What is your most important function at the University and why?
I am sort of the CEO of a faculty with 240 full-time professors and more than 6000 students.
What is it about your job that inspires you most?
The possibility of translating into action what are, in the first instance, ideas and concepts, the stock in trade of university professors. I took this job with three priorities: to favour interdisciplinarity (that is, thinking outside the box); to promote internationalization; and to introduce, as best as possible, contemporary media into the humanities and the arts.
How did you come to your area of research?
Like any intellectual, there are deep personal reasons difficult to explain for my choice of fields, in my case African literature, but eventually cultural studies in the widest sense, how we define ourselves through language and the self-reflections we find in our cultures.
What was your life’s proudest moment?
My proudest moment is actually a series of moments — that I have changed and developed over the years through a diverse career in many places, cultures and occupations. Being dean is just the latest. I am looking to the next big change.
What would you change in the world today if you could?
Without resorting to any utopian perspective, I would like to see a world in which individuals are valued and rewarded not for what has been given to them, for example, the positions or wealth they have inherited, but for what they have brought to others around them as a result of their own qualities and achievements.
Who is the most influential person in your life? Why?
There have a been in fact a number of mentors who inspired me: teachers, but also artists, entrepreneurs of all types. I place great value on individual creativity, and I may follow a similar path, though not always exactly in the same way.
What would your co-workers be most surprised to know about you?
They would perhaps not be surprised to learn that I have a very imaginative private life, or that I am drawn to adventure of all sorts. What they probably don’t know (and I won’t tell) how radical some of my thinking is.
What is your favourite pastime?
Flamenco guitar, though I always reserve time for sport (skiing), and for epicurean pleasures.
You’ve just won a $1 million. What do you do?
I would take care of a number of pressing needs among those for whom I feel myself responsible, but I would probably finish, as quickly as possible, the commitments to others, including the University and my colleagues, and live as modestly as possible off the benefits of that money in a way as free and ever-evolving as I could find.
What is the quality you value the most?
Compassion, but complex compassion, tough love to some extent, combined with intelligence.
Which five people (living or dead) would you like to invite to a dinner party? Tell us why.
I regularly try to dine with the five living people I would like to dine with, but the list is ever-changing. As for the dead, well I think it is best to leave them lying in peace.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
I'll be more or less free from my social and professional obligations, and be devoting myself to my own development as a human being.
What is your greatest hope for the future?
To find the best possible way to face death and do so in an honourable and independent way.
What is the best kept secret in your faculty, department or service?
The secret lives of my colleagues, at times most sad and unfortunate, but also rich and even dazzling.
