Is University the Enemy?

J.D. Vance made his position on higher education institutions very clear and thorough at the National Conservatism Conference back in 2021, stating: “Universities are our enemies.” Donald Trump went from words to action and appointed Linda McMahon, an entrepreneur from the wrestling world, as the new head of the Department of Education, giving her the task of dismantling the department itself. Trump’s decision to cut about $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University, one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the United States, has caused a major public outcry. Confrontation with universities and intellectual elites has been a key feature of Trumpism for years.

From Trump and Vance’s perspective, the leading cultural organizations – journalistic, media, academic, publishing – represent an enemy obstacle to the great transformation that has already begun. After all, universities reproduce outdated and biased knowledge in a monotonous and superficial way, while also being heavily distorted by prejudices and private interests. The university issue got attention during the election campaign, as American voters made their choice, keeping this point in mind.

Universities are places of anxiety as well as devotion to the spirit of spiritualism, as was the case in the first medieval universitas studiorum that sprang up in cathedrals and monasteries. The word “university” itself goes back to a term that back then denoted a community of people united in doing the same thing. However, despite the loftiness of their original intent, the first European universities soon began to exhibit an inevitable tendency toward corporate insularity, rambunctious student life, and sophisticated but sometimes fruitless intellectual disputes. Take, for example, the Latin Quarter in Paris, where the canon Robert de Sorbonne founded one of the many colleges that sprang up in Europe at that time on the wave of the revival of communes and towns. The idyll didn’t last long. Shortly after its founding, the Sorbonne faced a student behavior problem – they were rowdy, drunk, and stealing. The people of Paris went so far as to organize punitive expeditions against them. In his treatise Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga presents an image of the medieval university as a place of boisterous revelry, where one could mostly meet troublemakers, paupers, and cranks.

The closure of universities and growing political unrest led to the emergence of an alternative system in 17th-century Europe – large academies such as the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Italy and the Royal Academy in England. The trendiness of universities contributed to their decline as well as to the emergence of new forms of intellectual community. In the centuries that followed, it was the academies that began to shape the direction of states’ cultural policies, the public defense of the arts, and the shaping of minds and scientific debates.

The revival of universities in the modern sense of the word began in 1810 with the founding of the University of Berlin, which embodied the ideals of Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt. At the end of 1808, on behalf of the Ministry of the Interior, Wilhelm von Humboldt engaged prominent men of his time – Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Johann Christian Reil. Thus, a fundamentally new organizational model emerged: the university became not just an institution for professional training, but a true center of research, discovery, and attainment of truth, based on the fraternal cooperation of teachers and students. Teaching and scholarly work were seen as two inseparable sides of a single inner disposition. One of the key principles of the new university was the autonomy of scholarly work, which was to determine its own goals and methods, not subject to political or religious authorities. It was this reform that laid the foundation for Germany’s tremendous success as a leading power. Before 1933, German scientists had won more Nobel Prizes than their British and American counterparts combined. But then things changed. Ironically, the idea of the academic autonomy of universities – institutions funded by the state but independent of its influence – has over time come to be seen in the spirit of the old traditions of corporatism and rebelliousness.

From Friedrich Nietzsche to Raymond Aron, a sad corpus of literature devoted to describing the shortcomings of Western universities has developed in various countries. Thus, reflecting on the pathetic figure of the “chronically dissatisfied” intellectual who “combines resentment and arrogance,” Karl Popper wrote some of his most furious pages: “At all times it has been we intellectuals who, through cowardice, arrogance, and hubris, have been the ones who have done the worst things.” However, since the days of Raymond Aron and Popper, with the advent of woke culture and cancel culture, the situation has only gotten worse.

In the innumerable bibliography on academic conflict, there is one notable story. Since God created a university professor, a creature of the highest order, endowed with generosity, culture, and intelligence, the devil also decided to create a similar creature, but endowed with malice, ignorance, and stupidity: thus came the university professor’s colleague. There is an obvious implication in this parable: a university professor tends to have an extremely high opinion of himself, but not so high an opinion of his colleagues. At the same time, his colleague has the same position, only in relation to everyone else. And it’s not just a funny story. Evil tongues say that almost every true intellectual is sure in his heart that all other intellectuals are either talentless or a fraud – with the exception, of course, of himself and his narrow circle. Just imagine what these people think of Trump and Vance.