Dies Academicus 2007

Dies academicus 2007: Ivan Strenski honoured by the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies

A thinker in context

Professor Strenski, you are to receive an honorary doctorate from UNIL. What does this distinction mean on a personal level?

Ivan Strenski: The work of academics is akin to a vocation, in the sense of the monks who founded our European universities many centuries ago. We are caught up in the heavy demands of our teaching and writing, and therefore attach little importance to honours or recognition of any kind. In fact, recognition is so rare that few of us would persist if our vocation depended on external approval. To tell you the truth, I am therefore very surprised by this generous gesture of recognition from the University of Lausanne. And so as not to limit the scope of your question, I would like to recall the wisdom of your compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who emphasised the extent to which a man's life is enriched by recognition. In addition to the fact that this distinction testifies to the recognized importance of the sciences of religions, I must say that I am very touched by this honour, which is all the more motivating because it comes from a European university. It reinforces my determination and I feel like I'm moving in the right direction by thinking comparatively about the notion of secularism.

It is taken for granted that secularism has the same meaning everywhere, all the time. Moreover, it is given a negative meaning, meaning simply the negation of what might be a religious point of view on the relationship between society and religion, or politics and religion. We know that Roman Catholic nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries postulated French laws in conformity with Roman Catholic doctrine. At that time, secularism was largely presented as a negation or rejection of these fundamentalist proposals. I wonder whether the concept of secularism is exhausted by negation, or whether secularism can also express a certain number of positive values defined independently of this opposition to religious values? This reflection is necessary for France, but must be extended to the conception of secularism in Turkey. Finally, a comparative study of this question should, in my opinion, include the cases of India and the United States.

How can your discipline help us  understand our contemporary society and our époque?

I don't believe that religion always, and in all cases, has an influence or a privileged place in human affairs, at least not if we consider it in the sense of the established traditions of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism... We know that traditions can have an influence, but it's not always a primary one. The impact of these traditions on human affairs needs to be clearly defined, and I believe that this is an important part of our work. This is particularly obvious when you think of the controversy in France over the famous ‘headscarf affair’, and more generally the question of Islam in Europe, Turkey's accession or the Christian identity of Europe recently expressed by Pope Benedict XVI. If we regard religion as a world view (in the sense of ‘Weltanschauung’), it seems to me that it can make a difference today, and its study is all the more necessary to answer the questions raised by the modern world, alongside the other human and social sciences. In particular, we can contribute our expertise on how to approach intercultural issues and comparative history.

I'd like to emphasise the extent to which many of the events we're seeing today call into play notions that are fundamental to the sciences of religion, such as the sacred and the profane in the violation of holy sites in Iraq, or in the creation of a memorial on the New York site of the former World Trade Center. Look also at how notions of purity and impurity determine behaviour relating to the ‘honour of women’ in certain Muslim societies, or how the Protestant West shuns the notion of sacrifice while Al Qaeda, for example, embraces the idea. You can also think of other religious notions such as rituals, prophecies, holy wars, divine justice and many other dimensions and areas in which the study of religion has produced high-quality work.

Religion no longer guides our daily lives, but many politicians still refer to it. What can we say today about the relationship, dangerous or fair, between politics and religion?

This relationship is certainly dangerous, but nonetheless inevitable. I do not believe that a viable political and social order can flourish without some sort of common ground anchored in fundamental principles defining ‘living together’. Traditional religion has long played this role, and we are witnessing several attempts in the Muslim world to introduce Islamic foundations into modern social and political arrangements. It's an open question whether these societies will evolve in a traditional or innovative way, but the fact remains that they are driven by this appeal to Islamic beliefs and traditions. In this sense, the content of your question (the fact that religion no longer guides our daily lives) testifies, in my opinion, to the extraordinary propensity of Western Europe to fail to see how religion actually guides our daily lives, here too, not to mention the United States. Finally, would the citizens of India's great democracy agree that religion no longer guides our daily lives?

What's more, we can consider secularism as a vision of the world, in other words as a kind of religion, even if the term will not please some people. By asserting the primacy of secularism, we are declaring our allegiance to a set of values held sacred. What's more, the presence of a strong Islam in Europe is precisely forcing rather irreligious and secular citizens to re-examine their own identity and, in the long term, to recognise what is fundamental and sacred to this European identity. In my view, the problem is not whether religion guides our daily lives, but how to articulate the link between religion and daily life. Citizens need a spiritual basis for their political commitments, but if this spirituality takes the form of an overly precisely identified God or a specific religious tradition, we can expect resistance. When religious forces invade politics, they threaten the spiritual and religious factors that have motivated the emergence of these forces in the field of politics.

