The Enlightenment University: A Seductive Myth
Universities, historically, were not bastions of free speech but, simply, bastions.
View of Magdalen College, Oxford, founded in the 15th century by Bishop William Waynflete who was not a broker in the free marketplace of ideas.
For any given person, there is a discipline that they will never acquire, a field of knowledge that we will never grasp. The holes in our knowledge can be due to a number of factors. One is that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. Sometimes there are mysterious but deep mismatches between a person and some field of human understanding. I, for instance, am at a loss for biology. Species and their habits will never interest me, and I will remain wholly ignorant of it, perhaps forever. It is not ignorance per se, but a more intrinsic lack of aptitude.
The fact remains, however, that I inhabit a body. I live in a living world which is surrounded by organisms. I lack interest in a field of study, yes, but that discipline points to a reality that I cannot deny out of ignorance or indifference. We are always lingering on the periphery of some subject we don’t care about enough to investigate. As much as we’d like, we cannot escape it. From time to time, I will express an opinion which is contingent on some fact about nature. I studied the history of art, but in order to make any interpretation I have to assume certain things about perception and vision. These assumptions may be completely wrong, or parodically oversimplified.
The situation I am trying to describe is where one really should, morally, pronounce ignorance on a topic and leave it well alone. But, as I said, these topics can never be escaped. They have a powerful gravitational pull which means we are in the territory of a subject we don’t like, even if we think we’re discussing something else. As a result, all of us carry little ‘ideas’, in the Greek sense of an ‘image’, a ‘vision’ around with us to summarise the fields we don’t understand. These images of disciplines are the crudest of thumbnail images: they are not genuine knowledge.
History, I believe, sits in a unique position here. History is covered by a surface of powerful, influential ‘ideas’, which are often totally false but utterly compelling. These ideas shouldn’t be called ‘facts’, but they aren’t even ‘points of view’. I might call them ‘memes’, in Dawkins’ sense, because they spread due to evolutionary growth, rather than any apparent intellectual rigour. They are rarely explicitly articulated, because they are so simple and fundamental that they are almost embarrassing to explain. I said, earlier, that these ideas might be wrong. This specifically means that they are not necessarily wrong. I am going to consider one particularly tenacious ‘ideal’ history.
The ‘ideal’ history I am considering is one about universities, but it refers to broader debates about the nature of ‘modernity’ and historical growth. In particular, the idea is that universities were founded, and are fundamentally designed, with the view to protect freedom of speech. The university is, and always has been, a liberal programme. The university is a beacon of progress and intellectual foresight and truth. As one freedom-of-speech campaign at Cambridge, in the end of 2020 put it: “Liberalism is coming under attack from authoritarians of both left and right, yet it is the foundation on which modern academic life is built and our own university has contributed more than any other to its development over the past 811 years.”
814 years ago. That’s the year 1209. What was happening in the year 1209? Probably the most important event that year in Europe was the foundation of the Ordo Fratrum Minorum, more commonly known as the Franciscan Order. This religious foundation would flourish as the thirteenth century progressed, having a profound impact on European society by bringing preaching to its burgeoning urban centres. Franciscans, indeed, were partly ‘funded’ intellectual figures: they were a hugely dominant presence at the universities of Paris and of Oxford, second only to the Dominican Order. The reason they were present was with a specific aim in mind. They learned what they did to be effective, persuasive, and knowledgeable preachers. Preaching, like ‘sanctimoniousness’, is now a derogatory term. Both words began as straight-faced descriptions of the necessarily hierarchical nature of Christian instruction. Faith was not a dialogue. Yes, there were anchorites, individual holy women and men, a few radicals. These were the exceptions that proved the rule.
The most important event of the year 1209, then, was religious, not political. It speaks to an organisation of society utterly alien to modern life and would almost certainly loathe every aspect of it were the two ages to be confronted. I do not just mean the twenty-first century by ‘modern’, but also the eighteenth century, or even the seventeenth century. These were centuries where traditional religion had already been overturned, and monarchs could be beheaded and not be immediately replaced with other monarchs. Sure, six years after 1209 and the passing of Magna Carta happened. But King John did this for his barons, which were likely to cause trouble if he didn’t. He did not do this because he was a figurehead for Amnesty International. Before John was strong-armed into drawing up Magna carta, one of his royal powers was represented by the ‘Forest Laws’. For minor property crimes, especially poaching, individuals would be prosecuted aggressively and given remarkable punishments. A favourite was castration, and blinding (for the same individual). Such punishments crop up as a commonplace trope of Royal cruelty and arbitrariness in 12th century hagiographies, with figures like Saint William of York restoring sight (but not, apparently, testicles) to a man punished in this way.
