Contemporary university as agent for local development

In accordance with the UN development objectives (Millennium), with the UNESCO report (Our creative diversity) and with the definitions of global ethics of the European Council, we think that the conceptual and practical tools offered by intercultural relations’ literature and praxis should be used and disseminated not only among students, faculties and staff, but also embodied by local communities in the perspective of shared responsibility. It is necessary to stabilize all the practice of change in order to open the traditionally closed systems of higher education. In the academic year 2010-2011, Bicocca University inaugurated a 160 hours bilingual workshop, taught simultaneously in Italian and Spanish. Professors and students had a diverse background (sociology, anthropology, medicine, economics, political science, informatics, statistics, intercultural communication, psychology, and public health) and were evenly distributed between Italians and Latinamericans from universities in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Italy and Nicaragua. Through an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach, it offered new extraordinary opportunities of learning and human progress. The workshop, in turn, inserts into a program of action research which offers to the students and professors of the participating universities a chance to interact, also through fieldwork, in the context of integrated local development activities, collaborating with institutional actors and civil society organizations. The program of the Interuniversity and Intercultural Network, foresees that this experience, along with that of the workshop in Bicocca, could extend to all the universities of the network and their territories, under the broad idea that the universities should increasingly act as agents for local development.