| 01-02-2008 - Traces, n. 2
An Appeal for Reason and Freedom in the University With the publication of the speech that Benedict XVI was to have delivered at La Sapienza University in Rome, we feel it is urgent to express our indignation and our concern at the unprecedented gravity of what happened. As people engaged in our everyday lives of scholarly research and teaching at the university, we believe it is disgraceful that at a university, the designated place for the free exchange of ideas, a small minority of faculty and students should have succeeded in preventing the Pope from honoring an invitation to take part in the inauguration of the academic year and expressing his thoughts. This act plumbs the depths of ideological intolerance and is one of the blackest pages in the history of freedom of expression in our university and in civilized society. Here follows the address by Benedict XVI, in which he seeks, lucidly and with passion, to uphold “the responsibility proper to reason” as the “task to safeguard sensibility to the truth.” “The danger for the Western world–to speak only of this–is that today, precisely because of the greatness of his knowledge and power, man will fail to face up to the question of the truth. This would mean at the same time that reason would ultimately bow to the pressure of interests and the attraction of utility, constrained to recognize this as the ultimate criterion.” We cannot help feeling that the words of the Pope contained in this address are profoundly relevant to the experience of each of us. In them, we acknowledge the perspective of a more fully aware and vigorous defense of that breadth and fullness of reason, of that freedom for research and discussion, which we consider essential to the exercise of our responsibility as teachers, for the present and future of the university and therefore for our life as a society and for our civilization. When we went to press, the Appeal for Reason and Freedom in the University had |