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© 2020 ACCADEMIA DELLE S CIENZE DI T ORINO Via Accademia delle Scienze, 6 Via Maria Vittoria, 3 10123 Torino, Italy +39-011-562.00.47 [email protected] ISSN: 1125-0402 ISBN: 978-88-99471-26-2 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES IN SUSTAINING EUROPEAN KNOWLEDGE SOCIETIES IN TIMES OF CRISIS

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Introduction

The Academy of Sciences of Turin on 7-9 November 2019 organized, in collaboration with ALLEA (European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities), a Conference on The Role of Academies in Sustaining European Knowledge in Times of Crisis . The Conference had two main focus- es, which mirrored the double mandate created from the collaboration of the two Academies. Our fi rst goal was to investigate and clarify the role of Academies in today’s academic world. This fundamental question has long been a crucial point of debate within the Academy of Sciences of Turin, whose members have often entertained this problem in their meetings and fi nally felt the need to address it in a specifi c Conference. We must ask ourselves to what extent and in what way Academies can still carry out the task for which they were founded many centuries ago, namely, to produce knowledge. In order to answer this question, we scheduled several presentations aimed at addressing the problem from dif- ferent disciplinary perspectives. Yet, we must fi rst be aware that only large Academies or Federations of Academies still have the means to effectively perform their original func- tion of producing knowledge. ALLEA is one of these. For this reason, we most welcome its 25 th anniversary, which was celebrated at the recent Berne Conference. In doing so, we look forward to widening the network of cooper- ation between the several member Academies in the years to come. In addition to these projects, today’s society requires that all Academies – in- cluding middle-size, national or regional ones – perform new functions. While retaining a particular attention to the production of knowledge, the dissemina- tion of knowledge should become one of the paramount tasks undertaken by Academies today. In order to achieve this objective, considerable theoretical and especially practical diffi culties need to be overcome. Establishing mean- ingful connections within a social context, with other cultural institutions, and with the administration; harmonizing the cultural programs of the Academies with the tastes of the general public; dovetailing the preservation of historical 6 Massimo Mori memory and the attention for present events—these are just some of the chal- lenges that still require our continuing effort. The second focus of the conference stemmed from the collaboration with ALLEA, which suggested framing the question of the role of Academies with- in the European context specifi cally, thus including the Conference in a series of meetings sponsored by ALLEA on the theme ‘Europe on Test: Narratives of Union and Disunion’. After a fi rst conference organized in London by the British Academy, three other ALLEA member Academies (Göttingen, Helsinki, and Warsaw) discussed the crisis of the European Union from differ- ent points of view. ALLEA also suggested considering these problems against the background of a knowledge society, that is, a society in which knowledge takes on a central role in social and economic processes. The connection be- tween the European Union and knowledge society was already stressed by the European Council held in Lisbon in March 2000, when the European Union was assigned the strategic goal of developing an economy based on a more competitive kind of knowledge in order to achieve sustainable growth with improved working conditions and greater social cohesion. Most scholars in social and political sciences maintain that the knowledge society has become an essential feature of today’s world. Accordingly, the challenges it poses will determine our future, not only in Europe but also globally. By placing the issue of knowledge at the center of socio-political dynamics, knowledge societies would take the place of the outdated industrial society, emphasizing intellectual capital rather than economic or fi nancial cap- ital. Furthermore, knowledge societies improve and surpass the information society, which depends on the success of web and digital communication. While this discussion on the endurance of the European Union in con- nection with knowledge society may have a constructive rationale, there are perhaps two reasons why it is so crucial to do so now. The recent weakening of European cohesion seems to go hand in hand with two critical features of knowledge society. The fi rst is that the transition from information soci- ety to the knowledge society is far from complete. A large portion of digital information circulated through the media dramatically lacks objectivity and can hardly be considered ‘knowledge’ at all. We can think of slogans, fake news, unverifi ed quantitative data, unlikely interpretations claiming scientif- ic certainty, etc. These ‘knowledge’ contents frequently generate beliefs in the public opinion that are as quantitatively powerful as they are qualitative- ly weak. Most frequently, the triggers of public opinion include egoistic and particularistic motivations that are at odds with perspectives and strategies in- volving communities that are wider than one’s own. This attitude has been and Introduction 7 is a serious threat to the development and endurance of a unitary conscience in Europe. The second critical aspect in present knowledge societies is that of content. Even when problem setting is connected to problem solving, technological aspects are usually considered a priority in order to attain practical skills and know-how competences. This attitude involves notable social implications, since the possibility of improving one’s skills in the workplace leads to the acquisition of a higher position in production processes and, in consequence, on the social scale. However, the fulfi lment of these productive or social goals does not guarantee that growth in knowledge corresponds to a similar growth in awareness and critical capability. Certainly, knowledge societies tend to converge with learning society, but learning contents are more likely to pro- mote the achievement of practical results than the awareness of the principles and values that underlie it. In brief, knowledge, having emancipated itself from sheer information, has yet to become real ‘culture’. We can thus return now to our starting point, the question of knowledge production. In order to become culture in the broadest and highest sense of the term, technological and humanistic knowledge must join. We need, therefore, to promote the synergy not only between different technological competences but also between two fundamental ‘cultures’: on the one hand, that which aims at the scientifi c understanding of reality and at its technological rep- resentation; on the other, that which explores the human world in terms of its sociological, anthropological, juridical, philosophical, literary, and artistic aspects. This task can be carried out by Academies better than any other cul- tural institution.

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PART I AN OVERVIEW

Acc. Sc. Torino Quaderni, 35 (2020), 11-15 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES

European Academies and European Values A L

I am honoured to speak in the presence of so many scholars of the uni- versity in which I’ve studied, the University of Turin, and particularly of one person that meant so much in my own development as an individual and as a scholar: Professor Fabrizio Pennacchietti, who is also present here today and an honorary member of this academy. Today I would like to take you on a journey, a journey on the role of academies as opposed to universities in forging the European intellectual and scholarly landscape the way we know it. While academies have played a crucial role in the development of em- pirical science during the Enlightenment and in the emergence of academic disciplines during the XIX century, they have been less affected by the institu- tional turn that has changed the mission of European universities and funding agencies in the XXI century from teaching (fi rst mission) and research (second mission) to also include innovation (third mission). I argue that an important contribution that academies can give to European knowledge societies con- sists in providing a proactive link between science and society at large. Therefore, I start by focusing on the connection between the term “aca- demia” and the institution that is frequently associated with this term, at least in the fi rst part of the historical development: the university. What is frequent- ly misunderstood today is that at its conception, “the university” was not a place of research, but of instruction, a place of magisterium, and the high faculties were connected with a practical activity: theology, law and medicine. What we now call university or research derives from preparation to the real study of a professional activity. This connection with a practical dimension is something that remains in the DNA of academia. From its inception in the Middle Ages through the 18 th century, the European academia was an institu- tion aiming at a trust-building formation of elites. Back then, this was realised through having the academia focus on the usefulness of contents in the prepa- ration for elite functions in church, in law, medicine and on the basis of a scholarly (trivium) and scientifi c curriculum (quadrivium) in the faculty of artes liberales. A second important dimension of academic formation was that 12 Antonio Loprieno it was highly globalised, as membership in a community of scholars meant moving freely across local political boundaries, especially given that there were no ‘national’ universities like in modern times. Academic boundaries were therefore culturally defi ned as ‘European universities’ or ‘Islamic uni- versities’ rather than nationally. Through this combination and a high degree of independence, academia contributed to the formation of what we now call European values. With Renaissance in the 16 th century, a semantic split between academies as learned societies (cf. the noun “academy”) and universities as institutions of higher education (cf. the adjective “academic”) occurred. Academies thus lost their education function and were now reserved for intellectual discussions and the development of further knowledge. Another dimension occurred in the 17 th century with the development of nationalism and the idea that the support of science represents a “national” endeavour which the Académie Française (Institut de France) represents well. It is here that the academies became key players within the state’s scientifi c and educational policy. In the 19 th century, three models of academic practice emerged, each with a different cultural setting within a specifi c national agenda that found their way into academia. The fi rst was the Humboldt model which was a research-driven type of education. It held a disciplinary view of academic formation ( Fach) where students were seen as junior colleagues and confronted with research. Here, training (Ausbildung) entailed a general education ( Bildung). On the other hand, the second model, the Newman model which was adopted in the Anglo-Saxon world, is a kind of general education that introduces students to a canon of texts and methods which prepare them for social, professional or scientifi c activity, and where the main unit is the college. Here, the university builds an elite that functions as a societal supporter. In this sense, education precedes specialisation. Lastly, in post-Napoleonic France and in federal Switzerland, the Schools of Engineering are the ideal education path in view of an elite profession and civil service, where the purpose of academic training is professional qualifi cation (diploma). Each also had their own degrees, with the Humboldt model conferring Drs. and Phils., the Newman model BAs, MAs, and PhDs, and the post-Napoleonic model diplomas. In the wake of Reformation, European universities became more confes- sional, and tended to delay the transformation brought about by the emergence of a scienza nuova (G.B. Vico, 1725), i.e. of empirical research replacing the primary magisterium. In this sense, academies became the carriers of the pro- duction of science and the scientifi c project in 18 th and 19 th century, which did not occur as much in the universities. In the 19 th century, universities went European Academies and European Values 13 through reforms. While there were indeed considerable differences in the type of academic education aimed at in these three models and in their impact on their respective societies, all of them entailed a hierarchical break between “academia” and “society” that – in largely poorly educated contexts – fostered the equation of academics becoming eminent and therefore, also trustwor- thy. Until the end of the 20 th century, trust in science and scholarship was fi rmly controlled by the academic communities. Methodological debates (e.g. monism vs. dualism or positivism vs. hermeneutics) were confi ned to these academic circles. However, there was a clear cultural turn in academia that became ob- servable in the European higher education since the late 1990s that manifested itself in three ways. First, through governance, where European universities gradually became emancipated from political control. Yet, their newly acquired autonomy did not reduce their fi nancial dependence on public policy makers. This led to institutional strategies to replace traditional mission statements. Secondly, the cultural turn manifested through their organization: European universities moved from a decentralised culture which privileged the identity of the academic unit (Fach, Institut) to an organisational model which privileges the success of the institutional brand. This led to the impor- tance of rankings and the development of institutionally centered approaches to higher education. Lastly, it manifested through administration. After their emergence in the UK in the 1980s, various forms of new public management were established across academia as a response to political and social expec- tations of transparency and accountability leading to effi ciency that tends to be privileged over effectivity, including in instructional aspects (cf. the recurrent curricular reforms in the wake of Bologna 1999). Hence, academia shifted from having institutions with mission statements to becoming organisations with a strategic plan. It can be concluded that institutions of higher education, until 1999, were operating with a set of common values but that since 2000, they started to operate with different institutional goals. All of these changes separated academies (that took on a conservative role by remaining largely unchanged), and universities (which took the progressive lead), further. This “societal turn” ( Vergesellschaftung ) of European higher education that occurred in late 1990s and early 2000s has brought about the emergence of a competitive “academic market”. Universities changed their role dramatically. As a consequence of these changes, that have been accompanied by the Bologna- reform, the so-called “economization” of higher education or the development of a professional academic leadership, the ownership of scientifi c “trust” (and of other emotionally loaded concepts such as “excellence” or “evidence-based 14 Antonio Loprieno results”) has shifted from the scholarly community as a whole to the academic institutions themselves. This process has weakened the position of academies vis-à-vis universities, as they remained at the margins of the institutional turn of the late 20th to early 21st century. Challenges to academies in the post-factual world involve the transition from individual to social knowledge whereby the digital turn neutralises the individual, authorial or professorial ownership of knowledge and confronts academies with the constant need to emphasise the individual contribution to contextual social knowledge. What this means overall is that information has shifted from individual authors to becoming something social (take Wikipedia for instance where an article can have multiple authors). Another challenge comes from Anywhere’s club to Somewhere’s partner. The end of post-68 academic culture and the gradual emergence of a socio-political dichotomy between globalised liberals (“Anywheres”) and defenders of local identities (“Somewheres”) requires academies to become proactive stakeholders within the economic and cultural context by defending Enlightenment values against identitarian agendas and populist drifts. Lastly, another key challenge is spe- cialised knowledge and the loss of frames of reference. Nowadays, knowledge societies are confronted with a broad availability of information based on spe- cialised research but lack interpretive frames of reference that are likely to generate societal trust. To meet these challenges, it is mandatory for our academies to embrace the social dimension of knowledge in our activities as scientists which means em- bracing open access and science communication. These are the ways in which we can respond to the passage, the transition from individual to social knowl- edge. The second transition deals with the polarisation which has taken place in the political life in Europe and the world, that replaced ideology with identi- tarian type of discourses. It is mandatory for European academies to defend the values of Enlightenment here, against the identitarian drift which jeopardises these Enlightenment values that represent the basis of scientifi c work. These Enlightenment values, such as human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, rule of law and human rights amongst others, are also at the heart of ALLEA’s work. Lastly, we need as academies, to adjust to the transition to a loss of frames of reference by not just delivering punctual information and result of a scientifi c experiment but rather framing our fi ndings into a discourse that allows also for broader access, because specifi c punctual research can usually be taken out of context by individuals to spread scientifi c disinformation. The core function of academies is therefore to provide orientation to younger gen- erations of scientists, and a frame within which one can make sense of science. European Academies and European Values 15

ALLEA’s Strategic Priorities (2019-2024) aims to address precisely these points. Through ‘Serving Academies and Facilitating Cooperation’ (1) and ‘Thinking and Acting Globally’ (7), ALLEA aims to provide member academies with ways to harmonise cooperation among European academy networks, facilitates inter-academy exchange and engage academies, scien- tists and scholars actively in the public discourse, particularly on Europe’s values, identity and future. It also aims to ‘promote science as a global and borderless public good, engaging in European and global science diplomacy activities where appropriate’. This way, ALLEA and its member academies address the growing pains associated with the transition from individual to social knowledge, and the transition to a newly polarised political reality in Europe that threatens the Enlightenment values. Secondly, the Strategic Priorities’ second objective, ‘Improving Framework Conditions for Science and Research’ addresses the transition to a loss of frames of reference, with the objective to ‘shape European research policy, especially the ERA and EU research framework programmes, and promote diverse mechanisms for the broad dissemination of and access to research through open science’ as one of its key points. This demonstrates that through intense cooperation and facili- tating frameworks for producing and disseminating scientifi c research, these challenges are not invincible. To conclude, in order to meet contemporary challenges, European academ- ic institutions must become less self-centred and more involved in society at large, engaging with many stakeholders (including the private sector) and seeking interinstitutional collaborations, as academies already do through various projects in ALLEA. We are very grateful for and look forward to the continued efforts of the academies in contributing to various ALLEA projects and Working Groups in this regard. Furthermore, academies need to under- stand their role in the contextualisation of science as in times of social (as opposed to individual) knowledge. The challenge ahead is not so much to transmit a knowledge that is often broadly accessible online, but rather to provide hermeneutic frames that allow the public to discriminate between plausible and implausible claims – in science, politics and society. In many European societies, the recent populist drift, and the loss of trust in science and scholarship that usually accompanies it, can only be overcome through a more intense dialogue between science and societies taking into account the technological and cultural turn represented by digital transformation. Academies have the opportunity to take the lead in this “change of paradigm” and make the dissemination of (and the trust in) scientifi c results their unique contribution to fl ourishing in digital societies.

Acc. Sc. Torino Quaderni, 35 (2020), 17-20 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES

The Impact of Academies on European Identity G A

The diffi culties our European Union is facing are various and wide-ranging. They can be perceived in the allocation of powers both among the suprana- tional institutions with each other and between such institutions and those at national level. Equally sensitive are the areas of political relationships between the Union and the States and between some States and others (due to issues such as public debts and immigration). However, if we go below the surface, we are forced to admit that what we call European crisis is fundamentally a crisis of the delicate balance between national identities and the European identity that we had successfully achieved and preserved in the early decades of our common adventure. As we will see, it is precisely in relation to a crisis of this nature that Academies have a signifi cant role to play. Right from the start, it was clear that our national identities were not going to be superseded by the European one. Not even the visionary supporters of federal Europe ever proposed a similar, radical move. They were well aware of the strength of national identities in our continent, profoundly rooted in our history. Their aim was to transfer to European level the powers that had allowed the transformation of confl ict into devastating wars in the past. For the rest – Altiero Spinelli wrote – the States could continue to exercise their individual roles. That is not exactly what happened (foreign relations and the military have largely remained in the hands of the States), but a reasonable balance was reached, allowing solidarity, instead of hostility, to grow among the States, while a common European identity was fi nding its roots alongside national identities. To this end, a great contribution was made by the European Court of Justice. In its decisions, the Court nurtured European citizenship not only with the rights acknowledged to all citizens of member States by the Community Treaties, but also with those other rights stemming from our common consti- tutional traditions. Nothing could express more neatly the genetic relationship between our common European and national identities. We had been fi ght- ing each other and the defence of each national identity had been used to foster hostilities towards the others. However, our history had also produced 18 Giuliano Amato common traditions, common values and common legal principles upon which our solidarity could be solidly built. The successful steps of our integration – the common market, the direct election of the Parliament, the more and more frequent use of majority vot- ing (in itself a highly relevant sign of mutual trust), the Charter of European Rights, through to the single currency – could rely on this solidarity. However, when diffi cult times arrived, when Europe was no longer seen as a source of benefi ts and the fi rst demand of most of our citizens became protection from the outside world, we discovered that solidarity had prevailed, but had not re- moved the dark side of national identities. ‘Never forget history and the heavy load of hostility that has remained in its heritage’, Lucien Febvre had warned in his Lessons on Europe of 1945. Our experience in recent years is eloquent evidence that he was right. So, here we are, coping with the complexity of our soul. National identi- ties are still part of it and whether they concur to our being Europeans or, by opposing each other, erode and therefore weaken our European construction depends on the use we make of them. Within this framework the role of Academies is crucial. After centuries during which they had primarily been educational institutions, their para- mount mission has become concurring to shape national cultures by selecting prestigious fi gures from the sciences and humanities as their members, by offering grants and hospitality to scholars, artists and specialised students, by promoting and endorsing their studies and works of research. By doing so, they may give their national cultures either a nationalist or, on the contrary, an international fl avour and also accentuate, or mitigate, the common features of our European identity. It is culture, what else could it be? But we all know how politically sen- sitive it is. Political institutions have always nurtured their visions and their aims with cultural ingredients, mostly when raising identarian pride has been part of their policies. There is no need to go back to the construction of Nation States to prove this well tested truth, which even now is being confi rmed in more than one European State. This being so, for our Academies to fully exercise their role, there is a pre-requisite they must comply with; they have to be independent institutions, not subject to the power of their national governments and jealous guardians of their independence. Do not underestimate this point, even if you are a mem- ber of a democratic system of government. Things may change rapidly and complacency may sometimes be a substitute for coercive obedience. The Impact of Academies on European Identity 19

Protected against the risk of conveying offi cial national cultures, Academies can greatly contribute nowadays to restoring the frequently obscured reasons of our common identity. Let me also add that in order to do persuasively so, they should refrain from any sort of offi cial European culture and therefore never ignore the enduring role of our national identities. However, the reasons why mutual tolerance became the grund norm of our union in the aftermath of the second world war should be explained (mostly to our youth). Similarly, the origins of the rule of law all over Europe, need to be constantly explained, also clarifying the number of situations in which it is a precious shield for citizens against arbitrary acts that could injured them. No less important is the explanation of why the death penalty is banned in our Union. I fully understand that these tasks are not at all specifi c to Academies, and that every cultural agent in Europe should feel responsible for them. However, the reputation they enjoy would add value to their arguments. Furthermore, in two areas I see distinctive responsibilities of Academies. The fi rst is the organ- isation of research, which, in recent decades, due also to the priorities of EU fi nancing, has given rise to the welcome proliferation of multinational clusters of researchers. It has been written that such clusters are so naturally and fi rmly cross border that Europe exists more because of their internal glue than of the European institutions themselves. Preserving this reality and making it strong- er than any nationalist wind is a goal only Academies (and Universities) can pursue; not for political reasons, but in the best interest of science. The second area is a completely new one and refers to an endeavour no- body has tried up to now. We all know that when two neighbouring countries have fought against each other in the past, it is very diffi cult for their scholars to write a common history. It becomes possible when the peace has prevailed, when, due to the common pledge to a common future, we look at the past to fi nd not what divides the two communities, but what unites them. I hum- bly submit it is the right time for us to ask our historians to write a common European history; and for the Academies to promote and organise such com- mon work. The fundamental goal that initially triggered the European Communities – no more wars among us – was already accomplished several years ago. And not only wars are now impossible among us, all confl ict is being disposed of in our European collegial bodies. Whatever sovereigntist cultures may try to elaborate, our past has suffi cient common links to allow a common history to be written at this stage. Only the decision not to have a common future – Ernest Renan would say – could prevent us from doing it. 20 Giuliano Amato

Our Academies, united as they are in the European Federation of Academies, consider such decision far away from our future. May I expect a common history of Europe promoted and organised by the European Federation of Academies? It would be a conclusive seal of its existence and of its aims. Acc. Sc. Torino Quaderni, 35 (2020), 21-27 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES

Challenges and Tasks for Today’s Academies G S

The role and impact of academies for and in our modern world is unique and can be decisive for the development of our societies. Here I am going to describe some of the major aspects which – according to my experience and hope – need to and can be addressed.

• Academies have an interest in caring and an obligation to care for academic freedom worldwide. We have to be aware and concerned that our freedom of research and our responsibility for the results are ultimately connected to and cannot be separated from each other. Of course, freedom of research is complemented by the other side of the coin, responsibility. • Academies can comply with this obligation with interdisciplinary, in- dependent, transparent scientifi c advice for the public and for politics. • We must interact, talk and listen to the questions and concerns of the public and politics. It is no longer about teaching the public alone, it is about true public engagement. • Our purposely designed international working procedures and mem- berships allow academies to incorporate data, attitudes and approaches at a global level to refl ect on new technologies and developments. • In view of the multitude of tasks, it is important for academies to share the workload, fi nd ways of agreeing on processes and the results obtained and try to incentivise the cooperation of as many scientists as possible.

