Beyond the tyranny of the performance: professing commitent, pedagogically humanizing the University

Abstract

Heavily bound to the business world, the university of performance seems to reduce its mission to a process of translation of knowledge into professional skills (Bellofiore, Vertova, 2018). A utilitarian, functionalist and efficiency-driven concept sustains and nourishes the academic institution, which appears not to elude the entrepreneurial governmentalization of knowledge (Paltrinieri, 2016; Pinto, 2019) that seems to be overwhelmed, both on the formative and on the scientific research side, by the managerial, quantocentric, high-per-formance ‘vision’ of the neoliberal economic order (Mauro, 2017). By giving up the Derridean declarative engagement for a university without conditions and by confining the learner, the relationship and the dissident profession of truth (Derrida, Rovatti, 2002) to the edges of its discursivity and practices, university ends up by turning into a place of unease and ‘dehumanization’. Moving from these premises, this study aims to recentralize the face of the human person as a promise of creative realization (Zambrano, 2008, p. 100), to reproblematize the pedagogically sustained idea of the university professor as a destined-vocated being and not as a merely employed-occupied one, capable of becoming aurora and of promoting – through the relationship and by overflowing from mere knowledge into the engagement of responsibility, an idea of teaching as reality grasping, as intervention in the world (Freire, 2014).