If you had to highlight something in your work, it would be?

Let's just say that right from my first book, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cas-sirer, Eliade, Levi-Strauss and Malinowski, I anchored theoretical thinking in concrete historical and social contexts. I have sought to demonstrate the links between text and context, and how the study of one can illuminate the understanding of the other. My commitment to pursuing this perhaps obsessive exploration of context has never wavered since, and I claim great rigour in this exercise, in which I am not the only one to venture: locating a thinker in his or her context.

Dies academicus 2007: Christine Delphy honoured by the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences

« Science is always political »

Christine Delphy, you are to receive the Doctorate honoris causa from UNIL at the Dies academicus 2007. What does this distinction represent?

I am very pleased to receive this doctorate, which is a tribute to feminist and gender studies, and recognises that they have their rightful place in the field of knowledge. This breaks with the constant suspicion that these studies are illiterate and unscientific. Admittedly, these studies are political, in the broad sense of the term, as are all social science disciplines; we must stop seeing this as a shortcoming, and admit instead that knowledge in general is always driven by a concern for action and therefore by the values of the society that undertakes this quest for knowledge. It also breaks with the tradition of treating these studies as a minor subject. This recent recognition is due precisely to the place that the issue of gender discrimination has come to occupy on the properly political stage in recent years, further demonstrating the interweaving of the city and the university.

It's not just a question of the role of the university, it's also a question of the role of the city and the university.

You edit the journal Nouvelles Questions Féministes with our professor Patricia Roux. How do you see the thematic and political role of this journal?

The journal Questions féministes (1977-1980) was the first journal to set itself the explicit objective of linking the means of science and the aims of feminism. The terms "women's studies", "gender studies" and "feminist studies" did not yet exist in French. It was succeeded by Nouvelles Questions féministes, produced from 1980 to 2001 in Paris, and from 2002 at the University of Lausanne (LIEGE). Our journal has therefore played a pioneering role, and although several other high-quality journals have since been published, I hope that our specificity will continue to make its mark in this field. This speciality has been and remains to never take at face value the myth of pure science, to know that science is always political, and to ask all our authors to seek and find the political relevance of their research.

Being a woman didn't work in Ségolène Royal's favour in the last presidential election. How do you explain this lack of feminist mobilisation?

It is very difficult to know whether the fact of being a woman played overall in favour or against Ségolène Royal; because it played both ways. Many women supported her candidacy less critically than they would have if it had been a man, while it is likely that many men - and women too - supported her. It is likely that many men - and women too - rejected her on principle, as did the media and politicians who made the candidate an incompetent prosecutor throughout the campaign. It is clear that gender plays a role and will continue to play a role in politics for a long time to come, and the call to treat women and men in the same way is naive: why should they be treated identically, when everywhere else in society gender makes a difference, that everywhere else women and men are treated differently?

Is there a political and/or thematic issue that you feel is a priority and that you are working on at the moment?

I am continuing to work on the similarities and dissimilarities between the sexist aspects and the racist aspects of the social structure in Europe, and on the practical interweaving of these systems of hierarchisation and discrimination.

Dies academicus 2007: Anglo-American Robin M. Hogarth honoured by the Faculté des HEC

« The problem remains our limited intelligence »

Professor Hogarth, you are to receive an honorary doctorate from UNIL. Were you surprised by this offer and what does it mean on a personal level?

Robin M. Hogarth: The announcement of this prize was totally unexpected for me and I feel it is a great honour, as peer recognition is basically the ultimate accolade. I am also particularly honoured that such an old and remarkable institution, founded in 1537, should present me with this prize. In fact, the University of Lausanne has been in existence for 470 years, far more than any of the five universities I have studied and taught at (333)!

You are one of the founders of a relatively new science, behavioural economics, which combines psychology with economics. What do you see as the major problems facing our society?

One of my main concerns is what I call the small mind problem. What does this expression mean? For me, this problem is caused by the time lag between changes in our environment and our ability to adapt as we evolve. In fact, the abilities we have today were developed to meet the needs of the past, not those of our time. In other words, until very recently (on an evolutionary scale), a limited number of people lived in relatively small and isolated communities, and their main concern was to find a place to live and food to eat, all with limited technical resources.

