Bologna’s Birthday
This was an article in Oxford, the dons’ periodical, written shortly after the Bologna celebrations.
The University of Bologna, which has a well-authenticated claim to be the oldest in the world, celebrated its 900th anniversary in the autumn of 1988. The festivities, while not perhaps quite up to the 800th when Giuseppe Verdi was chairman of the organizing committee and Giosuè Carducci delivered the principal oration, were none the less splendid. Nearly four hundred rettori, which was the generic term under which all of us, chancellors, vice-chancellors, presidents, principals, and genuine rectors, were lumped, were assembled for the main open-air ceremony in the Piazza Maggiore in front of the great basilica of San Petronio in which the Emperor Charles V was crowned in 1530 and Rossini’s Stabat Mater was first performed in 1839.
A wide variety of academic dress was favoured by this throng. Some, mainly from Eastern Europe and down through the Caucasus to the borders of India, looked more like judges than academics, and judges of a tribunal which had been engaged for many centuries in handing out cruel and unusual punishments to students and teachers alike. One British chancellor was bedecked in his gold regalia and the vice-chancellor of Cambridge was impressive in fur. I decided, however, influenced by the combination of the reluctance of the Oxford authorities ever to allow the cancellarian robe to go more than half a mile from Carfax, the problems of luggage, and the likely heat of an Italian September sun, that the University of Oxford could afford to dress down. I made do with white tie, bands and the cool silk of a DCL black gown, and felt rather like a notary in an elaborately costumed Mozart opera. The status of Oxford was however preserved, and Cinderella asked to the ball (to vary the operatic metaphor), when the President of the Italian Republic arrived and paused in his procession across the square to exclaim to me ‘il mio cancellario’, thereby illustrating the value which those in authority abroad place upon having been honoured in the Sheldonian.
In general, however, I had the rare experience for a representative of Oxford of not being pre-eminent at a festival of age. ‘The University of Oxford is not used’, I began my short speech, ‘to saluting institutions of greater venerability than itself, but when it has to recognize an indisputable claim does so with the greater enthusiasm and respect.’ Having made that obeisance I then felt able to point out that we had far more remaining mediaeval academic buildings than either Bologna, although they are very splendid from about 1550, or the Sorbonne, which achieved second place to our third, and that in Merton we have the fount of collegiate living, where people had slept, eaten, read, taught, and prayed together in an entity with clear continuity since the very early fourteenth century.
There had to be a certain finessing to enable me to make that speech at all. Obviously all four hundred could not speak without the proceedings lasting some considerable way towards the millennial celebrations. So it was decided that there should be an oration of greeting from the head of the senior university in each continent. This was interpreted sufficiently rigidly that the Americas were not split and Harvard was relegated to a silent role behind Lima.
It should also have had the effect of leaving Oxford to be represented by Paris and hearing Sydney speak as the representative of the venerability of Australian academic life. Oxford’s reputation as a talking rather than a listening university was judged by the Bolognese authorities to be too strong for this to be possible and my European position (which Bologna was anxious to stress because of their leading role in the Erasmus scheme and consequent close relationship with the European Commission) was amalgamated with our semi-seniority to create a special slot. This sleight of hand passed off without hostile demonstrations from Paris, Coimbra, Salamanca, Prague, Cambridge and St Andrews and other near competitors. Cambridge and St Andrews had more reason to complain the next morning when Paris and Oxford headed a column of twenty European ‘venerabili’ and they were relegated to the kindergarten, although the 1592 upstart of Trinity College, Dublin, got in because it was from a separate and sovereign state.
As with all grand celebrations there were elements of theatre about the occasion. But it was also a moving and genuinely splendid event. The notes of the slaves’ chorus from Nabucco swelling into the great square was a suitable accompaniment to the signing by us all (including the Rector of Leningrad) of a ringing declaration of the independence of universities which had certainly not been drafted in the Department of Education and Science - nor even in Mr Gorbachev’s Kremlin, for that matter.