A New Cluny?
Why we need small rogue academic institutions to save the university
It is more than 20 years since I gave my first academic course at RWTH Aachen University in the summer of 2004, soon to be followed by near-continuous teaching at various universities in France, Belgium, Germany and Poland in many different functions. Overall, the impressions resulting from this experience can be condensed as follows: It is no longer a pleasure to teach, nor does it make any true sense, as academia, with a few laudable exceptions, has degenerated into a fiction, a mutual imposture: professors pretend to continue not only to impart education according to academic standards, but to instruct in independent scholarly work; and students pretend to grasp and apply these lessons.
In reality, however, all we find on the professorial side is systematically turning a blind eye to the fact that 90% of students do not fulfil the necessary requirements for university studies, not only at the beginning but also at the end. And what do we find on the student side? Partly an enormous dissatisfaction that the little bit of motivation and good will is quickly driven out by absurd study regulations and incompetent lecturers; partly an unscrupulous playing of legal loopholes in order to acquire a diploma as efficiently as possible with a minimum of personal effort, let alone ‘learning’. And of course – and this is probably the worst -: an unprecedented ideologisation of university teaching, which is no longer about content and certainly no longer about shaping free personalities, but about inculcating political correctness.
The success of Western civilisation was largely due to its irrepressible, almost ‘Faustian’ drive for knowledge; a drive that goes back far into the Middle Ages. Even then, universities developed into hoards of presuppositionless intellectual freedom, which, if they ever clashed too much with church doctrine, were given the opportunity to convince in public disputes through arguments, not merely authority: the first steps on the way to a modern concept of research. But this freedom is now under threat everywhere in the West, for two reasons. On the one hand, the famous ‘march through the institutions’ has increasingly turned teaching and research institutions into bastions of anti-conservative thinking, in which persons and positions with a different orientation hardly find a hearing, or are even actively excluded. On the other hand, a leaden atmosphere of political correctness has settled over the West, in which it is no longer a matter of unprejudiced discussion, but rather a matter of determining from the outset what is the ‘right’ and what is the ‘wrong’ position: it is enough to label the opponent as ‘right-wing’ in order to permanently discredit him or her and thereby conveniently avoid the necessity of any discussion and thus also the risk of having to admit one’s own mistakes. The much lamented diagnosis ‘much opinion, little knowledge’ from two decades ago has now become ‘one sole opinion, little knowledge’.
Of course, in the new ideology dominating research and education, the old Marxist class struggle has slowly been replaced by a new vocabulary. The proletariat of old has made space for the innumerable sexual, religious and ethnic minorities that need to be protected from exploitation not only by good old capitalism, but also by colonialism, toxic masculinity and white supremacy – and the universities are a central element in this ideological battle. Texts that ‘offend’ because they are (allegedly) fascist, misogynistic, racist or Islamophobic, such as Plato, Ovid, Chaucer or Dante, are given trigger warnings, are censored or even removed; universities are declared ‘safe spaces’ where everyone pretending to feel ‘offended’ by a viewpoint diverging from political correctness is automatically declared a ‘victim’ of aggression; only what is classified as unobjectionable by highly politicised peer-review procedures is published; project funds are only approved if they contain appropriate catchwords such as ‘diversity’, ‘migration’, ‘tolerance’, ‘privilege’, ‘gender’, ‘climate’ or ‘inclusiveness’; vacant positions are largely distributed to members of various minorities in order to fulfil absurd quotas imposed from above; and even those who believed they had a permanent position can now lose it if they do not regularly provide evidence of publications and third-party funding linked to the corresponding ideological kowtowing.
How has this revolution been brought forward? First, often enough, children are delegated to a wide variety of caretakers and institutions from the moment they are born and are hardly given the opportunity to have their specific interests and facilities individually stimulated on a long-term basis. And even the ‘Zeitgeist’, which generally confuses achievement with coercion, education with elitism and general culture with bourgeois pettiness and seeks to avoid any frustration or attribute it to the responsibility of external powers (‘patriarchy’, ‘capitalism’, ‘climate’, ‘whiteness’, etc.), hardly guarantees a solid character formation.
