Transcript of the speeches given by Professor Pierre Wolper, Rector of ULiège, at the 2022-2023 academic year start

Welcome speech

Welcome to the new academic year at the Université de Liège

One year ago, masks in pocket and CST in hand (do you still know where it is on your phone?), our new academic year was the occasion for a triple celebration:

• of the new academic year,
• honorary doctors united under the theme "the forces of change": the human factor, research and innovation translating into economic development, and freely expressed critical thinking, and
• the victory of vaccines over covid.

A celebration, however, overshadowed by the damage caused by the July floods and the underlying climate change, continually mentioned, but glaringly lacking in decisive action.

The victory over covid was not as total and final as had been hoped. Fortunately, the combination of vaccine and infection immunity seems to have reduced the threat of this disease to a level we can live with without major disruption.

Today we celebrate

• the new academic year,
• the inauguration of the University's first female Rector, whereas it was not far from a century ago that the first woman was appointed to the University's teaching staff. It took a long time.

But I couldn't think of any other victory to celebrate

• when floods gave way to drought,
• decisive action on climate change is still overdue,
• war rages on in Europe, with the threat of nuclear escalation,
• the energy crisis is creating dramatic situations for many and threatening our economy,
• that the risk of famine is becoming more than alarming.

It's no exaggeration to say that we're living in unstable times, and that our world is about to tip over. It's not an exaggeration to say that we're living in unstable times, and that our world is about to tip over. The temptation is to cling to a past that may be glorious, but which nothing can preserve. On the contrary, we need to be part of the movement and act to keep it moving in the right direction.

Of course, the stakes are so high that it's easy to feel insignificant and powerless. But a university that develops knowledge through its research and trains the younger generation through its teaching can and must play a central role in influencing the direction of this shift.

• Existing and developing technologies enable a broad and rapid energy transition. It's up to us to help refine and promote them.
• Society needs ideas and proposals to change the way it works. It's up to us to formulate and disseminate them.
• The world needs citizens who are aware of the issues at stake, and who are not seduced by simplistic solutions where rejection takes precedence over positive construction. It's up to us to train them.

All these possibilities for action are exciting. So, despite the circumstances, I'd like to open a session that I hope will be a joyful one. We welcome a new generation of students, so there's much to celebrate. The traditional gaudeamus igitur at the end of the session will not be sadly nostalgic, but genuinely joyful.

Let's start the festivities with a retrospective of the past year.

Thank you very much.

Closing speech

In a speech at the end of a term of office, it's more natural to take stock than to look to the future. It is, however, more delicate because, unlike the future, there are many who have lived through the recent past and not necessarily the same view as the one that could be presented.

Nevertheless, I'm taking the risk, but it won't be in the form of a catalog of supposed "successes". Indeed, it would generally be pretentious to present successes as the result of the Rector's actions alone.

I have chosen to give a relaxed account of moments and actions during my term of office, and to mention some of the conclusions I have drawn from it.

Let's start with the election and the assumption of office. Since the election was opened up to the entire university community in 2014, being elected "rector" involves much more than discreetly declaring oneself available to serve the university. And, on election day, waiting until, after enough rounds of voting, you've been voted in by 2/3 of your colleagues ... motivated by the desire to get it over with before lunch. For a long time now, however, reality has been very different from this ideal of consensual choice. The difference is that the electoral jousting is now done in broad daylight in front of the entire University. The foils are speckled, but the feathers are sharp, the ink acidic and the tweets roaring.

The possibility, in the current system, of reopening candidacies if none of the candidates in the second round has an absolute majority is a remnant of the ideal of consensual choice: if no candidate is sufficiently popular, let's find others! This can be seen as a positive thing, but the consequences are a prolonged disruption to university life, a delay in taking up office - as was the case for me in 2018 - and a heavy workload in organizing the elections.

As far as the organization of the elections is concerned, I would like to emphasize the quality of the work that was carried out and the large-scale mobilization of volunteers to manage the various stages of an election organized according to the traditional mode of office voting on paper ballots. But why not use electronic voting?

Electronic voting is highly practical, and the techniques for ensuring its reliability are sophisticated. However, in order to guarantee all the characteristics of a democratic vote: anonymous voting, in complete freedom, control of voters' identity and the impossibility of multiple voting, verifiable vote count... it quickly becomes complicated and impossible for the voter to understand. This is a serious flaw in the election of a rector on whom voters are more or less directly dependent.

At a time when the United States is mired in electoral contestation, and pseudo-referendums on Russian annexation are about to be held in the occupied Ukraine, being an example of irreproachable electoral organization is part of our formative role. The first blows that strike a democracy often hit the electoral system.

