We are very grateful to publish, in two instalments, this contribution by David Engels. This is the slightly revised English translation of his “Auswege aus der Bildungsmisere: ein neues Cluny?,” published in H. Schulze-Eisentraut / A. Ulfig (eds.), Das Ende der Universität. Niedergang und mögliche Erneuerung einer europäischen Institution, Baden-Baden 2024, 168-179.
Part 1. The shipwreck of modern academia
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.
Source: https://www.cieo.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/callum-shaw-wUCksfbKYJI-unsplash-2048×1366.jpg
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.
Dr David Engels, Lux Mundi Advisory Board