Senior University, testimony of a professor
It was summer, but we lit the fire. In a corner of the Sierra de Gredos, in this very house, my grandmother was telling me about her experiences during the Spanish Civil War. "I came to Madrid to spend three happy days, and I spent three sad and hungry years. How much I remember her now...
He also told me his stories, putting different voices to the characters; and he read me legends from Egypt. We were outside of time, outside of space, in one of the places in the world that is closest to heaven, the inner castle. Stone and sky, memory and story, word and fire. The eternal present. The oral tradition hypnotizes me, I can't help it. Also the work well done: a hand writing, a few hands working, someone patching a printed fabric of many colors. Those hands... were parchment flowers that took care of me and guided my steps. That's why I called my grandmother Güella, because for me she was like the grandmother cat that takes care of her grandchildren, these kittens that clumsily put their paws where the big white cat printed her footprints. She is a grandmother, footprint, Güella. She looks at the horizon of the years and the experience, apparently alien to the instant; although the centuries throb in who guides those who will live.
It may seem ridiculous to you, but we were in such isolation that my aunt had to call us to find out about the 9/11 attacks. History changes in an instant, and live. Is history made up of ruptures or continuities? The truth is that I don't know, I would say that it is a continuous transit. But what I do know is that with my grandmother I learned to love things made with my hands -including churros with chocolate-, the beauty of stories and I discovered my vocation, the history of art. It is curious, because now I am the one who teaches many older people to discover -or rediscover- this same vocation. And here I am, dedicated to teaching those who are living their second youth, teaching that in our university system is considered second rate... reasons that reason does not understand.
Do you like hierarchies? Not really, maybe because I was the youngest of both families. I have to admit that sometimes I've let myself be carried away by stereotypes, but soon the situation was redirected. The classes in the University for the Elderly program gave me the opportunity to play with hierarchies: the young person teaches the elder and also the student teaches the teacher. Teaching is a theater, and I had many stories to live with and many desires to get on stage. But what I didn't expect was that finally the audience would respond with such passion. We had achieved the total work of art.
Teaching adults is starting from an advantage: they still believe in the story of the teacher's authority, although they also have more weapons to denounce undemanding profiles. They do not mince their words and are there because they want to be; if they are not interested, they leave. It is a constant, dynamic challenge, open to any surprise. As in any human group, there are pearls and there are pedants. But I am glad that the university spirit can live, at least, in the older ones, because the university is to discuss and question to add. Young people are afraid of the abuse they suffer from the institution and its ministers: lack of empathy or understanding, a failing grade, a bad average, a precarious future. Young people promise a whole world of possibilities, the older ones have a whole world of possibilities to contribute. I think this is the main difference between one and the other. Although we understand that young people are - or we are - in a position to start a long journey, with all its freshness and exciting risks, the older ones already have much of this work done and offer it to enrich the university spirit, with less fear and with a desire to contribute to the group. Due to their different biographical situation, the seniors do not look so much at the need to carve out a career in a competitive world that shakes us and of which we are victims. This tranquility also gives them more freedom; and freedom, as Gombrich would say, is the key to mastery, whether in art or in life.
I believe that one of the main challenges of the university is to find the perfect antithesis between an institution that represents a qualified authority to grant degrees - and all that this entails as a system of supervision and control, and at the same time, controlled - while it should stimulate without limits the exercise of freedom, of debate, of idealism. But it is also necessary to offer answers to immediate problems, while cultivating a vision in perspective, long-term projects, idealism beyond the occasional need. I do not believe that the solution is the supposed quality controls, but rather excellence based on civility and merit. It is the eternal debate, education or police?
