Al Gore, Kofi Annan, top philosophers and their adventures on the Tilburg campus

You need to celebrate your birthday, even when you’re a university. But how do you do that? Not sitting in a circle with coffee and cake, but still with visitors. Preferably big names to drive around in a celebratory chariot: top philosophers, or former world leaders and Nobel Prize winners. And when high-profile visitors come to visit, Univers has been there for 60 years.

Top Secret! On 27 January 1994, Jürgen Habermas pays a working visit to the Faculty of Philosophy for its fifteenth anniversary. No one is allowed to know, except for a select group of Habermas experts. The German philosopher doesn’t like crowds and fuss. ‘He was once invited to a private lecture in Utrecht, but at the start he was confronted by an audience of hundreds of ‘philosophy tourists’. Habermas has avoided Utrecht ever since,’ Univers reveals in the reportage of the meeting.

We read that the requirements for an invitation are high. ‘Each participant needed to have read Facticity and validity at least once. Moreover, they should have devoted themselves to Habermas’s work for a longer period of time.’ And even then: philosopher Harry Kunneman, who more or less introduced Habermas to the Netherlands, was not allowed to be there, ‘because he holds views that are quite different from the German.’

Habermas connoisseurs are quite literally thrown back into the school desks for a day

Yet among the wise, gray-haired and Habermas-loving professors and researchers, there was one odd duck: Roland Enthoven, philosophy student and student employee of Univers. In his account of that day, the balloting is described in detail, but not how he got through it himself.

Perhaps in exchange for his silence, and not writing a scoop in the newspaper about the expected high-profile visit? Or is it out of appreciation for the high philosophical level of Univers journalism and the desire to share this meeting with as many people as possible afterwards?

Back in school

In any case, we can now read that at nine o’clock in the morning in CZ 103 the highly learned Habermas experts are ‘literally thrown back into the school desks for a day’. For the occasion seven of them have done extra homework and written their own paper about the new Habermas book from the perspective of their own specialism.

During the sessions, the select corps of Habermas experts present is warned by the man himself that they should not overestimate the importance of philosophy. Philosophy is not the means to unlock all scientific knowledge, but at most it can help philosophers to make certain things clear. ‘Dews may take offence for that (Dews is an English philosopher who sits in the audience and laughs somewhat awkwardly), but I resist the so-called ‘key function’ of the philosopher,’ says Habermas.

Large squid

Three years later, the visit of another top philosopher to the university is a completely different affair. In June 1997, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida held court at Tilburg University for three days because of his new book Politics of friendship. Numerous national and international philosophers follow him to Tilburg. This time, philosophy student and Univers student employee Leon Heuts mingles with the audience to report the reactions on the book and the man.

Derrida is indefinable because of the swarming of many arms grasping in all directions

The Tilburg philosopher Gido Berns knows all about the politics of friendship. He turns out to be a ‘cher ami’, of the French philosopher. He got to know him in the 1970s, when he joined the philosophers’ union founded by Derrida.

Berns calls the book ‘Polyp-like’. ‘This typifies not only the book, but also Derrida himself. Because the French philosopher has something of a large squid, indefinable because of the swarming of many arms that grasp in all directions,’ writes Univers reporter Heuts.

Damn

Derrida’s visit also appears to be of interest to non-philosophers. Business economist Niels Noorderhaven is a fan. He explains how he could ‘feel in his clogs’ that something was not right with a certain economic theory, but he could not put his finger on it. Until he read Derrida. At first for fun, ‘but gradually I thought: ‘Damn, isn’t this also what is going on in the book that occupies a central place in my own research?’

Thanks to Derrida, he discovers the error in that book. “There was the hairline crack that runs through the work. By referring to that, the book fell apart.’ Derrida helps to pierce through the rhetoric of a text, which can be liberating, says Noorderhaven.

Nobel Prizes

The next lustrum of the Faculty of Philosophy (now part of the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences) is also a reason for high-profile visits. Very high. To mark the anniversary, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan receives an honorary doctorate from the university. Annan is a very busy man, only a year earlier he was called to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

‘We don’t need to be converted by an American environmental evangelist’

Annan is not the only Peace Prize winner to visit Tilburg. In 2007, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore pays a birthday visit. He gives a lecture in honor of the university’s 83rd Dies Natalis.

Gore’s global warming warning documentary An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize. We need to live and think more sustainably, is the message of his lecture.

Environmental evangelist

Not really news for some of the listeners, according to the article in Univers. For example professor of Economic Psychology Fred van Raaij: ‘I admire Al Gore for his talent as an orator, but the content of his speech was already known. And who in the auditorium still needs to be convinced of the importance of reducing CO2 emissions? The Netherlands and Europe do not need to be converted by an American environmental evangelist.’

Still, there are plenty of enthusiastic reactions, because Gore can tell it so well. ‘If only all presentations were of this quality. Whether it’s trained, staged, it doesn’t matter much to me. He grabbed the audience and that’s what counts,’ says Professor of Econometrics Marcel Das with admiration. And Professor of Social Psychology Christel Rutte sighs: ‘I really sat in the auditorium with tears in my eyes. What a speaker! His lecture was a lesson in rhetoric.’

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