With our electoral system, you don't become a rector without a certain amount of will and even, I dare say in my case, a certain amount of stubbornness. I went through 6 rounds of elections: 2 in 2014 without being elected and 4 in 2018, each time with a great deal of debate. Maybe that prepares you for the job, but I have to admit that, in addition to perseverance, being in the right place at the right time is another key. And that depends on a career and life path in which the combination of circumstances is a significant boost. Remembering this helps to put things in perspective.

Being elected - late in my case - you find yourself in office from one day to the next, not without preparation in view of my previous duties, but without the comfort of a long transition period. The welcome is warm and the office prestigious, even if there is something to be said for its thermal comfort. In any case, next winter it will be 19°C and no more.

The diary is quickly filled with requests for appointments, including press interviews. At this point, the first choice is whether to say what's on your mind or to be cautious and not offend anyone. My choice was instinctive: if you want to get things moving, you have to be open about your opinion and back it up with good arguments, while avoiding overly categorical positions.

I'd even go so far as to say that the more serious the problem, the more culpable complacent silence. Finally, it is widely recognized that the quality of academic establishments is positively correlated with the independence of their management. We must defend it!

The number of meetings we have to attend or chair is considerable. Documents are numerous and voluminous. Unfortunately, the electronic media that make them easily transportable do nothing to reduce the number of words. On the contrary, they do away with the need to use excessive amounts of paper. Effective help in preparing meetings is essential. As meetings and speeches multiply, quiet moments are reduced to commutes, nights and parts of weekends, provided you ignore your phone.

When it comes to speaking, I've been given some advice: you need a "pen". Not the one you wear in your hat, but the behind-the-scenes editor who prepares texts that you just have to read. Certainly comfortable, but speaking the truth requires that you use your own words. I didn't follow this advice, and it often allowed me to have a bit of fun, while getting across messages that I felt were important.

As soon as school starts, it's time to start thinking about budgets, which need to be adopted earlier and earlier. Initially, it's difficult to go beyond minor adjustments, but the important thing is the method. Finance is often seen as a complex field, difficult for the non-specialist to tackle. In fact, a budget is no more than the presentation of more or less detailed income and expenditure forecasts. The difficulty lies in the multi-year and long-term consequences of the decisions we take, particularly in terms of personnel. The first surprising observation was that the cost of our salaries was rising (excluding inflation) despite seemingly restrictive measures.

Our salaries increase steadily with seniority, according to fixed scales, and roughly speaking, the cost of a person at the end of his or her career is double that of a person at the start of his or her career. So we have the illusion that if we replace a retiring employee with a new recruit, we'll make substantial savings. This is partly true if you only have one employee, whom you could then replace with two new ones. But it should be noted that in this case, even if there is no immediate extra cost, one will be apparent from the first increase. If you have a larger workforce distributed according to seniority, this is totally false: the savings from replacing one old employee with a new one are almost immediately cancelled out by the pay scale increases for those in the middle of their career.

We therefore worked with a rule that compares the estimated end-of-career cost of new hires with the costs freed up by retirements. Once the rule had been assimilated, it clarified and simplified discussions, without of course solving the general shortage of resources, but avoiding the slippage followed by restrictive measures that we have seen in the past.

The same reasoning also makes it possible to calmly address the issue of promotions and their budgetary impact. When we establish an end-of-career cost, we have to take into account the promotions expected in a typical reference career. This reasoning forces us to open our eyes to our recruitment policy and desired career profiles, rather than calculating the cost of promotions on the basis of their effect on the current year alone. In a few words, a good forecasting model avoids many errors and discussions.

Another difficult subject is what I would call the "points of friction" that can develop in various parts of the institution. A typical situation is the tension that can build up between project managers and scientific leaders in entities that largely draw their resources from external activities. In such situations, the first request I usually made was for my support in acting with "authority" and reviewing the organization and working methods.

First of all, the concept of authority within a university is relative. In a number of situations, the mechanisms for imposing authority are non-existent, as a university leaves its members with a high degree of autonomy once they have reached a certain level. Secondly, the problem is actually quite different: it's one of understanding and communication. If there are changes to be made, it's fairly easy to win support by clearly explaining the objectives and rationale. Everyone readily admits that you can't operate for long in deficit. The difficulty lies in making it clear to everyone how the proposed measures will solve the problem. Without this, the measures will be seen as arbitrary and rejected.

One point that is particularly close to my heart is how to react to requests from University members to control communication. The usual scenario is this. A professor or researcher from the University intervenes in the traditional or digital media, expressing a position on a topical issue that, let's say, does not meet with consensus. I then receive a series of questions asking me how the University can tolerate people expressing themselves in this way. The remarks relate either to a form seen as excessively abrupt, to the position itself which is disturbing, or to the fact that a University Professor should not express himself publicly on subjects which are not in his "domain".