Science has changed and continues to change our lives fundamentally. Scientists have created, and will always create what Jürgen Mittelstraß, the former president of Academia Europaea, has called ‛The Leonardo World՚. And the pace of all the new discoveries, for example in medicine, information technology and many other fi elds, demands of us all to be aware of and take responsibility for these developments. 22 Günter Stock

With the renaissance and the enlightenment we, as citizens, as scientists, have gained the freedom to think, act, determine our future and construct our world. At the same time, we have taken on the burden of responsibility for these changes in its broadest sense. How do we as citizens, and especially as scientists, fulfi l this responsibility? It is probably no mere coincidence that the modern system of academies was created exactly at the time of the renaissance and the enlightenment. Not only as places where research could be conducted without external pressure, but also as places where the impact of science was discussed, and new ideas and data could be tested and debated, where refl ection on new developments was a leading element from the outset. In most of today’s ‛modern՚ academies, the creation of new knowledge in a disciplinary sense has become marginal – yet interdisciplinary exchange has increased and the refl ection on aspects and topics of our modern world has become a major element of their work. Academies have become places of disciplinary excellence, but also arenas where interdisciplinarity is ‛trained՚ and practiced and has become part of their mission. This is both a task and a virtue at the same time. Interdisciplinarity is needed in our modern world, to broadly refl ect not only the technological aspects of new inventions, but also the social, ethical and legal consequences. A different type of new knowledge is created. A knowledge which can and should bring forward what my late friend Yehuda Elkana called ‛the con- cerned scientist՚, a scientist who works at the forefront of disciplinary science while trying to understand the full impact of new advancements as much as possible. If enlightenment is an elementary part of our, the academies, genetic code, today we must take over the task of honestly searching for the roots, rea- sons and consequences of new technologies, creating and shaping our modern world. In other words, responsibility must be understood in its broadest sense and scientists should endeavour to explain every element of new develop- ments to our fellow citizens, helping them understand, accept and make the best use of our scientifi c knowledge and advancement. The aim should be to create a ‛concerned citizen՚, someone who really cares. Furthermore, acad- emies have a special obligation to give scientifi c advice to politics, to help politicians formulate the legislation which impacts our future. A few examples should suffi ce to show why scientifi c advice for politics and politicians is necessary. Being a doctor, I would like to start with a few examples in the fi eld of modern, molecular medicine; examples which show to what extent new technological knowledge and possibilities impact our ethical and societal habits and behaviours, thereby creating dilemmas for which answers are needed. Challenges and Tasks for Today’s Academies 23

The knowledge of our genome and the knowledge of its contribution to certain diseases allow us to diagnose quite a few of these diseases, long be- fore children are born. And this raises complicated questions, such as: are the diseases too severe to allow for a ‛normal՚ life? How to cope with, how to alleviate the burden of disease? And should these embryos be allowed to develop and be born? Many academies, including the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, have developed scientifi c advice, ex- plained all facts available and presented options on how to respond to and act on these complicated questions. A second example refers to gene therapy. After a series of dramatic failures two decades ago, medicine is once again in a position to approach gene ther- apy with concrete measures. Diseased genes can be silenced or can even be replaced by genes that do not carry the risk of the disease. And there is even a theoretical chance to bring in genetic material, which has the potential to create desired features. This immediately leads into the question of genetic enhancement. Should we, as societies, use these technological sets in order to improve individual performance? It is on us to fi nd answers to questions like those mentioned above and if we fi nd the answers, for how long will they be be valid? Should societies apply the discoveries made and enforce a set of rules? Even more interesting is the question – what if all cultures, all societies fi nd the same an- swers and adhere to the same rules? Recent discoveries and advancements in gene repair, in gene editing, open up the possibility not only to repair a genetic disorder within an individual. In principle, we can now think of repairing genes in the germ line for inherited severe diseases. This would mean that scientists would not only be able to treat an individual, but even generations. These examples do not only show to what extent interdisciplinary re- fl ections and approaches are urgently needed to understand and regulate the impact of new technologies in the fi eld of medicine, they also pose the ques- tion of how do we secure and control adherence to the rules established? Even more critical is the point made above: what if different societies, different cultures fi nd different answers? Here the third element of modern academies, i.e.: their internation- al nature, the fact that academies are forming an international network of scientists, can and should have an impact. If scientists reach a joint under- standing of how our scientifi c advice should look early on, we could help – hopefully well before legal actions are taken – create a basis of common understanding and common principles accepted by the public even beyond national borders. 24 Günter Stock

Another example is the advancement of our digital world. Standards that balance aspects of individual freedom and privacy within social media have to be found and they must allow free communication and protection of human dignity. To what extent do we need new or adjusted rules in the digital world as opposed to the rules applied in the analogue world, especially those pro- tecting human dignity? And if we look at the new world of machine learning or what many people euphemistically call ‛artifi cial intelligence՚, it is obvious that these technologies enable fantastic new developments, create amazing new opportunities, allow the interpretation of huge amounts of data within milliseconds due to their highly advanced algorithms. However, when it comes to deep learning, where computers modify their algorithms, as a consequence of past ‛learning՚ (machine learning!), it is ob- vious that the question of responsibility for the modifi ed ‛decisions՚ of the machines requires an answer. How do we make sure that we as humans fully understand the rationale of these deep learning results? Currently, the opinion seems to prevail that responsibility should not be assigned to machines as though they were a kind of electronic person (e-person). So how do we keep pace and maintain control, and therefore form the basis for responsibility? Academies are certainly not the only places where refl ections on these new developments should be taking place, but I am convinced that academies are uniquely positioned to discuss, refl ect, inform and advise society and politics. And academies should start refl ecting on these types of questions as early as possible. Due to their inherent mechanisms, academies are not the ideal places for rapid advice. Interdisciplinarity, internationality, fi nding the best possible dis- ciplinary advice in different areas, all this takes time. Scientifi c advice for politics takes time and equally important is the formulation of clear mech- anisms on how the advice is brought up. Rules concerning methods, quality assurance, interests, causes of knowledge, a clear demarcation whether the knowledge base is weak and where guessing (often declared as an ‛educat- ed guess՚) begins, are important elements to differentiate our advice from strong – but not scientifi cally founded – opinions or ‛alternative facts՚ (what an expression!). And, as indicated above, the international network of academies is of great value, where the opinions of different societies, scientifi c schools, ethnicities and religious groups, can be included in the discussions and refl ections from the beginning, thereby creating a rich and multinational set of informative material and options for action. This confi guration not only makes advice on scientifi c policy more valuable, it is also capable of creating a more tolerant Challenges and Tasks for Today’s Academies 25 attitude, a better understanding of diverting advice and options. This is exact- ly the reason why I consider it an important step for most European academies to join forces under the umbrella of the academy consortium SAPEA (Science Advice for Policy by European Academies). In this consortium, some (hope- fully most) of the relevant and pressing questions of our time are and will be addressed. In the future, the knowledge, exchange, refl ections and thoughts of SAPEA will have to be shared with other academic consortia in order to fi nd as many common principles as possible for offering scientifi c advice for policy and society. If we want to be heard, if we want academies to be an eminent voice in a world of exhilarating knowledge, a world searching for orientation and guid- ance, a world that competes more and more with the so-called alternative facts, we have to be very conscious of the quality of our processes and our work, and the seriousness of the scientifi c advice. As already mentioned, we must be very aware of transparency, methods, sources of knowledge, and con- fl icting interests, and particularly of the limits of our knowledge, and where knowledge crosses over to educated guesses and opinion. Back in 2008, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities published its ‛Leitlinien der Politikberatung՚, guidelines for pol- icy advice. And it was ALLEA that recently re-elaborated and published the European code of conduct for research integrity. A precisely written document which, in the meantime, has been translated into more than twenty languag- es and approved by numerous scientifi c organisations across Europe and the world as a blueprint for national research integrity principles. The document was prepared by the European academies in ALLEA, and has since been ac- cepted in non-European academies and scientifi c organisations. There is no doubt, we have to be very sensitive towards misconduct and misbehaviour within the scientifi c community in order to be fully respected and accepted, to be regarded as trustworthy. And we must defend the open- ness towards being corrected by better knowledge, by newer facts. We can achieve truth based on the best facts currently available. Furthermore, we must defend the fact that scientifi c results are, in most cases, complex. We need to recreate an understanding and acceptance of com- plexity. And this is probably the hardest part of public engagement, when we disclose our results, our options, to the public. The complexity, the openness to disapproval is by no means a weakening of our scientifi c reasoning. On the contrary, it is one of the core strengths. Not to be misunderstood: asking for awareness of the complexity of scientifi c data is by no means an excuse for not trying hard enough to make science be understood by the public and by 26 Günter Stock politicians. Actually, ALLEA has taken up and profoundly discussed many of these aspects in a working group named ‛truth, trust and expertise՚. Finally, I would like to address a topic which has come up recently and needs careful consideration. And probably also a solution. The public debate on climate change has increased the expectations of many societal groups, who think that scientists should take a stance and engage politically; i.e.: document and formulate a political will and ‛force՚ politicians to take certain measures. If we as scientists do not comply with these public expectations, we are considered by some as people who shy away from responsibility, people who want to stay in their ‛comfort zone՚. And one aspect of these public expectations is that apparently less and less room is given to careful and complex consideration, careful refl ections. There even seems to be a lack of understanding for a certain modesty in proposing op- tions instead of direct political actions. Scientists are increasingly expected not only to academically discuss and present the arguments, but also to take part in protests and political actions, thereby crossing the border between giving scientifi cally based advice to offer certain options and directly formu- lating political actions. As citizens we, of course, have our opinions and we are prepared to dis- cuss them in the political arena, or maybe take part in protests. But when we talk as scientists or academies, we must be aware of the limitations of our knowledge, especially when it comes to legal societal actions, which have to bear in mind more aspects than the scientifi c evidence. Social coherence is of great value in our world. The debate on climate has all the necessary elements to endanger social coherence so it is of utmost importance to balance out what we know and what should be done. It is my fi rm conviction that we have to prepare all the necessary facts from all disciplines and that it is up to society and politicians to act. And scientists should be careful of when and how to ‛lend՚ the prestige which they gained and deserve in their disciplines to their role as ‛concerned citizens՚. Apart from all the urgent issues mentioned above there are challenges within the science community which also deserve and demand action by academies. First and foremost, there is the fundamental issue of academic freedom. In countries like Turkey, Hungary and others, there is an imminent threat to academic freedom within universities, the freedom to speak, to carry out research into whatever individual researchers want to. Here I am speak- ing not only about Russia, Hungary and Turkey, but also about Berkeley, Hamburg, Berlin and Frankfurt in Germany when it comes to the freedom to speak, and where professors are, for various reasons, boycotted by small Challenges and Tasks for Today’s Academies 27 and loud groups of students. We need to become much clearer and we have to stand up for freedom of academic teaching and research. And lastly, we have to especially protect the freedom of research in certain disciplines, at a time when governments are asking for more applied science instead of curiosity driven research. And at a time when governments are trying to rewrite his- tory (we have seen this in the former GDR in Germany, and we are seeing it in Russia, Poland and Hungary, and many other countries today) we have to defend and protect independent science. One could argue that the plethora of tasks and ideas that I have present- ed in this brief contribution overstretches the capacities of academies. This argument however underestimates the potential of more than one hundred academies in Europe alone, with thousands of scientists as members, not to mention the number of academies throughout the world. Hence, the counter- argument and strategy must be that all these academies work together to fi nd a consensus on sharing the workload, establishing mechanisms of approval for joint positions developed by individual academies and academy consortia, and for individual researchers to invest a certain amount of time into some of the aforementioned tasks. Freedom is a human right and a privilege, but it is at the same time a re- sponsibility to defend it.

Acc. Sc. Torino Quaderni, 35 (2020), 29-36 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES

Academies, Interdisciplinary Research, Europe A P S

A re-examination on the function of the Academies in the present time is to be welcomed for several reasons: fi rst, the situation of culture and the re- lationships between all scientifi c disciplines and reality in the world’s current historical phase of profound transformation makes such a re-examination not only well-timed but also necessary; second, the academies can and must play an important role in the future, and this role must be complementary with respect to other cultural institutions; third, in such a context, networks among Academies in a European perspective offer new opportunities and stimuli. The theme is not new. In recent years some initiatives aimed at promoting the role of the Academies have been pursued in France and in Italy by the Institut de France and by the Accademia dei Lincei1. The unprecedented development of scientifi c research constitutes one of the most important characteristics of the present era. Not only in Europe and in the United States of America, but in every part of the planet – from China to India and Russia, from Australia to South America and even Africa – universities and research institutes are producing an impressive number of contributions in print and online, and that number is rising exponential- ly, especially in the sciences – biology, medicine, physics, chemistry, natural sciences and computer science. Equally impressive is the outstanding devel- opment of new technologies, strictly interconnected with scientifi c theories and discoveries. In humanities, too, a similar increase in research is taking place in every fi eld, such as in prehistory, history, law, economy, sociology, archaeology, philosophy, philology and more. To recall just one example, me- dieval history studies produce over 8,000 contributions in print every year. In the natural sciences, research is so fast-paced that articles are considered obsolete only fi ve years after publication. The need to update is so absorbing as to demand an enormous amount of time and energy from every researcher, and the supervening research engages scholars full-time in their chosen fi elds,

1 Les Académies en Europe au XXIe siècle, 21-23 octobre 2007 , Paris [2009]; Le Accademie nazionali e la storia d’Italia, 9-10 dicembre 2010 , Rome 2012 (Atti dei Convegni Lincei, 268). 30 Antonio Padoa Schioppa which are necessarily narrow so that they can be kept under control. As a consequence, original results can only be achieved in a circumscribed fi eld. These elements are well-known and have led to increasing specialisation. Scientifi c careers, both in and outside the university, limit these horizons be- cause this is the only way for scholars to have opportunities to gain credit (and credits) in their institutions. How can the role of the Academies be conceived in this context, which produces not only a wealth of outstanding results but also limits, imposed by its hyper-specialised nature? A fi rst profi le worthy of attention is one which suggest that the Academies promote research initiatives in the direction of interdisciplinarity. Others have already drawn attention to this aspect. However, the theme still deserves to be investigated. In the past, such interdisciplinarity was certainly not lacking; to mention one example, it is worth recalling that an essential spark for the theory of evolution came to Charles Darwin from his refl ections upon Malthus’s theory of population. In medicine today, biotechnologies are fundamental; in astron- omy and cosmology, particle physics is basic; in business law, the economic dimension is indispensable; in archaeology, both the physics of carbonium decay and genetics are essential tools, and there are countless other exam- ples. However, the structure of universities is generally not well-adapted to promoting these connections. Departments are compartmentalised according to the fi elds of specifi c disciplines or groups of disciplines. Here is where Academies could effectively step in with complementary functions. Each Academy is made up of a selection of scholars with different sci- entifi c backgrounds. Academies are interdisciplinary by very nature and that is why tangible activities could be pursued in this direction. This is true not only for the mutual relationship between the so-called hard sciences, but also for the cross-cutting relations between what we call the two cultures. Mathematics and law, literature and sociology, palaeontology and prehisto- ry, genetics and historical population dynamics have already cut across the boundaries of their research fi eld with extraordinary results. However, much has yet to be performed in other sectors of knowledge. The interface with big data procedures, computer science and artifi cial intelligence is often just as indispensable. A second cult ural domain that deserves to be focused on by Academies is the task of divulging scientifi c knowledge. Today, all high-level periodi- cal publications, and many daily newspapers too, have introduced a section on science and technology. There are also numerous high-quality volumes published for the general public by internationally famous authors, beginning Academies, Interdisciplinary Research, Europe 31 with winners of the Nobel Prize and other distinguished awards. However, it must be stressed that not all of these volumes keep their promises because – starting with mathematics, physics and biology, but the same can also be said for humanities and social sciences – writing to explain scientifi c approaches and results in a way that is both correct and comprehensible is a diffi cult task. Not all scientists, even of a high standard, are able to do so, even if excel- lent examples abound. It might suffi ce to recall, just to quote a few classic examples, Einstein on relativity, Schroedinger on life, Feynman on quantum theory, Gell Mann on quarks 2. Texts written by specialists in scientifi c inform- ative literature, include works by authors such as Simon Singh on the theory of Fermat or Fabio Toscano on Ricci Curbastro, Torricelli and Tartaglia 3, not to mention many others. The need for high ranking scientifi c divulgation is real on two fronts. On the one hand, basic scientifi c culture must be increased as part of the school- ing and permanent education of every individual; on the other, specialised researchers themselves also need to know about research developments in fi elds that are often very distant from their own. Here too, besides the inter- disciplinarity cooperation mentioned above, the divulgation role is essential, as specialised training is not possible across such distant fi elds of human knowledge. In this perspective, in order to spread knowledge of research, the Academies seem particularly qualifi ed, also with regard to the high schools, as some recent initiatives have shown. A third task that deserves attention is the fi eld of research projects and editions of historical and archaeological sources , which require different approaches and dynamics than those usually applied in a typical university research setting, where the basic task for researchers is to write original scien- tifi c articles. Yet without the diffi cult and tiresome work of editing unprinted

2 A. Einstein e Altri, Relatività: esposizione divulgativa (1916), Boringhieri, Torino 1974; A. Einstein e L. Infeld, L’evoluzione della fi sica , Einaudi, Torino 1955; E. Schroedinger, Che cosa è la vita? (1944), Milano 1995; R.P. Feynman, QED, La strana teoria della luce e della materia, Adelphi, Milano 1989; M. Gell-Mann, Il quark e il giaguaro , Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2000; Ch. de Duve, Come evolve la vita, Bollati Boringhieri, Milano 2003; J.D. Watson, DNA, Adelphi, Milano 2004; T. Pievani, La vita inaspettata, Cortina, Milano 2011; C. Rovelli, Sette brevi lezioni sulla fi sica , Adelphi, Milano 2014; L. Smolin, La rinascita del tempo, Einaudi, Torino 2014. 3 S. Singh, Fermat’s Enigma , Anchor Books, New York 1997; F. Toscano, Il genio e il gentiluomo, Einstein e Ricci Curbastro , Sironi Editore, Milano 2004; Id., L’erede di Galileo, Vita [...] di Evangelista Torricelli , Sironi Editore, Milano 2008; Id., La formula segreta, Tartaglia, Cardano e il duello matematico , Sironi Editore, Milano 2009. 32 Antonio Padoa Schioppa sources, both ancient and modern, the progress in scientifi c work is itself of- ten impossible. Here we should mention such extraordinary results as those produced in the past by non-university cultural institutions, like the imposing Monumenta Germaniae Historica, or, here in Piedmont, by the Monumenta Historiae Patriae, the great campaigns of archaeological research or the na- tional editions of important authors, including those in mathematical and medical history, which have recently been forced into standstill due to a lack of funds. On these fronts, too, Academies could play a prominent role, if they could get the resources to fund initiatives and pay some young scholars who will otherwise endorse (as actually happens) monographic studies, the only ones that are actually needed for a university career. If greater accent is placed on the functions of the Academies as promoters of research and initiatives like those mentioned above, it will be convenient and even necessary to think of fl anking the Academies’ present members (the majority of whom are currently mature scholars, not only in terms of scien- tifi c experience, but overwhelmingly also in terms of their age) with newly nominated younger members who are at the height of their careers. We should not forget that in the past, in France for example, some very young schol- ars and writers were made members of the Academies. Achieving this aim could eventually require the rewriting of their statutes, designating a number of vacant places to scholars in their thirties or forties for example, or perhaps stipulating that members who are over eighty be designated as emeriti, reserv- ing the places left vacant for younger scholars. Solidly grounded activities that the Academies could usefully be called up- on to engage in go beyond those I have just been mentioned. Others could be added, as a fourth basic task, concerning decisions made in the public sphere and in the world of policy making in general. In today’s world, the extension of the range of parliamentary and gov- ernment competencies has led to unprecedented power of the political class in almost every fi eld of community life. From economics to law, from edu- cation to scientifi c research, from health to the environment, all of this and much more falls in many cases and domains under the control of the political class. This is justifi ed on the basis of the principle of popular sovereignty that underlies representative democracies. Modern constitutions have placed this principle alongside the principle of separation/balance of powers to avoid the risk of dictatorships of the majority, raised in the past by eminent thinkers like Locke, Tocqueville and Stuart Mill, to name but a few. Nevertheless, this trend is not without serious risks, given the temporal horizon to which the po- litical classes usually direct their decisions with a constant eye on upcoming Academies, Interdisciplinary Research, Europe 33 elections, even at local level. A second and no less dangerous risk for the present and future social and political sector lies in the superpower of the great supranational corporations, including those working in the digital world, that we all know. Other risks can be added, like the constant orientation of the political class toward a direct and indirect control of television networks and social media, due to the incessant encroachment of the Internet, not only a bearer of an immense volume of information accessible by each and every citizen for the fi rst time in history, but also the source of devious manipula- tions of the information available, threatening the very core of democratic institutions. A series of instruments – primarily the seminal role of the Constitutional Courts and of the European Court of Human Rights – both of which are ac- tively represented here today by two eminent members, Giuliano Amato and Vladimiro Zagrebelsky – has been set up to reduce these risks, which are nevertheless anything but obsolete. And a key role is also played by the insti- tution of independent Agencies, set up by several democratic States in recent decades. If democratic political control is required here, also important, even es- sential, is the information of public opinion by independent institutions. What I suggest is that the Academies could play a signifi cant role in this context, composed as they are of individuals who have been chosen because of their scientifi c and cultural prestige, through a co-optation procedure, and – at least in principle but for the most part also in practice – without political or ideo- logical biases. This role could assume various tangible forms, each of them worthy of attention. The fi rst can be summed up in Einaudi’s ‛know in order to decide՚, ‛cono- scere per deliberare՚. In the past, the range of activities performed by Academies was very broad. Each of them had its own characteristics, established by the founders and advanced by its members over time. Scientifi c aims (mathematics, nat- ural sciences, physics, chemistry) were present beside literary, philological and historical ones, as were in-depth activities in medicine and social scienc- es, promoted also with prizes open to anyone producing innovative work. Many new ideas have come to light in this way. Moreover, there have been Academies that have highlighted practical, tangible objectives: for the devel- opment of new agricultural techniques, the promotion of more rational forms of manufacturing technology, the development of road systems and irriga- tion, the fi ght against epidemics, and much more. Among others, the Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere, active since 1802, worked intensely in some 34 Antonio Padoa Schioppa of these areas in the 19 th Century. Other Academies have shown a prefer- ence for other areas. Such pluralism should remain one of the qualities of the Academies, because it allows them to complement each other. I certainly do not deny that impartial initiatives and authorities are already underway in the fi elds of natural and social sciences, with investigations pro- moted by political organizations, Parliaments and Governments themselves, not to mention the fundamental work of international organizations like the United Nations, Unesco and many NGO. Nevertheless, space for further information – on topics like the environment, representative democracies, inequalities, natural disasters, hunger and thirst in the world, bioethics, ris- ing nationalism, migratory phenomena, demographics, alternative forms of energy, and much more – certainly exists. And in these domains, studies and reports by the Academies would bring signifi cant contributions. Fact checking should be combined with the indication of possible concrete choices on each issue. If a certain amount of scepticism is well grounded, as politicians abhor delegating choices, it could sometimes be benefi cial for them to stick to the result of serious and far-sighted reports, as happened many times in the past; it is suffi cient to recall the Poor law in England, the railway network in the XIX Century, the Beveridge Plan, but also the Coal and Steel Community Plan, the Common Market and the Euro itself, along with many others. Each of these fundamental reforms was born as a follow-on from far-sighted independent researches and proposals. Another task that could potentially be assigned to Academies is the selec- tion of potential candidates, to cover some independent Agencies. Politicians and the government could, in some cases, agree to entrust such choices to an impartial, external organization, which is exactly what the Academies are. If, for example, we consider the distinction between freedom of thought (which must be absolute and unlimited) and the promotion of ideas with the inten- tion of infl uencing public opinion also in directions that could be potentially dangerous or even fatal to the survival of the democratic order and the rule of law, which on the contrary should be subject to scrutiny by impartial judges to prevent the diffusion of false information4, we see that the Academies could play a role on this crucial front. A last profi le to which I wish to draw attention regards the relationship between the different Academies and their function on a European and inter- national scale.

4 This distinction is clearly outlined by Simone Weil in her work L’Enracinement , Gallimard, Paris 1953, written in London in the early months of 1943, some aspects of which are still very pertinent today. Academies, Interdisciplinary Research, Europe 35

In the past, the great Academies have always promoted and valorised ex- changes among scholars from the various European countries. Just think, for example, of the fruitful contacts that the Royal Society of London promoted in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries among English scholars and mathe- maticians, physicists, biologists and naturalists from France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and elsewhere. The same is also true for the Academies united under the aegis of the Istitut de France, for the Prussian Academy founded by Leibniz in Berlin at the beginning of the Eighteenth century and for other Academies. This European and international dimension is still necessary today. The following brief summary outlines some of the research paths that could be un- dertaken in coordinated initiatives among Academies from different countries. It is well-known that the history of the different countries in Europe, as written by historians and taught in schools was and still is often distorted because the viewpoint of the historians was restricted by their national frame- work. Several attempts have been made to write national histories which are not vitiated by such distortions. However, a great deal still remains to be done. Research work and, above all, proper divulgation could be undertaken by the Academies, mainly through bilateral and multilateral relations. Another fi eld deserving attention aims to identify the characteristics of European civilization – from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age – which are original and specifi c when compared to the other great civilizations. Here, too, a wealth of research has been carried out, but only gradually is headway being made with regard to the conviction that these original characteristics not only exist, but have taken on tangible form thanks to a close relationship of intra-European exchange. However, it is also true that each of these crea- tive innovations in culture, art, music, law and religious, scientifi c and civil thought, as well as most of the innovations in technology and economics, have generally come to light in a particular region or even in a single city of Europe, only to be spread to other regions, each time with new specifi c devel- opments. In this regard, the Academies of the various European countries can also offer valuable opportunities for comparative investigation and synthesis. A vast fi eld deserving consideration concerns Europe’s exchanges with non-European cultures and the study of the deep infl uences that they have had on European culture. The Islamic culture, between the 8th and 10 th centuries, not only discovered and translated the philosophical, mathematical, astro- nomical, medical and naturalistic works of Ancient and Hellenistic Greece, it also pursued these disciplines, obtaining valuable and highly original re- sults, and also fruitfully exploited the cultures of India and of Persia. It would 36 Antonio Padoa Schioppa be highly valuable to promote scholarly and personal relationships between European Academies and those of the Islamic world, as the knowledge of the fascinating history of the deep mutual infl uences between European and Islamic culture is still lacking or too weak, outside a tight circle of specialists. It is not necessary to underline how cultural exchanges can be vital to improve political relationships between the West and Islam. The same is also true for the intercultural relationships over the centuries between India and Europe, and between China and Europe. How can the initiatives summarily sketched above be performed? A fi rst condition is that, inside any Academy, some of its members agree, with the president’s consent, to work towards (or pursue) some, or at least one, of the paths mentioned above, with their personal and direct involvement. A second aspect to be considered is that of resources, as it is clear that many of these activities cannot be performed at zero cost. Of course, it will be necessary to take part in national and European calls for grants, following the norms and procedures established by each differ- ent institution. However, the interdisciplinary approach and the possibility of setting out on routes that are different from those usually taken, calls for different tools and for specifi c direct intervention from both public and private sources. We should also stress the need for further fi nancing resources, as happened in different ways in the past when members of several prestigious Academies and scholars in charge of specifi c researches were fi nanced by generous private donors to meet the costs of their research commitments. The great cultural Foundations could also contribute. It is clear that the correct achievement of such enterprises and initiatives requires the identifi cation and pursuit of suitable strategies and effective control procedures, thus avoiding the risks of mere self-referential distribution of funds. In conclusion, let me say that I do not imagine that every Academy could pursue and carry out the whole wide spectrum of activities and initiatives outlined above. I rather think that each Academy could select at least one or some of them, in a fruitful connection with other National, European, or Extra-European Academies. Acc. Sc. Torino Quaderni, 35 (2020), 37-44 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES

Academies and the Information-Rich Society J E

1. Introduction

Science academies have a long history starting from Plato in ancient Greece and followed by the launching of academies in Renaissance Italy dur- ing the 15 th century. Quite surely, the world has been changing ever since and the same can be said about the roles of academies. Historical overviews have analysed the history and changes in academies in detail1. The members of the academies were and are the best scientists and scholars of every nation and are the strongholds of knowledge in the most general sense of the word2. The main assets of academies are independence, excellence and authority. New knowledge advocated by academies, policy for science and science for policy have been among the important roles played by academies. Whether these roles, especially the last one, have always been accepted by rulers, is another question. In what follows, the contemporary roles of academies are analysed following the theme of this conference.

