A few years ago, Santiago Gangotena, atop an elegant platform, gave me my diploma. On that day, I became a lawyer and thus ended the fundamental phase of my life: the student one. Or so I thought. Carlos Montúfar, who was also my rector for several years, told the graduates that we can keep that title in a drawer and never see it again, because what the university has given us is not a piece of paper. No one, he said, will be able to take away what they keep in their hearts. It was an antidote to titulitis. That time, to borrow a concept from Charles Dickens, was the best of times and the worst of times, a period of hope and despair, madness and sanity, faith and disbelief. I graduated without a penny in my pocket, I had two jobs and tried not to lose my scholarship despite being exhausted. However, I have never felt so much in the world as I did on campus, in lectures, in the fact that I was walking the path to ignorance, because those who founded the university promised me that on the day of graduation I would be a real ignoramus… And so it was. Never, as on that occasion, was I so aware that learning had just begun for me and that it was endless.

From 110 to 10,000 students: University of San Francisco de Quito, legacy of Santiago Gangotena

That day, I think, I dedicated myself like a dragon. Or as someone who knew himself much better than when it all started. With the little money I had to travel to college, I bought a beat-up Fiat Uno from 1988. As the winner of a literary short story competition, my scholarship was complete, but I worked for gas, constant car repairs, lunches, trips with friends and the books I bought and read. Before, nothing was easy for me, but finally I was studying something I liked and I felt happy. The educational institution harmoniously reconciled my desire to study law and become a writer. For my second semester, I got a position as a reporter at Great hall, the university newspaper. Journalist Daniel Márquez was my first real editor. One of the initial reports that I was in charge of was about the Socratic classes that all students, from all majors, had to take, especially Self-Knowledge, which was the study of Eastern thought and spirituality. So I was able to interview Santiago, who was the founder and rector, to ask him why this class exists. He told me, as recorded in an audio recording from the time, that he wanted the students to know the conditioning they have from their family, society, friends or enemies, and gain wisdom about who they are. He preached non-attachment. He told me that there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom, “the former is the result of instruction, the latter is achieved when conditioning is broken through introspection.”

Genius and character

Now, when Santiago’s death had so impressed all of us who knew him, I could return to his words, the deep meaning of his mission, the greatness of his work. He founded the university so that generations of students could learn to know each other, to question who they are, to venture toward the intangible and hopeful possibility of wisdom. He had mistakes, because he was human. So human that he undertook an undertaking, for many impossible: to transform higher education in Ecuador with the philosophy of the liberal arts, those that liberate the spirit, mind and body. And he achieves it. His quality was not prudence, but patience. He liked to be irreverent and everyday. His enemies accused him of the most controversial and impressive points of his narrative. His works, however, were as lucid as they were colossal: he created a scholarship program unprecedented in scope, especially for ethnic diversity. He supported the humanities in a country that promotes technical specialization. he translated The Tao Te Ching Lao-Tzu from Chinese to Spanish. He built a university identity that could shine and be an intellectual elite in all areas of knowledge and events in Ecuador. The dream of Santiago was a miracle that happened to many of us. I can say, without fear of being wrong, that my scholarship and studies have been the learning process that has changed my life the most in every way. Nothing has been the same since then. The world with all its complexity appeared before my eyes and I set out to explore it.

Truth, Goodness, and Beauty by John Dunn Insu

I have only words of thanks for the person who founded the university where I studied. I will not respond with my writing to the pettiness and inhumanity of those who rejoiced in their death. I wish someone would ever change their existence with the lucidity, generosity and fire with which the dream of Santiago transformed those of us who passed through those classrooms. For him, fire was kindness and the search for wisdom. Passion and creation. Also fragility. I would like to thank him in my lifetime, I won’t be able to. But I will never, ever stop defending the freedoms of the people of this country. I will try to be ‘good people’, as he said, or at least admit my mistakes. I will continue to question myself. I will breathe so I don’t die. I will not abandon the awareness of my ignorance and will always feed my desire to learn more, like Socrates, until the last second. It will be my way of honoring him, Santiago and my other essential teachers, who made my university life what it was: a quest. With this text, which is the most I can give, I hug it and thank Carlos Montúfaro, for giving me something that no one can ever take from me, because it is in my heart, not on paper. It’s not even in words. Life and its twists and turns are a mystery. I have not met anyone who knows how to convey to the masses, almost in silence, what the feeling of the immense and mythological power of the dragon is. Except for Santiago. (OR)