Thank you Mr. Chairman for this introduction, Rector Magnificus, distinguished Rectors of the visiting universities, your Excellency, Madam of Ministry of  Science and Education, Excellences Ambassadors, distinguished quests ladies and gentlemen.

This is a year of anniversaries, both happy and sad on the European continent. And the creation of the University of Latvia, after the birth of the country is, of course, a signal that here is a country that as soon as it possibly could, and while it was still fighting for the territorial integrity of this newly created state entity, saw it as an absolute priority to establish an institution of higher learning.

During my term as the President of the Republic, there was one traditional evening in which the President of the Republic, as head of the armed forces, visits the academy, the military academy and recalls those young men who have just enrolled in the university when, before even starting classes, they were called off to the front to defend Latvia against invaders who were coming both from Russia and from Germany and to commemorate those who did not return after that first call to action.

The university, therefore, has been part and parcel of Latvia's development as an independent and sovereign nation where its students and professors and even high school students had to take up arms, in order to ensure that it was created, and now that we have recovered our independence after this very difficult and oppressive period of soviet rule, we have opportunities that we have been looking forward to, of fulfilling the dreams of the founders and, indeed, of fulfilling the  dreams of a nation that for too long on this European continent has been prevented from having its own university on its own soil. Fortunately, already in the 19^th century those Latvians, sons of peasants, just recently freed from serfdom, did, often literally starving themselves to death and dying from exhaustion, walk to universities abroad to get their education and they were the ones who were then ready to get the Republic on its feet when they came back and when it was created. So that we have this history of the interlink between strivings for independence, the existence  of a country and its democratic institutions intimately linked, concretely with the University of Latvia but in a more general way, with higher education and its democratic availability to everybody, regardless of the social status of their birth, regardless of how close to the larger centres of urban development they happened to be living during their early education. And I think that when we look at the future of higher education concretely at the University of Latvia in larger context of the European future and if we look at the role of the higher education in any country large or small it seems to me that there is one thing that is common to all and that is necessity in a democratic environment to ensure that every child born say, today, in the course of their life not be faced with the impediments  to their full development to the attaining of the highest achievements what their inborn capacities allow.

 And recent studies in many fields confirm what we already new in the previous century when Terman in California started his very famous study of gifted children. He was at the time following Binet' s introduction of the intelligence tests in French schools developed at Stanford for Binet at Stanford University selected the brightest of the brightest at the California school system and followed through their lifetimes with the conviction that the brighter they were the further they would go in life. And indeed the brightness, intellectual giftedness actually is linked to such factors as general health or even good looks as it turns out in terms of correlations. But one thing, it is not necessarily correlated to it perfectly- to achievements in later life. And Terman with great disappointment afterlife devoted to these bright children following them was forced to notice that what made the difference in their success in life was the environment in which they had been born. Children born in middle class or upper middle class families had their intelligence, their native intelligence, nurtured health and fostered and they were the ones who had the greatest achievements. In lower class they had lower middle class achievements, and those born into poor families had never managed to reach the potential that God had given them at birth and that should have been developed.

And this is in America which after all was already considered as a country open to all and ready to offer the American Dream to every immigrant, it was not so.

Today here in Latvia that had regained its independence for 20 years, in a Europe now where former barriers have fallen and totalitarianisms have been certainly pushed back beyond our borders, we would like, I think, to first of all keep this in mind as the goal of education of any kind and of higher education as being the birth right of our citizens. Not that everybody should necessarily go to university, because you know that many people do not enjoy it nor wish it. But university education should not be unavailable to anybody who has the intellectual ability and the desire to follow it. And indeed we know from birth statistics that what used to be considered as basic alphabetization and which Latvia was fortunate to already acquire in for the peasant classes in the 17^th century under the Swedish kings, because of the Reformation, the general level of alphabetization in the country rose in the 19^th and 20^th centuries steadily upwards. So that what before the IIWW considered as average education which is a high school diploma has by now become a BA, I think as an elementary tool for a person to be inserted into the society. It means that the universities has taken the crucial role in preparing the citizens of tomorrow, to have the thinking and judgement and information sifting skills to be responsible citizens in a democratic society which rests on a good understanding and wisdom of its citizens to evaluate the programmes of the politicians would put before them and from their part as well to be contributing to the society to ensure that economic development stays on an even keel and that the future generations are not encumbered  by the mistakes and the debts incurred by the preceding ones.