2. The Ideas of Academies

There are several societal roles that contemporary academies foster. One role of academies is to mobilize all scientists and scholars to transmit scientifi c results to society. This role becomes extremely important in the in- formation-rich globalized society where fake news and non-scientifi c ideas are widely spread. Consequently, the communication and explanatory role of scientists, resp. academies, must be taken very seriously. Another role of the

1 J. Engelbrecht and N. Mann, The Sum of the Parts: ALLEA and Academies , ALLEA, Amsterdam 2011; L. Engwall, Academies and their roles for policy decisions , in L. Wedlin, M. Nedeva (eds.), Towards European Science: Dynamics and Change in Science Policy and Organization , Edward Elgar Publ., Cheltenham 2015, pp. 147-174. 2 J. Engelbrecht and N. Mann, The Sum of the Parts: ALLEA and Academies, cit. 38 Jüri Engelbrecht academies is to give advice to society, and especially to policy-makers, on evidence-based possibilities for decisions. The advisory role of academies is related to trust as a social capital between scientists and society. This brings us also to the role of academies to support ethical aspects of scientifi c research which is presently affected by questionable publishing that does not follow the accepted standards, including peer-review. Integrity of research and sound open data publishing must be supported by the scientifi c community, also con- fronting the threats to politicize research. Here academies are in the front line of activity. The scientifi c community has a general understanding of the complexity of the world but it is not well understood by society. This is why science ed- ucation is extremely important on all societal levels, from primary schools to governments. Interconnections of all social and natural effects, uncertainty of predictions, sensitivity of processes to small changes, possibility of collapses, understanding the causes behind the effects, etc, must be made widely under- stood within contemporary education3. It must be stressed that, in complex societal systems, values often play the role of constraints. This all happens in the framework of the world which is globalizing quick- ly, so these activities related to societal tasks require constant review. The strength of academies is based on the strength of research – always looking for new knowledge. New ideas combined with the traditions embedded in academies are assets for all academies. As we know, there are many problems in society, starting from climate change, energy, air, soil and water pollution, poverty, migration, security, etc. These have created a lot of tension in soci- ety, which is why scientists and scholars should always ask: have we done everything we could in terms of knowledge management in order to fi nd solu- tions to various challenges. Two ideas should be remembered in this context. First, the Nobel laureate Joseph Rotblat has said that more knowledge means also more responsibility. Second, the International Science Council (ISC) has stressed that science is a global public asset and asks: ‘How can science be a transformative power for peace and development during times of complexity and rapid change?’4. Many academies are acting along these lines but the general understanding is that they must join forces in order to tackle the global problems and learn

3 J. Engelbrecht, The knowledge on complexity should be a part of contemporary education , «Eruditio», 2018, vol. 2, issue 4, pp. 27-37. 4 G. Boulton, The contemporary global context for science, International Science Council, World Science Forum, Budapest 2019. Academies and the Information-Rich Society 39 from each other how to confront local problems. The next Section of this es- say clearly defi nes what has been done and what should be done.

3. Uniting the Academies

‘Science has always been, to an increasing extent, international in its need for shared thought and for joint action’ – so begins the history of the International Council of Scientifi c Unions (ICSU) 5. This history begins with the description of the International Association of Academies (IAA) which existed in 1899- 1914. The Union Académique International (UAI) was launched in 1919 to unite academies in the humanities and social sciences. The International Council of Scientifi c Unions (ICSU) was launched in 1931 and united national scientifi c bodies (mostly academies) and International Scientifi c Unions. In 1952, UNESCO launched the International Social Science Council (ISSC) in order to unite social science scholars from all over the world. The ICSU and ISSC merged in 2018 under the name of the International Science Council (ISC), which comprises 40 International Scientifi c Unions and over 140 na- tional science bodies, including Academies and Research Councils. It is the largest global science organization in the world. The InterAcademy Panel on International issues (IAP), launched in 1993, was a global network of the world’s science academies, involving more than 100 academies. In 2016, it merged with the InterAcademy Medical Panel (IAMP) and the InterAcademy Council (IAC) under the name of InterAcademy Partnership (IAP). It has over 140 members. More about the history of international science organizations can be found in detailed overviews6. In Europe, academies are united in the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities – ALL European Academies (ALLEA), launched in 1994. It has more than 50 member academies from over 40 EU and non- EU countries7. ALLEA works mainly in policy for science but the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC), launched in 2001, provides reports and assessments relevant to European policy needs – i.e.: science for

5 F. Greenaway, Science International. A history of the International Council of Scientifi c Unions, University Press Cambridge, Cambridge 1966. 6 L. Engwall, Academies and their roles for policy decisions , cit., pp. 147-174; F. Greenaway, Science International. A history of the International Council of Scientifi c Unions, cit. 7 J. Engelbrecht and N. Mann, The Sum of the Parts: ALLEA and Academies , cit.; F. Greenaway, Science International. A history of the International Council of Scientifi c Unions , cit. 40 Jüri Engelbrecht policy. These reports cover biosciences, energy and the environment. The EASAC involves academies from the EU states, Norway and Switzerland, together with ALLEA and Academia Europea. Beside National Academies, there are many Academies with internation- al membership which bring another dimension to international cooperation compared with National Academies or Scientifi c Unions. Academia Europaea (AE) is a European Academy of Humanities, Letters and Sciences, founded in 1988. Its members (around 4000 in 2019) come from across the whole of Europe and are experts from the physical sciences and technology, biolog- ical sciences and medicine, mathematics, letters and humanities, social and cognitive sciences, economics and law. According to AE’s Strategic Plan for 2019-20248, its priority is to strengthen the development of individual schol- arships and scholars for the benefi t of society. The World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS) was founded in 1960, based on the ideas of Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russel and other eminent scientists and scholars. According to the ideas of founding fathers, WAAS serves as a forum for its members, addressing the challeng- es facing mankind today, bearing in mind the motto: leadership in thought that leads to action. It has around 700 members from all the continents of the world. WAAS has consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council ECOSOC and UNESCO. In 2013, WAAS and its partners founded the World University Consortium (WUC). It conducts a series of international conferences on future education, and roundtables to develop new transdisci- plinary subjects. The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) was launched in 1983 for the advancement of science in developing countries. It was formerly called the Third World Academy of Sciences, hence its acronym TWAS. It has around 1200 members. The next section offers several examples, characterizing the joint efforts of academies for the benefi t of research and society.

4. Academies and Society

The scientifi c community, academies and their associations have clearly intensifi ed all their activities for the benefi t of progress in research and the de- velopment of society. Although the ideas of academies were once concentrated

8 Academia Europaea. Strategic Plan 2019-2024 https://www.ae-info.org. Academies and the Information-Rich Society 41 on sharing and discussing new scientifi c results within the framework of learned societies, today’s dynamic world has changed this situation. There are many areas of activity, as mentioned above (see the ideas of academies). The scientifi c community is better structured through various organizations and knowledge of new scientifi c results spreads quickly. However, there is one threat in the dissemination process which is called katataxiphilia (love for ranking)9. Indeed, too much emphasis on ranking may make life for the funders of science easier, but the essence of scientifi c research may become obvious in the long run and not refl ected immediately in various indices. From the viewpoint of society, the information available through all the elec- tronic channels has created a lot of misunderstandings, involving fake news and non-scientifi c ideas. Mankind is certainly much better informed about the challenges we face. This has sharpened the situation, with society quite understandably wanting solutions as quickly as possible, but scientifi c re- search takes time. Such a contradiction may easily lead to accusations that researchers do not do what is expected. Such accusations are more common in countries where democracy is still developing. What is important in society, is the mutual understanding of all the activities of its stakeholders. Although the principle of understanding is not a new idea, it should probably be a basis for a global paradigm and joint efforts. The key words for action could be fl exibil- ity, openness, networking and trust. Communication, known in the semiotics of sign systems between the parts of the system, is decisive for understanding each other. The responsibility of scientists leads them to solve the acute prob- lems of society and mature society leaves scientists free to carry out research in fi elds where the results are not immediately applicable. From the history of science, we know that the results of many research projects were applied after some time. The classic example is the saying attributed to Michael Faraday on the practical value of electricity – there is a probability that you will soon be able to tax it, was his explanation to the British Chancellor of Exchequer (mid-19th century). So, we could say that communication and the advisory role of academies are closely related. This is refl ected also by the Strategic Plans and Reports of many scientifi c institutions 10 . The ISC, for example, has very clearly set up the

9 J. Velterop, Openness is a scientifi cally and societally relevant part of a published article’s quality, in The Freedom of Scientifi c Research in the Face of Political and Societal Demands , Akademie im Dialog/9, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, 2017, pp. 57-65. 10 Academia Europaea. Strategic Plan 2019-2024 https://www.ae-info.org; International Science Council, Advancing Science as a Global Public Good, Action Plan 2019-2021. 42 Jüri Engelbrecht major challenges for society to which science should respond11 . The domains of action are the following: (i) the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; (ii ) the digital revolution; ( iii) science in policy and public discourse; ( iv ) the evolution of science and science systems. The IAP invites its member acade- mies to pay attention to 12 the balance of local and global problems, to quality while increasing inclusivity, to disciplinary interaction, to the service mission of academies and to rationality in a post-truth world. It is clear that the challenges facing global research are related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by all UN member states in 2015. The SDGs call for the protection of the planet and improvement of living conditions for everyone. These goals constitute a complex system, as complex as the world is, and there are many interactions between the single goals. The ISC invites all academies to plan their agendas to include local, regional and global activities, in order to mobilize the scientifi c community in research along the SDG lines. Indeed, the complexity of the problems needs theoretical research as well as practical implementations, which are possible only through cooperation. Actually, such research is also related to communi- cation, advisory role and science education. The advisory role of academies is often mentioned in their missions 13 . At international level, the EC has created a Scientifi c Advice Mechanism (SAM) Unit at the EC. This Unit involves the Group of Chief Scientifi c Advisors and the Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA) con- sortium. This consortium is made up of fi ve Academy Networks: ALLEA, EASAC, AE and the European Council of Academies of Applied Sciences, Technologies and Engineering (Euro-CASE) and the Federation of European Academies of Medicine (FEAM). The mission of SAPEA is to provide inde- pendent scientifi c advice for the EC to support decision-making. The subjects of the reports of SAPEA include the problems of microplastics, carbon cap- ture and utilisation techniques, food from oceans, transforming the future of ageing, etc. The EASAC provides bottom-up reports and shorter state- ments (over 80 reports since 2001) on many topics and various themes (see

ISC, Paris 2019; Improving Scientifi c Input to Global Policymaking with a focus on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. IAP Report, 2019; Merit-based Academies in the 21 st Century: a think piece, IAP Working Group, 2019 ; ALLEA Strategic Priorities 2019-2024 , ALLEA, Berlin 2019. 11 International Science Council, Advancing Science as a Global Public Good, cit. 12 Merit-based Academies in the 21st Century: a think piece, IAP Working Group , 2019. 13 L. Engwall, Academies and their roles for policy decisions, cit., pp. 147-174. Academies and the Information-Rich Society 43 https://easac.eu/ publications). So the role of academies in advising the EC is well organized. The ethical aspects of research have always been the focus of ALLEA. The EC recognizes the Code of Conduct worked out by an ALLEA Work Group as the reference document for research integrity for all EU-funded research projects14 . It is now translated into all the offi cial EU languages. One of the important areas of communication is related to science educa- tion. effective and coordinated science and policy interface mechanisms need constant attention. This means that science education at all levels must be sup- ported in order to make the need for evidence-based decisions an indisputable practice. It requires attention not only by scientists and scholars but also by policy-makers, journalists and society as a whole15 . All these problems are intensively discussed at various scientifi c fora or- ganized by academies and their associations16 . It must be noted that the AE runs a journal «European Review» and WAAS runs the journals Cadmus and «Eruditio» where new ideas on science policy and global problems are regu- larly published.

5. Final Remarks

This is a brief overview of the activities currently performed by academies, at a time when studies on complexity of the world are gaining more and more attention. It requires constant work and we, scientists and scholars, should al- ways ask: have we fulfi lled our potential to improve the world? I am tempted to fi nish this short essay with a statement by the ISC 17 : The human capital involved in scientifi c research and its application

is greater than ever before, refl ecting the centrality of scientifi c under- standing to contemporary human affairs. Major advances have occurred across the whole spectrum of science, partly driven by curiosity about

14 The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity, ALLEA, Berlin 2017. 15 J. Engelbrecht, The knowledge on complexity should be a part of contemporary education , cit., pp. 27-37. 16 The Freedom of Scientifi c Research in the Face of Political and Societal Demands , cit.; Advisory Role of Academies in the Information-Rich Society, Conference Abstracts, Estonian Academy of Sciences, Tallinn 2018; The Role of Academies in Sustaining European Knowledge Societies in Times of Crisis, Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, Turin 2019. 17 International Science Council, Advancing Science as a Global Public Good, cit. 44 Jüri Engelbrecht

the fundamental processes that animate nature and society, and partly in response to the complexities of a world that needs science more than ever, and where the ‘social’ and the ‘natural’ are inextricably entwined.

This means that freedom of research and responsibility of scientists are tightly connected. Acc. Sc. Torino Quaderni, 35 (2020), 45-49 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES

Prospects for the Academy of Sciences of Turin A P

1. The Academy of Sciences of Torino: its mission

The Academy of Sciences was instituted in 1783. It was the national acad- emy, fi rst of the Kingdom of Sardinia and later of the Kingdom of Italy, until 1874, when the newly reconstituted Accademia dei Lincei in Rome took over as the offi cial academy of the Italian nation. As defi ned in its by-laws, its mission is to

contribute to scientifi c progress, supporting research and seeing to the publication of its results, contributing to the spread of knowledge through congresses, conventions, seminars, lectures and all other suit- able means, and further by providing opinions and making proposals to public institutions and private organisations in its fi elds of competence.

2. The Academy of Sciences of Torino: its Members

Today the Academy comprises about 350 members, consisting of Italian members, foreign members and corresponding members, divided into two Classes, ‛physical, mathematical and natural sciences՚ (in short Scientifi c Class ) and ‛moral, historical and philological sciences՚ (in short Humanistic Class ). More specifi cally the Scientifi c Class includes 74 Italian and foreign members besides 115 corresponding members for a total of 189 members; the correspond- ing numbers for the Humanistic Class are 73, 70 for a total of 143 members.

3. Initiatives by the Academy of Sciences of Torino in the Academic Years 2018-2019 and 2019-2020

In Table I the initiatives of the Academy of Sciences in the Academic Years 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 are shown in their distribution by typology and by 46 Alberto Piazza

Class. A further classifi cation is specifi ed according to the disciplinary fi eld, a transdisciplinary research being defi ned as that which goes beyond Academia involving stakeholders from policy, civil society, etc.: a target the Academy of Sciences tries to reach with variable success.

T I I A S T A Y 2018-2019 2019-2020 ( ) Typology Scientifi c Humanistic TransDisciplinary Total

Conference 9 7 7 23 11 3 14

Meeting 8 7 11 26 9 1 4 14

Publication 2 3 1 6 1 5 6

Teaching 18 10 28 19 5 24

Total 37 27 19 83 40 14 4 58

About two events per week were planned in the academic year 2018- 2019. All of them were appreciated by the audience and often the ‘Sala dei Mappamondi’, originally a theatre, today a hall taking its name from the two large historical globes on either side of it as well as the Academy meeting heart, has their seats sold out.

4. Transdisciplinarity

It is worth looking into the topics classifi ed as ‛transdisciplinary initiative՚ covered by our Academy in the last academic year November 2018-October Prospects for the Academy of Sciences of Turin 47

2019. They included a series of lectures by different speakers dealing with the following matters:

• Talks with «time»: Arts, Literatures, Sciences, Medicine • Conservative restoration involving different professional skills • Leonardo da Vinci • Geology: knowing the past to better manage the future • New edition of the complete work by Shakespeare: artist or craftsman? • Neuroscience and emotions in honor of Joseph Le Doux • Italy and the Suez Canal. A global history, from the mid-19° century to the present • Nanobiology: new technologies and new biology • The Moon from science to fi ction: astronomy, music and literature • A correspondence between Paul Valéry and Albert Einstein • Primo Levi and Il sistema Periodico (Book) • On the imitation. Johann Winckelmann between art history, political ide- als and Altertumswissenschaft (Book).

My own research has focused on the fi eld of human evolution with its interplay of biological and cultural events. Researchers from diverse back- grounds are converging on the view that human evolution has been shaped by gene-culture interactions. This view is supported by recent analyses of human genetic variation, which reveal that hundreds of genes have been subject to recent selective pressures, often in response to human activities. The variety of the topics above highlights the considerable potential for cross-disciplinary exchange to provide novel insights into how culture has shaped the human genome. I am aware of my professional bias in advancing the idea that today a main function of the Academies should be to fertilize such trans-disciplinarity.

5. Strategic priorities

Table II shows seven strategic priorities ALLEA specifi cally suggested to implement in the fi ve years period 2019-2024. Such indication should allows each of the ALLEA 59 Academies (the Italian ones are Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti and Accademia delle Scienze di Torino) to devise actions aiming to fulfi ll its own priorities within the available possibilities. 48 Alberto Piazza

T II Strategic priorities 2019-2024 ALLEA/TORINO Serving European Academies and Facilitating Allea Cooperation Improving Framework Conditions for Science ? and Research Providing Independent Scientifi c Advice to ? Policymakers and Society Facilitating Good Research Practice Torino Defending Academic Freedom and Torino Trustworthy Science Strengthening Diversity and Inclusivity Torino Thinking and Acting Globally Allea

What about the possibilities for the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino? The fi rst column of the table shows what ALLEA plans to do and it is actually doing by some lines of action settled by its working groups. Some ex- amples are the working groups on: Intellectual Property Rights (dealing with ‘Open access journals or platforms՚ and ‘Patent-related aspects of CRISPR- Cas technology՚); Humanities (‘Going digital՚); Truth, Trust & Expertise (‘Trust within science: dinamics and norms of knowledge production՚); Horizon Europe (‘Developing a vision for Framework Programme 9՚); Health Inequality (‘A transdisciplinary exploration of socioeconomic position, health and causality՚). The second column of Table 2 identifi es three possible strategic priori- ties the Academy of Sciences of Torino shares with ALLEA. The priorities ‘Serving European Academies and Facilitating Cooperation՚ and ‘Thinking and Acting Globally՚ cannot be pursued if not by an ‘European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities՚ as ALLEA defi nes itself. Two priorities in Table 2 ‘Improving Framework Conditions for Science and Research՚ and ‘Providing Independent Scientifi c Advice to Policymakers and Society՚ are pointed out with a question mark. Both are very important: all the Members of this Academy know they were the original function of the Academies, but improving framework conditions for science and research is probably a too ambitious goal even for a glorious Academy like this one, with budget constraints making problematic any systematic and continuous effort to improve science and research. Even more important could be the function of ‘providing scientifi c advice to policymakers and society՚ for the simple and Prospects for the Academy of Sciences of Turin 49 bitter reason that in Italy most policymakers think science and research are not an effective engine to trigger off economic growth. In fact the research and development average expenditure by the 27 countries of the European Union has been 2.19 % of its whole Gross Domestic Product (GDP) but Italy invest- ed only 1.39% of its GDP1. This stimulating and fruitful Meeting is going to end, but its challenges remain open and one of the many ones discussed in these two days, i.e. the trust in evidence-based social institutions, plays a central role rightly pointed out by ALLEA in many documents. In recent times, however, both a dismissal of journalism and scientifi c facts, and a stronger scepticism in political institu- tions are apparently growing across Europe. In spite of this trend, at the core of European academies’ priorities is the promotion of the values of science and research, as well as the benefi ts of including scientifi c reasoning in public discourse. ALLEA seeks to provide a transnational platform for perspectives on the nature of and relationship between truth, trust and expertise in the fi eld of science and the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino is prepared to give its contribution.

1 Source of Data: Eurostat, Hyperlink to the table: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?ta b=table&init=1&plugin=1&language=en&pcode=tsc00001 (Last update: 18.03.2020).

PART II SPECIFIC ISSUES

Acc. Sc. Torino Quaderni, 35 (2020), 53-57 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES

Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms: the Voice of Academies V Z

I will deal with the the topic of human rights and fundamental freedoms, with particular reference to the role the Academies can play in studying, de- fending, promoting and, fi rst of all, understanding these rights. In our times we don’t enjoy clear skies; the future is uncertain. Every meas- ure that could possibly be useful to defend one of humanity’s greatest conquests, a major conquest in particular for we Europeans, should now be promoted. I am going to organise my speech into two parts. Both of them will show important similarity and possible synergy for the Academies and those who are engaged in the fi eld of fundamental rights. I refer, in the fi rst part, to uni- versality as a character of Human Rights and of the attitude of the Academies in carrying out their studies. I will then say a few words on the possibility – or should I say necessity? – of overcoming the divide between ‛two cultures՚: humanities on one hand and sciences on the other. This new approach be- comes more and more necessary in the fi eld of law and human rights and the Academies know how to make both cultures live and work together.

1. Universality, no State Borders

An intrinsic characteristic of human rights is their universality. It is cer- tainly a tendential universality (think of the long and diffi cult history of equal rights for women), that admits variations, providing the essence is preserved. The idea of fundamental human rights postulates the unity of human nature and the inherent dignity of every human being. This is the common ground of the different philosophical approach of the human rights movement in France and in America: the secular philosophy of the Enlightenments in France and the religious one, deriving from the Reformation, in America. One produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (26 August 1789), the other the Constitution of the State of Virginia and the American Declaration of Independence (both in 1776). 54 Vladimiro Zagrebelsky

The French Declaration proclaimed that ‛The goal of any political asso- ciation is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man՚ adding, following L’esprit des lois of Montesquieu, that ‛Any society in which the guarantee of rights is not assured, nor the separation of powers deter- mined, has no Constitution՚. The American Declaration of Independence, mainly written by Thomas Jefferson, opens its Preamble by saying

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Self-evident, as Jefferson wrote, means that there is no external justifi ca- tion. Probably an explanation would have undermined the self-evidence of the claim and open a diffi cult discussion about universality. Both the French and the American Declarations, notwithstanding the rhe- torical emphasis, in practice concerned only the French and the American citizens. French and American governments and judges were responsible for implementing the rights and liberties of the Declarations. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 is even more clear in defi ning its “national” scope, referring to the “ancient rights and liberties” of English law, deriving from English history. In 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which article 1 declares that ‛All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’. The echo of the French Declaration is quite clear. The UN Declaration continues by saying that the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. And the Declaration adds that it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law. With the Universal Declaration, the two Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), form the International Bill of Human Rights. At European level, the Preamble of the Convention of Human Rights and fundamental Freedoms considers that the aim of the Council of Europe is the achievement of greater unity between its members and that one of the methods by which that aim is to be pursued is the maintenance and further realisation Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms: the Voice of Academies 55 of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, reaffi rming that fundamental freedoms are the foundation of justice and peace in the world, best maintained on the one hand by an effective political democracy and on the other by a common understanding and observance of Human Rights. Similar words have been repeated from the eighteenth century to the pres- ent day, but with a deep difference in legal meaning. Because, meanwhile, the very idea of Human Rights has evolved. After the Second World War, a rad- ical modifi cation of the concept of fundamental human rights was affi rmed, as a terrain of responsibility for the international community. Consequently, the principles of domestic jurisdiction and of non-interference in the internal affairs of States became no longer applicable. The philosophical and political movement that developed in Europe and America has thus acquired a new nature, which fully recognises the ownership of rights by each individual, inasmuch as they are a human being. The desire in Europe was to adopt new measures to help to avoid wars on the European continent. The link between violations of Human Rights and war has been underlined in each and every international document on Human Rights. The Nuremberg trial gave the Human Rights movement an impor- tant boost, justifying the position of those who indicated massive violation of Human Rights as one of the causes of the recent world war. Moreover, the Nuremberg trial was one of the foundations of the new idea of the right (and duty) of the international community in the fi eld of human rights. The UN Charter and bodies were the most important international basis for the human rights movement to develop and bear fruit. The new position of the individual in international law has been the most important result. The equal position of the parties before judges at the European Court of Human Rights hearings (the individual applicant and the State) is a clear sign of a revolution in traditional international law, which considered States alone. Thanks to the role played by the European Court of Human Rights, the European system for the protection of individual fundamental rights is the most advanced in the world. Direct application by individuals to the European Court is a tangible sign of the ownership of rights and freedoms asserted against the States. The Court is external to those States. Indeed, European States “recognise” (not ‘grant’) the rights of the Convention. The current situation reveals that fundamental rights are far from being fully recognised everywhere. On the contrary, strong claims of specifi c differ- ences – sometimes deep differences – are widespread. They speak of an Asian notion of rights and there are African and Islamic charters; there is the Inter- American Convention on Fundamental Rights and, for we Europeans, the Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, for the European Union and the Member States, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union. All these documents, although they derive in some way from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations (1948), have a certain amount of specifi c content. All, however, are characterised by being applica- ble in certain areas, in certain regions of the world, regardless of the borders of the States and the citizenship of the persons under their jurisdiction. This is, if you will, an aspect of the universality of fundamental rights: limited in their operative space, but nevertheless indifferent to the political borders of States and primarily concerned with human beings as such. The respect of migrants’ rights is currently the best example of what that means. The origin of our Academies also lies in seventeenth and eighteenth-cen- tury Europe. Aspiration to the universality of knowledge, be it scientifi c or humanistic, is fundamental, with the consequent tendency towards indiffer- ence (or is it intolerance?) to State borders. The only concern was the rigour and laicism of the method, the openness to educated dialogue and tolerance. It was the fertile ground on which the philosophy and the political battle of human rights could take root. For some time now, the explicit attack on the very idea of the universality of fundamental rights (even when only regional) has been evident. The call for the sovereignty of States, the return of the demand for non-interference by other States or by supranational organisations, the reference to the identity (historical, cultural and especially religious) of States is well advanced. The identity self-assigned by those who see themselves as the majority of the citizens of the State, resents the different, minority identities, urging nationalistic pride, calling for contrasts and confl icts; it also leads, in the fi eld of human rights, to differentiation rather than harmonisation. It operates ac- cording to the logic of “us versus them”. The network of European Academies can build a valid contrast to this tendency. It is their historical reason for being, while the re-emergence of borders is a denial.