Something else happens in 1209, in a certain midlands town. A university begins there. Why? The short answer is that some people got murdered, then some other people got executed, then people fled to a new place. Cambridge happened to be the destination. The violence was caused by a rift between the people of Oxford and their university. We know this happened because of Roger of Wendover’s account. Oddly, he doesn’t censure the violence, or pass comment on it at all. What he does take issue with is that the King’s order of execution of some fellows was in contemptum ecclesiasticae libertatis. The liberty of the church. Was this the liberty of speech? To have rigorous debate in a well-moderated public forum? Was this the liberty to explore challenging ideas outside of the status quo?
The liberty of the church refers to its separation from secular law. As one present-day scholar put it, this amounted to the liberty to “quite literally get away with murder”. This applied to students, as well as fellows, monks and churchmen. There are many accounts of ecclesiastical courts refusing to prosecute monks who had killed people, and the situation of universities was no different. The liberty of the church can be put tersely as the liberty of clergymen and anyone within their remit to get away with various crimes. Such ‘liberty’ would not be afforded always, of course, but this is not the point. Biases and injustices in society can still be pernicious and systematic without being entirely thorough.
What, then, of intellectual liberty? It is perhaps unsurprising to learn from this deeply unjust setup that there was not much intellectual liberty to speak of. John Wycliffe, who produced a middle-English bible translation in the 14th century, was dismissed from Oxford for criticism of the institutional church. In modern free-speech discourse, there is an assumption that the most important things are those that must be discussed. In medieval discourse, the assumption was that the most important things are those that must not be questioned. The medieval period as a time of intellectual darkness, superstition and authoritarianism— now this sounds like another ‘ideal’ history, a cartoonish misrepresentation.
Unlike the ‘liberal-medieval’ university, there is rather a lot of evidence for this dim view of the medieval period. The mass murder of the Albigensian heretical group, the Cathars, was occasioned because they had different ideas about God and religious practice. The authorities of Europe did not seek to argue against such views, but to kill its proponents. The countless blood-libels of European Jews in the period, particularly after the 12th century, also has an ‘intellectual’ character. What I mean by this is that the Jewish population was not just an ‘other’, loathed for pure xenophobia, but a mental threat. The Jewish presence was one that did not believe the same things about the Trinity, or about Christ as the rest. The ‘Catholic’ church could not be ‘catholic’ in the presence of Jews, because the very name stipulates absolute universality. Medieval rulers found a quick fix, which was simply to expel Jews. In England, the religion Jews were proscribed from 1290 all the way down to 1657. In Hannah Arendt’s postwar definition of propaganda, she describes it not merely as a form of information, but a means of dealing with the ‘nontotalitarian world’. Erasure is, then, just another, particularly effective form of propaganda. Medieval Christians may not have known this, but they performed it, which is more important.
Jews, along with Catholics, dissenters, and members of any other world religion were forbidden from taking degrees until the mid-19th century. Even then, the universities used the status of higher degrees and fellowship positions as a smokescreen to allow discrimination around those more prestigious achievements. The inequality was not properly resolved until 1871, when religious tests were wholly abolished. From foundation to the late years of the nineteenth century, genuine religious debate was quashed. There were no opponents to fight: only internal squabbles within the traditional accretions of Catholicism, or afterwards, Anglicanism.
To put this into the rhetoric of very big numbers, this intellectual solipsism lasted 662 years. That is only one example of the conservatism of universities. One could also cite the ludicrous treatment of women, or rather the refusal to acknowledge their existence, until the 19th century, and then the co-educational drive of the 1980s— 780 years. Universities, and most institutions for that matter, cannot be expected to move forwards. Save a few individuals that pass through them, they are brakes, not engines of progress; they yield myopia, not foresight.
The ‘idea’ that universities were a creative force in the history of liberalism belongs to the domain of fantasy. The solution to this misapprehension, and so many others is, appropriately enough, education. Empirical research and serious writing are obviously required. It is not in university students’ and graduates’ interests to check these myths about their almae matres, but they of all people should know better.