Imagine a place where university lectures are rewarded not when students learn, but when they don’t? Imagine this display of majestic rivers, vast forests, and beautiful cities, where a lecturer who fails a student is scolded for “wasting money” by her Department Head. The reason? Universities receive their paycheck when the student with maximum velocity has been whisked through the system towards graduation – whether or not the student has learned anything. Try to picture a place where universities, instead of allowing the student to draw his or her own conclusions, offer courses “against Samuel Huntington” and his thesis about the Clash of Civilisations? Where diversity and multiculturalism have morphed from perspective to ideological baseline? Where diversity – hence – is at once preached and prevented? Where professors are being streamlined, computerized, commodified, where AI is hailed as saviour against the fatal influence of intellectuals and dissenters, and where the state prohibits any university research about any issues that might offend anyone for any reason – which means the university´s critical function is wiped out with a stroke of a pen? Where rigorous thinking among students is prohibited because their only justification is the extent in which they can prove useful as a clog in the state machinery. Imagine this place, finally, where the reputation of a university no longer depends on its professors but on its prestigious and ever-expanding Department of Information, effortlessly trying to outrun the free-fall in international repute with increasingly glossier folders, media campaigns, and pictures of laughing students where not a shade in skin complexion is missing.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cole_Thomas_The_Course_of_Empire_Destruction_1836.jpg
Did you manage to imagine this place? Well done, it requires some effort. And yet, it exists – you will find it on Google Maps. And what does this unfortunate country tell us here at Lux Mundi? If offers a useful counter-image. It shows us, if I may be so bold, what we are not. We have no Department of Information, and we do not plan to set one up either. The reputation of Lux Mundi as an academic institution relies solely on the skills of our professors along with the feedback of our students. We are not thrilled by image, but by real impact. We adhere to the Humboldtian idea, whereby the university is assigned the role of a society´s critical conscience, going back, at the end of the day, upon the independent student. Turning university students into bureaucratic cogs and state servants in anything but name is a betrayal of the entire idea of higher education, and, by implications, of the general idea of a self-conscious, open and resilient society. We do not give a pass to students out of some sordid, financial incentive. We are merely intellectual gatekeepers, and all students who work hard shall be rewarded. The professors at Lux Mundi are not hired because we are streamlined, but because we offer students a plethora of divergent perspectives – and yes – we practise true diversity, even though we might not preach it. We will teach about a topic, not against or in favour of it. We offer a range of ideas and values and trust the students can chose what to believe themselves. At Lux Mundi, we tell and learn students to think, not what to think.
I am not saying state servants and bureaucrats are of lesser merit. They are vital for the smooth functioning of society. As Max Weber, the father of sociology might put it, without efficient bureaucracies, transparent institutions, and the rule of law, the jungle is around the corner. However, the task of the university is not to tame young minds into state officials and assign them a rather smallish office in which they shall exercise their sharply constricted applied expertise, but to widen their intellectual horizons and set them genuinely free from suffocating ideology and the shackles of group-think. At Lux Mundi, we are proud to belong to this classic intellectual tradition.
Göran Adamson, Lux Mundi Advisory Board