Sofia Corradi, known as “Mamma Erasmus” or “Mother Erasmus”, passed away last Friday, October 17th, in Rome, aged 91. The family, cited by the French newspaperThe Worlddescribes her as a woman “of great energy and great intellectual and emotional generosity”.
Winner of European Carlos V Prize— which distinguishes figures who contributed to the construction of Europe — in 2016, Sofia was a professor of pedagogy at Roma Tre University.
She studied Law at the University of Rome La Sapienza and, during the fourth year of her degree, obtained a Fulbright scholarship, which took her, in 1957, to Columbia Universityin New York, where he started his master’s degree in Comparative University Legislation.
However, upon returning to Rome in 1958, she discovered that the American diploma was not recognized by the Italian educational system — which motivated her to design a system for recognizing foreign courses and promoting university exchanges.
In 1969, his ideas were debated at the European Conference of Rectors, in Geneva, and, in 1976, they took shape with the approval of the Resolution of February 9, 1976 of the European Economic Community, which boosted exchanges between university students from different countries. The initiative would be consolidated in 1987 under the name of the Erasmus Program.
“I came up with the idea after seeing how important the Fulbright scholarship and the experience of studying a year abroad were for me,” recalled Sofia Corradi in a 2016 interview, made available by European Parliament Multimedia Center. “It opened so many doors for me and changed my life, and I thought, ‘Why should an experience like this be limited to a privileged few?’ I thought this privilege should become an opportunity for anyone who wanted to take advantage of it.”
Faced with the idea of Umberto Eco, who said in 2012 that Erasmus is “a sexual revolution”, given that students “fall in love, get married, have children and become Europeans” — with which she agreed —, Sofia stated, in another interview, that “love is really an instrument to make peace between peoples”.
“When they return from exchanges Erasmus, [os estudantes] They feel like different people, they respect themselves, they respect their own national culture, they know how to interact with people who are not from their culture, they don’t judge, they love what’s different, they are different people, they have something extra.”
Since its creation in 1987, a total of 16,669,478 students have participated in the program, according to data from the Erasmus website. For the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Italian Deputy Prime Minister, Antonio Tajani, who attributed to Corradi “the birth of Generation Europe”, the academic “inspired the lives of millions of young people who travelled, studied and embraced different cultures”, cites the The World.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, also reacted to her death on the social network
Text written by André Sousa and edited by
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