The original sin stems from the pretension to be other than one’s true self. It is our privilege to try to be whatever we wish; but it is vicious to pretend to be what we are not, and to delude ourselves by growing habituated to a radically false idea of what we are. . . .

Not only does it [the university] need perpetual contact with science, on pain of atrophy, it needs contact, likewise, with public life, with historical reality, with the present, which is essentially a whole to be dealt with only in its totality, not after amputations ad usum Delphini. The university must be open to the whole reality of its time. It must be in the midst of life, and saturated with it . . .