One should like to see a world where new generations do not start in the handicap and the burden of debts to carry on on their backs but where everybody has a level playing field this within each society, this on the scale of the continent and indeed ultimately, of course, on the whole planet everywhere around the globe. And we have seen in recent decades surprising progress made in countries deemed backward, deemed undeveloped and where education has really taken extraordinary strives.

A few days ago I had the privilege of being asked to address a gathering of the generals, commanders of all the forces in Europe. It was a privilege and also an opportunity to talk to them in private about their own careers. I had an interesting conversation with the general, head of the armed forces, land forces of Norway. He told me he was born in a small village on the west of Norway, in a very poor family and father having died when the children were young. And in the milieu where it was considered that only the labour of one´s hands was honest labour. And anything else really was certainly not for the people coming from this society.

As he discovered that he had interesting books and enjoys learning, he was first discouraged by his family and then, when he  actually had the audacity to wish to go to high-school after finishing his primary education rather than  to trade school as was the custom for the people of his village, the local teacher came and protested to his mother that it was a very unwise thing to do, he was a boy, clever with his hands and  he should definitely go into carpentry. He should not do such a foolish thing as to go to the high-school, as going to the high-school was for people who go to the university later. And that was only for the privileged few. He should not have such foolish notions.  It shows the strength of the character of this person that in spite of loving his mother and respecting his  teachers, he did get ultimately where he was, but you  can imagine the barriers that were put on his path. This is a person younger than I am and I said to myself in the Europe of today and tomorrow we should like to see such attitudes disappear. There is this old class consciousness that Europe has not got rid of, that higher education is a luxury, that is somehow an aristocratic thing and that ordinary plain people do honest labour or again the other attitude that honest labour is really where you make money, so therefore you must go into business as soon as you can, only technologically and applied oriented education and research is of any use.  Everything else is a pie in the sky, is theoretical, is abstract, it is a luxury for the few, an aristocratic privilege that you cannot expect elsewhere.

I would like to underscore the importance of the revolution in the higher education that Alexander Von Humboldt introduced in the 19^th century. I myself I spent my career at the University in Edmonton in Canada within this atmosphere of humboldtian concept of the higher education. And believe me, if there are debates here in Latvia, and elsewhere in Europe about what the higher education should be about, they have been equally long and equally vigorous in Canada and I am sure everywhere else in the world.

Higher education and its throw on the society is not an evident given, the one of science and research even less.

I had a privilege recently of being entrusted with a high level panel that evaluated the creation of the European Research Council. Two years ago for the first time in its history, the European Union set up a Europe wide institution with money coming from common resources for free research, advanced frontier research, investigator driven and based only on the excellence of the proposals and the quality of the applicant as evaluated by panels and the external reviewers of their peers. And I was amazed to see that only 2 years ago such a creature had been created here on the European continent, because countries, of course, have their own research funding institutions, some of them extremely generous and extremely efficient, like could be the ones in Germany, in France and Britain and in more prosperous countries and elsewhere academies have been the privileged places of research under, in certain countries,  soviet domination.

The idea that we could have a competitions Europe wide for excellence our panel came to a conclusion to as an excellent one. And yesterday I had the privilege of addressing a meeting of a Competitiveness Council of the European Union,  and I must say that around the table all the countries represented, unanimously agreed Europe must raise its sights, Europe must get common funding for researches of the highest quality and that the Europe and every country in it must teach its researchers to reach for the stars and not contempt themselves with the facilities and opportunities open to them by the financial support of their own country. This innovative research support structure has only been operating for a brief time but when we look at what it has achieved and it had a fantastic success in terms of attracting an overwhelming number of applications, over 9 thousand in a very brief time, it was able to give only support to 3% of them and immensely large weight of refusal. But  the frightening thing when we look at the results and their distribution across  the  map of Europe is that the basis where the grants were awarded and the places where they were not, are distributed across the map of Europe exactly as if the iron curtain was still running down it with a few exceptions that simply confirm the rule. And this reveals something I think that is a challenge, for the countries beyond that invisible border but also for the European Union and its future.