2. Make the Two Cultures Match and Work Together

I would now like to say a few words about the other reason why the role of Academies may be important also in the fi eld of Human Rights. It is evident Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms: the Voice of Academies 57 that increasingly rapid and pervasive technological development produces profound changes in the structure of societies and in the scope of people’s fundamental rights (and duties). The information society and the gathering and management of personal da- ta have changed the signifi cance of the right to respect for privacy and personal life. The sense of freedom of expression and the right to receive information has also changed. New genetics can question personal identity. New medical technologies have enriched the range of fi liation possibilities and the right to respect for the family life that follows. The extension of these possibilities, in these as in other fi elds, drives the analysis of the limits that it is necessary to impose upon new rights or new as- pects of traditional rights and on the consequent new duties and responsibilities. The development of robots and artifi cial intelligence in every fi eld also raises the problem of ownership of rights and attribution of duties. The use of algorithms in the fi eld of justice and some examples of automated justice raise a number of questions about fundamental rights, the rule of law and fair trial. In the situation we are experiencing, the study of human rights cannot be monopolized by lawyers. The integration of the “two cultures” – scientifi c and humanistic – is essential. Academies could help overcome a long-standing distance and diffi cult dialogue where separate, specialized language doesn’t help. An effective dialogue could be useful for both “cultures”. One can fer- tilize the other. What is certain, is that lawyers in general and those who deal with human rights in particular need to enrich their knowledge with access to at least some branches of scientifi c culture. And it is unquestionable that “hard” sciences are not neutral and have to be aware of the values they encounter. It is a matter of understanding each other and moving forward together. In conclusion, in the fi eld of Human Rights, the nature of the Academies and the role they can play are particularly relevant, because of their interna- tional scope and of the integration of knowledge they practise. The commitment of all available organizations and authorities – Academies among them – is urgent, because we must stop the political regression on uni- versality of Human Rights and help to govern the technological revolution which is taking place.

Acc. Sc. Torino Quaderni, 35 (2020), 59-65 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES

Academy and European Industrial Development L M

Disruption is here and is here to stay. We are going through a wave of change that has no historical precedent and that is not about to stop. Various speakers at this conference have pointed out that we live in a time when disruption is the new normal. The fi rst sign of such disruption has to do with corporate longevity, intended as the capacity of a fi rm to maintain its market leadership over time. The European industrial fabric – but the phenom- enon is even more acute worldwide – is increasingly exposed to the gale of ‘creative destruction’, described by Schumpeter as the ‘process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one’1. This is documented in an evidence-based manner by the relentless re- duction in the tenure of companies on the S&P 500 Index. According to Innosight’s studies 2, in fact, the trendline is for average longevity to continue to slope downward: the 33-year average company lifespan on S&P 500 in 1964 had narrowed to 24 years by 2016 and is forecast to shrink to just 12 years by 2027 (Fig. 1). There are a variety of reasons why companies drop off the list. They can be overtaken by faster-growing newcomers leveraging innovative technologies or groundbreaking business models. They can become less relevant due to new product categories making their appearance (e.g., Facebook has entered the list in the last fi ve years by reshaping the advertising market) or they can enter into a merger or acquisition deal. Few companies are immune to the forces of creative destruction: at the current churn rate, about half of today’s S&P 500 companies will be replaced over the next ten years3. More evidence of the furious pace of market change is the tectonic shift in dominant business models. A glance at the top-10 companies with the largest

1 J.A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Routledge, London 1942. 2 Innosight. 2018 Corporate Longevity Forecast: Creative Destruction is Accelerating, 2018. 3 Ibidem. 60 Licia Mattioli

Fig. 1. Average company lifespan on S&P 500 Index (Source: Innosight).

Fig. 2. Radical shift in dominant business models. Academy and European Industrial Development 61 market capitalization worldwide4 reveals a megatrend that has been playing out over the past two decades: digital transformation. In fact, the companies currently leading the pack have a different DNA from those that preceded them (Fig. 2). In 2000, the companies with the largest market capitalization worldwide were asset-heavy giants, like General Electric and Pfi zer, implementing ‘pipeline’ business models that turn inputs into tangible outputs thanks to cap- ital-intensive plants and machinery. Firms create stuff, push it out and sell it to customers: value is produced upstream and consumed downstream, following a linear supply chain. Now, companies at the top of the ranking are digital platforms, which turn the model upside down by enabling transactions between different sides of the market 5. Their core assets are no longer tangible own entities but rather network effects and Big Data for user profi ling, which are the ultimate sources of their competitive advantage. This new guard of digital platforms is epitomized by GAFA companies (i.e., Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple), based in the United States, and BAT companies (i.e., Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent), based in China. How is Europe’s research and innovation responding to this inherent un- predictability of modern times? Well, strengths and weaknesses coexist. Compared to other major world economies (i.e., the United States and China), Europe has secured a global leadership position in terms of volume of research activities6 (Fig. 3). With more than 1.8 million researchers, Europe is the economy with the largest number of researchers, ahead of China and the United States, with 1.6 million and 1.3 million researchers respectively7. Europe is a front-runner in scientifi c production: Europe generates 27% of papers worldwide, far more than the United States (19%) and China (17%)8. Europe continues to be a global powerhouse in terms of public funds for research and innovation: Europe accounts for 23% of the global public R&D budget, compared to 21% in the United States and 16% in China9.

4 PwC, Global Top 100 companies by market capitalisation, 2019. 5 M.W. Van Alstyne, G.G. Parker, S.P. Choudary, Pipelines, platforms, and the new rules of strategy, in «Harvard Business Review», 94(4), 2016, pp. 54-62. 6 European Commission, Science, research and innovation performance of the EU – Strengthening the foundations for Europe’s future, 2018. 7 Sources: Eurostat, OECD. 8 Source: Web of Science. 9 Sources: Eurostat, OECD. 62 Licia Mattioli

Fig. 3. European leadership in terms of volume of research activities.

Fig. 4. Europe struggling in bringing research results from lab to market.

Fig. 5. Towards an ambidextrous vision. Academy and European Industrial Development 63

These data points portray Europe as an extremely knowledge-intensive society. This ‘big picture’ is corroborated by intense cultural production, cou- pled with mobility programs such as Erasmus and Marie SkłodowskaCurie Actions. However, such knowledge-intensity is not suffi ciently refl ected in European industrial outputs and market value. Europe, in fact, lags behind when it comes to bringing research results from lab to market (Fig. 4). As far as intellectual property is concerned, Europe has a limited patent pro- pensity compared to the United States and Japan, especially in new-generation technologies such as Internet of Things, Big Data, and Artifi cial Intelligence 10 . Europe’s diffi culty in capitalizing on its strong scientifi c base becomes ev- ident if we look at ‘unicorns’ (i.e., privately held start-up companies valued at over $1 billion). 109 of them were founded in the United States (accounting for 51% of the total market value) while only 26 have their roots in Europe (accounting for 7% of the total market value)11 . The EU-US gap is exacerbated in the platform economy. In this market space, European operators (i.e., 27 out of a total 176 identifi ed worldwide) represent only 4% of the total market value while the US platform economy skyrockets by capturing 68% of the overall market cap12 . Not surprisingly, this persistent gap prompted Ursula von der Leyen – freshly nominated to head the European Commission – to propose a European Future Fund. This €100 billion sovereign wealth fund aims to bol- ster European champions in the digital space with the purpose of mitigating the market power held by non-EU competitors provided with unprecedented fi nancial means. In such a scenario, what value can academies bring to the European indus- trial fabric? Academies are the home of advanced knowledge. They work with univer- sities – gathering world-leading scholars and researchers – and, at the same time, have the capacity to go beyond university boundaries. Academies ex- pand the reach of universities in their ‘third mission’ by championing the role of science and research in society. This takes place in Europe, where ALLEA – which organizes this confer- ence – brings together more than 50 academies from over 40 countries.

10 Sources: Eurostat, OECD, JRC. 11 Sources: CB Insights, Eurostat, OECD. 12 Source: The Center for Global Enterprise. 64 Licia Mattioli

It also takes place in Italy. The Turin Academy of Sciences – which hosts this conference – has been the heart of Turin’s scientifi c community for over two centuries. Distinguished alumni such as Charles Darwin, Galileo Ferraris, and Norberto Bobbio –to name but a few – make the Turin Academy of Sciences the cultural centre of gravity par excellence, the place where knowl- edge fl ourishes without barriers or frontiers. Three distinctive traits of academies make them the right interlocutor for European entrepreneurs: 1 – Intellectual excellence (i.e., depth of thought) 2 – Long-term vision (i.e., horizons of thought) 3 – Multi-disciplinary knowledge (i.e., breadth of thought). To understand how academies can most effectively support European in- dustry, we should consider the notion of ‘ambidextrous innovation’ 13 , which is well-known among scholars as and Innovation Management practitioners. In a nutshell, it is a resilient approach to innovation that combines the need for stability in the present with a leaning towards change in the near future. From a business standpoint, being ambidextrous means striking the right balance between harnessing existing capabilities on today’s market (i.e., exploitation) and building new opportunities for tomorrow’s market (i.e., exploration)14 . To manage the market of today, companies resort to incremental innovation (i.e., ‘evolution’), exploiting existing skills to achieve operational effi ciency and ever-greater value for customers. All this takes place under the guidance of the management system already in place. Looking ahead, preparing for the industry of tomorrow requires discontinuity (i.e., ‘revolution’) with the status quo: radical innovation is cultivated in a space that transcends today’s comfort zone, calling for a new generation of leaders (Fig. 5). The industry of tomorrow is exactly where academies direct their thoughts. Academies provide an in-depth, independent and forward-looking view of the main factors that enable and inhibit economic development in view of the ex- ponential change that European industry will have to confront in the coming years and decades: academies help shape the industry of tomorrow. In conclusion, in the 500th anniversary of his death, we remember Leonardo da Vinci, a fi ne illustration of the spirit of academies.

13 C.A. O’Reilly, M.L. Tushman, The Ambidextrous Organization , in «Harvard Business Review», 82(4), 2004, pp. 74-81. 14 J.G. March, Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning , in «Organization Science», 2(1), 1991, pp. 71-87. Academy and European Industrial Development 65

He was an inventor, architect, painter and civil engineer. He was a great observer, curious about everything and gifted with a special talent for making connections across disciplines. 500 years later, one man alone cannot be the sole source of universal knowledge. A single man has to be necessarily replaced by a network of the brightest minds (i.e., distinguished scholars performing pioneering research) thinking and acting in a coordinated manner. The community of academies as a whole can represent the ‘new Leonardo da Vinci’, a hotbed of knowledge acting as a major source of inspiration for tomorrow’s industry. Leonardo’s genius demonstrates that leadership of thought, long-term thinking, and the ability to join the dots between disciplines are key to inno- vation, especially innovation that intends to remain relevant over time: it is no mere coincidence that modern science took a different turn after Leonardo.

Acc. Sc. Torino In Defence of the Environment:a European Academic Prospective 67 Quaderni, 35 (2020), 67-77 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES

In Defence of the Environment: a European Academic Prospective G S and P L

1. Introduction

Population growth and increased prosperity, ever-expanding economies, rapid urbanization and globalization are bringing global demand for energy, water and food to a point increasingly beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity. Together with climate change, these pressures are causing signifi cant environ- mental degradation in many parts of the planet. The Global Climate Agreement signed in 2015 and the UN Agenda on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) constitute urgent calls and drivers for involvement by Higher Education1. The UN goals for instance emphasis the following:

By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles.

According to UNESCO and the United Nations, education has a key role to play in our a sustainable future, challenging Universities to take a leadership role in sustainability issues. As universities educate the next generation of de- cision-makers and infl uencers, they can have a greater impact on sustainable development than any other single sector in society. Furthermore, universities occupy a unique position within society, as they drive technological and so- cietal progress through research, discovery, knowledge creation and adoption. However, only recently have academic institutions undertaken integrated actions for supporting transition strategies towards a more sustainable environment. Transitions to sustainability are understood here as ‘socio-technical՚ process- es, because they involve a deep-structural change in current linear deterministic scientifi c knowledge paradigm and the adoption of new approaches based on

1 Sustainable Development Goals. UN Agenda. https://sustainabledevelopment. un.org/?menu=1300. 68 Guido Saracco and Patrizia Lombardi system thinking, critical value-based skills and multi-stakeholder collabora- tive approaches. The key role plaid by universities in supporting societal transition and the achievement of SDGs through education, scientifi c research, technological innovation and public empowerment are highlighted in the next section of this paper. This is organized as follows. The next section highlights the cli- mate crisis and the role of universities in supporting energy transition and the whole societal process. It discusses emerging management theories including socio-ecology approaches. Section 3 provides some evidence and examples of the services provided by universities through education, scientifi c research, tech- nological innovation and public empowerment at European level. Conclusive remarks and refl ections are reported in the fi nal section of this paper.

2. Global Warming and the Role of Universities in Societal Transition

In the Middle Ages, universities were meant to be the place for teaching and shaping the elite class of administrators serving the regnant in charge. With the industrial revolution, academia was asked to improve the effi cien- cy of machines and new production systems. During the Second World War, great effort went into military controlled research and development. As a consequence, science and technology have been seen as the engines for eco- nomic progress2. More recently, as argued by Lombardi and Sonetti 3, a new University role has been outlined by Richard Florida in nurturing the rampant ‛creative class՚4, while John Scott recalled the necessary postmodern shift of university missions from teaching to research as a tool for public service mis- sion. Last but not least, Henry Etzkowitz designed a triple helix cluster with the aim of softening the boundaries between university-industry-government. The current global climate crisis situation and the recognition of the Anthropocene era by geologists which infl uence the future of civilization have highlighted a new role of universities within society. The importance of climate is clear for humans as we need food, fresh water, fi bre, timber and protection from natural disasters in order to survive

2 B. Lund and S. Arndt (eds.), The creative university: contemporary responses to the changing role of the university , Creative education, v. 7, Brill, Leiden 2018. 3 P. Lombardi and G. Sonetti (eds.), News from the front of sustainable university campuses , Edizione Nuova Cultura, Roma 2017. 4 R. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited, Basic Books, New York 2012. )ORULGDLQQXUWXULQJWKHUDPSDQW³FUHDWLYHFODVV´

² ²

In Defence of the Environment:a European Academic Prospective 69

Fig. 1. Source: IPCC Climate Change 2014 report.

and thrive. Sachs recognizes that climate infl uences crop productivity, dis- ease, water scarcity or availability, and vulnerability to disaster 5. The main cause of this global environmental problem can be attributed to anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Indeed, after the industrial revolution, with the introduction of inventions based on the exploitation of combustions and chemicals, and with the subsequent growth of the economy and of the pop- ulation, the quantities of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere have been increasing, following an exponential path. Specifi cally, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)6, 2040 ± 340 GtCO2 were emitted between 1750 and 2011, about 40% of which held by the atmosphere and 30% absorbed by the oceans, causing their acid- ifi cation, which we will look at later on. The problem is that half of the total emissions between the two aforementioned years, have been produced over the last four decades (fi g. 1). This increasing amount of GHGs implies global warming and ocean acid- ifi cation. In fact, the last 30 years have been the warmest in the last 1400, at least in the northern hemisphere. Indeed, the average increase of the overall global temperature is estimated to be 0.85 °C. During the same period, this effect has been responsible for the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic gla- ciers, 3.5 to 4.1% and 1.2 to 1.8% per decade respectively, and for rising sea levels (0.19 m in the last century). Moreover, global warming facilitates

5 J.D. Sachs, The Age of Sustainable Development, Columbia University Press, New York 2015. 6 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), IPCC Climate Change 2014 report ; https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/. 70 Guido Saracco and Patrizia Lombardi extreme climatic events like hurricanes or fl oods and opposing phenomena like drought and desertifi cation. Consequently, water quality and quantity may be deeply compromised in several regions, with alarming consequences for the population. Another effect of this phenomenon is related to the reactions of the various species. Indeed, due to the change in the climatic conditions of the ecosystems, species tend to modify their habits and the ways they interact with each other and with the environments they were used to. For instance, many species change geographic and ambient conditions, seasonal behaviours, mi- gration patterns and so on. As far as oceanic acidifi cation is concerned, it is straightforward to consider the repercussions on marine species, since they are evidently weakened by the 0.1 decrease in the average pH, corresponding to a 26% increase in acidity, and by the resulting change in the food chain, which is obviously affected by these phenomena. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IREA)7 and International Energy Agency (IEA) (2016)8, meeting the goals enshrined in the Paris Agreement – limiting global temperature rise to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels – demands that we reduce the carbon dioxide intensity of the global economy by 85 percent in 35 years, corresponding to an aver- age reduction of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions of about 2.6 percent a year, or 0.6 Gigatons a year (IREA and IEA, 2017)9. As noted by Kirsten and Benjamin (2018) 10 , meeting such targets requires the rapid and extensive deployment of low-carbon technologies throughout the economy and across multiple sociotechnical domains, including electricity and heating, industry and buildings, agriculture and transport, to name a few. These low- carbon transi- tions will have implications on institutions, social practices and cultural norms. Transitional frameworks for understanding the pathways by which these changes occur have emerged in response to universal and localised ener- gy challenges, including the coupled threats of climate change, fossil fuel

7 The International Renewable Energy Agency (IREA), REthinking Energy 2017: Accelerating the global energy transformation, January 2017. 8 International Energy Agency (IEA), Energy and Climate Change 2016. 9 The International Renewable Energy Agency (IREA), REthinking Energy 2017: Accelerating the global energy transformation, January 2017; International Energy Agency (IEA), Key World Energy Statistics 2017. 10 K. Jenkins and B. Sovacool, Managing energy and climate transitions in theory and practice. A critical systematic review of Strategic Niche Management , in K.E.H. Jenkins and D. Hopkins (eds.), Transitions in Energy Effi ciency and Demand. The Emergence, Diffusion and Impact of Low-Carbon Innovation (Open Access), Taylor & Francis Group, 2018; https://www.taylor- francis.com/books/e/9781351127264/chapters/10.4324/9781351127264-13. In Defence of the Environment:a European Academic Prospective 71

Environment

Academia Civil Society

Industry Government

Fig. 2: The Quintuple Helix innovation model (Source: Carayannis et al., 2012).

depletion and fuel poverty. Within transition management theory, a number of approaches exist for examining societal transitions towards sustainable development, such as socio-technical transition research, technological in- novation systems, and co-evolutionary dynamics11 . Socio-technical transition research combines technical, social and historical analysis to examine past and contemporary societal transitions. The technological innovation systems approach differs from the socio-technical transition idea with regard to long- term socio-technical changes, in that it focuses on understanding innovation from a system perspective, as opposed to the interaction between technologi- cal and social elements. The approach claims that companies and stakeholders innovate mostly in response to incentives from the wider innovation system, studying feedback mechanisms and interactive relations used in the devel- opment and application of new knowledge by science, technology, learning, production, policy, and demand. Finally, co-evolutionary approaches seek to explain long-term processes of change, claiming that dynamics are determined by casual infl uences between mutually evolving systems.

11 D. Loorbach, N. Frantzeskaki and F. Avelino, Sustainability Transitions Research: Transforming Science and Practice for Societal Change , in «Annual Review of Environment and Resources», 42(1), 2017, pp. 599-626, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-102014-021340. 72 Guido Saracco and Patrizia Lombardi

On the base of the recognition of global warming as a challenge and driver for innovation, Carayannis12 proposes a Quintuple Helix innovation model, ‛where the environment or the natural environments represent the fi fth helix՚ (see fi g. 2). This model enriches the well-known Triple Helix model designed by Henry Etzkowitz13 adding two more elements: a fourth helix, represent- ing civil society and all the ‛media-based and culture-based public՚, including media, creative industries , culture, values, lifestyles and art, a fi fth helix, rep- resenting the ‛natural environment՚. This ‘fi ve-helix model’ can be proposed as a framework for transdisci- plinary (and interdisciplinary) analysis. It stresses the socio-ecological perspective of the natural environments of society. This perspective implies in- teraction, co-development and co-evolution of society, and nature. According to the European Commission (2009) 14 , ‘socio-ecological transition’ is one of the major challenges for current and future societies and economies. As noted by Loorbach15 , in our Western democracies, this ‘socio-ecological transition’ has already started and is, in essence, an aggregation of incremental processes of experimentation, breakthrough, institutionalization, behaviour and cultural change, driven by system thinking, distributed control, renewable resources and social innovation. Universities drive technological and societal progress through research, discovery, knowledge creation and adoption. Therefore, this sector is crucial in supporting socio-ecological transition and in addressing the challenges of the SDGs. Tertiary education provides people with professional and personal skills and capabilities. In addition, universities have access to large concen- trations of young, passionate and creative people who desire a better world. Consequently, universities are facing the big challenge of ensuring that they are equipping current and future leaders, decision-makers, teachers, innova- tors, entrepreneurs, and citizens with the knowledge, skills and motivation that will help them contribute to achieving the SDGs.