Perhaps many people opt for the University for the Elderly program precisely because the degree obtained - in their case - is symbolic, but in exchange it offers greater space for freedom than in a normal career. Is this a bad thing? I wish we didn't have to ask ourselves these questions because there is room for everyone at the university, young and old, students, teachers and other professionals. Perhaps the program for seniors is not so much a segmentation of this group, as a compromise solution to the lack of real alternatives for many of these students to have a place in the university. A similar problem is offered by the doctoral studies: the bureaucratic yincana or the diversity of criteria are such that many candidates desist or directly can not access. The university should be a teacher of freedom and perspective. In this mission the elders would also have much to contribute. On the other hand, it is not necessary to segment groups or lower the level for those who have decided to embark on the university adventure. It is an invitation to initiate a process of personal growth and the teacher contributes by helping to reinforce the student's criteria and method. I am also against the supposed adaptations of the classics or complex subjects. It is to treat certain groups - among them the elderly - as if they did not have the capacity to admire, understand and apprehend something excellent, profound and universal. Euclid already said it when Ptolemy I asked him for an easy method: "There is no way of kings in geometry".
The University for the Elderly program is also called the University of Experience. The polysemy of this word could not be more timely. What are our students looking for? In general, a 'real university experience'. Here they are not only looking for what a cultural center, an academy, an association or similar can offer them, but something specific that they believe only the university can give them. A question of environment or something else? For now, they value the camaraderie, the spirit of work, the diversity of people and ideas. But is this the university? The university is what each person wants it to be; here is its triumph or its misfortune. My students want it to be a full-fledged experience and each one builds their meaning. They appeal to their freedom, and if it is a virtuous freedom, it is a masterful freedom. In these cases, the university is a very large space, a space of those who enlarge the soul. For some of them it is a new situation in their lives, which before they did not want or could not afford; for others, it gives them the opportunity to revive the best stage of their life and to improve it on the basis of their accumulated experience. Some come alone, although in general couples and groups of friends abound. Even when we have done online courses, they see my classes in the company of other friends or relatives in the house I play. It is fun to imagine them following the classes with the passion with which one reads a book that moves us or with which one follows a series that keeps us on edge: such are their testimonies.
But what else are they looking for? Above all, they are driven by their passion for knowledge, an enormous interest and curiosity in all subjects, a desire to work, to continue to challenge themselves. They want to be active, to count, to be and to feel in movement. There are systematic profiles who want traditional classes and other systemic ones who are willing to do anything. I choose to provoke both of them; it is also my experience. In reality, there are many shared experiences and a beautiful feeling of complicity is generated, not without surprises that stimulate us mutually. On the other hand, they are very careful with the notes, even if I send them the presentations I use in the classes. Perhaps they do this because they understand that good notes are part of the experience. But whether they take notes or rely on the materials I send them, they all agree that they like to learn and remember what they learn. They like the rest, something between the material and the spiritual, something affective and identifying. On one occasion, when I taught a course on Asian art to which I have a special affection because I had great teachers and because I have lived it, my students confessed to me that at first they signed up out of curiosity or simply to try it out, although they were afraid of facing a subject that was unknown to them and that at first seemed more difficult to assimilate because of the differences with our culture. But at the end of the course they were so satisfied with themselves that they told me that now they were not only interested in Asian art, but that their next trip had to be to Asia. They have proposed me excursions outside the university agenda and, of course, we have done them, although Asia and Egypt are pending. This brings me back to the stories my grandmother used to tell me.
I like to tell stories, but I pray to the gods - and to my students - that they do not make me fall into the figure of the professor who only listens to himself. I hope that one day the university will be saved from looking at its navel, self-satisfied with how its ruins are devouring themselves in a bureaucratic, meticulous, mechanical orgy. The gods throw unintelligible oracles, but the elders are clear. So every year I force myself to review my materials and enjoy telling you about all the new things I have been able to incorporate. On the other hand, from the Program we are encouraged to present new courses and monographs every year; and the veteran students even demand me to tell what paths my own investigations are taking. Archaeology, art history, travel... travel is what has brought us together the most. It is striking how important the relationship between teaching and the spatial environment where it takes place is. When I refer to space, I speak not only of the physical place but, above all, of the emotional horizon.
The emotional horizon is the same thing that encouraged me to start this post with the story of my grandmother. It is the identity, it is the belonging, it is the community, but also what is beyond, what we ask ourselves in the great altarpiece of the world. Sharing responsibilities, walking together, writing with our eyes and reading with our hands... a kind of twinning that is what truly makes the university universal.
