speech president

María Iraburu

"In the very birth of new things". With this expression, the founder of the University invited those who listened to him to be committed protagonists of the times in which they lived. These words are especially inspiring at the beginning of the 2022-23 academic year, in which we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the beginnings of the University of Navarra. It is also the first opening ceremony that I preside over, and I am aware of the expectation that this may arouse, since the speech of the President, of the president in this case, always has something of a programmatic nature. Allow me, however, members of the academic community and so many friends present here, to propose to you, in the light of this expression of St. Josemaría, not so much a program Closed, but rather ways forward for the coming years.

"In the very birth of new things" speaks to us, above all, of change, of novelty. We all perceive the magnitude and speed of change. "The new" constantly surprises us: in the field of technology and Economics, as the master lecture has shown, but also in the aspirations of people, culture or the international scene, where it sometimes appears with threatening glimpses. For an institution like the university, the speed of change, the emergence of the new, could be seen as an obstacle. Our fundamental tasks, the research and the teaching, require time, calm. We may argue that the volatility of many of these new things makes their mere consideration futile, or that their complexity and dimensions exceed us. And yet, in the words of St. Josemaría: "everyone in the University and the University as a corporation has the obligation to foster concern for resolving the great problems of human life. We do not live, we do not want to live, "with our backs turned to any concern, to any uncertainty, to any need" of the men and women of our time. To remain on the sidelines, or to limit our involvement to a closed criticism would be a betrayal of our university vocation, which urges us to enter into dialogue with the questions and problems of society. What is new affects us, what is new interests us, what is new challenges us.

But we can ask ourselves, how can the university be at the very origin of the changes? I would like to answer this question with a little story. Last August I had the opportunity to travel far away, to Kenya. In informal meetings with different people, I have discovered unsuspected links between the University of Navarra and that country. One of the most inspiring conversations was with the wife and daughter of a former student, Paul Saiti, recently deceased, who came to the University in 1960. His time there was brief, as he completed his programs of study at other academic centers before returning to Africa. But, as his family told me, he always maintained the conviction that he owed to the University of Navarra the great principles of his life: the sense of ethics of work, the desire to improve one's country and finding of the spiritual dimension of life. This is not the time to recount the initiatives that this former student started in Kenya in his long professional life, but it is moving to think that the University was somehow present there. It is also like a small window in time that allows us to look back to the University of the beginnings, which with only eight years and a few hundred students was capable of transforming lives and generating change.

Paul's story reminds us of the university's capacity for impact through its alumni. They are, to a large extent, the ones who make the new present through the transformative power of the work they perform with other colleagues. And this reality is a strong call to our mission statement as an institution, most specifically to our mission statement as professors. Is the training we teach the one our students really need? Do we give priority to individuals, to each student student, in their unique and unrepeatable uniqueness? Are we capable of creating truly transformative teaching environments? Are we contributing to society professionals capable of working with others, committed to the common good so that the world advances in solidarity, in coexistence, in justice, in final, in humanity?

Every first of September the new invades our classrooms and the meeting between people that defines the university takes place. It is this meeting that can and should inspire us to amore committed teaching , more in tune with the hopes and needs of our students and with the challenges posed by society. There are many possibilities for progress in this area: methodologies such as service-learning, which favor a solidarity-based approach of the profession itself; the integration between the humanistic subjects of core curriculum and the professionalizing contents; or projects that lead our students to learn about the difficult economic, social and human reality in which most of the world's population lives, in order to try to improve it.

And now I propose that we turn our gaze to research as the other great front in which the University is a generator of innovation and progress, a creator of the new. Strategy 2025, University and Sustainability, aspires to a research open to the needs of society and institutions, involved in that great collective challenge which is to seek ways for a profoundly human development , capable of making innovative proposals and of facing the consequences of a pandemic or the destabilization caused by a war on the international scene.

In this context, the project Biomawith its dual research and expository dimension, is emerging as a unique contribution that, with the partnership of all, wants to offer the rigor and reliability of science to open new horizons of sustainable development . It also wishes to be a space for interdisciplinary reflection in which issues related to sustainability are explored, given depth of content, their anthropological roots, their ethical consequences are discovered. I take this opportunity to thank all the institutions and companies that support us in its launching. Just this week we have had the good news that the general state budgets include a budget line for the Science Museum which is part of this project. These funds are very welcome and so will be all those that may come to us.

But the research task of the University extends to many other areas. And it is here where each School, each research center, from the proximity to the different areas of knowledge, can consider what is its specific contribution through the research. Researching more, with more ambition, with more depth, is undoubtedly one of the challenges facing the University of Navarra in the coming years. An exciting and shared challenge , which will require the joint effort of those of us who work at the University and of so many public and private institutions to make research work sustainable, also economically. I am thinking, in particular, of the training of young researchers that has always characterized the University of Navarra and the need to increase the presence of students from doctorate and to obtain new sources of funding work. The association de Amigos has been core topic in these past years and I am sure that it will be the best ally to achieve this goal.

Recently a professor at Columbia University asked himself in a article "Can the University save the world?". In it he wondered what could be the mission statement of the university institution in the face of a social context full of paradoxes and so often threatening. This summer I found in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" the perfect answer in the mouth of Gandalf, a not very academic authority, although undoubtedly wise: "It is not for us to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in our power for the good of the days that are ours to live in.". And we have a lot in our hands: we work in a place of youth, of growth, of commitment. For that reason, the university, every university, is also a place of hope. I would venture to say that Christian-inspired universities are especially so: we are encouraged by the conviction that the tides of the world are in God's hands, that He also accompanies and inspires our daily work , and gives it that unsuspected projection that we so often have the privilege of experiencing. With confidence in Him, as in that October of 70 years ago, when our first academic opening ceremony took place, we begin the 2022-23 academic year at the University of Navarra.