"Everybody says, without knowing what he said, that the compass indicating north, lets move"
"Today - recently said Gerard Depardieu - the young actors are no longer afraid of being ignorant. Instead, they see this as a quality. I pity them. " Without doubt, this pithy observation deserves it to be refined to point out with this great French actor what he means by "ignorance", but more importantly understand where he observes the world to collect and this reversal of order of knowledge that bring young players he castigates to submit their supposed ignorance as a virtue. In fact, it is however not to stigmatize them or pity them - which is the same - by deploring of the disappearance of a world where high culture elite functioned as a single yardstick to gauge and characterize the other. As an example, who read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Jules Verne will recall the first meeting between Captain Nemo and Pierre Aronnax, Professor at the Paris Museum, while the latter comes to be taken on board the submarine Nautilus and discovers there, amazed, "a library that would do credit to more than one continental palace. [I have the twelve thousand volumes - said Nemo-]. This are the only ties that bind me to earth. But the world has come to me the day my Nautilus plunged for the first time under water. That day I bought my last volumes, my latest brochures, my last newspapers, and since then, I believe that humanity has neither thought nor written. " Thus the library she saw Nemo works mingle science and literature - Hugo, Xenophon, Michelet, Rabelais, Sand, Humboldt, Foucault, Chasles, Milne-Edwards, Agassiz, etc.. - With works of art and sheet music signed Holbein, Ribera, Veronese, Murillo, Teniers Delacroix, Gounod, Weber, Mozart, Rossini and Meyerbeer. "These artists were contemporaries of Orpheus as chronological differences fade in the memory of the dead, and I am dead, Professor - Nemo found - both dead as those friends who lie six feet underground! "By way of directing the conflict-Aronnax Nemo, Jules Verne outlines a philosophical question deep, true parable about our relationship to culture and what we do with that relationship. 
Indeed, Aronnax, throughout his underwater adventure, will try to understand, without ever so, why a man like Nemo, who seems more educated than most of his contemporaries, decided to break with humanity. Gold Aronnax can, as an academic, imagine culture as more than a factor of progress for reconciliation between people and as an opening to another ; Nemo, meanwhile, lets us see that culture instrument of domination may also lead to isolation, remoteness, and probably some form of social scorn. Whether they are Nemo, Depardieu's or Aronnax, all three are found with an awareness their own face to diffuse feelings they feel about a world changing before their eyes. One, Nemo decides to give up and cut the world is his. Depardieu, he prefers to complain about the new generations in the making with which he did more, he said, that the name of a profession - actor - in common. Professor Aronnax finally acting under an ethic and loyalty that lead to social passionately interested in the changes he is both actor and witness and understand the other as it occurs in him. Like Nietzsche, Professor Aronnax knows that the forces of life are greater than the forces of thought, which means, to put it differently, that we first consistency through all the interrelationships that we may built with the world is ours . is the rest, this sense that our living and Culture Committee University would like to provide the very idea of culture: a culture of diversity, always becoming, that resonates with the values of generosity, interest and curiosity that should, in our sense, underlie all political ambition to accompany creative dynamics of knowledge, sharing and transmission of culture in contemporary societies.
In 1985, Pierre Bourdieu, Chair of Sociology at the College de France, presented a joint report developed by professors of this institution at the request of the President of the Republic entitled "Nine proposals pourl'enseignement of future . After developing with Distinction his theory of cultural legitimacy, and analyzed in French academia Homo Academicus Bourdieu was both defend independence and autonomy of universities facing the "protectionism" of the state, greater democratization of access to our institutions of higher education and the limited validity of degrees by the development of their regular revaluations . Finally, in its latest proposal, the sociologist would emphasize the importance cultural exchanges, the widespread use of audiovisual aids and the institutionalization of broader links between the university and culture . Twenty-five years later, our committee chose to present the Ministry of Higher Education and Research hundred twenty eight proposals to try to encourage the development of culture at the university, but also recognition of the creative potential of our universities through the worlds of culture.