12 E.G. Carayannis, Th.D. Barth and D.F.J. Campbell, The Quintuple Helix innovation model: global warming as a challenge and driver for innovation , in «Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship», vol. 1, 2012. 13 H. Etzkowitz, The triple helix: university-industry-government innovation in action , Routledge, New York 2008. 14 European Commission, The world in 2025: rising Asia and socio-ecological transition, Luxembourg: Offi ce for Offi cial Publications of the European Communities, 2009. 15 D. Loorbach, N. Frantzeskaki and F. Avelino, Sustainability Transitions Research: Transforming Science and Practice for Societal Change, in «Annual Review of Environment and Resources», 42(1), 2017, pp. 599-626, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-102014-021340. In Defence of the Environment:a European Academic Prospective 73

3. A Case Study

The university sector has started to work towards the achievement of the SDGs, with many individual initiatives, partnerships and networks. In many cases, as noted by Lozano16 , they are doing this by recognizing that they not only educate future societal leaders, decision-makers, and intellectuals, but that they themselves should be learning organizations and should practice sus- tainability in their activities such as education, research, outreach and campus facilities management. Through their staff, students, campuses, neighbourhoods and supply chains, they have signifi cant social, economic and environmental footprints. Incorporating sustainability into the university sector clearly presents chal- lenges regarding all: education, research, operations and outreach dimensions. It also creates opportunities for higher education institutions to implement effective assessment and reporting systems. In the last two decades, an increasing number of Universities have begun introducing Sustainability strategies, and many Universities have begun alter- ing their curricula and their research programmes, adapting their structures, reporting data, programmes and activities. A number of organisations and net- works across many countries have facilitated the process of responding to the SDGs by exchanging information, ideas and best practices. These include all the followings: the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), Future Earth, the UN Educational, Scientifi c and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Principles of Responsible Management in Education (PRME), the International Sustainable Campus Network (ISCN) and nationally focused member-based associations – such as the Italian Network of Universities for sustainable development (RUS)17 , the Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability (ACTS), the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC), the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), the European University Association (EUA), the Network of European Technical Universities (CESAER), etc. For instance, Politecnico di Torino (PoliTO) is coordinating a network of 78 universities in Italy named RUS – Universities Network for Sustainable

16 D. Ferrer-Balas, R. Lozano, D. Huisingh, H. Buckland, P. Ysern and G. Zilahy, Going beyond the rhetoric: system-wide changes in universities for sustainable societies , in «Journal of Cleaner Production», 18, 2010, pp. 607-610. 17 RUS Network of Universities for Sustainable Development. (2019) Report 2018. Available at: https://sites.google.com/unive.it/rus/chi-siamo/report. 74 Guido Saracco and Patrizia Lombardi

Development, which is committed to implementing the SDGs by 2030, and to accelerating the take-off of sustainable campus initiatives through cooperation and exchange of good practice. The discussion around energy management, sustainable mobility, waste and resources, food, climate change and carbon neutrality, education and social justice and inclusion involves more than 400 members staff across the nation. This network has been promoted and sup- ported by the Italian Rectors Conference (CRUI) since 2015 and currently has several partnership agreements with a number of key associations and public stakeholders working in the fi eld of SDG implementation. For PoliTO, sustainability is about ‛futurity՚, critical and value thinking and long-term environmental and social responsiveness. It represents an ex- traordinary journey and an opportunity to develop a strategy for disseminating environmental responsiveness and sustainability across society. Like all the top international universities, one of PoliTO’s aims is to increase the awareness of its social role in the city and, as individuals and institution, drive the change toward a more sustainable future. A team of dedicated human resources called the ‛Green team՚ encourages integrated actions for current environmental, economic and social challenges, within a specifi c sustaina- bility path embedded in the strategic plan even before it referred to the word ‛sustainability՚ was a word. Policies about bottom-up participation in uni- versity governance, integrated environmental education in campus operation management, resource optimisation for buildings and facilities, display of the environmental performance of the whole campus, all these represent valuable grounds to test sustainable solutions to be transferred to the public today and the decision-makers of tomorrow who are part of the university community. The Green team has its own data monitoring centre (the ‛Living Lab՚) which collects and elaborates data streams from on-site sensors to monitor trends and support decision-making for energy and resource management. The da- ta managed by the Living Lab focus on: Energy consumption; Renewable Energy production; Water consumption (overall and drinking); Other campus resources. The new Strategic document of Politecnico di Torino PoliTO4Impact pub- lished in 2018, highlights sustainability goals and SDGs in its strategic vision across all the main fi elds of Education, Research, and Technology Transfer and Knowledge Sharing18 . The Strategic Plan puts people and community fi rst and aims to create a new sense of community based on a shared sustainable

18 Politecnico di Torino “PoliTO 4 impact” published in 2018, http://www.pianostrategico. polito.it. In Defence of the Environment:a European Academic Prospective 75 and participated vision of the University. The Plan recognizes the social role played by the university and highlights the importance of improving our capacity to address the SDGs. These represent a political drive and an op- portunity for individual and collective refl ection on personal and professional choices that can help enhance natural, built, human, social and intellectual capitals. In Education in particular, the Plan includes a number of strategic objectives related to sustainability which include the following: - to include the SDGs of the UN 2030 Agenda in our curricula; - to innovate our pedagogical approach with the aim of fostering students’ critical thinking, social responsibility, problem-setting and problem-solving abilities, capacity for innovation as well as soft skills; - to recognize the importance of human and social sciences and interdisci- plinarity as an educational value. Even the research of next years will be guided by the SDGs, which will also be the basis of the fi ve priority clusters of Horizon Europe. Within this framework, the University’s research activities will be addressed in order to guarantee coherence with the SDGs and as a support to multi- and trans-dis- ciplinary activities, promoting the creation of interdepartmental centres and thematic clusters (or platforms) disseminated in the metropolitan areas, work- ing in partnerships with local stakeholders. In order to align the vision of the Green team with respect to the SDGs, in 2018 PoliTo began reviewing its teaching and research output, according to the 17 goals proposed by Agenda 2030. This dual initiative enabled the university to take ownership of the content and objectives of Agenda 2030 and progressively measure its contribution to the creation of a more sustaina- ble society, operating with respect for the resources available and setting the attention to the needs of future generations19 . Each faculty member and lec- turer has been asked to select a maximum of three SDGs for his/her lecturing course. In education, the most popular SDGs are connected with quality of ed- ucation (SDG4), Industry & Innovation (SDG9), Sustainable cities (SDG11), Responsible consumption (SDG12), followed by Affordable energy (ASG7),

19 P. Lombardi, Introduction , in Sustainability report 2019. A summary of the most important actions and data 2017/2018 - 2018/2019 , Politecnico di Torino, 2019. Available at: http:// www.campus- sostenibile.polito.it/content/download/1677/8649/fi le/PoliTO-SustainablePathReport2019.pdf. See also P. Lombardi and M. Gruenig (eds.), Low-carbon Energy Security from a European Perspective, Elsevier, London 2016; P. Lombardi and G. Sonetti (eds.), News from the front of sustainable university campuses, Edizione Nuova Cultura, Roma 2017; G. Saracco, Chimica verde 2.0: impariamo dalla natura come combattere il riscaldamento globale , Zanichelli, Bologna 2017. 76 Guido Saracco and Patrizia Lombardi decent work (SDG8), Good health (SDG3), Climate action (SDG13) and Life on land (SDG15). In the research fi eld, SDGs 11 and 12 are the most popular in the scientifi c publications of the PoliTO community. SDG 7 on Affordable and Clean energy and SDG 3 on Good health and wellbeing demonstrate addi- tional interesting fi elds of a large part of our community. In parallel, the Green team has developed informative and training programmes for all PoliTO de- partments with the aim of increasing knowledge about each goal and avoid possible misunderstanding in SDGs selection. This initiative received very positive feedback, with increasing interest from professors, researchers and administrative staff.

4. Conclusive Remarks and Further Development

In the words of Nobel prize economist Stiglitz,

In times of profound crisis in the economy and in politics, non- profi t organizations, like universities, are the only social stakeholders capable of making a change towards new sustainable trajectory20 .

This paper has provided evidence of the critical role played by university networks and institutions like PoliTO, and has stressed the need for changes to institutional strategies. Fundamentally, transitions and changes must be linked to incremental learning, with the participation and empowerment of all the stakeholders. Despite the efforts made and the awareness of the need for this transforma- tion, and given the size of the task of achieving the SDGs, and the critical roles universities have in delivering on the SDGs, there is an urgent need for the sector to accelerate action. As noted by Lozano21 , although universities should be organizations which foster change, they tend to be very conservative and resist change; they depend heavily on paradigms based upon disciplinary specialization. Fortunately, a number of universities are engaging in efforts to contribute to sustainable development.

20 J. Stiglitz, In un mondo imperfetto, Donzelli, Roma 2001. 21 R. Lozano et al. , Going beyond the rhetoric: system-wide changes in universities for sustainable societies , cit. In Defence of the Environment:a European Academic Prospective 77

The process of transition towards sustainability has begun but the results need to be achieved effectively and at the right time. Universities still have a signifi cant impact on global energy consumption, equivalent to 6.8% of total EU energy consumption (BPIE, 2015)22 . Though the trend in adopting green strategies is positive, their mean global dissemination is still insuffi cient 23 . In parallel, as discussed in this paper, universities have to face the main challenge of a systemic integration of all: curricula, research, operations, outreach, as- sessment and reporting. This is critical to the achievement of SDGs. Arguably the SDGs will not be achieved without this sector24 .

22 BPIE-Buildings Performance Institute Europe, Committed to increasing the energy performance of buildings across Europe, Brussels Belgium, 2015; www.bpie.eu; www.buildingsdata.eu. 23 M. Alonso-Almeida, F. Marimon, F., Casania and J. Rodriguez-Pomeda, Diffusion of sus- tainability reporting in universities: current situation and future perspectives , in «Journal of Cleaner Production», vol. 106, November 1, 2015, pp. 144-154; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. jclepro.2014.02.008. 24 Australia, New Zealand & Pacifi c Edition, Getting Started with the SDGS in Universities. A Guide For Universities, Higher Education Institutions, and The Academic Sector. Available on-line at http://ap-unsdsn.org/wp-content/uploads/University-SDG-Guide_web.pdf.

Acc. Sc. Torino Quaderni, 35 (2020), 79-86 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES

Europe and the Migration Dilemma M L B

The Academies have an important role to play as far as migration is concerned. And this for various reasons, the fi rst being the need to have au- thoritative voices establishing the facts – as far as this is possible – about migration. There are several aspects of migration that need rigorous assess- ment in terms of data and facts, in order to have a solid basis on which to hold informed debates and discussions, and build policies. First, it is essen- tial to gain a solid knowledge of the characteristics of migratory fl ows; of the migrants’ presence and impact on life and the economy; of the cost of their welfare and the contribution they make to the public purse. There is also a need for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of migration, in order to understand the causes and the consequences of the movements of people, these being cultural, social, political and economic. Lastly, there is an ethical reason for the Academies to make their voice heard in the debate on migration. Academies are better prepared than other institutions to evaluate the impli- cations of migration on individual human rights. Migrants’ human rights are imperilled in many ways, because migrants are the weak and fragile human element in the interplay between the State of origin and the State of destina- tion. The Academies’ voice may be crucial whenever migrants’ rights are in jeopardy.

Some time ago, I was invited to one of the many round tables that are the inevitable lot of academics who deal with hot contemporary issues. The ques- tion I had been asked in advance was: ‛does Europe need mass migration?՚. I consulted the Oxford dictionary, my faithful companion whenever I face the awkward task of speaking English, and read the defi nition of the word ‛mass՚: according to the dictionary, the word means ‛a large number՚ … ‛usually of people՚. And when asked the question again, I answered ‛yes, in the coming decades Europe will need a large number of migrants, in other words, will need ‛mass immigration՚. If one looks at pictures or videos of immigrants arriving at European borders over the last decade, the term mass immigration is indeed appropriate. Migrants in Europe, today, are a normal feature of the 80 Massimo Livi Bacci human landscape; at some time and in some places, in everyday life, they are a majority, such as the early morning on public transportation, and they can be found at any time of day in many urban districts. Since the beginning of this century, 15% of the renewal of European societies has been assured by immi- gration. According toUN estimates, net immigration into the EU between 2000 and 2019, has taken place at the annual tune of 1.5 million people per year; but gross migration is about the double that number. Moreover, to this annual infl ow of immigrants, encouraged by normal drivers, such as higher salaries in destination countries, better living conditions, family ties, social and cultural opportunities, one has to add the wave of refugees and asylum seekers, which exceeded the million mark in 2015. This exceptional number of refugees has been proclaimed almost unanimously to be ‛unsustainable՚ – but European memory is short, and has forgotten the millions of refugees – between 15 and 20 – which, in the aftermath of the World War II, crisscrossed our devastated continent, reminding us that nothing is unsustainable for humans. Let us consider the entire continent, from the Atlantic to the Urals, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. Between 1950 and 1980, the population increased by 26%; over the following 30-year period, from 1980 to 2010, the increase was just 6%; in the last decade, it has been about zero. In 30 years of demographic buoyancy, net migration into the continent has been close to zero, while in the following 30 years, of demographic stagnation, 30 million people have been added (four fi fths of the total increase) through migration, joined by 14 million more in the last ten years. The fact is that Europe - which had been a net exporter of human resources for about 500 years - has become a continent of immigration: a structural historical change. With an acceleration in recent decades: 1990, the stock of migrants (foreign-born population) in Europe represented 6.8% of the total population, in 2019, 11% (but fi ve points lower than in North America). The question on ‛mass migration՚ admits only two answers: yes and no, each one with many shades, specifi cations and caveats. However, it is al- so possible for the answer to be affi rmative but with a negative outcome (Europe needs mass immigration, but policies will preclude it), or negative, but with a positive outcome (Europe does not need mass immigration, but this will occur anyhow, because of the growing external pressure on its bor- ders). I am now going to look at whether, in my view, and for the sake of balanced social and economic development, Europe should expect, and be prepared to accept, mass immigration; or, vice versa, severely restrict future infl ows. In doing so, I will be touching on questions of a demographic, eco- nomic and social nature. Europe and the Migration Dilemma 81

Let us begin with demography. Population projections are a tricky affair: they are more robust than other social forecasts but have to be used with care. According to the United Nations projections (2019, and I will spare you the details for the sake of brevity), in the case of zero migration into Europe, the continent’s population would experience a 9 percent drop. This in itself, would not be a catastrophic decline, diluted as it is over a 30-year period. However, if we were to break down this change by age group, Europe would lose one fi fth of the population below the age of 70, while the population above that age would increase by more than half. The median age of the population would increase from 41 to 47 years. At country level, out of 40 European countries (excluding microstates), population will decline in 33 (to four fi fths of the to- tal population) and increase in 7 (by one fi fth of the population). This decline would become steeper past mid-century. This preliminary excursion into the future must be completed with a short examination of another set of more realistic (but rather conservative) projec- tions, that include a net infl ow of migrants of about 1 million a year, at the same level as the past decade, hit by the economic recession that reduced immigration almost everywhere in Europe. In this case, Europe would fare slightly better: between 2020 and 2050, the population would decline by 5 percent, but ageing would continue unabated. The main question to be addressed is whether smooth and balanced devel- opment would be compatible with a declining and ageing population such as the one that Europe would be nurturing in decades to come, and with a steeper gradient should the doors to immigration remain closed.

In 1937, John Maynard Keynes delivered his Galton Conference before the Eugenics Society: population dynamics was central to his discourse.

An increasing population has a very important infl uence on the de- mand for capital. Not only does the demand for capital, apart from technical changes and an improved standard of life, increase more or less in proportion to population. But, business expectations being based much more on present than on prospective demand, an era of increasing population tends to promote optimism, since demand will in general tend to exceed, rather than fall short of, what was hoped for… But in an era of declining population the opposite is true. Demand tends to be below what was expected… Thus a pessimistic atmosphere may ensue; and, although at long last pessimism may tend to correct itself through its effect on supply, the fi rst result to prosperity of a change-over from an increasing to a declining population may be very disastrous. 82 Massimo Livi Bacci

Indeed, ‛a change-over from an increasing to a declining population՚ is what is happening today in the developed world, but is this going to be disas- trous? Certainly a declining population implies a shrinking labour force and, possibly, a shrinking GDP, and – among developed countries – a shift in the balance of power in favour of North America (where demography is robust) compared to Europe and Japan (whose demography is weak). From a geopo- litical or geodemographic perspective, a declining population implies a loss of power and infl uence in the international arena. But one can legitimately argue that we should place the individual wellbeing (with its imperfect proxy, GDP per person) at the centre of our worries, instead of the ‛power՚ of a nation. The matter has been discussed over and over in the decades since Keynes’ state- ment. What are the effects of demographic decline on the growth of GDP per capita? Negative, since the population in working age will fall more rapidly than the overall population. But this negative impact may be attenuated by growth in productivity, since there will be more investment in technologies and this will make up for a declining and ageing labour force. On the other hand, activity rates may increase and retirement age may also increase, offset- ting the negative effect of population decline.

In theory, this is possible. We may, however, gain a clearer view of the matter is we take a closer look at Germany, Europe’s powerhouse, in the case of a future with zero migration. In this case, between 2020 and 2050, its pop- ulation would decline by 11.5% while the population in working age (20 to 65 years old), would decline by 24.9%. Let us now look at what would happen if activity rates, in each age group, among men and women, were to rise to the level of the European country with the highest activity rate for that age group and for each gender. Let us also make the rather extreme assumption that 50% of men and women aged 65 to 80 years will be active in 2050, thus scraping the bottom of the barrel of native German human resources; this implies a considerable increase in age at retirement. Even in this extreme perspective, the total active population in 2050 would still marginally decline and, in the meantime, it would age rapidly.

Let us now assume that a slight decline of the labour force – obtained, it is true, scraping the bottom of the barrel – has no infl uence on the average, individual wellbeing. Can the same be assumed for the process of ageing? Is it possible that a 70-year old additional worker might substitute, with no loss of productivity, a missing 30-year old one? This is a central issue. From the point of view of mere physical effi ciency, the health of the elderly has Europe and the Migration Dilemma 83 been improving rapidly: not only has survival – at a given age –increased, the same can also be said of many other indicators, such as physical fi tness, while the incidence of disability and chronic pathologies and the like, has declined. On the other hand, the gradual shift from forms of labour requiring physical, muscular effort to forms of labour requiring sophisticated intellectual abilities – typical of modern societies – makes ageing a lesser obstacle to economic ef- fi ciency. Technology and education are the keys to transition, in keeping with the process of dematerialisation of production and consumption. Policies and institutions will sustain this process. So, why worry about ageing? The problem is that, notwithstanding the improved wellbeing of the aged, empirical studies confi rm the fact that individual job performance, or produc- tivity, over the working life cycle, is shaped like an inverted bowl. It increases in the early part of the working cycle, is fl at for most of the cycle, and declines towards the end. The shape of the bowl, the length of the fl at platform, the steep- ness var timing of the decline all var depending on a number of factors, such as the nature of the job, physical and psychological fi tness, the cognitive abilities required and the working environment. Most studies converge on the conclu- sion that ‛young workers are signifi cantly more productive than older workers՚. Of course this disparity can be reduced with the right policies and more invest- ment in human capital or technology. But surely it cannot be eliminated in full. There is, however, another aspect that has to be taken into account. If pro- ductivity is shaped like an inverted bowl, there are many other signifi cant areas of human activity where productivity’s life cycle profi le is heavily skewed to the left, with modal values at a relatively young age. In the hard sciences, the modal age of the ‛beautiful minds՚ at the time of the invention or innovation that earned them a Nobel Prize or other prestigious recognition, is between 35 and 40 years of age, with a frequency several times higher than at 60 or 70 years of age. This is often true in other fi elds – not only sports or performing arts, but also among innovative entrepreneurs or initiators of successful start- ups. Quickness of mind, risk taking, some homeopathic doses of arrogance and rebelliousness, are often key to success and the salt of development. To sum things up, there is little doubt that the process of ageing repre- sents a trade wind that is unfavourable to development. The problem is that, in the 21 st century, the wind is blowing much stronger than in the past. The unfavourable consequences of an ageing and shrinking labour force can only be counteracted by more technology, richer human capital, improved social and working environment up to a point. Moreover, the future trends we have examined follow a negative spiral that must be reversed: generational replace- ment cannot be negative forever! 84 Massimo Livi Bacci

The obvious alternative to migration is an increase in fertility. Is this pos- sible? Yes, probably, with complex, costly and durable social policies. Many policy measures now applied to raise fertility have so far proven ineffective, and their application in heavier doses promises no better results. While in a longer-term perspective a spontaneous rise in fertility rates to a level at or at least close to that required for population replacement cannot be excluded as a possibility, neither can their decline to even lower levels. Since these social policies have to be designed in consideration of the peculiarities of each coun- try, it is impossible to advance an estimate of their cost. An indirect idea can be gained by looking at the amount of social benefi ts transferred to households and individuals for housing or raising children: this is much higher in northern European countries, where fertility is higher, than in southern ones, where it is lower. Or by considering the fact that the average cost of an additional child is about 20 or 30% of a family’s income, and that should the public coffers cover a substantial part of that cost (i.e. a quarter or a third), until children come of age, that would amount, again, to a few points in terms of GDP. A robust pro-fertility social policy would therefore be very expensive, with no guarantee of success, short of a radical change in cultural preferences and choices. But let us assume that the best policies will be enacted, with generous fi nancial support, sustained through the years by different governments; let us also assume that this policy will be successful, and that it will lead, by mid-century, to replacement fertility (a highly unlikely but not impossible outcome). The problem is that the addi- tional child born today, as a consequence of incentives provided by a pro-natalist policy, would enter the labour force 20 years from now, and since fertility re- covery would be gradual, recognizable effects on the labour force would only be evident after 30 years or more, so not before mid-century. In the intervening three decades, immigration seems to be the only viable demographic solution.

An acceleration in immigration looks inevitable. According to OECD esti- mates (2018), the (gross) infl ow of permanent immigrants into the EU, in the decade from 2007 to 2016, has been between 2 and 3 million – and these were the years of the economic recession and weak recovery. If a modest amount of common sense and deductive reasoning is admitted in this sophisticated assembly, I am tempted to say that immigration, in the next three or four dec- ades, could be considerably higher than it has been in the recent past. However, migration policies are becoming more restrictive in almost every European country. Skilled workers are still wanted, but countries are pick- ing them more selectively; investors and entrepreneurs are sought after, but are increasingly scrutinized; there are more obstacles to family reunion; and Europe and the Migration Dilemma 85 actions to strengthen border controls, encourage voluntary returns, and fi ghts against illegal employment of foreign workers have been implemented. So, governments seem to be slowly steering their course towards more restrictive policies. But it is also true that, in the long run, the facts may bend the policies in another direction, in an attempt to slow the decline of the labour force and the ageing population. For the moment, however, the prevailing consensus in Europe seems to be in favour of more restriction, with a series of arguments that can be summarized as follows. – First argument: immigration is not a solution to ageing: immigrants age too, so the ‛anti-ageing՚ effect is transitory. This is true only for a wave of immigration, but does not apply to a continuous ‛stream՚ of migrants as a complement to the stream of births or – as is often said – as ‛substitute՚ for births. In this case, an immigrant can be equated to ‛an adopted child՚ in a fam- ily. A family adopts a child while it is an infant, while society usually ‛adopts՚ an immigrant in early adulthood. But the concept is the same. – Second argument: should immigrants be a ‛substitute for births՚, their conspicuous number is likely to be detrimental to the material welfare and social well-being of the poorer segment of the receiving population, depress- ing wage levels at the lower end of the income scale and creating friction in schools, housing markets, and claims on welfare-state and environmental amenities. Maybe, but in the absence of immigration and with a sustained population decline, the material welfare of the poor – as well as that of the well-to-do – would be endangered by an economic downturn. – Third argument: Mass immigration, under certain conditions, may sus- tain aggregate growth, but it is doubtful that per capita income would be raised. This depends on the skills of the migrants and particularly on their employa- bility. When the skills of the immigrants do not match the requirements of the labour market… or are a burden on the public purse, than they may weigh neg- atively on per capita income. But ‛even if per capita gains were to be achieved՚

through admitting large numbers of immigrants, the distribution of gains is likely to be lopsided, leaving many less well-off. Compensation for such losses, even if theoretically possible, is in fact never effected. Thus, while the immigrants themselves are likely to be clear benefi ciar- ies of the move they voluntarily elected to make, the welfare gain for the receiving population is far from assured and likely to be skewed.

But if admitting a large number of immigrants sustains the economy – one could counter – this would help those very programmes aimed at reducing inequality. 86 Massimo Livi Bacci

– Fourth argument: continued mass immigration threatens cultural cohesion, undermines ‛mutual regard՚, weakens cooperation and renders un- popular redistributive efforts because taxpayers think the benefi ciaries will be people who are different and have only recently arrived in the country. A sour consequence of all this is the fact that immigration jeopardizes the feelings of national solidarity, which, in turn, seems to drive western societies in a dangerously rightward direction. Inordinate and excessive immigration may certainly jeopardize the cultural cohesion and social compact of any country. Counter argument: closing the doors and causing the economy and individual wellbeing to shrink, may harm cohesion, for different reasons. In this case, the migrant cannot be held responsible, but another scapegoat can easily be found. It is not my intention to continue the debate, and discuss the merits of the arguments of those who fear that mass immigration may be detrimental to social cohesion, increase inequality, produce nativist excesses, nurture xeno- phobia, or even disrupt the European Union. In order to discuss these issues, it would be necessary to evaluate the policies for admission, integration and citizenship applied by each country, and this is not the topic of this address. It would also be necessary to take into account the fact that anti-migration feelings increase during times of depression and decrease during moments of expansion. A fi nal, short, answer to the question posed in the title of this address: ‛Does Europe need mass immigration՚? The answer is yes, if the time horizon is that of a generation. And if by mass immigration we mean a net immigration of one or two million a year, that is an impressive stream, but not a tsunami. Acc. Sc. Torino Quaderni, 35 (2020), 87-96 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES

Protecting Cultural Heritage: a Challenge for Our Time and the Role of European Academies S S

I am going to start by mentioning some key points of the intellectual dis- cussion about the very nature of cultural heritage, and about the strategies to envisage, design and grant its future. Not only professionals, but also public intellectuals and politicians from several countries, both in Europe and elsewhere, widely and publicly discuss the role of Cultural Heritage, including museums and exhibitions, within changing contexts and against quite disparate historical, social, and cultural backgrounds. More often than not, though, we take it for granted that the no- tion of ‛cultural heritage’ is more or less solidly established, and that museums are well-grounded institutions, fi rmly devoted to widely accepted socio-cul- tural practices. We seem to believe that such socio-cultural practices, like, say, conservation or exhibitions, might be discussed, improved or worsened by what we do (or avoid doing), but are nevertheless a basically unchangeable element of our cultural landscape. It is therefore extremely important for us to remind ourselves that everything belonging to, or surrounding, the notion of cultural heritage is, by its very nature, temporary and vulnerable. Let’s take, as a very eloquent case in point, the main institution of cultural heritage: the museum. Actually, the museum is a cultural creation and, indeed, a very recent one. However, we might defi ne its genealogy and current status, the public museum as an institution (as opposed to royal, papal or private collections) dates no further back than 1734, when the Capitoline Museum in Rome was founded by Pope Clemens XII (while the enormous papal collections at the Vatican, just like the royal collections in Paris or London, weren’t open to the general public). In around 1820, there were no more than 30 museums worldwide (all in Europe). Now there are no less than 55,000 in 202 countries. Every institution produced by human societies that has a beginning at some point in time might well, sooner or later, have an end; to put it differently, to a birthdate of all cultural creations, from, say, epic poetry to representative 88 Salvatore Settis democracy, necessarily corresponds a potential expiration date. It is only in this context, I believe, that it makes sense to discuss some recent develop- ments in the museum world, and in the conception of cultural heritage, that are currently being debated. Let me start by mentioning a few among the several points that are current- ly under discussion on a broader scale, i.e. throughout the intense debate on the nature of Cultural Heritage. The points I will mention fall into fi ve general categories: Defi nition, Relevance, Function, Ownership and Costs.

