01-04-2007 - Traces, n. 4
Broadening reason

Reality and the
question

A group of State University of Milan students judged a university-sponsored conference on embryonic stem cells they attended in late January as “too narrow”–too narrow to allow questions, too narrow to permit the formation of a judgment. “An industry fair of opinions,” they called it. These eight students protested with a letter to the professor who had organized the conference, sending copies to all the students of the State University, and in the midst of the ensuing controversy, with its rejoinders, accusations, and media exploitation, there also came forth new discoveries and relationships. The following pages recount what happened, in the words of the students and a professor

by Davide Perillo

A page with three questions was enough to send half the university spinning into a tizzy, or to kindle it back to life, depending on your point of view. Theirs was crystal clear, and when they left the conference on embryonic stem cells organized by UniStem of the State University of Milan, their heads reverberating with the opinions of scholars who theorized about “different stages of value in human life,” they drafted their “Letter to a Professor” (Elena Cattaneo, the conference organizer), which even ended up in the papers. Why? Because of the questions they asked. “Is it possible to do research without asking the main question: What do I have here in front of me? In the case in point: What is the embryo? Is it human life?” It also hit the papers because of the signatures, those of eight students from the university’s science faculties. This was enough to unleash the usual conditioned reflexes in half the newspaper media (“CL on crusade against stem cell use,” read the article in L’Unità, a major Communist daily newspaper), the offended reaction of the professor (“The letter is so oversimplified, inaccurate, and circulated by improper methods that it’s unworthy of a response”), and the attempt to explain everything away in terms of politics, since “everybody knows that university elections are coming up soon.”
But it wasn’t that simple. Those “CL kids” didn’t care about labels. They were as stubborn as the topic they’d set out on the table for discussion. They persisted, proposing a conference open to everyone to allow further discussion of the issue, even inviting Professor Cattaneo, and the professors who had taken sides for and against; even among the staff the question stirred up souls, and alongside those demanding censure of the disruptive students, there were others who collected signatures for a letter of support for “their concerns, which are far from banal.” So, questions continued, and gave birth to other questions, the most important being: What is going on now at the State University? What has grown from this gesture of freedom?

Questions without answers
“We can start out from a fact: nobody has answered our questions,” says Michele Benetti, one of the signers, a Physics student and President of the Conference of Students of the University of Milan. “We’re still waiting to be able to begin working on the issues we’ve raised. It’s not an off-base demand–we touched on some worthwhile points. We wanted to make it known that research is being done on human embryonic stem cells at the State University. We wanted to foster discussion on what that embryo is. If you don’t ask this question, you’re not using reason. In fact, that conference wasn’t a challenge to the truth; it was an industry fair of opinions. Nobody talked about what they had in front of them.”
So then, for responses, they got fits of piqué, at least for the moment. But alongside the main question, others were raised, about merit and method, about the use of reason, as well as freedom of expression. Can students ask questions? Can they always ask them, or only when and where others deem it appropriate? This would seem to be the opinion of those who complained that the students “should have spoken during the conference, and not afterwards.” Freedom, or probation? “It’s as if we’re bins to be stuffed full of information, but nobody dares to raise his head,” says Agnese Taboni, a Senior in Pharmacy. “Today at the University, it’s a lot easier to occupy a classroom [as they did during the Sixties protests], than to ask questions. If you do an “occupation,” you’re actually under control. But if you use your head, you’re not; you’re an intimidator.” The result? “This controversy made me decide. I said to myself, ‘Agnese, what truly interests you? What are you willing to give everything for, even to risk your good name for?’ And I threw myself into this.”

The royal pains
It was true, their good names suffered. Professors would see them and say amongst themselves, “There are those royal pains,” and classmates would clog their e-mails with not exactly delicate comments. “But among a lot of us, a bond has formed; there’s discussion, encounter.” There’s life. “We’ve even gained richer relationships with our professors,” adds Michele. “This is the most exciting aspect, in many regards.” Out tumbles one anecdote after another, facts, little episodes charged with meaning. One student stopped a professor to talk, and as they concluded, the professor said, “Thank goodness there are still students like you.” Thank goodness? How many professors would agree? How many realized, or wanted to realize, that the issue went well beyond the stem cell controversy, embracing the topic of reason, and what it means to be a teacher? Deep down, the university is based on this, or, at least, it should be. Instead… “Instead, I don’t know how many among us got the point: what are we doing here at the university, us and the students?” queries Carlo Soave, Full Professor in Plant Physiology. “What’s at stake here is the current student–teacher relationship. In the face of questions of this kind, the normal reaction is no longer to try to understand the origin. They just try to package them up. But if this is the case, it means that the relationship of kinship between us has broken down. You don’t educate if you’re not in some way a father.”
In fact, it was Soave who wrote the other letter, with the signatures of other colleagues, and saw it delivered to University President Enrico Decleva, who took note of it and forwarded it with the concise but effective heading: “The university is by its nature a place for discussion.”
What were the effects of his letter? Some people got even nastier, others shrugged, but still others began wondering about a model of university where, Soave relates, “students arrive at eight, attend lessons until two, gobble down a sandwich, and continue with laboratories through the afternoon. Everything full, everything organized.” It seems more like a production plant for rearing scientists than a place for dialogue and comparison of ideas. “When I was at the university, it was normal that a student like me, at the age of 22 or 23, would write a term paper on Neurophysiology and present it for discussion during the lesson. Today, no. There’s no place for the student’s contribution. Maybe we should be asking whether this is right or not.”

Beyond the university
That’s a good question, one too big to remain confined behind the walls of the university. In fact, the seeds of their questions were carried beyond the little garden of the university and, newspapers aside, provoked serious debate, expressed in letters and e-mails. The students even received one from a father of three in the Friuli region in northeastern Italy, who wrote of his memories of high school, where “the CL students, implacable as mosquitoes, wrote, spoke, and distributed flyers.” He commented about the current situation and spoke of his daughter, who attends a school tied to CL, someone he’s seen “grow up serene, and who maybe one day will resemble you: a young woman who won’t swallow the dogmas of political correctness, who will be a bright young upstart, who’ll ask questions and expect answers. I want to thank you, because people like you strengthen our faith in the future.” “Tomorrow evening we’re going north to meet him,” says Agnese. “You see, the most important thing to me is meeting these people,” adds Riccardo Branca, a fourth-year student in Pharmacy. “It’s not a conflict between theories; it’s putting what we say to the test of experience, that life is worth living.”
This is also why, controversy or not, they continue the battle about merit and method. “I don’t care about the sensational headlines or being quoted in the papers,” says Michele. “I care about being in a place where you continually learn to use reason in this way, where I can continue asking myself the why of what I do and the reality I have before me. I’m grateful to have a place like this.” Grateful. Like Ettore Barbagallo, who studies Philosophy and adds only one comment, in closing the discussion: ”I’ve understood better what the Pope says, that we need to broaden reason.” And live.