In schools, the educational ideals have increasingly abdicated in favour of one-sided ideological claims: While European children are finding it increasingly difficult to read, write, do arithmetic or understand their cultural environment, political goals such as gender ideology, the fight against anything allegedly ‘right-wing’, the one-sided focus on the dark sides of European history, the idealisation of Islam, the praise of multiculturalism or climate activism are coming more and more to the fore – and this in a way that brands any criticism from pupils or parents as a pre-occupying sign of extremist attitudes.
Alas, the universities are no different by now: especially in the social sciences and humanities, we witness not only a sometimes almost unbelievable decline in the general level of education, but also a growing ideologisation of students and teachers alike, which is reflected in increasingly absurd programme reforms and violent exactions against conservative professors. This is accompanied by a far-reaching departure from Humboldt’s ideal of education: the modern university no longer focuses on the ‘placet experiri’ of a free development of one’s own abilities, accompanied by demanding and competent teachers, but only on professional formation, and this as quickly as possible. The ‘universitas’ of old has given way to a system based on mere quantification: Be it the ‘competences’ that the student has to tick off as quickly as possible, the number of graduates, which has become the key to financing the universities, or the scholarly ‘output’ of the teaching stuff.
Anyone who intends to embark on an academic career in this climate is hardly to be envied: Not only has the business of teaching become very unedifying, since the level of knowledge can hardly be raised in an efficient way without putting one’s own job at risk (less students mean less funding); by now, research, too, is irremediably tied to ideological guidelines and often surreal topics, due to the compulsion to raise third-party funds and thus to submit to scholarly angles defined from the outside. This means that, in view of the ever-scarcer jobs and funds, only those whose profile most closely corresponds to the ‘Zeitgeist’ – and who, moreover, belong to one of the ever more absurd gender and ethnicity quotas which are supposed to create ‘diversity’ by force – can actually have a career.
The universities of today are thus reaping the fruits of relativism and ultraliberalism: Popper’s idea that, in humanities too, only that which can be falsified is also truly ‘scientific’ has caused enormous damage to the social sciences, because in the last instance, it replaced the quest for truth with quotation frequency and quantifying bibliometrics, and created a situation of permanent academic competition where the right of the stronger, i.e. politically more correct scholar, reigns sovereign. And where Truth is negated and regarded as a purely provisional majority decision, it is logical that the financing of research is also handed over to competition for money from free enterprise and politicised funds – with the disastrous consequence that scholars have been forced by their universities to become first managers, then ideological sycophants in order to be able to carry out their activities at all.
So the consequences of this development are huge. As a scientist, it often means academic suicide to express views that have been considered commonplace for the last three to four millennia, but are now condemned as ‘conservative’, ‘controversial’ or even ‘alt-right’. Stepping out of the prescribed woke framework can not only result in Antifa visits, court cases or the obstruction of post-graduate qualification, but also hinder prospects for promotion, appointment, tenure or those now indispensable third-party funds. At the same time, under those conditions, a new generation is growing up that is accustomed to political conformity from the start and finds it normal not to be bothered with supposedly ‘hurtful’ opinions or inconvenient facts in their ideological ‘safe space’, while at the same time being encouraged to denounce and defame dissenters – usually to the applause of the mainstream media. And so what might have been considered a surreal fringe opinion a decade ago has become a binding doxa thanks to woke hegemony over education and media alike. From gender inclusive language, Fridays for Future, children’s book censorship and free choice of names and pronouns, over the increased deletion of classics from the ‘decolonised’ canon in favour of postmodernist, pseudo-feminist and anti-racist literature, to the lowering of all performance requirements and a grading system that deliberately ignores not only formalities but also content and only grades ‘feeling’ or individual ‘progress’ –woke culture is everywhere, and with disastrous consequences, if one compares the steady decline of Western schools and universities to the rise of East Asia, a discrepancy which we will soon have to pay dearly, very dearly.
What would be needed is a radical rethinking of what science is supposed to be about in the first place, a new ‘Cluny’ of education that puts the freedom and security of the scholar, the guarantee of his unchallenged interest in fundamental questions and the integration of his research into a superordinate pursuit of Truth, Goodness and Beauty once more at the centre and thus returns to the sense of the original holistic ‘universitas’. Unfortunately, I doubt that such a reform can come from the universities themselves – the system is rigged and sclerosed. The only hope lies in the foundation of wholly new institutions and academies situated outside of the existing system and slowly attracting and educating a new elite.