1. Defi nition: How should we mark the limits of ‛Cultural Heritage՚? Does it pertain exclusively to various forms of ‛art՚ (however defi ned), or should it include objects or documents relating to history, religion, technol- ogy, medicine, craftsmanship, society, agriculture or industrial organization? To what extent do museums represent a signifi cant cross-section of the cultur- al heritage of a country, a city, a geo-cultural area? Which is the ‛right՚ balance between what the cultural heritage is preserved in public collections and what is privately owned? Or between what belongs to museums and what is fortu- itously scattered throughout churches, palaces, public areas, institutional and private buildings?

2. Relevance: What is, or rather should be, the meaning of Cultural Heritage in contemporary society, i.e. at a time obsessively dominated by the rhetoric of ‛globalization՚? Should we look for a ‛global՚ defi nition and/ or standards of protection of cultural heritage worldwide, or should we, in- stead, aim at different cultural standards in each country, or even in individual areas, according to their distinctive cultural traditions? Does a given coun- try’s Cultural Heritage apply only to what one fi nds in that particular region (British culture in the UK, Italian culture in Italy), or should we pursue a more general defi nition of its meaning and relevance on a world-wide scale? Should we strive, for instance in Europe, for common, shared criteria on how to locate and foster cultural heritage, and particularly museums, within political and cultural preoccupations, or should we leave its role and relevance to the fl uctu- ating choices and policies of individual governments in individual countries?

3. Function: What should we do with Cultural Heritage? Should we re- gard it as a depository of historical memory and/or cultural identity? Is it, accordingly, integral to the notion of ‛nationality՚, or should it belong, instead, to a multinational European identity, or else to mankind as a whole? How do we assess the nature and status of cultural heritage before the ‛invention՚ of Protecting Cultural Heritage: a Challenge for Our Time and the Role of European Academies 89 the very concept of ‛nation՚ and of the ‛nationalisms՚ involved? Should we preserve the objects of cultural heritage forever (be it in museums or within their original contexts), and therefore set what is Cultural Heritage very clear- ly apart from what is not? If we choose to preserve something because it is labelled as cultural heritage, should its function be merely aesthetic pleasure, or rather historical/archival information, or else directed at implementing the education of future generations?

4. Ownership: Who owns Cultural Heritage, however defi ned? Does it belong to the public or to the private sector? Or both? Does the private owner of a historical mansion or of an important painting, for instance, have the right to tear it down, or not? Can the government or public administration of a state, a city, or a public agency of any sort, including European or international in- stitutions, limit the rights attached to the status of private property in order to protect a piece of Cultural Heritage? To what extent do privately owned muse- ums fall into the same category as public ones? How much does the genealogy of a given museum (for instance, its being originally a royal collection, later made public as a consequence of a revolution and/or the transition to popular sovereignty) affect our ability to keep or change the ‛rules of the game՚?

5. Costs: Preserving Cultural Heritage, and particularly museums, can be very expensive. If one decides to preserve a building, such as the Coliseum in Rome, which has lost its original function and has indisputably earned the ‛Cultural Heritage՚ label, who should cover the costs? Should one expect vis- itors to do it, as is actually the case at the Coliseum? What if there are not enough visitors to cover the costs, as often happens with most monuments and museums? Why should governments spend public money on them? Should they spend it on all of them, or would it be more sensible to identify a limited number of monuments and collections to preserve, and then leave the rest to their own fate, whatever it may be? Would selling or loaning monuments and museums to private owners, who may be willing to take care of them, be a good solution? Should it be permanent, or temporary? Would private, rather than public, management of Cultural Heritage be more effective and perhaps less expensive? Under what conditions, if any, might privatization of public monuments and museums be considered in government policies?

In order to appropriately and effectively address such a complex constel- lation of problems, we need an equally complex constellation of expertise 90 Salvatore Settis from various fi elds and disciplines, such as that which our Academies can offer. Interdisciplinary research could actually be to some extent easier in Academies than in Universities, where disciplinary boundaries are more visible due to their articulation into competing Departments, Institutes or Faculties. Moreover, while we usually think about our Academies as individu- al, discrete, distinct institutions, we should perhaps count more, as a potential lever, on their network, lending more weight, among other things, to our own individual affi liation with some of them. Let me, just for sake of time, take myself as an example: I happen to belong not only to some Academies in Italy (such as this Accademia delle Scienze, the Accademia dei Lincei and the Istituto Veneto), but to other European Academies as well, such as the Institut de France, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, the Académie Royale de Belgique, and (in the U.S.) the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Yet, I must confess I am not taking from this multiple affi liation all the potential advantage it could imply, and I mean de- veloping the ability to address a topic like that of Cultural Heritage from a privileged vantage point, i.e. a multifaceted, and multi-national, observatory. The same is true, I guess, for many of you in this room, who, like myself, are members of several academies. We should, I suggest, think more and work more in this respect, encouraging and fostering common refl ection and inter- or meta- disciplinary research. Our Academies, by their very nature, gather under the same roof a number of diverse skills, Consequently they (i.e. we) have great potential for moving from reactive to proactive activities or, to put it differently, from competently gathering information and methodologies to imaginatively generating new ideas and projects, if not solutions. I didn’t mention so far, as perhaps I should have, a number of other is- sues. Among them, to name but a few, the balance between large (national or regional) museums, and small local museums; and the controversial balance between permanent collections and exhibition policies. Though, before com- ing to the possible role of European academies in the highly problematic and edgy context I am roughly trying to sketch, let me dwell on a very important point, which deeply affects the entire discussion on Cultural Heritage. I mean, the increasingly dominant conception of Cultural Heritage as primarily an economic asset, which we may, or be bound to, exploit accordingly. Such an argument is, on one hand, one of the many signs of the global emphasis on money and fi nance that we experience on a daily basis; on the other, it is also a clear symptom of the shaky and fragile status of Cultural Heritage in our contemporary world. In this respect, whatever happens in European countries Protecting Cultural Heritage: a Challenge for Our Time and the Role of European Academies 91

(be they members of the EU or not) necessarily takes on an unparalleled insti- tutional and political relevance, since it is European culture that elaborated the very notion of Cultural Heritage as the central, self-reliant and autonomous institution and device of cultural memory; and it is in Europe that the main structure of Cultural Heritage, i.e. the museum, was fi rst ‛invented՚ in the 18th century, to later spread throughout the world up until our own time. One of the many paradoxes we are living through in the early 21 st cen- tury is that the protection of Cultural Heritage simultaneously increases in some areas of the world while it decreases, or rather changes in nature, in others. It does actually increase in a number of ‛emerging countries՚, from Latin America to Africa, where it is considered integral to a country’s cultural identity, political self-awareness, and economic development; and, as a part of this process, the more local governments choose to protect their own Cultural Heritage in general, however defi ned, the more an increasing number of ob- jects of archaeological or artistic value move into local museums. The same countries, where more often than not there was historically no tradition of spe- cial laws for the protection of Cultural Heritage, gradually adopt some form of public enforcement, sometimes even incorporating it into their Constitutions. Interestingly, such developments normally happen within a post-colonial and non-Eurocentric culture, yet they are quite often based on European models. In some sort of reverse symmetry, however, and to a certain extent coun- terintuitively, countries where, historically, the tradition of law enforcement of different forms of protection of Cultural Heritage is older and more fi rmly established, such as Italy and most of Europe, are currently developing some sort of a confl icting conception, whereby the main, if not the only, reason for protecting Cultural Heritage is its economic and monetary value, and not any given set of artistic, cultural, moral or civic values. As a consequence, even in a country like Italy, which was the fi rst in the world to include the protec- tion of Cultural Heritage (and Landscape) among the basic principles of its 1948 Constitution, every step in the process of protection of Cultural Heritage, funding of museums, and so on, must increasingly be negotiated, and argued for, as something that may be deemed tendentially optional, if not altogether superfl uous. It would perhaps be not entirely misleading to argue that the same driving force, i.e. the market, dictates both developments. It operates, however, quite differently from place to place. On one hand, developing countries have re- cently enforced laws to protect Cultural Heritage in order to limit the damage caused by the massive exportation of art objects from them. In other countries, and let me take again Italy as an example, laws protecting Cultural Heritage 92 Salvatore Settis have enabled over time the preservation of an impressively large public pat- rimony; yet, unfortunately, its monetary value increasingly takes precedence, to the point that sometimes even its public guardians, who are supposed to act for the public good, end up caring more about exploiting rather than preserv- ing monuments, museums and archaeological sites, and therefore essentially weaken the norms and practices of preservation. If we bear in mind the very demanding questions I have just outlined, let’s ask ourselves, within the context of today’s conference: which could (or should) be the role of European Academies in the challenges posed by the protection of Cultural Heritage in our time? I will now gather a few possi- ble answers around three bywords: dissemination, refl ection, transmission of knowledge. It is a truism to remind an audience like this that, traditionally, European Academies played, and still play, an extremely important, indeed indispen- sable, role in encouraging, promoting and leading research projects in every possible fi eld, including all those pertinent to Cultural Heritage. Yet we should also focus on an equally important aspect of their (i.e. of our) work in this respect, namely the dissemination of knowledge, after it has been gathered and accredited by the authority and reputation of a well-established Academy. Let me mention three examples, all launched in the 19 th century by three Academies, and all still alive. Among the many merits of the Preußische (now Berlin-Brandenburgische) Akademie der Wissenschaften, one of the most important is undoubtedly the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, a gigantic un- dertaking initiated in 1847 and still ongoing, in which several thousands of inscriptions from all over the Roman empire have been (and are) collected, analyzed and critically published in a large number of perfectly organized volumes. In Italy, in 1876, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei began the famous series of Notizie degli scavi di antichità (still ongoing), in which a number (though not all) of archaeological fi ndings and excavations in Italy are duly examined and published. In France, the Comptes Rendus de l’Académe des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres , regularly printed since 1857, continues to publish a wealth of learned papers on matters mostly pertaining to cultural memory and heritage. I am sure that, while I was very rapidly mentioning these three examples, every one in this room had other, and perhaps even better, examples in mind. Evidently enough, it is highly important for European Academies to pursue, today and tomorrow, the very same objective by rigorously and sys- tematically gathering, at the highest scholarly level, documents and comments of different sorts relating to cultural memory and heritage. Yet we should also Protecting Cultural Heritage: a Challenge for Our Time and the Role of European Academies 93 ask ourselves to what extent, in the context of our, ‘globalized’ mass culture of the 21 st century, European academies are doing (or not doing) enough to effectively share with the general public the nature, importance and impact of their (our) continued effort focusing on Cultural Heritage. In other words, the question I am putting forward is: shouldn’t we think more about whether to imagine our mission of dissemination on two different yet converging levels (and languages), i.e. high scholarly accuracy for specialized researches on one hand and the ability to reach a more general public of citizens on the other?

The second byword mentioned above is refl ection, i.e. the duty, for every individual Academy, as well as for a gathering of several Academies such as this, to actively contribute, as we are doing right now, to the intellectual debate on Cultural Heritage and its different functions. This is, as should be evident from my general argument, a very hot topic, where the hierarchy of values (economic worth vs. ethical or aesthetical merits, for instance) deserves not just generic attention, but careful analysis based on solid conceptual ground. All the various components summoned by the idea of Cultural Heritage and its histor- ical precedents and determinations should be conveniently brought together in such a discussion, and our Academies, with the wide spectrum of expertise they are able to gather together (from Law to Art History, from Sociology to Archaeology, and so on), are ideally placed to make such a discussion advance: again, with an eye on a highly scholarly, sophisticated level, but another eye fo- cused on the general, non-specialized public, which —very importantly— also includes most decision makers within governments and parliaments.

The transmission of knowledge is the third and last byword that I put forward a few minutes ago; and it is closely linked to our duty to provide orientation, as mentioned yesterday by Antonio Loprieno. Our Academies are ideally placed to act as a repository of wisdom and as a laboratory of thought about the role Cultural Heritage should play in our contemporary world, sub- ject as our societies currently are to a loss of historical and cultural memory and of the values connected with it. It is therefore extremely important for our Academies to focus very carefully on how to involve new generations in the endeavour of keeping Europe’s cultural memory alive. Due to their long histo- ry and to their ‘genetic code’, Academies act as guardians of cultural memory and can, therefore, conveniently provide an effective framework in which to contrast one of the main pathologies of our time, i.e. the continuous obsession with the present, that we could call ‛presentism՚, perfectly, if early, described, or rather diagnosed, by T.S. Eliot: 94 Salvatore Settis

In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is the provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of provincialism is, that we can all, all the peoples of the globe, be provincials together; and those who are not content to be provincials can only be hermits (T.S. Eliot, 1944).

What I am suggesting, in other words, is that the ‛new name՚ for Eliot’s ‛provincialism of time՚ is precisely presentism (présentisme), a trend our Academies should strongly oppose. Let me now briefl y conclude by mentioning a few fi nal points that would obviously deserve further discussion. First: the very nature of Cultural Heritage, including the portion preserved in museums, is neither about con- serving nor displaying art objects, but about making citizens of every age think and refl ect upon them. Objects of Cultural Heritage, from potsherds to cathedrals, work as ‛thought-provoking mechanisms՚, and therefore they need to be seen within very large contexts, that only education in schools can pro- vide. Our Academies should, accordingly, plead for a central role of historical disciplines in European schools of every age and sort. Lack of basic contex- tual information within society at large only makes Cultural Heritage largely ineffective, and tends to transform its main objects into a sort of quasi super- stitious ‛adoration՚ of emblematic icons. Moreover, we should properly wonder whether the marginalization of Cultural Heritage in public investment policies, as experienced in various forms throughout Europe, doesn’t ultimately rest on a basic lack of awareness of its function, among the policy makers as well as within society at large. Our Academies should, therefore, foster initiatives aimed at better defi ning such a function and make it more widely known. We should be able to persuasively and forcefully argue that Cultural Heritage, in museums and elsewhere, his- torically operated and still operates for a purpose, i.e. making us think about the art and culture of the past, in order to draw from it ideas and cultural en- ergies for our present and our future. Art and culture, in this conception, are primarily about citizenship, i.e. about full awareness of our collective cultural memory as an essential ingredient of democracy. If this is true, our Academies should also seriously think about a pressing, yet altogether unnoticed, risk of our time, namely the ‛institutionalization՚ Protecting Cultural Heritage: a Challenge for Our Time and the Role of European Academies 95 of Cultural Heritage, if conceived as something separate from ‛normal life՚. Signs of this tendency are the increasingly common transferring of whatever is ‛of artistic value՚ from streets and piazzas, churches and palaces into mu- seums, and, symmetrically, the perception of churches, palaces, buildings of various sorts, and even large city areas into ‛museum-like՚ showcases. Slowly and inconspicuously, we get used to talking about entire cities, such as Venice or Florence, as ‛museum-cities՚, ‛città-museo՚. Yet whe should fi rmly keep in mind that cities are defi nitely not museums: the real issue is not how to experience a city as if it were a museum, but rather how to make museums a dynamic, essential part of the urban fabric, in small and large cities alike. How can such a goal be achieved? We are currently experiencing in Europe what we could call a double movement: on the one hand, as mentioned, a general movement towards the establishment of more and more museums everywhere; on the other hand, though, museums themselves are constantly evolving, sometimes into shopping centres, sometimes into places for enter- tainment (hence the neologism ‘edutainment’), to the point that historic cities can be seen and experienced as playful, artifi cial theme parks (this is what is happening with the ‛Disneyfi cation՚ of Venice). We therefore fi nd ourselves at a very important crossroads, that between the museum as entertainment and the museum as thought experiment and token for citizenship. Analyzing such a process and reacting to it should be a signifi cant, and therefore highly visi- ble, component of the mission and activities of our Academies. Let me now end my talk by coming back to my starting point: while we normally take the existence of something called ‛Cultural Heritage՚ as a giv- en, we should bear in mind that museums, and the very notion of Cultural Heritage, are a relatively new formation, a historical concretion of a long pro- cess that may well come to an end. Their function, if deprived of cultural memory and contextual awareness, will inevitably become less and less clear. Not just museums, but entire historic cities will be mistaken as a form of at- traction by many: and this is unavoidable as long as we are unable to consider them as integral to the city and its life, rather than separate from it. Cultural Heritage, including museums, must converse with the city, be grafted onto its patrimonial, civil and social fabric. It should be conceived as a distillation of historical sedimentation and collective memory. In a present, like ours, obses- sively focused on itself and affl icted by growing cultural amnesia, Cultural Heritage can and must be a medicine for our memory. The past, as in the title of a rightly famous book by David Lowenthal, is really a foreign country , and can give us, as we see it alive in the cities we inhabit, the experience of diver- sity, of complexity, of a collective cultural memory. 96 Salvatore Settis

The urban crowd, including the museum-going public, can be the determin- ing agent of this socio-cultural process, well described by Georges Bataille in 1930:

the rooms of the museum and its art objects are but a container . The real content is the public of visitors. A museum is like the lung of a big city: the crowd fl ows in it like blood, and comes out purifi ed and fresh. The paintings are only dead surfaces, it is within the crowd that sparkle the games, the clamour, the lights, before the authorized critics describe them with their technical language.

As ‛owners՚ and guardians of ‛technical languages՚, the European Academies, I believe, are bound to enhance and develop not just their mission of generating new ideas out of expertise and research, but also their ability to continuously converse about Cultural Heritage with the increasing ‛urban crowds՚ of our own time. Whether this would imply deeply changing the mis- sion, and more importantly the modus operandi, of our Academies, is for you to decide. Acc. Sc. Torino Quaderni, 35 (2020), 97-105 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES

Academies and the Defence of European National Languages J T

Preliminary Remark

Speaking of the defence of national la nguages automatically evokes the mother of all language defences, i.e. Joachim Du Bellay’s Défense et illus- tration de la langue française, 1549 1. A defence of French against Latin, the universal language of the Middle Ages, its aim is to make French as illustrious as Latin. I will say no more about the book, but I want you to keep its title in mind. Language academies promote and defend national languages. Scientifi c academies promote and defend science.

1. Language Academies

The two most famous language academies are the Accademia della Crusca and the Académie française. The Académie française explicitly and pas- sionately defends French against all possible aggressors, hence also against the worst aggressor today, which replaces French in many communication situations: English or Globalese, as I call it. The Crusca bravely defends Italian. In the confl ict about the introduction of English as the only teaching language at the Politecnico di Milano (2012-17), the Crusca fought to keep Italian in Universities. Claudio Marazzini, its president, protested against the ‛imposizione totale, autoritaria e forzata, della lingua inglese, con esplicita e autolesionistica abolizione dell’italiano՚, the ‛authoritarian and compulsory total imposition of the English language, with the explicit and self-destructive

1 J. Du Bellay, La deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse [1549] (ed. H. Chamard), Fontemoing, Paris 1904. 98 Jürgen Trabant abolition of Italian՚2. The Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung would never do such a thing. I am not aware of any protest by the German academy against the decision by the Technical University in Munich to do ex- actly the same as the Politecnico di Milano, i.e. establish teaching exclusively in English, or against the recent announcement by the Bavarian government regarding the imposition of English in all technical universities. And there are and will be no German professors suing Munich University or applying to the Constitutional Court the way their Italian colleagues did. Nobody dares. Protesters against the ‛imposizione totale, autoritaria e forzata՚ of English would be crucifi ed as awful nationalists – and worse. Consequently there is no defence of German in German Academia or by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. Usually, however, language academies defend their languages. This has to be specifi ed historically. The Crusca and the Académie française were founded to create order in a somewhat chaotic linguistic situation: the Crusca to codify a literary norm for Italy, the French Academy to create a linguistic norm for the social elite of the centralised kingdom: ‛donner des règles certaines à notre langue et à la rendre pure, éloquente et capable de traiter les arts et sciences՚3. These tasks necessar- ily imply a “defence” of the languages they create and protect, not necessarily against foreign languages, but against unwelcome linguistic forms that con- tradict the fi nality of their codifi cation. Thus, the Crusca defends its Tuscan Italian against words from other dialects and from lower or spoken language. The French Academy defends its aristocratic Parisian language against low and provincial versions of French. The adversary against which the languages are defended has changed in the course of history. After the Revolution, the French Academy fought against aristocratic distinction and old monarchist thinking in words – so against itself – in favour of a republican or democratic language. It did not re- ally succeed, but, nevertheless, the language it defended after the Revolution was considered to be the language of the nation that had become sovereign in the Republic, and therefore a “national” language. Language academies in democracies in the globalised world defend their national languages against the linguistic dangers of that world. The main dan- ger being, of course, the invasive power of English and the disappearance

2 C. Marazzini, Internazionalizzazione sì, ma non contro l’italiano , 16 marzo 2017. https:// accademiadellacrusca.it. 3 Art. 24 of the Règlement of the Académie française 1635. http://www.academie-francaise.fr/ sites/academie-francaise.fr/fi les/statuts_af_0.pdf. Academies and the Defence of European National Languages 99 of national languages in certain important domains of communication. Once more, the Crusca defended Italian against the takeover by English at the Politecnico, against ‘the authoritarian and compulsory total imposition of the English language with the explicit and self-destructive abolition of Italian’, as Claudio Marazzini put it. The Crusca pointed to the fact that one of the most important and pres- tigious fi elds of discourse that national languages are losing is the fi eld of science. The language of science was one of the problems raised by the so-called questione della lingua in the 16 th century. The question then was whether science should write and speak the national language or, better, the language of the People, volgo, i.e. Volgare – or stay with Latin, the learned language of medieval Europe, the Globalese of the Old World. And the most advanced and modern stance, that taken by natural scientists, was then to switch from Latin Globalese to Volgare . This is what Galilei – the scientist of scientists – did when he switched from Latin to Italian/Tuscan in his most infl uential writings: Saggiatore (1623), Dialogo (1632), Discorsi (1638). This is what Francis Bacon, the Father of European Enlightenment, did, followed by Descartes, Vico and Kant. In the wake of the Italian discussion, the French Academy took a strong and modern stance in the matter of the language of science. Its second task, as we read in the règlement, was to make the French language ‘capable de traiter les arts et les sciences’. The French Academy elaborated French for use in the sciences. Not only did it write a dictionary for common language, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise 4, the French Academy also published the Dictionnaire des Arts et des Sciences , written by one of its members, Thomas Corneille5. This is an explicit inclusion of science in the French lan- guage i.e. a vulgar language, and the integration of French into science. From that historical book onwards, the sciences in Europe belonged “offi cially” to the vulgar languages.

2. Academies of Science

Academies of science were founded during that same period: Accademia dei Lincei 1603, the Royal Society 1660, Académie des Sciences 1666,

4 Académie française, Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française , 2 vols., Coignard, Paris 1694. 5 T. Corneille, Le Dictionnaire des Arts et des Sciences, 2 vols., Coignard, Paris 1694/95. 100 Jürgen Trabant

Kurfürstlich Brandenburgische (Königlich Preußische) Societät der Wissenschaften 1700, Académie des Inscriptions 1701.

2.1. The aim of academies of science was to foster and defend scientifi c excellence and the best conditions for scientifi c production. Defence and il- lustration of science. At fi rst glance, they appear to have nothing to do with language. This is how the Royal Society describes its mission:

The Society’s fundamental purpose, refl ected in its founding Charters of the 1660s, is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in sci- ence and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefi t of humanity 6.

The Académie des Sciences affi rms as its fundamental task:

Encourager la vie scientifi que: La production de connaissances, mo- tivée par la perspective d’application ou par la seule envie de savoir, est vitale pour le dynamisme économique et culturel d’une nation7.

There is no explicit mention of language in those statements relating to the purpose of the academies. As places for the encouragement of science, these academies are institu- tions in which, as the philosopher Jürgen Mittelstrass put it, science refl ects upon itself – in order to create those good conditions for scientifi c excellence:

In the academy, Science refl ects upon itself, and in the academy, so- ciety refl ects upon its scientifi c nature. Science recognises itself and society recognises its future that is not possible without science8.

