van den Doel, Wim

I would like to offer six provocations.

The first deals with the universal and the particular. We are looking for students to be Spanish/Italian and to study in other universities; to guard their identity as nationals but to become more than that. I am fascinated by the fact that we are all speaking English. If we are talking about a universal kind of identity and a European identity in Professor Zimmerman’s sense, why are we all speaking English as the universal language? All across Europe, certain subjects, such as economics and political science, could be taught in French or German, but the texts are in English and come from the United States.