This is not to say that, in today's world, there is no such thing as a "modern" economy, but rather that, in today's world, there is no such thing as a "modern" economy, which is to say that, until very recently (on an evolutionary scale), a limited number of people lived in relatively small and isolated communities, and their main concern was to find a place to live and food to eat, all with limited technical resources.

In addition, man had relatively little impact on his environment. Today, there are many more of us. We live mainly in urban centres and our life expectancy has increased considerably. Technological developments have significantly reduced the problems associated with food and housing. These advances have also transformed the way we communicate, the opportunities and dangers we face, and the environment in which we live. We have gone from a natural environment, to which evolution has given us time to adapt, to new worlds whose only constant is perpetual change. Moreover, ironically enough, the complex problems that beset us today were largely created by the cumulative effects, over time, of the products of our own limited intelligence.

That's the diagnosis, what should the cure be?

It's one thing to say that we suffer from our limited intelligence, or an antiquated worldview, it's quite another to know how to remedy it. An important dimension of the problem lies in the actions we take. In other words, decision-making is crucial. The field of research to which I am proud to belong contributes to solving this problem by asking two questions about decision-making. These questions are (1) How do people make decisions, and (2) How can we help them make better decisions? Today, these questions may seem reasonable. However, it is important to remember that not so long ago, decision making was a reserved area of economic discipline, and these two questions were at odds with the conventional logic of economics. The first question stresses the process or procedure, in other words, the way of doing things that guides decision-making. The second question does not take for granted the fact that people, automatically, tend to maximise the resources at their disposal, to make the best use of them.

Finally, a more personal question: how does your work fit into this framework?

From a scientific point of view, it would be illusory to expect major problems to be solved by a single project or a single researcher. In practical terms, the bulk of my work devoted to these two issues can be summed up as follows: to try to understand how people can (1) make good decisions using simple methods, (2) learn from their experiences, (3) arrive at explanatory judgements, (4) make informed decisions, (5) make informed judgements, and (6) make informed decisions; explanatory judgements, (4) making decisions in ambiguous situations, (5) updating old beliefs with new information, (6) using intuition and (7) making decisions together. From this, and from other parallel work, I draw three conclusions. Firstly, people's natural decision-making abilities are useful when it comes to short-term decisions, for which they receive excellent feedback. Secondly, people have difficulty understanding that the socio-economic world is highly unpredictable. Thirdly, it is possible to teach people to become better decision-makers. That said, the question remains open as to whether this improvement will be enough to solve the problem of our limited intelligence.

Dies academicus 2007: Dr Karel Svoboda honoured by the Faculty of Biology and Medicine

The brain exposed

A neuroscience specialist, Dr Karel Svoboda has achieved the technical feat of being able to observe, on a day-to-day basis for a month or more, the functioning of a specific synapse marked with a fluorescent product in the brain of a living mouse. Using extremely powerful two-photon microscopes - which he designed and developed himself - he can see the opening and closing of calcium channels which, through the chemical signals they generate, ensure the reconfiguration of synapses in response to a sensory experience. The implementation of this technique has revolutionised neuroscience research, because it has made it possible to make a direct link between structural and functional observations of individual neurons. It provided proof of the concept of brain plasticity.

The collaboration between researchers from the DBCM-Department of Cell Biology and Morphology in the Faculty of Biology and Medicine at UNIL and Dr Karel Svoboda has resulted in several publications in prestigious journals. It enabled a number of doctoral and post-doctoral students from Lausanne to spend time in the United States. Above all, it was an opportunity for all researchers in this field to discuss the most recent developments in two-photon microscopy and its use in investigating the function of the nervous system. Interview with Karel Svobada, Director of Research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Janelia Farm Research Laboratories, Ashburn, Virginia.

Dr Svoboda, what has technology contributed so far and what will it contribute in the future to a better understanding of how our brains work?

Since the time of Ramon y Cajal, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1906 for his research into the structure of the nervous system, neuroscience has advanced at the same pace as technology. The invention of the voltage-clamp method made it possible to observe the role of electrical potentials in communication between neurons. The development of the tungsten microelectrode led to fundamental advances in our understanding of the organisation of the neocortex. More recently, high-throughput DNA sequencing has revealed various genetic aspects of mental illness. An essential part of our own work has been made possible by the development of the two-photon laser microscope, an imaging technique that allows us to see deep into the brain of a living mouse with incredible precision. There is every reason to believe that technological innovations will continue to drive advances in neuroscience. Of course, this will require considerable investment. But if they are carried out intelligently, they will lead to scientific breakthroughs that will make the most of them.