A first observation is that, at a time when positions are often highly polarized, the only way to achieve consensus is to remain silent, although one can also be criticized for remaining silent. We live in a country where freedom of expression is very well protected, with limited and well-accepted limits, for example on incitement to discrimination or hatred.

The question is whether the university can and should limit its members' freedom of expression, beyond the legal boundaries. Academic freedom" is often invoked to exclude the possibility of limitation. However, academic freedom is not about expression in general, but about the freedom to choose how one teaches a subject, and how and on what subject one develops one's research. Even if we set aside the principle of academic freedom as an obstacle to control, the possibility of exercising it is doubtful. In any case, for me the question is irrelevant, as I consider that the University should not control or sanction the communication of its members. To do so implies that the University has the capacity to judge impartially the relevance of a comment. Who, what body? Going down this road inevitably leads to getting inextricably bogged down in a path contrary to fundamental and university values.

As I said earlier, "The first blows that strike a democracy often hit the electoral system"; freedom of expression is also on the front line.

In the same line of thought, another worrying element is the increasingly frequent calls for swift sanctions when accusations of any kind are made against a member of the University. And this is not confined solely to the area of behavior towards other people, but also appears in the context of controversies over the quality of scientific work. Of course, it is sometimes necessary to take urgent precautionary measures to protect individuals or the interests of the University. However, sanctions can only be taken within the framework of a well-established procedure in which the rights of each individual are respected. This is a basic rule that is all too often forgotten and even contested, which is frightening. I have already mentioned two targets of the blows to democracy. A third is the requirement for a procedure that respects the presumption of innocence and the rights of the defense before imposing a sentence.

It's impossible not to say a few words about the management of the covid-19 crisis. At the outset, rapid action, consistency and clear communication were required. In this context, inter-university concertation at rector level played an essential role. It made it possible to anticipate certain measures, which were then rapidly generalized, to apply them simultaneously and in a coordinated way in the various institutions, and to communicate jointly.

Concerted action also enabled better decisions to be made by comparing points of view drawn from the variety of sources to which everyone had access. Concertation also avoided the questioning of differentiated measures, which therefore appeared less solidly justified. Contacts between rectors by videoconference have thus become very frequent, reinforcing the spirit of cooperation and the frequency of common positions. Inter-university competition is always present, but set aside when urgency and the common good require it. An excellent thing.

The covid-19 crisis also highlighted the role of experts from universities, and the difficulty of sometimes diverging positions on a subject that calls on a variety of skills: despite the rhyme, virology is not immunology or epidemiology. The questions of freedom of expression and the limits of competence that I mentioned earlier came to the fore. There was occasional cacophony, but this is far preferable to the controlled expression that leads to a policy without possible contestation or reversal. Allowing opinions to be expressed freely has been a strength for our country.

Finally, covid-19 highlighted the essential scientific contribution of universities, their responsiveness and their ability to implement solutions, with ULiège particularly at the forefront in the field of testing.

Unfortunately, we are not out of the crises of floods, war in Ukraine, energy, drought and increasingly worrying global warming. The reflexes acquired during covid are still very much in evidence: inter-university coordination is active and communication common, our experts are speaking out and contributing to the debate, and our researchers are developing solutions. Once again, in a situation where there is no simple solution, the multiplicity of opinions freely expressed is a strength that will help lead us in the right direction.

To sum up what has guided and served me over the past four years, I would cite building a clear view and description of situations that enables us to reason and communicate about them, being guided by fundamental values and resisting pressures to deviate from them.

I would also like to underline the essential contribution of the many people with whom I have worked within the University: my rectoral team, two successive administrators, the deans of the faculties, the heads of the administrations, the members of the Board of Directors and many others. Support, suggestions and criticism have all been invaluable in helping us to move forward.

The same applies to all those with whom I have been in contact outside the University

• at local level in Liège, Gembloux and Arlon,
• at Pôle Liège-Luxembourg level,
• at the level of inter-university research and higher education bodies in the FWB and the Region
• at national and international levels

I will end this long and necessarily incomplete list here. My thanks to you all.

For me, leaving office at the end of a term is just as important as starting it. Of course, there's none of the excitement of new activities and new contacts, but the calm of a new lease of life is just as exciting. It's also a reminder that the first commitment you make when you take up a position of power is to leave it at the end. Sounds obvious, but remember January 6, 2021 in Washington. A fourth target of attacks on democracy is undoubtedly the limit to the duration of power.

In a few minutes, I will solemnly leave my post and hand over to Anne-Sophie Nyssen. I'm delighted to be able to make this symbolically powerful gesture before such a large assembly, and I'll do so with confidence and serenity.

Thank you very much.