Emilio Lledó Iñigo was born in Sevilla 81 years ago, but he stays young. This philosopher is, above all, a fan of language. He weighs and tastes every word and manages to deliver a discourse that feels like savoring the best of meals. And not because he uses complex or poetic words, but because of the opposite: the precision and naturalness with which he conveys the most abstract ideas. He is one of those cases that exemplify well that one’s wisdom is not necessarily reflected in the use of elaborate words.

More than optimistic, Emilio Lledó starts his speech with a warning: “Do not let them convince you that life is worse than it was back in the day… no, no, no… I have lived enough and I can assure you that this saying has been going on for years and that life as we know it is much better than before. Despite the brutality, violence, and barbarity of humankind, we do not have the right to stop fighting for life, love, words… we do not have the right to lose hope, because it is not so true that as long as there is life, there is hope, but rather as long as there is hope, there is life.”

But, what is the key to progress? to life? Words. According to him, “being able to use words is what makes us human”. His message flows around words, language as the connecting thread of life. “The world is full of mother tongues, but it is not them that define us, root languages do.” Those root languages, beyond the frontiers marked by mother tongues, are “the fingerprint of our soul, everyone has its own.” This variety of root languages is what enriches the World, according to Lledó.
“Writing allows us to communicate with root languages, with Kant, Descartes… and talking allows us to do so with the root languages that surround us.” Therefore, diversity is not an obstacle to understand the attitude some have towards the Tower of Babel, but more like a way of enriching ourselves, sharing opinions that allow us to understand the Other to, starting from there, engage in dialogue with each individual, using other root languages, with other people.

Europe - although Lledó did not mention it - is a clear example of the search for union, not in unification but rather in the enrichment that can be reached through diversity when there is understanding. It is, or at least it could be.

Sara Domínguez Martín
Translated by Cristina Crosby

In the middle of a shower of applause, a good-looking, neat and little elderly woman goes up onto the stage. She is Ana Maria Matute, the well-known Spanish writer, author of books for children and adults and Member of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. She comes to answer to our question: “Who will imagine us?” Pleasant and close, just after sitting down, she warns us with a sweet smile: “I’m not hard of hearing, I’m deaf, and an absolute disaster as well, I’ve forgotten my hearing-aid again”.

This writer is not, and neither does she pretend to be, a scholar; she is, according to her own words, a writer. She tells us that she started to write because the world didn’t understand her, “I thought, if the world rejects me, then I´ll invent a world of my own; I’m the second type of writers, those who are writers against their will”. In a slow, smooth voice, she speaks about the multiple realities that surround us and how, as we get older, we start losing our ability to move among them, how we lose the magic. That’s why she’s often written for children, “Not because I like them, in fact I don’t, but because I’m interested in them, in their world, which is a round world; when you write for children, you don’t have to worry about their understanding you, because they always understand you, unlike the adults”. In spite of this, she says she’s grown tired of writing for children, now she looks for different things, she looks for the adult, who “is nothing else than what remains of the child, for good or for evil”.
She reads for us one of her stories about silly children “El niño que era amigo del Diablo (The child who was the devil’s friend)” and tells us something about her childhood of paper. Today, at 82, she continues to have two lives, a real one and another life of words, “one doesn’t exclude the other- she tells us while laughing-, having a life of paper doesn’t prevent you from entering the other life, which has such wonderful things as making love on a river of stones”. Being a person who fears nothing, she opens her heart, “sometimes I live in words, but when I leave them, I become again the little hooligan I am”. A “little hooligan” who hates getting up early, who takes naps and loves having a drink in the afternoon, surrounded by friends, a woman who “understands better an elf than a bank manager”.

After making it clear that she’s not going to answer difficult questions about the future, “How should I know, son, how should I know what’s going to happen… people think that because you are a writer you have to know everything”, she leaves us a teaching: “I love life, I love it a lot, because we only have one life …or at least, so they say”.

Sara Domínguez Martín
Translated by Diana Irene Arancibia

FROM GRANT HOLDERS TO CLIENTS

One of the foundations the European Universities Reform is based on is the relationship company-university. In this relationship the banks enter the game; they will have, through the legislative framework, the role of financial creditors for the university studies. If they lend the money, will the government aids be totally eliminated? Maybe the welfare State wasn’t the panacea.



In the Resolution of March 21st in the Spanish Official Gazette (BOE) the banks are called to participate in the “subsidized loan programme”. We are witnesses to the qualitative transformation of the scholarship system we have now, and which will exist until the definitive incorporation to the EEES, when the students will become borrowers instead of grant-holders. It means that they will be clients of a bank, which will provide them with an amount between 3000 and 9000 Euros for the complete grade, which together with the postgraduate degree or master and doctorate, constitute the new university offer, according to the established in Bologna and related successive documents.

The new loans will be applied a three-year amortization period, plus another year of grace period (during which the customer won’t be charged any interest). The grace-period interest will be accumulated to the three remaining years. The “Euribor” will come to be decisive in the new “university client’s life. During the first year of amortization, banks will apply to the loan the interest rate corresponding to Euribor mortgage market of June, published in the Spanish Official Gazette (BOE), plus a maximum differential of 0.3 %. During the three following years in which the loan is in effect, the collaborating bank will use the interest rate equivalent to Euribor corresponding to June in each year, increasing it by a maximum of 0.3 % .

One of the news in the Education Budget for 2008 is “University Income Loans” . This initiative has been launched in September 2007 by the Ministry. With this initiative, the State intends to finance the university graduates under 35 years old, who want to continue their “investment-studies” with an official master, which will be related to the future income of the beneficiary, with the aim of promoting postgraduate studies.

Compared to the conventional loans, the main difference of this financing method is that there’s no charge for interest or commission, and endorsements or family income conditioning are not required., The repayment of the loan will be done during the two years after it’s obtained. After that date, the Tax Agency (AEAT) will check the “student-client’s income yearly, to verify the income level. Once he/she reaches an income of 22,000 Euros/year, they will start to repay the loan, and will only continue to repay it while the income level is maintained. If during fifteen years the total amount or part of it can’t be paid, the remaining amount won’t have to be repaid. In case the income is greater than 22,000 Euros the repayment will be completed in eight years, paying each three months the same amount, and the total amount of the yearly amortizations won’t exceed the eighth part of the total contracted debt.

Considering this situation, two new profiles of the “student-client” are foreseen: the one who solves his studies by using the checkbook, and the one who, being 18 years old, starts to repay the bank loan.

Rosa María Romero Pérez
Translated by, Diana Irene Arancibia.

Bolonia’s process is the European reform of the university system. It was born in 1999 in the Italian city which gives it its name, with 46 signatary countries. Unless its opposition prevents it from happening, it’s expected to be fully implemented in 2010.

The Sorbona Declaration (Germany, France, Italy and Great Britain) [Paris, 1998] laid the foundations for the national, international and institutional changes which were announced ( and still are, because there are more changes to be introduced) in the University. It took eleven years for the European universities (agreement after agreement) to unify and compete with those of U.S.A. What doesn’t seem to be quite unified is the popular feeling. Several demonstrations have already taken place in the streets of Athens, Paris, Barcelona, Granada or Sevilla on the part of students and professors rejecting in a greater or lesser extent, part of these reforms. Will the University liberalization mean its privatization?.

* During this month, you will be able to read in this blog information about the Bolonia’s process, by means of which the Sevilla Babel team will intend to answer the question: “Bolonia’s process: illusion or reality?” Don’t miss it!


Concha Hierro
Translated by Diana Irene Arancibia