6 https://royalsociety.org. 7 https://academie-sciences.fr. 8 ‛In der Akademie schaut sich die Wissenschaft selbst an, und in der Akademie refl ektiert die Gesellschaft ihr wissenschaftliches Wesen. Die Wissenschaft erkennt sich selbst und die Gesellschaft ihre Zukunft, die ohne Wissenschaft [...] nicht zu haben ist՚. J. Mittelstrass, ‛Wissenschaftskultur. Zur Vernunft wissenschaftlicher Institutionen՚, Rede vor der Leopoldina am 26.2.2010, printed in Forschung & Lehre (6.6.2010). Academies and the Defence of European National Languages 101

Now, in that self-refl ection, academies can easily come to the point where science is also a linguistic process: science speaks, science writes, at differ- ent points of its production of knowledge, for different people, for different purposes, in different depth. Science is a complicated ensemble of language games. Therefore, science and its institutions, the academies, certainly have to give some thought to the matter of language in the scientifi c process.

2.2. And this is what science did, from its very fi rst academy onwards, from Plato’s grove of Akademos. Plato asked: What is the role of language in the search for true knowledge? Do we fi nd any knowledge in words? This was Plato’s question in his dialogue about language, Cratylus. And his answer was: Since words are rather bad images of the world, it would be better to do without and thrive for true knowledge without language. Hence, from its very fi rst moment, science is opposed to language. Plato did not say whether obtaining true knowledge without language is possible or not. But Aristotle an- swered the question for European scientists for thousands of years. According to De interpretatione, language has no cognitive impact, it is only a means of communication. Words are just signs, language is just sound, different lan- guages are different sounds. Thought, says Aristotle, is universally the same for everybody. Hence, language does not matter for cognition – or for science. What language we use is only a matter of practical communication. This is still the majoritarian position and not only in science. It is the triv- ial common opinion of language. And this is why the Politecnico or the TU Munich or the Bavarian government just want to switch to English without any further refl ection. They see languages as nothing but indifferent means of communication. However, Aristotle is not always right. 2000 years after Aristotle, after the encounter with the American nations and their radically different languages, the Europeans had to realise that languages are not only different sounds, but that they contain also different thoughts, that they conceptualise the world in different ways. Language is production of thought – not only communication – and thought is different in different languages. This insight made scientists even more furious about language because it jeopardised the existence of universal thought. So they had to do some- thing about it, they had to re-establish a universal scientifi c language. The new Aristotle, Francis Bacon, connected the instauration of modern science with a passionate criticism of natural language, with its false and unscientifi c concepts – idola fori, idols of the market – and he imagined a kingdom of 102 Jürgen Trabant science – regnum scientiarum – with a new scientifi c language in a scien- tifi c Paradise 9. John Locke complained about the “mist” words cast before truth 10 . But what happens in real (scientifi c) life – and Bacon is one of the protag- onists of that historical process – is that science, modern science, Baconian science, just switches to vulgar languages notwithstanding the terrible seman- tic dangers connected to them. Modern science speaks in vulgar languages – and not in a new celestial language. Modern scientists do so simply for political reasons. Their area of action is the closer political or linguistic com- munity: France, England, Italy, and no longer the old Latin world, the catholic European world. All the academies on my list use their vulgar – or national – languages (and still some Latin), as their names indicate: Accademia dei Lincei, Royal Society, Académie des Sciences, Kurfürstlich Brandenburgische (Königlich Preußische) Societät der Wissenschaften, Académie des Inscriptions. The Académie des Sciences uses only French, it does not refl ect upon the language of science. Nor does the Académie des Inscriptions, the academy for humanistic sciences. They are not concerned with language. This task is left to the Académie francaise, the French language academy. This French sepa- ration of the scientifi c academies from the language academy perpetuates the Aristotelian separation of thought and language-communication. The scientif- ic academies steer clear of the matter of language.

3. The Leibnitian Academy

3.1. There is however the interesting exception of my own academy, the Kurfürstlich Brandenburgische Societät (K öniglich Preußische ) Societät der Wissenschaften . The Prussian Academy did not follow the French ex- ample of separating the natural sciences from humanities. And – and this is rather exceptional – it did not separate the two scientifi c academies from a language academy. It connected both provinces of science with the language problem.

9 F. Bacon, The New Organon (1620) (eds. Lisa Jardine & Michael Silverthorne), Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 2000. 10 ‘their [the words’] obscurity and disorder does not seldom cast a mist before our eyes and impose upon our understandings՚, J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) (ed. P.H. Nidditch), Clarendon Press, Oxford 1975, III ix 21. Academies and the Defence of European National Languages 103

As you can see from the frontispiece of the fi rst publication of Leibniz’s Academy, science and humanities are taken together. On the left, we have the allegoric representation of the humanistic disciplines, and on the right, the natural sciences, medicine, physics and mathematics. “Science” is conceived of – in the Latin and in the German meaning of the word – as applying to both realms of the learned elaboration of the world. And in the middle, we have a book whose title shows four letters: T and W and two Ss. The letters T W S S are the abbreviation for Teutscher Wort- und SprachSchatz , German Word and Language Treasure. The sciences and humanities shall develop a linguis- tic treasure for the national language: Teutsch . And vice versa: the Language Treasure also feeds the sciences. Thus, on one hand, the sciences are responsible for the enrichment of the national language, for its defence. And, on the other, the national language is the home of the sciences. The frontispiece symbolises the connection between the sciences and the national language 11 .

11 However, the Berlin Academy did not succeed in realising that connection of Science and Language in the past. Only recently, in 2018, through the acquisition of the most important national lexicographical project, did the Berlin Academy incorporate the TWSS into its body. 104 Jürgen Trabant

3.2. And this connection is based on philosophical reasons. Following Bacon’s and Locke’s insights, Leibniz was deeply convinced of the connec- tion of thought and language. The British philosophers had discovered the cognitive impact of languages, but they saw it as a catastrophic insight, com- plained of cognitive obscurity and diversity of natural languages – ‘a mist before our eyes’– and wanted to get rid of it. Leibniz just turns this com- plaint into a celebration of languages. Yes, languages contain thought, but this thought is precious, it is connaissance:

On enregistrera avec le temps et mettra en dictionnaires et en gram- maires toutes les langues de l’univers, et on les comparera entre elles; ce qui aura des usages très grands tant pour la connaissance des cho- ses [...] que pour la connaissance de notre esprit et de la merveilleuse variété de ses opérations12 .

The different languages contain knowledge of the world, ‘connaissance des choses’, and of the mind, ‘connaissance de notre esprit’. Therefore, languages have to be documented as precious depositories of knowledge. They form the basis of our knowledge of the world. And they have to be elaborated and de- veloped through the sciences. The sciences contribute to the cognitive treasure – Schatz – of the national language. For Leibniz, the content of the words in natural languages is not the high- est kind of cognition. Language is only cognitio distincta inadaequata13 . It is knowledge, but not yet scientifi c knowledge, cognitio distincta adaequata. Scientifi c knowledge transcends the knowledge contained in languages. But in order to get there, to reach cognitio adaequata, we have to use the treasures of natural languages. They are the basis of the highest of scientifi c knowledge. Leibniz’ hierarchy of knowledge makes it possible to understand the matter of language in science. So yes, academies, scientifi c academies have a duty to refl ect on their lin- guistic nature because thought is inextricably immersed in language. It is an element of their self-refl ection, an element of the refl ection on the conditions of the possibility of scientifi c production and of scientifi c excellence.

12 G.W. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (1765) (ed. J. Brunschwig), Garnier-Flammarion, Paris 1966, p. 293. 13 Cf. G.W. Leibniz, Meditationes de cognitione, veritati et ideis, in Philosophische Schriften, vol. I. (ed. H. Heinz Holz), Wiss. Buchges, Darmstadt 1985, pp. 25-47. Academies and the Defence of European National Languages 105

3.3. And in that refl ection of the conditions of scientifi c excellence they should take into consideration one fi nal observation. In the Prussian Academy, as well as in the Lincei or in the Academy of Torino, humanistic and natural sciences together form one body of knowledge. In Latin as well as in German, all disciplines are “sciences”, Wissenschaften . And through this togetherness, the academies become aware of the fact that the matter of language is not the same for the whole scientifi c family. Let me try to simplify things. The expe- riential nature of the natural sciences implies material instruments as essential means of the scientifi c process. Language here is not so much an instrument of research as a means for the communication of its results. And these results are often symbolised with non-linguistic means, i.e. signs or images. This is different for the humanistic sciences. Their means of exploration, their main research instrument, is language. Their research result is not presented in an image, a schema, in numbers – or the next slide. Their result is a text – lan- guage. The instrument as well as the result – and often also the object – of that research is linguistic. And just as natural scientists need the best instruments, humanists need the best instruments too. And their best instruments are the languages they know and manipulate best. Therefore, they have a much closer relationship with the national or vulgar language they use. This means that they tend to cling to national languages as a condition of the possibility of their excellence. And in the case of academies like the Lincei, Torino and Berlin, they have to defend these means for the production of excellent research in the humanistic sciences: Défense et illustration des langues européennes.

Acc. Sc. Torino Quaderni, 35 (2020), 107-124 THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES

Academies and the Public: Some Historical Refl ections

J O

Academies of science present us with a paradox. On the one hand their basic features have not changed dramatically since the seventeenth century 1. Robert Boyle and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, on a visit via time-machine, would easily recognise present-day academies as direct successors to the academies they themselves had created or helped to create – the Royal Society in London and the Society of Sciences of the Elector of Brandenburg (today the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences). The academy has proved a remarkably resilient type of institution and has, during the past four centu- ries, undergone much less change than its eternal companion, the university 2. Like the university, the academy of sciences is a successful European ex- port commodity. Numerous countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa have established national academies of sciences (and technology), often also in- cluding the arts. On the other hand, the societal and communicative contexts in which the academy is embedded have changed enormously. They have changed in the

1 From a huge literature on the history of academies of science, one book stands out as an ex- cellent overview: C. Grau, Berühmte Wissenschaftsakademien. Von ihrem Entstehen und ihrem weltweiten Erfolg, Edition Leipzig, Leipzig 1988. For a collection of specialist studies across Europe see K. Garber and H. Wismann (eds.), Die europäischen Akademien der Frühen Neuzeit zwischen Frührenaissance und Spätaufklärung, 2 vols., Niemeyer, Tübingen 1996. On the pioneering role of the Italian academies see J.E. Everson, D.V. Reidy and L. Sampson (eds.), The Italian Academies 1525-1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation and Dissent, Routledge, London and New York 2016. For a crucial phase of modernisation and ‛nationalisation՚ of European academies see L. Pepe, Istituti nazionali, accademie e società scientifi che nell’Eu- ropa di Napoleone , Olschki, Florence 2005. 2 An interesting attempt to draw a clear typological distinction between the university and the academy is W. Frijhoff, University, academia, Hochschule, College: Early Modern Perceptions and Realities of European Institutions of Higher Education , in J.-H. de Boer, M. Füssel and J.M. Schütte (eds.), Zwischen Konfl ikt und Kooperation: Praktiken der europäischen Gelehrtenkultur (12.-17. Jahrhundert) , Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2016, pp. 67-88, here pp. 81-83. 108 Jürgen Osterhammel long-run from princely patronage to competition on a diversifi ed market for knowledge. Especially since the 1960s and then again with the general spread of digital communication since the 1990s, academies have had to confront rapidly changing environments. Today, in a world of social media and a debate on the legitimacy and credibility of scientifi c expertise, a structurally conser- vative institution with a considerable potential for adaptation is faced with challenges of an unprecedented magnitude3.

1. Science and the Public: Two Separate, but Entangled Stories

Refl ecting on the relationship between academies and the public would be relatively easy if we were able to narrate two separate stories – a story of academies and a second one of publics – and then in a third step study their mutual entanglement. However, this is impossible, mainly for two reasons. First, academies have always been based on a hierarchy of various forms of knowledge and often on a strict dichotomy between the knowledge of su- perior authority and refi nement cultivated inside the academy, and the mere ‛opinion՚ prevailing outside its walls. Theorists have disagreed in their as- sessment of that ‛opinion՚. They have not always sided unambiguously with ‛higher՚ knowledge. Since Antiquity, the wisdom of the common man – and the common woman – has been recommended as an antidote to the one-sid- edness of the philosopher’s or scientist’s knowledge, a kind of knowledge that is not immune to impracticability, unworldliness or orthodox ossifi cation. It never remains uncontested4. Even the most radically internalist conception of the academy that sees it as an insular community or even a clerisy of the initiated and the chosen few, has to reckon with the academy’s ‛Other՚ – its non-academic environment. Academies can only defi ne themselves as elite in- stitutions in relation to an outside world that is non-elite, and often non-elite in a self-confi dent way. We might call it ‛the public՚. More precisely, it emerged in a long process that gradually established a bifurcation of the public into

3 An excellent discussion of digitalisation in scientifi c communication is P. Weingart et al. (eds.), Perspektiven der Wissenschaftskommunikation im digitalen Zeitalter , Velbrück Wissenschaft, Weilerswist 2017. I am not aware of a comparable book in English. 4 B. Bensaude-Vincent, A Genealogy of the Increasing Gap between Science and the Public , in «Public Understanding of Science», 10, 2001, pp. 99-113, at 100-101. See also B. Bensaude- Vincent, L’opinion publique et la science: à chacun son ignorance , Éditions Synthélabo, Paris 2000. Academies and the Public: Some Historical Refl ections 109 an internal and an external public, a divide between experts and lay persons 5. This process, as Steven Shapin reminds us, did not just happen anonymously. It depended on

the enormous labour expended by individuals in the past in construct- ing the very categories of ‘science’ and ‘the public’6.

Second, that ‛public՚ is no describable institution in the way any individual academy is 7. An academy possesses a clear ‛address՚, the public does not. Rather, the public is a framework, or a sphere, or a sub-system of society, where different institutions emerge and operate, for example theatres, news- papers or non-governmental organisations. It may even be argued that there are only publics and public spheres in the plural: a rich and ever-changing landscape that is becoming more and more differentiated and fragmented in the course of societal evolution, culminating, for the time being, in the myriad pockets, niches and bubbles of the Internet. In one widely shared view, publics are only discursive constructions of an ephemeral nature. At any rate, one can see and even inhabit an academy, but we cannot see a public unless it is an audience in a room or a crowd in the street, and even then it disperses after some time. Public ‛opinion՚ is an even less tangible and an even more abstract concept relating to vaguely expressed views and moods held by human collectives8. Public opinion has always been a cacophonic chorus of individual voices – opinions that do not easily add up to public opinion in the singular. Strictly speaking, public opinion did not exist before it could be pinned down and doc- umented. Since the 1930s, when George Gallup introduced mass questioning

5 P. Weingart, Die Wissenschaft der Öffentlichkeit: Essays zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaft, Medien und Öffentlichkeit, Velbrück Wissenschaft, Weilerswirst 2005, p. 9. 6 S. Shapin, Science and the Public, in R.C. Olby et al. (eds.), Companion to the History of Modern Science, Routledge, London and New York 1990, pp. 990-1007, here p. 992. 7 Key contributions on the history and theory of the public and the publics sphere are col- lected in J. Gripsrud et al. (eds.), The Idea of the Public Sphere: A Reader , Lexington Books, Lanham, MD 2010, and J. Gripsrud (ed.), The Public Sphere, 4 vols., SAGE, Los Angeles 2010. A good introduction is S. Landi, Stampa, censura e opinione pubblica in età moderna , Il Mulino, Bologna 2011. See also V. Huber and J. Osterhammel (eds.), Global Publics: Their Power and Their Limits, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2020. pp. 1-60, especially the editors’ introduction. 8 A.M. Theis-Berglmair, Öffentlichkeit und öffentliche Meinung, in R. Fröhlich et al. (eds.), Handbuch der Public Relations, Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 2015, pp. 399-410. 110 Jürgen Osterhammel and sampling techniques, survey research in the shape of opinion polls has claimed that public opinion can be empirically determined through large-scale anonymous questioning and statistical processing of the data thereby obtained, in short: than it can be counted and measured9. Today this is big business in the service of commerce and politics. Public opinion as we get to know it through statistics, charts and diagrams is a product of professional pollsters. They inform us, among other things, about the trust or suspicion shown to- wards science and scientists by the population at large 10 . When we proclaim a crisis of science in society, it is in response to such fi ndings. It is diffi cult to position academies in this landscape of publics and public opinion. In the vast literature on science and learning – in the wider German sense of ‛Wissenschaft՚ that encompasses the ‛hard՚ as well as the ‛soft՚ disciplines – and the public there is very little to be found specifi cally on academies. Most references are to scientists, to science in general or to the universities11 . Keeping a fi rm focus on academies is not easy. One of the many reasons for this is the fact that in everyday life the name ‛academy՚ is used much more loosely than the term ‛university՚. There is no copyright on it. The world’s most famous academy is likely to be the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that awards the yearly ‛Oscars՚ and has very little to do with science in an ordinary sense. Any dancing school is free to call itself a ‛dance academy՚, and driving lessons can be taken from a ‛driving academy՚. In Great Britain, the Labour government of Tony Blair bestowed the label ‛academy՚ on independent schools which get their funding directly from the government rather than their local council12 . Academies of sciences form a small minority among ‛academies՚ of all stripes.

9 N. Moon, Opinion Polls: History, Theory and Practice , Manchester University Press, Manchester 1999. 10 A particularly fertile source of opinion polls related to science is the Pew Research Center in Washington, DC that is run as a non-profi t organisation by the Pew Charitable Trust. 11 Despite its narrow title, the following article is extremely helpful due to a wealth of refer- ences to the international literature on universities and the public: C.I. Klein et al ., Universität, Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit in Westdeutschland 1945 bis ca. 1970. Einleitung , in S. Brandt et al. (eds.), Universität, Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit in Westdeutschland (1945 bis ca. 1970), Steiner, Stuttgart 2014, pp. 7-38. 12 The Guardian, 26 May 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/may/26/ what-is-an-academy. Academies and the Public: Some Historical Refl ections 111

2. Observers Observed

A straightforward connection between the public and, more specifi cally, public opinion and academies is the watching of academies by those who do not belong to them. Academies have always been objects of observation, sus- picion and envy. In contrast to a professional association – or a political party and to a certain extent also a church – one cannot simply join an academy by paying a membership fee. In contrast to the university and its professors, there is no contractual relation of salaried employment between the academy and its members. The academy is a place where the cash nexus hardly plays a role. An academy is one of the few institutions left in society that work through peer election, moreover one where the selection process itself is not subject to further review. It is impossible to sue an academy for membership, which is a gift and not a legally enforceable right. There is no right of appeal. All this makes the academy look somewhat out-dated or even archaic, enhancing its vulnerability. In the wider public, there slumbers a potential resentment against the unaccountably elitist and exclusive character of acad- emies. Perhaps one day a history of Akademiefeindschaft will be written – of hostility towards academies. One chapter should tell the story of how during the Revolution of 1848/49 the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences was ve- hemently attacked by democrats as a pillar of the established order 13 . Similar incidents happened elsewhere. Reputation in the eyes of peers as well as the broader public has always been the most important type of cultural capital for academies to accumulate and preserve. Thus, after the First World War the German Leopoldina, whose history has been reconstructed in exemplary fashion, had to struggle against a serious loss of public esteem that had already begun in the nineteenth century14 . Are academies still vulnerable to criticism and attacks from outside? Yes and no. Yes – since most academies are funded by the state, and it is at the discretion of the ruling powers to doubt the relevance of academies and to curtail support for them. This happened in Hungary in 2019 when the Orbán government put the Academy of Sciences on a tight political and fi nancial

13 A. Harnack, Geschichte der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaft zu Berlin, vol. I/2: Vom Tode Friedrich’s des Großen bis zur Gegenwart , Reichsdruckerei, Berlin 1900, pp. 945-949. 14 J. Thiel, Die Leopoldina in der Weimarer Republik , in S. Gerstengarbe, J. Thiel and R. vom Bruch (eds.), Die Leopoldina: Die Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher zwischen Kaiserreich und früher DDR, be.bra Wissenschaft Verlag, Berlin and Brandenburg 2016, pp. 121-229, here p. 163. 112 Jürgen Osterhammel leash15 . No – because anonymous public opinion probably has little interest in academies. There are now plenty of opinion polls about popular attitudes to science, scientists and experts in general. They are already being summarised and analysed in meta-studies and overarching surveys, some of them issued by academies of science16 . At the same time, there are few studies that focus specifi cally on the image of academies, or of one particular academy, in the public eye. This is hardly surprising, given the fact that academies nowadays are less visible than in times when they – together with a small number of universities – were the only institutions where scientifi c excellence was con- centrated. In an academic market in which a great number of universities, independent research institutes, think tanks and supranational organisations are ceaselessly competing for attention and resources, academies are just one type of player among many others. They are probably not very well known even among the educated public and are therefore less likely to draw criticism of an anti-elitist and populist kind. Asking the man or woman on the street what they think of ‛Leopoldina՚ might trigger a bemused response. Very few even in Germany are likely to know that this is the venerable name of ‛The Academy of Sciences Leopoldina՚, one of the oldest learned societies in the world (founded in 1652) and since 2007 the German National Academy of Sciences. Still, academies – like everyone else – have good reasons to care for their public image. What was the role of the public during the long foundational period of academies, that is, mainly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? First of all, we have to think of the internal public of the academy comprised of its local members who came together as equals in an enclave of egalitarianism embedded in a rigorously ranked society 17 . In theory, and often in practice, academies ignored the social origins of their members and even – a more

15 Reuters message, 28 May 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-scientists/defy- ing-scientists-hungary-will-overhaul-academic-network-website-reports-idUSKCN1SY12M [accessed 3 December 2019]. 16 See, by way of example, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Perceptions of Science in America: The Public Face of Science [2018]. https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/fi les/pub- lication/downloads/PFoS-Perceptions-Science-America.pdf [accessed on 1 December 2019]. A comparison of various polls is N.M. Krause et al ., The Polls–Trends: Americans’ Trust in Science and Scientists, in Public Opinion Quarterly, November 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/ poq/nfz041. 17 An excellent study on face to face interaction and ‛economies of work՚ in the early acade- mies is S. Kühn, Wissen, Arbeit, Freundschaft: Ökonomien und soziale Beziehungen an den Akademien in London, Paris und Berlin um 1700, V&R Unipress, Göttingen 2011. Academies and the Public: Some Historical Refl ections 113 diffi cult barrier to overcome – their religious affi liations as long as they were able to take an active part in learned and ‛civilized՚ conversation18 . These abilities constituted mutual trust, if only among ‛gentlemen՚ with at least a minimum of material independence19 . The members came with their individu- al interests and skills, though for a very long time and until modern disciplines emerged – not before the nineteenth century – they typically remained uni- versalists able to engage in all kinds of learned conversations. The perfect academician was a virtuoso whose personal identity and appreciation by his peers rested on versatility rather than on narrow expertise. As Rudolf Stichweh has explained in one of the few sociological analyses of the history of academies, the early academies were modern in the sense that they combined nearly all conceivable functions related to secular knowl- edge20 . It is necessary to emphasise the secularity of the knowledge cultivated in academies; theology, a particularly divisive fi eld, remained largely confi ned to the universities. Whereas universities typically reproduced and taught ex- isting wisdom, academies generated new knowledge. They became sites for experiments that so far had been conducted in private homes; laboratories began to be established in academy buildings. Only in the later nineteenth century did natural science research again emigrate from the academies back to the universities that by now had made a great step forward in modernizing themselves. The internal public of the academies, quintessential face-to-face societies, was dominated by the spoken world. Scientifi c results were communicated to the fellows through lectures. Academies differed as to whether their meetings were open to an external public of listeners and spectators. While in some quarters this was common practice from an early stage onwards, the German Leopoldina, for instance, opened its sessions only in the 1920s21 . In any case, from the very beginning the work of the academies was watched keenly by

18 C. Losfeld, Universitäten / Akademien , in H. Thoma (ed.), Handbuch Europäische Aufklärung. Begriffe – Konzepte – Wirkung, Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 2015, pp. 506-516, here p. 510. 19 M.G. Ash, Wissenschaft, Politik und Öffentlichkeit - Zur Einführung , in M.G. Ash and C.H. Stifter (eds.), Wissenschaft, Politik und Öffentlichkeit. Von der Wiener Moderne bis zur Gegenwart, W: WUV-Universitäts-Verlag, Vienna 2002, pp. 19-43, here p. 23. 20 R. Stichweh, Wissenschaftliche Akademien aus soziologischer Perspektive. Organisierbarkeit und Organisationsformen im Wissenschaftssystem der Moderne , in «Nova Acta Leopoldina», 64, 2014, pp. 79-89, here p. 83. 21 M. Berg and J. Thiel, Akademiereden im ‛Krieg der Geister՚ (1914 bis 1918), in C. Debru (ed.), Akademien im Krieg, Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, Halle (Saale) 2019, pp. 9-22, here p. 16. 114 Jürgen Osterhammel outside scholars, members of an emerging ‛Republic of Letters՚ that in the long run covered the entire European continent – any place where Latin and French were understood and written. This cosmopolitan Republic of Letters in many ways anticipated today’s seamless – though unequal – world of glob- al science22 . Academies formed its nodal points, especially in countries and cultural spheres where regional and local academies were of considerable importance. This was the case in Ancien Régime France with its several pro- vincial academies as well as in the politically diverse German lands. Scholars from everywhere turned to the academies both as sources of new knowledge and as arbiters that had acquired the prestige and authority to judge the validity of any kind of knowledge, old or new23 . It was common practice that non-members submitted papers that were read and discussed at meetings of the academicians. Thereby, and through a dense web of correspondence in all directions, the academies became hubs of scholarly activity at a time when universities did not compete in any of these fi elds. Even though they were exclusive and elitist in their membership (the hardships of travel made it dif- fi cult for non-local members to attend meetings), they were able to shape the scientifi c activities of cities, provinces and entire kingdoms. The academies were not only observed by non-members, they were them- selves eager to cultivate their relations with the external scholarly community, mainly through making available their proceedings in print. In this sense, they created their own public, or they extended publics that already existed. We will see that public-building has remained a permanent task for acade- mies, performed within changing frameworks of communicative logistics. In the eighteenth century, academies began to award prizes and medals and organised highly publicised essay competitions where a theme was set and

22 See H. Bots and F. Waquet, La république des lettres , Belin-De Boeck, Paris 1997; P. Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot , Polity, Cambridge 2000; R. van Dülmen and S. Rauschenbach (eds.), Macht des Wissens. Die Entstehung der mod- ernen Wissensgesellschaft , Böhlau, Cologne 2004; A. Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT 1995; U. J. Schneider (ed.), Kultur der Kommunikation. Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter von Leibniz und Lessing, Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2005; B. Ogilvie, Correspondence Networks, in B.V. Lightman (ed.), A Companion to the History of Science , Wiley-Blackwell, Chicester 2016, pp. 358-371; L. O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2015. 23 H. Unger, Die Akademien der Wissenschaften in Europa , in W. Mantl (ed.), Phänomenologie des europäischen Wissenschaftssystems , Nomos, Baden-Baden 2010, pp. 173-187, here p. 175. Academies and the Public: Some Historical Refl ections 115 submissions were invited from anyone who felt up to the task24 . The more ‛the nation՚ – whether already organized as a nation-state or still a promise to be fulfi lled in the future – became a frame of political reference, the greater the temptation of a small minority of intellectuals and scholars to leave the halls of universities and academies and appeal to a wider public that was in the process of formation25 .

