactions have come at a cost.
To explore how universities can be envisioned beyond the framework of resistance (remaining open and engaged with society while preserving their autonomy), Nanz examined the key challenges these institutions face and their defining characteristics.
Using several examples, she addressed the pressures universities have been receiving since the 1970s to accommodate their activities with the demands of economic value production. This had significant implications for the perception of knowledge, which, under this framework, came to be viewed as an economic resource whose value is best determined by market mechanisms. In practice, this altered the structure of academic careers and working conditions, influencing the type of knowledge produced and creating challenges in validating knowledge and assessing its value.
“We have to ask ourselves whether something is being lost in the transformation of universities. If we try to measure and control every aspect of knowledge production, we risk losing the ability to engage meaningfully with the world around us.”, she pointed out.
President Nanz also touched upon the Draghi report, emphasising that beyond implementation strategies, transforming our societies toward sustainability demands social imagination, normative intelligence, and critical thinking, all areas where universities have a crucial role to play:
“Of course, we should embrace innovation, but we cannot do so without also thinking about the overall direction of the social transformations that innovation brings about.” She also exposed how the promotion of innovation depends on ensuring, protecting, and nurturing the role of universities as intellectual commons and spaces where deep questions without direct concern for application can be asked.
In this context, the EUI President stressed the vital role of social sciences and humanities in helping us to interpret the interconnections between the various aspects of the ongoing transformations driven by technological innovation.
In the second part of the lecture, Patrizia Nanz stressed reflexivity and community structures as key elements of universities. She clarified that ‘reflexivity’ does not mean just thinking about the world, but also critically examining how we think about it; and stated that there is no knowledge outside of knowing individuals.
“Universities exist through relationships between people before they exist through their buildings and campuses.”, she added on the nature of these reflexive communities.
Finally, she highlighted the need to safeguard the conditions for reflexivity and communities flourishing. This entails ensuring academic freedom, understood as the license to question everything; guaranteeing safe environments to engage with different perspectives, challenge assumptions, and allowing time to pursue this work without the pressure of immediacy.
“We believe that a reflexive engagement with society is fundamental for creating public value, even to fostering innovation. In the 21st century, universities should indeed be open to society, but open in the sense that they bring society within their walls and give it the opportunity, the time, the space, the pace, to think and to elaborate their experiences, and to explore possible futures.”, Nanz concluded.
Watch the recording of the Lecture here.
Discover the playlist with past Yves Mény Lectures on our YouTube Channel.