This December 19 we remember our beloved teacher Earle Herrera. This professor at the UCV School of Social Communication, in addition to being a politician and journalist, left us very recently, just two years ago, which is not at all enough time to properly evaluate his extensive legacy as a teacher, researcher and writer. . However, his imprint remains alive among those of us who knew him in the classroom, despite the stubborn and implacable forgetfulness imposed by that criticized type of academy that puts political difference above intellectual quality.
In the midst of that pain that day in December 2021, Simón, his son and also a fellow journalist, told me that his father would have liked to be remembered more as a poet than as other of his many public occupations that he carried out. And that is understandable, since poetry summarizes or synthesizes the entire human quality of the person who writes it. But the committed teacher, the one who assumes teaching as a life, also gives a lot of his yes in every line he writes, in every word he utters in the classroom and in every sentence he reads. And that's how the teacher was. In addition to being a poet, he was a true university professor, one of those that few remain, dedicated to writing, the classroom and reading. And so many of his disciples like to remember him.
It is the academy lived with absolute fidelity and intense intellectual activity that is the only thing that allows us to maintain that rational distance that, according to Norbert Elias, every academic or social scientist must possess to appropriately assume a political commitment.
Elias says: “Social scientists cannot help but take part in the political and social affairs of their group and their time, nor can they prevent them from affecting them. Furthermore, their personal participation, their commitment, constitute one of the preconditions for understanding the problem they have to solve as scientists” (Commitment and distancing, 1983).
This is also how Professor Herrera was, someone sensitive and passionate, with prose and verse constantly battling in his words, but also a rational and restrained academic in his university work, knowledgeable about his journalistic profession and the complex reality of his country. which allowed him to accept the political commitment that destiny imposed on him, albeit with the necessary distance from the intellectual.
