Dear Students,
I am writing to you again, following the summer exam session and before the summer break, with information about the coming academic year. I include as recipients of this letter newly enrolled students and pre-enrolled students for 2020.2021, to whom I offer a personal welcome in advance of meeting you personally.

These last months have been difficult for all of us. As students, you have had to adapt to new ways of delivering courses and exams and as professors, we have had to change our teaching tools at great speed. Above all we have been forced to abandon some of the features of academic life, which is normally made up of relationships between the people who take part in it, with all the personal contacts that entails and living this in a physical place. But as a result of the effort put in by everyone, university life has continued, although in a rather unusual manner.

Despite this, we hope that it will soon be possible to return to normality. To bring to mind the extraordinary charm of university life, a life which led many of us professors to lean towards joining the academic world, I would like to quote some words from a speech that Albert Einstein gave in December 1933 to the students at the University of Princeton, where he had recently settled after fleeing Nazi Germany.
“I am pleased to live amongst you young and happy people. If an old student may briefly give you some advice, it would be: Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your future work belongs.”
May these words be a warning and a wish for the future.

With regard to the coming months, I would like to update you on some points which will be explained in more detail by your programme coordinator(s), setting out in advance some details about the organisation of teaching activities for the next academic year.

Read the whole message from Professor Guido Merzoni
Dean of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences