FERRARA – Alessandra De Fazio, the president of the University of Ferrara student union, spoke strongly, in the presence of President Mattarella, calling for more support following  student suicides linked to the intense pressure students are under. 

 “I am a failure I do not deserve to live.  These are the words that came out of the same mouth as the person who is speaking in front of you today, my mother had to hear and suffer them after I thought I had failed a test for the second time,” De Fazio said. 

 “What an exaggeration for a test that you can retake the following year! But how can we think that a university course should be dictated by our times, be our own, while we are constantly bombarded by the myth of performativity and illogical competition that shoves the successes of others in our faces and makes us breathe a sigh of relief when someone fails in our place?" 

 Quoting the renowned historian, Alessandro Barbero, De Fazio continued, “In other eras they believed in witches, and we believe in meritocracy.”

 “Scholarships are blackmail, if we all have the same right, why should anyone be forced to keep tighter deadlines just because they are poorer? In the current system, universities promote the illusion of guaranteeing us equal tools, through courses of study and student halls of residence. In reality, access to these services is very complex due to bureaucratic, economic and above all meritocratic barriers. But mind you, we are given the chance to redeem ourselves from poverty, as if it were a guilt, as long as we are deserving.”

 De Fazio concluded her speech with a call to Mattarella and other politicians. “We call for our country to consider psychological well-being a fundamental right of the individual on a par with physical health, both with the introduction of the figure of the basic psychologist, but above all with a systemic reform that deconstructs the meritocratic pillars.”

 "We are no longer willing to accept feelings of inadequacy, depression or even suicide because of the conditions imposed by a sick system that trades the person for performance."

cw