The Societal Responsibility of Educated People

Today, a short memo from Racha Kirakosian, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages & Literatures and of the Study of Religion.

The desolation caused by the plague, which had eradicated 30-60% of Europe’s population, was still in living memory when, some fifty years later, on April 1st 1400, the chancellor of Paris University Jean Gerson (equivalent of a university president today) wrote a letter to his teacher and mentor, Pierre d’Ailly, in which he outlined the societal responsibility of educated people, meaning university members.

For him, a university instructor ought to consider in his teaching not only his colleagues and students but also society at large. Thinking back to the mid-fourteenth-century Black Death, Gerson recalls that the faculty of medicine had provided a model by issuing a handbook for the lay person. The mental state, in Gerson’s opinion, likewise required attention in turbulent times as he deemed “the need for the education of the people and the solution of moral questions in our time” (i.e. around 1400) to be of great importance. Ideally, the university was to take a leading role in this.

Gerson was as much a scholar and university administrator as a “public intellectual”; he sought to reconcile the university’s mission for knowledge with the needs of the general public, 620 years ago to this day.

All quotes and translations from: Brian Patrick McGuire, “Jean Gerson and the Renewal of Scholastic Discourse 1400–1415,” Knowledge, Discipline and Power in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of David Luscombe, Studien und Texte Zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 106, ed. Joseph Canning, Edmund King and Martial Staub (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011), 129–44.