The three missions of academics are currently teaching, research, and community service. The latter are conceived as writing reports, at the request of the city, publishing essays for a cultured external audience—which are sometimes scorned and very generally neglected in the analysis of academic careers, at least in so-called scientific faculties—popularizing science, participating in debates on issues that concern society, or knowledge, or even transmitting useful know-how. As we can see, this is a process where the professor “goes out” of the university to communicate generally well-documented messages.
Another thing is to let political issues and societal quarrels into the institution; this is unfortunately a strong trend at the moment.
It started with the events of May 68, the Vietnam War and the major student protests; this continues today with societal debates such as those concerning feminism, harassment, the veil problem, migration, the climate, the question of “gender”—which resulted in the adoption in universities of so-called inclusive writing, an insult to grammar opportunely condemned by the French Academy—etc. These subjects crystallize antagonisms and generate “conference-debates” which are only such in name because it is common for certain speakers to be prevented from speaking by agitators for whom freedom of expression is a vain thing. An example that has remained in the memory is agitators sabotaging a conference by Caroline Fourest at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). I also remember a difficult debate during a conference by the philosopher Alain Renaut at the ULB, which went badly after an audience member questioned the question of the Islamic veil.
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At the same time, university institutions, which should remain neutral and stick to the daily management of the institution, support various movements and even go so far as to welcome undocumented immigrants into their premises, which results in rendering them unusable on the one hand and degrading them on the other. This is to forget that the taxpayer finances the university to provide education to those who are deemed worthy of it, and not so that the equipment is used in the service of any cause, however honourable it may be, and ultimately to compensate for the negligence of the political authorities, the xenophobic overbidding of certain parties in the north of the country and the lack of sensitivity and efficiency of the Immigration Office and its police force. The recent case of an economics student of Congolese origin, duly registered at the Catholic University of Louvain, who was locked up in a closed centre upon his arrival, is a very good example of this.
The intrusion of these questions, however legitimate they may be, is likely to encourage the establishment, even involuntarily, of a kind of thought police at the university. For example, the opprobrium is upon you if you have the misfortune to believe—and to say—that it is not enough for activists supported by certain politicians and gutter journalists to desecrate the statues of former sovereigns for it to be admitted without any form of trial that scientific objects taken during the colonial era must automatically be “returned” to their country of origin. This deserves debate, where priority would be given to the scientific interest of preserving this material in an institution capable of studying and promoting it. Anyone who would challenge the ill-considered decision to repatriate—often in conditions where the country receiving the remains would not have the scientific infrastructure to collect them; their destiny would be at best to be buried and at worst to be trafficked—taken under pressure would quickly be called a “racist,” the ultimate ostracizing insult that denies the person who is accused of it the slightest right to express themselves and immediately puts them out of the game. In a case similar to this one, woe betide anyone who, with scientific and historical evidence to support it, would try to contest the current journalistic disinformation campaign that tends to attribute to the Belgian colonizers imaginary or at least extremely rare abuses imposed on African populations, and this without proof. For example, by asserting peremptorily and without analysis that medical amputations of the hand or leprosy lesions are in reality “hands cut off” as retaliation. Should we also accept that anthropologists, especially Anglo-Saxon ones, under the influence of postcolonial theories, set themselves up as censors and even categorically reject the possibility of using anthropometry, or even genetics, in order to characterize particular populations in museum collections? Whether we deny it or not, this is a return to the Inquisition. The cancel culture and woke cultureare modern forms of obscurantism.
The same observations apply to other issues such as gender policy, positive discrimination—which is discrimination—environmental issues, “mobility”—one would be more tempted to speak of immobility, given current urban policies, particularly that of the Brussels Region—etc. An increasingly dominant doxa is imposed in the institution and contributes to considerably reducing academic freedom, and freedom of expression in general from the moment when we know that a proven fact, if it is disseminated, risks arousing violent protests if it is contrary to the general idea that the man in the street, political figures or the journalistic world, or even some of our colleagues, have of it. We can say that it is considered self-evident that the entire academic community adheres to the implicit values of cultural leftism as defined by Jean-Pierre Le Goff in opposition to the historical and authentic social left.
Add to this the current tendency to general guilt over past events and the cathartic need to apologize for events for which, here and now, no one is responsible. On this score, it will probably be necessary one day to apologize for the Crusades or for Charlemagne’s destruction of the sacred tree of Irminsul at the same time as for the beheading of the Saxons who refused to convert.
In all these questions, social networks, which broadcast anything and everything and make everyone believe that they are supposed to master all knowledge, play a more than deleterious role. The beginnings of the thing were already perceptible at the end of the 1960s. Lucien Morin, a student of Gusdorf, denounced in a book what he called the opinionitis, that is, the tendency to consider that an opinion is automatically legitimate and good to say simply because it is “mine” and that I therefore have the right to express it without verification, even if it is wrong. This tendency has spread like the plague since social networks and the internet appeared, and it sometimes generates a systematic distrust of professors, but also of health practitioners and experts in general. The result is that from the moment an idea, even false, circulates freely in the city, it becomes very difficult, even dangerous, to contradict it without risking opprobrium, a little and again as if we had returned to the time of the Inquisition.
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We can thus see that the intrusion into the university of passionate questions that agitate society is likely to upset the fragile balance of the institution, to shatter its serenity, and to reduce its freedom of expression within it and also outside its walls. It would, therefore, seem legitimate to us that universities question the relevance of continuing to be too actively involved in these questions in such a militant and sometimes unsubtle manner. In fact, one only has to look through the newsletters published by universities to see to what extent the doxa bobo/eco and political correctness constitute its mainstays, in place of erudition, criticism, and a certain form of tradition.
I am well aware, however, that some will consider it of the utmost importance that the university takes up these issues, takes clear positions in the associated debates, and is at the forefront of certain battles. And that the university, by virtue of its insertion in the social fabric, must get involved in the problems that concern the city that hosts it, finances it, and supports it. That it analyzes the facts and arguments that underlie these issues, denounces untruths, is very good, takes a position in an institutional capacity—and considers it implicit that everyone adheres to it—is quite another thing!
For my part, I remain convinced, on the contrary, that by proceeding in this way, it renounces what constitutes its dignity: its suprafunctionality, its extraterritoriality and its mission of creation, conservation and transmission of high knowledge, sheltered from the political quarrels of a world that we would like to describe as “profane.”
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Image: “Université Libre de Bruxelles Franklin Rooseveltlaan Brussel” by Sally V on Wikimedia Commons
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
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