Massimo Zucchetti, full professor at the Polytechnic of Turin, who in 2015 was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Physics, made a strong gesture of solidarity by linking himself with the students protesting over the collaboration agreements with Leonardo and Israeli scientific bodies and the prestigious Savoy university.
“Am I also a troublemaker of the social centers? An outsider, a stranger? Shame on you, if it wasn’t for the students the Polytechnic would make a terrible impression. This should be a university, it’s not an exam factory, it’s not a career factory. Take a position, are you university professors or not?”, asked the teacher.
“Out of solidarity with the students I also chained myself to the gates. It is not a violent action and a non-violent action, like those Gandhi did, but a decisive one, because we don’t bother anyone except with our words”, explained Zucchetti.
This is an important signal, which encourages those – students and teachers – including at Sapienza, who are asking the rector Antonella Polimeni to leave the board of directors of MedOr, a foundation headed by Leonardo.
Polimeni responded with a very harsh letter in which she essentially accuses (specifiously) the protagonists of the protest of having damaged the Sapienza campus for 300 thousand euros. A diversion used to avoid going into the merits of the problem of universities being subjugated to economic power and in particular to that of arms dealers.
At Sapienza our prof. Luciano Vasapollo and his students from the School of Decolonial Anthropological Economics have lined up in support of the protest of the boys of Cambiare Rotta who demonstrate for peace, and pay the price of the truncheons suffered, the deprivations of the hunger strikes and the humiliation of isolation academic (which actually risks involving teachers too). In fact, two different ideas of teaching are compared in the academic body, that of those who consider the University as a company and therefore the student clients and the external financing bodies as master clients, and that, represented in particular by the Vasapollo school, which keeps the bar straight by trying to propose truthful analyzes which however go in the opposite direction, proclaiming for example the refusal of any compromise with the public and private, Italian and foreign arms industries. A decisive game is being played on this in Italian universities and many other countries. Exactly like 50 years ago for Vietnam.
Irina Smirnova
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