Thus we approach the explanation of the title of this contribution; a ‘new Cluny’ – a formulation I have already used in a couple of papers for some years without really elaborating on it until now. The meaning is, of course, immediately understandable: just as the Cluniac reform breathed new life into the Benedictine order through a return to austerity, discipline and uncompromising inwardness, and was partly responsible for the unprecedented new upsurge in the monastic movement of the High Middle Ages, so too is the academic world in need of such a reform. But how should one imagine such a thing in concrete terms? And above all, isn’t it a little too easy, indeed downright irresponsible, to preach something ‘new’ instead of first reforming the ‘old’?
For the sake of simplicity, let us start with the second question, since it is in fact the simplest to answer. For to reject the idea of a renewal of academia as ‘utopian’ and rather to present the patient and self-sacrificing mucking out of the Augean stables as the only serious solution is a form of thought that we encounter again and again when it comes to the fundamental question ‘What is to be done?’ – and which misses the real problem. For of course there is no question that we must make an effort to continue to hold and, if possible, expand the few positions of true diversity of thought in the everyday academic system. But we must also realise that without control over the political and legal system that sets the educational policy guidelines and checks that they are adhered to, without a complete reorganisation of the mass media, which represent a much more efficient system of social engineering than any modern institutional education will ever be, and finally without access to that diffuse third-party funding system in which semi-political foundations, obscure NGOS and politically correct ‘big players’ exercise de facto control over the academic entity, only rearguard actions are possible.
The often publicised idea of a second ‘march through the institutions’ is thus unrealistic. First, because such an internal renewal would take at least one, if not two generations – but Europe’s rapid decline will be much more rapid. Second, there is no denying the impression that the institutions now dominated by wokes tend to have less tolerance and understanding for conservative competitors than was the case since the 1960s when the situation was reversed. In other words, while conservative institutions have, in the past, grudgingly agreed to admit left or green positions to the education system in order to give voice to the whole range of social diversity, it seems that, now, the real sense of contemporary ‘diversity’ lies essentially in branding all conservative positions as allegedly ‘far-right’ and fighting them vigorously, instead of entering into a genuine dialogue with those who think differently. For many woke ideologues, politics is not the search for a constant balance, but only the fight for the implementation of their own positions, which, once legalised, can no longer be put up for discussion. Freedom of opinion is only demanded as long as one’s own position is not yet legally binding; but as soon as this is the case, the entire machinery of state, media and society is employed to curtail the freedom of all those who wish to criticise or even reverse the transformations that have just taken place.
Hence, the modern university will never be able to recover on its own; it needs the impetus from outside. So: How should we imagine a modern educational ‘Cluniac’ reform? To answer this question, I would like to start from the three actual problems of the modern university: First, the mass university has made any elite formation impossible; second, the actual formation of character is no longer carried out by the university, but by the social media; and third, educational policies increasingly correspond to the opposite of what would really make sense. From this follows the need for educational institutions that are radically tailored to elites, that focus not only on specialised knowledge but on genuine character development, and that follow a curriculum that is entirely their own and independent. What does this mean in practice?
First, in order to save what is left of our academic tradition, we would have to found new educational institutes all over Europe, designed not for the masses but for a small number of students; first and foremost in the field of the humanities, which, although seemingly less important for the concrete economy, are central to the shaping of the ‘Zeitgeist’: Nor did the increasing leftist control of Western society emanate from the doctors, mechanical engineers or physicists, but from those who went into politics, the media, the schools and the arts. In contrast to the mass university, those new institutes should be about the highest standards and performance and create a small but powerful and highly qualified elite. This requires a very high density of supervision with, at the same time, very small groups of students. This also implies a departure from the increasingly schoolish education system rules, a return to very mixed student groups and a diploma philosophy that is about collegial analysis of character and personality development, not about the mechanical addition of credit points. Especially in the humanities, the digitisation of literature makes such a foundation of new educational institutions working with small student groups exceedingly easy, since a single memory stick can replace an entire library: The goal of the new educational philosophy should therefore be the closest cooperation and the highest challenges, quality instead of quantity, with a simultaneous renewed connection between the formal teaching of the basics of our civilisation and their actual importance for today’s life – individually as collectively.
