II.xv. Protest

"What great noise there must be, when this enormous school [Bologna] is full, when this army of students and professors give themselves freely to a forceful dialectic that engenders so many ideas and so many paradoxes!"
- Jules Janin

Today classes were cancelled. There was a student strike at the University of Bologna. What exactly was being protested I didn't quite grasp. I understood, at some level, that it was a series of contentious reforms that were being implemented by the conservative government in Rome. To be honest, I don't know a great deal about Italian politics, nor do I very much care. To me, political intrigue, especially Italian political intrigue, is one of those things that is too petty, too pedantic, too inconsequential to really merit investigation. It is something so totally removed from the field of the artistic, the divine, the true, that it is really just a waste of time. Ideas are important, certainly, and people's lives all the more so, but there are better ways of bettering the world and leaving ideas to posterity than to follow politics like some quasi-intellectual spectator sport. My Professors, however, were not as passive as I. Lucia Corrain was certainly in favour of the students, as she had explained at length in class several days ago.
    I find this funny. It is in instances like this that Art History, a subject that is otherwise so rigorous, so scientific in its pursuit of humanistic truth, loses its objectivity through overextension. Aren't professors to be unbiased? I recall a point in time, several years ago, when a favourite professor of mine in Toronto suspended his lecture to have a discussion about the situation in Iraq. What in blazes does Iraq have to do with High Renaissance Art? I make the point only now because I agree with both professors' viewpoints on the respective subjects, but disagree over the decision to broach such subjects in class.
    Academia exposes itself to attack from the Right when it so lamely tries to step outside the ivory tower, and it loses the objectivity it values so much in other contexts. Of course the Universities are dominated by progressive thinkers, as they should be, but intellectuals need to take the moral high ground and not use their position as a platform for opinion à la Fox News. Besides, isn't lecturing a class of twenty year olds about the ills of Thatcherist educational reforms preaching to the converted?
    Not that things will change much once the students have protested. They don't quite have the clout of railway workers or mining unions, and to be honest I don't think they care. After a few hours of picketing in Piazza del Nuttuno, it's back to Via Zamboni for midday pannini and a few drinks, or, better yet, off to Rimini to spend one of the last nice days of fall on the beach.
    I for one didn't even make the protest on Wednesday morning; I slept in instead.