HRinI is delighted to include this contribution by Prof. Costas Douzinas of Birkbeck College, University of London. Prof. Douzinas is a renowned specialist in human rights and legal theory and the history and philosophy of human rights. He is also Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.
Between the eleventh and twelfth centuries the War of Investitures had dominated Europe. Barbarossa’s re-assertion of the Holy Roman Empire was a defining moment in the development of modern Europe in the relationship between church and state and the creation of the European University. In 1158, four eminent professors and doctors of law, Bulgaro, Martino, Jacopo and Ugo di Porta Ravegnana – members of the school established here in Bologna by the great glossator Irnerius – were invited to appear at the Diet of Roncaglia by the Emperor. They were asked to advise on the relation between Imperial Law and local legal and political institutions particularly those of the powerful Lombard cities. The co-operation was beneficial for both parties: The jurists, trained in the imperialism of the Justinian code, drew up a list of regalia or regulations, favouring the Emperor against local claims with one dissenting voice that of Martino. They demonstrated, with detailed commentary, that Roman Law was supreme law, and its authority rested with the empire not the cities.
The emperor’s gain was legal recognition. The reward of the jurists was an Authentica Habita, a decree later seen as the foundation act of Bologna, the oldest University in Europe. This grant of privilege had 3 elements: Each scholar could choose to recognise the jurisdiction of his Professor in all matters affecting him. Secondly, the Authentic, granted everyone who travelled for the sake of study, imperial protection on their way and during their stay at the place of learning, a privilege later extended to the student’s return journey as well as to exemption from all tolls, duties and customs for students and their servants (this is the beginning of the duty free now it is being phased out, academics should claim that they have historical claim to it). Finally, it prohibited the use of reprisals against students, a common and strongly resented practice under which if an English student, for example, left Bologna without paying his debts, the Bolognesi could recoup their money from other English students.
This was a seminal moment in European academic history. Bologna started as a Law School but developed out of the ” Liberal Arts” which flourished here early in the eleventh century. Grammar and rhetoric were taught as well as dictamen the art of composition. The first University brought together the study of law with what we now call the humanities. Later theology, music mathematics were added to the curriculum. The fame of the professors drew to Bologna students from Italy and from every part of Europe. Their number at the beginning of the thirteenth century was 10,000 Bologna was the first University trying to attract foreign student. The University became known as the “Mater studiorum”, and its motto, “Bononia docet”, Bologna teaches, was its proud claim.
What does the Authentic Habita, Bologna I teach to Bologna II or the Sequel, the Bologna process? First Internal jurisdiction that is academic freedom and academic asylum, absence of external interventions. The university is based on the absolute freedom to question publicly and to declare freely what research and knowledge tell us about truth. Thought must be unconditioned, indeed though is the experience of the unconditional, of asking about everything, including the value of questioning itself as well as the value of truth. This is even more crucial today when truth has multiplied into many truths. If Bologna was the mother of study, the European University remains the mother of truth.
The only precondition of knowledge and truth is protection from external threats and reprisals. But this protection has never been there fully de facto and de jure. The doctors and students of Bologna acquired their academic rights, by accepting the claims of Empire and Emperor. This is where we must take a certain distance from Bologna’s history and side with the dissident, Martino. Truth and the University have always been struggling with power. The University must oppose as much as it can power, including state, economic and media power, the power of ideologies and religions. It must remain the place of unconditional resistance to powers of dogmatism, domination and oppression. But this is an impossible demand: the very possibility of the University is based on this impossible distancing from power. this impossibility makes the University possible. The mother of study, the mother of truth, Bologna I is always to come, always in the future, a future that opens the present.
Unconditionality of knowledge and truth, resistance to the powers that lays siege on the way to knowledge and impose reprisals on its practitioners. We know of many instances of attacks on Universities and reprisals against academics today, particularly in the United States, where the University has become again fragile and impotent against the demands of the various powers.
You recall that the first study was that of law. But to teach law as an art and as the sister of theology, as what we call today the Humanities, meant to open it to justice, to a double justice: one within the law its procedures and remedies and rights and another higher law or justice to which the whole of law is held to account. The University and specifically the Humanities remain still the conscience of our societies. The question of human, of what is proper to the human, on which humanism the humanities and human rights are based, is becoming again crucial in the questioning of our societies and the resistance to power we have called the European University.