What are the major open questions in neuroscience today and how do you see the contribution of UNIL's research teams to these developments?

Neuroscience has no shortage of major open questions. However, for any of them to be resolved at any given time, the necessary skills and techniques must have reached a sufficient degree of maturity. From my point of view, one of the greatest challenges of the next decade will be to decipher a neural circuit as complex as the mammalian neocortex. This is the region of the brain that manages most of the cognitive functions in human beings. To understand how it works, we need to know what types of neurons connect to each other and what the properties of these connections are. Ultimately, we need to understand how this tissue enables us to perceive the world around us. The DBCM research teams at UNIL have a remarkable scientific reputation in the field of anatomy and structural biology of the brain. I believe that this scientific field is on the verge of undergoing a revolution that will see it play an essential role in future developments in neuroscience. The teams in Lausanne are well placed to contribute to this revolution with their cutting-edge skills in this field.

What does it mean to you to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Lausanne?

Receiving an honorary doctorate from a leading university like the University of Lausanne is a great joy in itself. It's even greater when it's an opportunity to come and meet up with friends with whom you have exciting collaborations.

For researchers committed to society

What does the award of the Prix de l'Université de Lausanne mean to you?

I am very touched by the award of this prize. I imagine that it is my commitment to science and society activities that has earned me this honour, and I am delighted because it shows that the management attaches a certain importance to this type of activity. I personally believe that it is essential for there to be a dialogue between citizens and scientists, so that the former understand what research is all about and the latter learn what citizens care about.

I am delighted to have been given this honour, because it shows that the Directorate attaches some importance to this kind of activity.

What do you consider to be the most striking recent initiatives developed in Switzerland in terms of science-society dialogue?

The creation of the Fondation Science et Cité whose aim is to encourage the establishment of a critical dialogue between scientists and citizens seems to me to be the most important initiative at national level. The activities it carries out, in particular through the organisation of the Festivals, have been quite successful. At the 2001 Festival, for example, I would like to mention the Open Days at the Hautes Ecoles, which attracted several thousand visitors to the Dorigny-Ecublens site. At the 2005 Festival, I learned about the laboratory set up in the Espace Arlaud by scientists from UNIL and EPFL, as well as the creation of themed performances on the theme of the relationship between science and society.

Unfortunately, the resources available to the Foundation are still insufficient; for example, the support that the Foundation gives to the Réseau Romand Science et Cité - which unites all the institutions and museums in French-speaking Switzerland with a scientific vocation - through the allocation of a grant of CHF 80,000.- The grant does not allow the creation of a real event, such as an exhibition or a show. The other remarkable initiative, which is still unique in Switzerland, is the opening by the Interface sciences-societé of UNIL's public laboratory, L'Eprouvette, where students from many classes and adults from all over the world can take part. Students in many classes and adults at all levels of education can familiarise themselves with the life sciences and discuss the impact of this new knowledge on society. The activities organised under the name Anthropos, which stimulate interdisciplinary encounters, are also an important initiative, especially when they lead to public debates.

In your opinion, what initiatives should be undertaken, and what obstacles should be overcome, to encourage the involvement of researchers in society?

First of all, I'd like to point out that while it has been relatively easy to get scientists from the natural and technical sciences to take part in the Festivals Science et Cité, it has been much more difficult to involve colleagues from the humanities and social sciences. This situation seems paradoxical, given that we would expect sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, economists and lawyers, who are in direct contact with society, to be particularly sensitive to social problems and to become the driving force behind attempts to engage in dialogue with the public. I think we need to develop forums where scientists from the natural and technical sciences can meet those from the humanities and social sciences.

From this point of view, UNIL's Nanopublic project, which brings together philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, engineers, physicists and toxicologists to take stock of the issues surrounding the impact of nanotechnologies, is a good example;I see this as an example of how we can encourage researchers to get involved in discussions with society. Finally, if researchers are to be encouraged to devote part of their time to relations with society, they need to be prepared for this during their training and for this activity to be valued in their curricula, which is not the case today.