Second: Alongside, perhaps even ahead of, subject-specific education, character building should be in the foreground: learning, researching and private life must no longer be understood as separate spheres, but as an inseparable unit, because knowledge without education and the ability to ‘lead a good life’ is more harmful than ignorance. This is about nothing less than awakening the young generation to an intellectual resilience that will make them real critical spirits who allow themselves to be influenced neither by the pressure of the masses nor by the temptations of cheap pleasures, but go their way straight and incorruptibly. Central to this is close cooperation with the university teachers, who should be seen less as mere service providers and more as mentors and partners. From this point of view, it would also make perfect sense to organise such a close cooperation after the example of the monastic communities in order to complement individual progress by a communal exemplary way of life; a life where moments of joint and individual research are always to be combined with moments of reflection, physical effort, work for the community, introspection and even artistic education.
Third: At first glance, the question of the curriculum may seem the most difficult, since two problems arise here. First, it is inevitable that the envisaged educational institutes will most likely not be licensed by the state; they will therefore have to be conceptualised less as a way of ‘infiltrating’ modern academia and more as the nucleus of a future informal economic and intellectual system increasingly freed from state dictates. Hence, the main aim should not be the formation of highly specialised future university professors, but rather a broad new elite capable of facing the challenges of modernity by delving deep into the legacy of Western civilisation. The second problem is of a substantive nature: the front against wokeism is one thing; the definition of an alternative is quite another: Is it libertarianism? Catholicism? Nationalism? Anarchism? The personal preferences of the author of these lines are well known; nevertheless, a ‘new Cluny’ must be generous enough not to lapse into sectarianism, but rather represent the entire spectrum of free counterculture so far as it is compatible with the genuine values of the West. Therefore, two concepts seem central. On the one hand, ‘universitas’: genuine education always presupposes an overview of the entirety of the humanistic disciplines, the old ‘artes liberales’, in order to be able to truly serve mankind and truth, and so specialisation should always go hand in hand with the simultaneous continuation of general educational activities. On the other hand, and closely related to this, ‘tradition’: the entire system of education should be guided on the one hand by respect for the millennia-old Western virtues and on the other hand by an understanding of the self-destructive consequences of its decline.
Highest quality, character building, cultivation of tradition – these should be, in short, the three pillars of such a Cluniac re-foundation of education through numerous small institutions all over Europe; institutions which, on the one hand, should each be independently adapted to their regional, national or ideological framework, but at the same time must also be interrelated to the extent that exchange, support and common growth must be assured from the very beginning. This will undoubtedly require a common charter, which must be the result of wise reflection and negotiation; nevertheless, it is certainly not out of place to provide at least a sketch of such a text here, if only as a basis for discussion:
As scholars, we are convinced by the following theses:
– There is a single, indivisible and absolute Truth. This Truth underlies all things of spirit and matter, but is only recognisable to man in approximation and therefore always requires critical debate – a task never fully completed.
– Truth and Oneness is at the same time also identical to Beauty and Goodness: morality, aesthetics, logic and philosophy spring from a single force and are mutually dependent. Understanding them is the noblest mission of man.
– As a spiritual being, man participates in the true, the good and the beautiful, but through his physical existence, he is also bound to nature and its laws, which are depend on the one Truth. Natural Science means studying nature and its laws, but at the same time also accepting, respecting and caring for them.
– The striving for Truth in all its facets has always been the basis of human research. As much as man has made quantitative progress in his mastery of nature, the pursuit of Truth must remain an inner approach. The totality of these attempts represents the treasure of a tradition that can never be considered as outdated, but must be cultivated and revived again and again.
– Research must not be an end in itself, but must be in harmony with the striving for a Good Life. Genuine education should therefore serve not only the approach to Truth but also the development of personality and the ideal of constant inner and outer self-surpassing, and must also include social responsibility for the present, the future and the heritage of the past.
– Knowledge requires exchange and mediation between times and between people. Places of teaching must therefore be places of equal conversation and cultivate order and an exemplary living alongside mere knowledge.