Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences

"A university without a Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences is an establishment without a soul or a thinking head." The University of Kinshasa, formerly Lovanium University, has understood this truth well. From its beginnings, it had begun to respond to the demands and urgencies of research and teaching in the vast fields of philosophical reflection and knowledge of man through his history, his traditions, his languages, his literary creations and, more generally, aesthetics. Nicolas Zufferey gives us some good reasons to study letters: He invites us to take a step back from the question because the studies of letters are in some circles considered useless and the faculties of letters are sometimes the first victims when ministries or universities have to cut budgets. In reality, letters are not a luxury, they are indispensable. In their favor, we will give the following four arguments:
1) Literature studies develop skills that are useful or essential in any job with responsibility. These skills are “critical sense”, initiative, individual autonomy, creativity and imagination, all skills formed by years of work and personal research. They are also communication skills, oral or written, from simple mastery of spelling to the most complex forms of expression, including knowledge of languages. Literature studies strive to shape broad and flexible minds, capable of considering situations in their entirety, of weighing the pros and cons with hindsight, of reacting to the unexpected, of finding solutions and innovating.
2) Literature studies respond to essential human aspirations: they address questions about the nature and limits of human experience. Literature possesses an irreplaceable ethical dimension.
3) And this is the extension of politics: letters are indispensable to democracy. If dictatorships can possibly function without Humanities worthy of the name, democracies cannot: they need philosophers to recall the great ethical issues, historians to make the link with the past and undo its myths or quite simply critical minds to resist simplistic ideas. Letters form citizens whose capacities for reflection are ramparts against the dangers that threaten our Freedoms and our values, our cultures, our languages, our Conscience and our collective memory, etc.