It is evident that the years under Communism have harmed the ability of researchers to compete internationally with advanced frontier science type of research. It cannot be that all of the Eastern Europe is less gifted than the Western Europe, such a notion is absurd. We have the proof of it. When so many professors of the University of Latvia fled into exile at the end of the IIWW, because they had seen so many of their colleagues deported in the first wave of deportation and the first year of Soviet Occupation 1941, they had to somehow find new careers in strange lands with languages that they did not necessarily know and what we found is that practically every single professor of the University of Latvia, who went into exile, developed an extremely successful career in west were absolutely able not only to compete with their colleagues but to achieve levels of excellence and recognition with the result that there are many buildings in universities, in the United States for instance and elsewhere named after some former professors of Latvia who then finished their career in some other place.

I think there we have an empirical evidence and unfortunate experiment on a large scale that Claude Bernard called “a natural experiment” such as there happen sometimes in medicine, here was a “natural experiment” in the higher education, it is not the case that a small country cannot produce people able to compete elsewhere. What does happen is that the environment in which a small country places its brightest minds, is so frequently at fault and does not reach the level where one would like it to be and it is just like with Termans and gifted children. We would not like to see in a Europe of tomorrow the Eastern part of it lagging behind like Termans gifted children from underprivileged families. I think it would be a disaster, it would be immoral, I think it would even be a crime against humanity, to maintain such a situation and not to do about it.

How  this is to be solved, I think there  is this heavy responsibility on  each and every country concerned, not just small ones like Latvia, but even larger ones, like Poland. To see what they can do to change the conditions for research, for higher education and for the accessibility to both. But then I think at the European level, at the level of institutions, at the level where funds are distributed  for cohesion, and structural changes and so on.. I think that very seriously rethinking of current practices has to be done, we have to think critically as to why in 20 years time or lets say now the time since we actually have the co-members of the Union, why we are not moving faster ahead and why we are facing this situation.

Naturally the current economic crisis has not helped and will not help to solve this situation, but I am told by economists that ultimately all crises resolve themselves and economy starts growing again. I think it is a bit like saying to a patient who is ill, that of course the diseases, most diseases do not last forever and at some point they end. But the sad thing is that sometimes they end with the death of the patient and we would not like to see that this crisis being so severe that in fact it kills the possibilities of the higher education, science and researches in small countries, particularly in those severely hit by the economic downturn.

Every day that goes by, every year that goes by, a child is growing up who will be the next Newton, or the next Einstein, or the next Shakespeare. Every year that goes by is a year in a person´s life, the children grow and mature and they need the best education they can get and students need to be caught in a net of the kind of inducements and intellectual excitement that will make them devote their lives to the pursuit not just of happiness, but to the pursuit of knowledge, the advancement of science and by doing so of course ultimately and inevitably for the betterment of society.

It does not have to be necessarily directed applied research, that will lead to the improvement of society to existence of researchers, pursuing truth whether make it possible, whether they think of it or not. That is how knowledge has always advanced in history and it is very clear that it will continue do so in the future. So, ladies and gentlemen, I think that in thinking about the higher education in the University of Latvia, in a small country like Latvia, any small country anywhere for that matter, there are many large countries in the world as well, these basic principles that I have been underlining, I think should be foremost in our minds when we are working out our long term strategies as our group, the reflection group in the future of the Europe is trying to reflect on the middle term and short term tactical solutions that governments and parliaments and decision makers have to decide upon whether in a long or in a short perspective. We have a job ahead of us. We have by no means reached the level where humbled we are saying to university that you should have teachers that convey the existing, advanced knowledge in the best possible way to the largest number of students and should be everybody on a population who has the intellectual gifts to attend university and to benefit from this transmission of knowledge. University should be the privileged base of the transmission of the preparation of students for life and of participation, active participation in a democratic society. There should be also places of the creation of knowledge, be they large or small, and as I say, being small does not preclude high quality, contributions, or high quality research may have empirical proof that it can be done. And therefore it is a heavy responsibility to make sure that there are not put any kind of barriers and impediments in the way of those who have gifts and that society needs and that must be nurtured and fostered, if the society is to benefit from it.

Thank you very much for your attention.