3. Academies, Universities and Their Publics

The academies’ modus operandi derived from their dual sources of or- igin: self-organisation and state sponsorship. This innovative combination distinguished the academies from universities with their old corporate priv- ileges. The Academy was a corporation where privilege did not rest in the institution itself but was attached to the individual elite status of its members. The monarchical state – academies seem to have fl ourished less in the few European republics – used the new academies for two of its own purposes: fi rst, to increase its cultural capital through attracting outstanding scholars – in the case of the Imperial Russian Academy that existed under varying names since 1724, a majority of them were non-Russians – and second, to gather expertise for practical purposes. The major addressee and benefi ciary of the academies’ advice was the monarch himself or herself – in a way a special kind of one-person public. The academies developed plans, for ex- ample, for infrastructural development. They accepted research assignments from the prince, organised geographical expeditions, and so on. Through their networks, they sometimes provided personal contacts on behalf of the state at a time when diplomatic services were still rudimentary. Access to the ruler was often fairly direct. Whereas in present-day democratic countries academies typically address the general public rather than give advice behind closed doors to ministers or their staff, in the early modern period many of them had an immediate con- nection to high dignitaries at the court. A separate media-public, apart from

24 J.L. Caradonna, The Enlightenment in Practice: Academic Prize Contests and Intellectual Culture in France, 1670-1794, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London 2012. 25 A case study is W. Greiling, Universität und Öffentlichkeit: Wahrnehmung und „Öffentlichkeitsarbeit“ der Alma Mater Jenensis um 1800, in J. Bauer, O. Breidbach and H.-W. Hahn (eds.), Universität im Umbruch: Universität und Wissenschaft im Spannungsfeld der Gesellschaft um 1800, Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2010, pp. 53-71. 116 Jürgen Osterhammel the readers of scholarly publications, many of them under the direct control of academies, did not yet exist. From the mid-eighteenth century, at fi rst very slowly, the universities began to assume functions that had traditionally been monopolised by the academies. The entire nineteenth century was a period of fruitful competition. While the academies by and large changed very little, the universities – institutions of a vastly different kind – began to profi t from two of their own peculiarities. First, they began to organise themselves according to a strict division of labour. Gone were the days of the universalists. It is no coincidence that Alexander von Humboldt remained a quintessential academy person and kept a distance from the new research university established in the Prussian capital by none other than his brother Wilhelm. Alexander never became a profes- sor. The new principle, vigorously promoted by Wilhelm von Humboldt, was Fachlichkeit, the idea and practice of the discipline that could expand in time and sprout sub-disciplines – obviously a process going on until the present day26 . Second, the university became part of emerging systems of education which channelled the best and the brightest from the middle classes and the lower nobility into the reformed institutions of higher education. This meant that the university was able to systematically recruit young talents and allow them to rise in the ranks whereas the academies continued to rest on the proven excel- lence of senior scholars. One is elected member of an academy because one is already supposed to be one of the best whereas a modern research university is a place to train young people for becoming the best. More and more, the acad- emies depended on reputations previously gained in the university or, from the early twentieth century, in independent research institutes. These became particularly important in Germany, where the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, the predecessor of today’s Max Planck Society, was established in 1911. In time, it became unthinkable for a private or ‛independent՚ scholar to be elected ordinary member of an academy. The mandarins of the universities met under more exclusive circumstances in the academies. The expansion of literacy and a reading public, of the book market, and of quality newspapers during the nineteenth century meant that the quasi-mo- nopoly of the academies on scientifi c publications ceased to exist. Thus began the long rise of the disciplinary journal, the Fachzeitschrift, to the prominent and uncontested position it enjoys today. Hardly any scholar nowadays would

26 The standard account is W. Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 2006. Academies and the Public: Some Historical Refl ections 117 prefer publication in the yearbook of an academy to that in an internation- al peer-reviewed A-Journal. A related development was what is often called ‛popularisation՚. According to a model that is now widely considered obso- lete, true science was popularised and often vulgarised in order to make it comprehensible to the growing audience of bourgeois readers and also to self-educated members of the working class. In place of this diffusion mod- el – or trickle-down model – historians of science prefer to see a close and interactive connection between professional scientists and their various audi- ences. Nineteenth-century fi ctional and autobiographical literature is replete with medical doctors, apothecaries or country parsons conducting electrical or chemical experiments in their garden cottages. Collecting botanical or geo- logical specimens was a widespread pastime, and people were encouraged to make systematic meteorological observations and report them to experts. Recent ideas of a new ‛citizen science՚, meant to overcome the strict dichoto- my between highly specialised experts and a vast majority of lay people barely literate in science basics, revive such practices of the nineteenth century27 . Until the great revolution in theoretical physics around 1900, much of nine- teenth-century science and technology had still been basically comprehensible to the educated amateur and needed only moderate simplifi cation and popularisation. Much of the popularising literature – the elderly Alexander von Humboldt himself was a highly successful pioneer of that genre – kept fairly close to the work of the scientists and did not belong to an entirely different world of media-driven vulgar- isation. Charles Darwin’s books became instant bestsellers.

4. Modelling Publics

In terms of publics, from about the mid-nineteenth century two simple mod- els no longer apply. First, the market for scientifi c knowledge and expertise expanded beyond a small and tightly-knit world of learned men (hardly any women). Whereas in the early modern period, when only a minority among the population of Europe was literate, participants in the Republic of Letters inside as well as outside the academies were gentlemen-scholars with a shared educational background, the public in the nineteenth century was much more heterogeneous and more fi nely graded. A uniform Republic of Letters disap- peared around 1800.

27 S. Hecker et al. (eds.), Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy, UCL Press, London 2018. 118 Jürgen Osterhammel

Second, it would be too simple to posit a deep gap between experts and non-experts, between ‛science՚ as such and ‛the public՚28 . Instead, Arne Schirrmacher, following in the footsteps of the famous theorist Ludwik Fleck with his concept of ‛thought collectives՚29 , has suggested a more differentiated model consisting of six elements – a model, that can be applied, grosso modo , even to the present situation. It can be imagined as a cascade of expertise and interest (my translations)30 : 1. core disciplinary scientists (who read the specialist journals of their dis- cipline and contribute to them); 2. expert circles within the same discipline but beyond a narrow and spe- cifi c fi eld of research; 3. scientists at large who are able to grasp and appreciate methods of scien- tifi c thinking in disciplines that are not their own; Then comes a porous border line towards the public realm where three concentric circles can be distinguished: 4. a small public that follows developments in science closely at a high level of amateur understanding (e.g. by reading magazines such as Scientifi c American); 5. a larger public that takes an occasional interest in science, especially if scientifi c issues are presented in the media as being relevant to their own lives; 6. an even wider public that has no particular interest in science and only takes account of scientifi c issues when they appear in the main TV news or on the front pages of tabloids - for instance, climate change at the present time. This model – obviously conceived with the natural sciences in mind – cap- tures the situation that arose in the fi nal decades of the nineteenth century. It also fi ts quite well much of the twentieth century, when diffusion became stronger than in the period before and the public was reduced to a more passive role needing translation and explanation. It had been possible to understand Michael Faraday or Charles Darwin in their own words, but Max Planck or Einstein were harder nuts to crack for the lay person. Popularisation was no longer a simplifi cation of science on its own terms. It was made subservient to a different logic, that of the media31 .

28 I. de Melo-Martín and K. Intemann, The Fight against Doubt: How to Bridge the Gap be- tween Scientists and the Public, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2019. 29 L. Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientifi c Fact , ed. by Thaddeus J. Trenn and R.K. Merton, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1979, p. 39. 30 A. Schirrmacher, Nach der Popularisierung. Zur Relation von Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit , in «Geschichte und Gesellschaft», 34, 2008, pp. 73-95, here pp. 85-87. 31 Weingart, Die Wissenschaft der Öffentlichkeit, pp. 20-21. Academies and the Public: Some Historical Refl ections 119

Schirrmacher’s model of diminishing expertise and involvement, there- fore, has to be augmented by an additional factor: the growing importance of professional mediators, above all the increasing indispensability of science journalists. In the nineteenth century, an army of writers explained scien- tifi c and technological innovations to a public that had a certain affi nity to these innovations. The mediators themselves promoted the image of science as diffi cult and their own role as missionaries who carried the light of truth to grateful audiences. New media in the twentieth century enhanced the po- tentials and possibilities for mediators who almost replaced the individual scientists themselves as speakers for science. Only very few fi rst-rate scien- tists in the second half of the twentieth century – perhaps Steven Hawking or James Watson – became celebrities in the way Humboldt, Darwin or Einstein had been household names in their own time. A new epoch began with regular science broadcasts from the 1960s onwards. That format obviously relied on visualisation: it is impossible to ex- plain Watson and Crick’s Double Helix without images. Television followed scientists to their places of work, told human interest stories and incorporated elements of the older nature movie or natural history fi lm. All this is different from the scientist occasionally writing for a popular magazine as was common practice in the age of the monopoly of print. The presentation of science in audio-visual media makes demands on the journalist that are quite different from science reporting in paper-based media. It creates a world of its own and strengthens the power of mediators to pick topics and set agendas. Science journalists are best seen not as representatives of the public but as third-party mediators between various publics and the different institutions that offer sci- entifi c knowledge and authority. The rise of social media has opened up yet another fi eld of challenges and opportunities where science can be explained to new cohorts of users while online platforms both foster and hinder trust in science32 . Paradoxically, with the increasing distance of cutting-edge research in the natural sciences from the intellectual horizon of the average educated person, the criteria by which to distinguish science proper from pseudo-sci- ence have become more blurred than in the recent past33 . To put it more pointedly: a consensus among scientists as to what is accepted as ‛science՚ is not necessarily shared by society at large. Competing claims for authority and

32 B. Huber et al. (2019). Fostering Public Trust in Science: The Role of Social Media , in «Public Understanding of Science», 28, 2019, pp. 759-777. 33 C. Reinhardt, Historische Wissenschaftsforschung heute. Überlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Wissensgesellschaft , in «Beiträge zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte», 33, 2010, pp. 81-99, here p. 83. 120 Jürgen Osterhammel what in German is called Deutungshoheit (sovereignty over interpretation) have increased in connection with two processes: fi rst, the multiplication of political issues – from public debt and air pollution to artifi cial intelligence and norma- tive questions of medical ethics – where arguments from science are regularly referred to, and second, the dramatically increasing number of forums and plat- forms on the internet that allow people to utter views on science-related matters completely bypassing mediation by responsible science journalism.

5. Authority and Confi dence

The role of academies in this epochal transformation of the public sphere is still very much under-researched. They certainly fulfi l at least two unique functions. First, academies embody the unity of Wissenschaft or academic scholarship across the entire range of disciplines in a way big and complex universities fail to do. Sometimes there is an institutional division between the natural sciences and humanities as in Britain where in 1902 the British Academy, reserved for the humanities and social sciences, was established alongside the venerable Royal Society that limited itself to the natural sciences. This split up the much-vaunt- ed unity of knowledge that had been so dear to both brothers Humboldt; but then preserving the unity of the humanities is a worthy task by itself. On the whole, under conditions of disciplinary fi ssion, where fi elds fragment into ever more subfi elds, one of the early and original functions of academies assumes a renewed signifi cance: keeping all branches of scholarly knowledge together in one institution that still largely works on the basis of face-to-face interaction. Second, in an imagined world of pure rationalism, scientifi c reason only has to speak for itself and will easily convince the ignorant and the doubtful through the profundity and clarity of disembodied ideas. This is obviously not how sci- ence works in practice. It is always connected to authority and reputation. The question of who speaks is anything but marginal or accidental; it may not even be clear at a given time who counts as a scientist 34 . The ranking of universities, the prestige of journals, the fame of Noble Laureates, the backing by munifi cent sponsors – all this has an impact on how scientifi c knowledge is received and esteemed outside scientifi c institutions. A truth pronounced by a celebrity is not truer than the same truth uttered by a scholar away from the limelight, but it

34 B. Suldovsky, A. Landrum and N.J. Stroud, Public Perception of Who Counts as a Scientist for Controversial Science, in «Public Understanding of Science», 28, 2019, pp. 797-811. Academies and the Public: Some Historical Refl ections 121 possesses a higher public effectiveness. Moreover, the media create their own experts who, through performative skills and sheer frequency of appearance on television and computer screens, acquire a status and infl uence largely detached from their scholarly accomplishments. From this volatile and thickly populated scene, academies stand out as the true clusters of excellence. Their age-old principle of self-recruitment of the best by the best translates into a trustworthy reputation that only the topmost universities in a particular country can hope to equal. In contrast to a university with its complex organisation in faculties, departments and institutes, an acade- my has less diffi culty in speaking with one voice. Since it pools expertise from many universities and from numerous schools and tendencies of scholarship, it promises a non-partisan cross-section of authoritative views. Through long-es- tablished methods of reputation-building, an academy generates respectability and inspires confi dence. This effect is enhanced when several academies, of- ten from a number of different countries, join forces and lend their cumulative weight to issues of exceptional public importance. An important early attempt in that direction was the International Association of Academies (IAA) that was established in 1899 and lived on under different names after the First World War 35 . Today such joint statements, meant to appeal to a global public, are far from uncommon. A key document was the 1994 declaration of 58 academies of science on world population 36 . On the whole, academies are well-placed in a competitive market for attention that still puts a premium on perceived authority. But who are the ‛customers՚ buying such offers? Who listens to academies?

6. Medialisation and Politics37

The key term in the literature that discusses the relationship between sci- ence and the public is ‛the media՚. But how important is ‛medialisation՚?

35 M. Gierl, Geschichte und Organisation. Institutionalisierung als Kommunikationsprozess am Beispiel der Wissenschaftsakademien um 1900, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2004. 36 ‛ Science Summit‛ on World Population: A Joint Statement by 58 of the World‘s Scientifi c Academies, in «Population and Development Review», 20, 1994, pp. 233-238. 37 See a comprehensive analysis: ALLEA Discussion Paper #3: Trust in Science and Changing Landscapes of Communication [January 2019]. https://www.allea.org/wp-content/up- loads/2019/01/ALLEA_Trust_in_Science_and_Changing_Landscapes_of_Communication. pdf [accessed on 1 December 2019]. The present problems are also laid out clearly in S. Iyengar and D.S. Massey, Scientifi c Communication in a Post-truth Society , in «Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States», 116:16 (16 April 2019), pp. 7656-7661. 122 Jürgen Osterhammel

In fl uential interpretations of the relationship between science and the public follow general systems theories in seeing the media as the dominant sub-sys- tem in contemporary society. According to some views, a new kind of ‛media public՚ took hold as early as the 1920s and has since made science more and more dependent on the whims of newspaper journalists, radio hosts, TV pro- ducers and internet bloggers. Other theorists suggest that ‛the public՚ is now virtually identical with the media and that science and the media face one an- other as symmetrical actors on equal terms, and that the media are no longer the servant of science38 . In this perspective, science and the media have arrived at a balanced and reciprocal relationship where they offer each other valuable ‛resources՚ 39 . Science would never be able to leave the laboratory and the lecture hall with- out help from the media; it would remain virtually silent. Conversely, the media may not be intrinsically interested in science and do not take it nearly as seriously as sports or the cinema, but they are aware of the epochal tendency of the rise of appeals to disinterested expertise in many political and societal issues. Quoting a professor may seldom be entertaining, but it is also rarely a completely wrong thing to do. The historian is in no position to assess general and theoretical claims about the centrality of the media in modern life and the dependence of science on them. However, one should beware of regarding the media as omnipotent and as an inescapable shaper or even distorter of scientifi c information. Like any other major organisation that communicates with its environment, an academy nowadays employs trained specialists in public relations. Science journalists, as ‛buyers՚ of scientifi c news, meet their ‛selling՚ counterparts, the publicity offi cers of academies and universities. Nobody on either side har- bours any illusions as to the power of unaccompanied truth. Simply providing people with more and better information is unlikely to change public opinion on controversial science issues. Such information has to be packaged strategi- cally and launched in a competitive environment40 . In practical terms, academies, more than ever before, issue voluminous re- ports and statements on self-chosen topics or on subjects they have been asked

38 P. Weingart, Die Wissenschaft der Öffentlichkeit, pp. 22, 28. 39 S. Nikolow and A. Schirrmacher (eds.), Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit als Ressourcen füreinander: Studien zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert , Campus, Frankfurt (Main) and New York 2007. 40 See the case study E. Howell et al ., National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Report on Genetically Engineeered Crops Infl uences Public Discourse , in «Politics and the Life Sciences», 37, 2018, pp. 250-261. Academies and the Public: Some Historical Refl ections 123 to investigate. Many of these documents are now easily available online, free of charge, for the benefi t of anyone who cares to read them. This is transparent publicity in an almost heroic Enlightenment sense: no intermediaries interfere between the author and the reader, between the scientist and the citoyen – no bookseller, no library, no censor. But this special kind of public is very small (as it would have been in earlier times), roughly congruent with categories nos. 3 and 4 in Arne Schirrmacher’s model, in other words: confi ned to experts with a focussed interest in a particular topic as well as to a small number of highly ed- ucated citizens with a high level of political and cultural awareness and activity. The media come into play when the need arises to boil down a 300-page re- port on climate change, demography, health care (or whatever else) to a single newspaper column directed at a much wider public: Schirrmacher’s category no. 5. An academy will, of course, provide its own condensed version while it has no control over if and how the media are going to use it. Media are far from being passive and grateful recipients of data and judgements handed down by Olympian purveyors of wisdom. They actively choose the topics they want to foreground, applying their own rules of preference. Academies may have other ideas than journalists about what are the principal topics of public interest at a given moment in time41 . The real power of the media is located in their agenda-setting and in their channelling and fi ne-tuning of attention. This happens across a broad spectrum from silence to overheated hype. Up to a point, academies are still able, as they have been from the very beginning of their long history, to form their own publics. These publics are sympathetic, they cherish the authority and impartiality of academies and tend to grant them priority over competing sources of information. In a word, they are a fan club. Some institutions, for instance, the British Academy, are particularly good at addressing this kind of audience. Beyond these inner cir- cles, the remoter types of public are more diffi cult to reach. At the far horizon loom those who defend their preconceived opinions – un public opinion, as one is tempted to say – in defi ance of proof and evidence: creationists, cli- mate-change deniers, partisans of what in Italy is called il antivaccinismo, and so on. It is an open question what academies can do to struggle against these frightening forms of obscurantism. Finally, a word on politics. Politicians are the ultimate target group of sci- entifi c communication. They take decisions on innumerable issues – from the

41 M. Lehmkuhl, Auswahlkriterien für Wissenschaftsthemen. Warum das eine in der Zeitung steht und das andere nicht , in W. Göpfert (ed.), Wissenschafts-Journalismus: Ein Handbuch für Ausbildung und Praxis, 6th ed., Wiesbaden, Springer VS 2019 , 151-60. 124 Jürgen Osterhammel economy to technology and the environment – where expert advice is indis- pensable and frequently sought through formal procedures. Some of these procedures are non-public or semi-public: committee hearings behind closed doors or routine ministerial consultations of experts (as well as lobbyists!) in the course of the legislative process. Focussing exclusively on the media-pub- lic diverts our attention away from these less conspicuous but highly important channels. Academies can and do play a role here, mostly in collaboration or competition with other actors in the respective fi eld 42 . But what if not just benighted barbarians but politicians at the levers of power – and don’t forget that they are also the people who decide on the fund- ing of academies! – do not welcome advice? When they ‛have had enough of experts՚, as Michael Gove, a leading Tory politician and British cabinet minis- ter, famously said in June 2016 43 ? To which, if I remember correctly, the then President of the British Academy, Lord Nicholas Stern, replied that experts will be indispensable ever for implementing Brexit. This was a clever, but at the same time a desperately ironic answer. The British Academy surely would have preferred to give advice of a quite different kind and calibre.

42 See International Network for Government Science Advice, The Role of National Academies in Science Advice to Governments [April 2017]. https://www.ingsa.org/wp-content/up- loads/2017/05/ROLE-of-ACADEMIES_Auckland-April-2017_fi nal-report-1.pdf [accessed on 1 December 2019]. 43 Interview with Faisal Islam, Sky News, 3 June 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G- GgiGtJk7MA. For Gove’s attempt to express a more nuanced position see his interview of 3 March 2017: https://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/comment/michael-gove-trouble-experts [both accessed on 1 December 2019]. A

G A (Roma), Constitutional Court of the Italian Republic. J E (Tallin), Estonian Academy of Sciences; Accademia delle Scienze di Torino; ALLEA, Past President. M L B (Firenze), Accademia delle Scienze di Torino. P L (Torino), Politecnico di Torino. A L (Basel), ALLEA, President; Accademia delle Scienze di Torino. L M (Torino), Confi ndustria, Vice President. M M (Torino), Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, President. J O (Konstanz), Accademia delle Scienze di Torino. A P S (Milano), Accademia delle Scienze di Torino. A P (Torino), Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, Past President. G S (Torino), Accademia delle Scienze di Torino; Politecnico di Torino, Rector. S S (Pisa), Accademia delle Scienze di Torino. G S (Berlin), ALLEA, Past President. J T (Berlin), Accademia delle Scienze di Torino. V Z (Torino), Accademia delle Scienze di Torino; Former Member of the European Court of Human Rights.

Q, 35

THE ROLE OF ACADEMIES IN SUSTAINING EUROPEAN KNOWLEDGE SOCIETIES IN TIMES OF CRISIS

Introduction, by Massimo Mori ...... 5

PART I: AN OVERVIEW

European Academies and European Values, by Antonio Loprieno ...... 11 The Impact of Academies on European Identity, by Giuliano Amato . . . . . 17 Challenges and Tasks for Today’s Academies, by Günter Stock ...... 21 Academies, Interdisciplinary Research, Europe , by Antonio Padoa Schioppa ...... 29 Academies and the Information-Rich Society , by Jüri Engelbrecht . . . . . 37 Prospects for the Academy of Sciences of Turin , by Alberto Piazza ...... 45

PART II: SPECIFIC ISSUES

Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms: the Voice of Academies , by Vladimiro Zagrebelsky ...... 53 Academy and European Industrial Development, by Licia Mattioli ...... 59 In Defence of the Environment: a European Academic Prospective , by Guido Saracco and Patrizia Lombardi ...... 67 Europe and the Migration Dilemma, by Massimo Livi Bacci ...... 79 Protecting Cultural Heritage: a Challenge for Our Time and the Role of European Academies, by Salvatore Settis ...... 87 Academies and the Defence of European National Languages, by Jürgen Trabant ...... 97 Academies and the Public: Some Historical Reflections , by Jürgen Osterhammel ...... 107

Authors ...... 125 Finito di stampare nel settembre 2020 da L'Artistica Savigliano