Why hundred and twenty eight nominations? addition it is a figure that speaks to all our students because it refers to a collection of academic books most read by them, we especially important to show a massive number of proposals in order to express more than symbolically, how many items and Culture University, when crossed, are able to stimulate imaginations and desires. Through this large number of proposals and recommendations, our committee also wanted to send his gratitude to the work of those who have long been working to invent and install sustainable issues in our culture as well: Entertainment services, Network A + U + C, associations and student unions and, of course, the lecturers and staff of our universities that have made these issues a daily commitment. Indeed, we are not starting from scratch. Just days after the official establishment of the Committee in June 2009, there are dozens of institutions, representatives of noscommunautés academics but also several cultural institutions who have contacted us to express their wishes to contribute ideas initiatives or simply express their interest with respect to what we could once again flourish at the intersection "Culture-University". They are all such meetings whenever rich and bubbling were born one hundred and twenty eight proposals presented here. Various by their nature or their density, different in their ambition or goal, they are nevertheless traversed by a common political denominator that brought us all together unanimously: that never considered the issue of arts and culture as an accessory or decorative, or as this "little more" in charge of compensating a sort of extra something that, for some unknown reason, our students would be deficient or more generally among our contemporaries. As noted by Pierre Berge at one of our first meetings: "We never talked about culture as much as during these last twenty-five years, but we did not notice that there are more educated people than before. In fact, attendance of the philosopher Max Stirner taught me to beware of concepts. Indeed, for him, the word freedom means nothing because there are only free men. That is why we have to consider that culture does not mean anything, but that only educated people. One must be careful not to dull contruire graduates by formatting their culture. We can not just two or three referees agreed that ultimately make them dull citator. This is not a culture that must be developed hygienic in universities. As you wash your teeth three times a day, you must have culture. We have some books of the Pleiades, is quoted, it goes a little drama, a little opera, then it stops there. The culture must not be programmed, not occasionally, it does not belong to an especially entertaining. It must be part beyond life, from sunrise to sunset without making provided a kind of priesthood. We should not ask. Culture should be part of us as we breathe, as we need to drink and eat. Culture is to put oneself in danger, it raises questions. Culture is not a bed of roses. Culture is to go to interrogations and that of imagination. It can not simply be taught. As in teaching methods to the Montessori Fresnay or the other must involve the student must eventually be taught the culture itself. Yet it is the university community as a whole must address by the university community. For, if culture can not be taught, it is transmitted and it does not happen without teachers and researchers who train and sometimes even format it. Aujourd'huiles lecturers must accompany students to brinkmanship ".
In his novel The Space Odyssey, the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke lists three loisque we could make our own and in their own way, extend the avecjustesse About Pierre Bergé: (1) When a distinguished scholar but aging feels that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but when he says that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. (2) The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture a bit beyond, into the impossible. (3) Any sufficiently advanced technology estindiscernable magic. For his part, Gregory Benford, a physicist at the University of California Irvine wanted state a corollary to that Act: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced ... And these are indeed the cultures and dialogic participants who have always based our universities it is also about value today as one of our primary sources of creativity that our students are infected. Thus, as advocated by Richard Florida, professor of urban studies at the University of Toronto, our universities can play a fundamental role in promoting the recognition of what he calls the "creative classes" . The creative classes designate an urban, mobile, skilled and connected and define themselves by bringing in the territories they inhabit Talent, Technology and Tolerance. For Florida confidence that our place in our creative classes is probably the best asset we can have, because they are the ones that promote this braindrain which is able to offer new contours to the very idea of progress. " Man - writes Georg Simmel - is a being that service abroad ability to have a passion for not chosesque concern its interests nothing. " And if something new happens, innovation, novelty in what we live, it is precisely because we are interested and that we have with the people and things to build, at some point another, a report likely to exceed truly, without us knowing exactly why, the base of what should be our initial interest. The university is a great place to open up to what those interests are disinterested. Best is often a place where we realize that not all not normal that some ideas come suddenly change the way we see or spend. Because this is how things happen in our heads: we all did once experience a foreign idea (in the sense of foreign body) which takes us unexpectedly and without which capable of upsetting the routine of our entire system of thought, or rather, we asouvent aware of the effort we need to do to accept this foreign idea, to make ours as to reconstruct all of our certainties. can take pleasure in it or not, but we know perfectly that it might take a liking to definitely make us more open, more permeable to our environment, whether near or far. As recalled by the historian Paul Veyne: "the relation of man to the things explained not only from what's inside of man. If altruism is selfishness, because altruism is "please" not to be selfish "... It is also precisely where and started our interest in others, and even more strongly the forms of thought the most generous we call "culture (s)". But let there be no mistake, our need and necessity of culture or creation always begin with a torment, so is it a torment was born the desire to write Stendhal, subsumed in a torment and determining an initial question: "How could I have behaved in one of these battles of Napoleon which I've never found?" Our hundred twenty eight proposals hope in this direction appear as opportunities to support possible all our troubles and that by recalling how, in line with Condorcet, our institution - the university - Must make every effort to "protect knowledge against the powers ", " consider excellence as the highest form of equality " and finally keep " subject of public instruction to individual wills and usefulness immediate e ".
[Excerpt from the introduction of the book From culture to the university, 128 proposals to be published October 5, 2010 by Armand Colin and full version downloadable here ]
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