Reading note on the book by Stéphane Louryan, University autopsy

In this small book, Professor Stéphane Louryan gives us a look at the Belgian university. Any resemblance to the French university is unfortunately not fortuitous: we are experiencing the same evolution, the same headlong rush of teachers in the face of students' ukases, the same omnipotence of a bloated administration. It is often believed that the university is made for the creation and dispensation of knowledge, so that students use their available brain time (the one that is not taken up by social gossip) to enter the world of thought and knowledge, so that teachers, for their part, contribute to the construction of new knowledge, climbing on the shoulders of their predecessors to try to see further than them. Serious error: Stéphane Louryan shows us that the university is first and foremost made to be administered. The pedagogy? The quality of the courses? The selective recruitment of the most promising students and the most passionate teachers? What's the point? Students are not there to learn but to have a good time, nice and warm. While reading Stéphane Louryan's book, I thought back to this injunction from a student at an American university to one of her professors.^{[1]Valentin P. Understanding the woke revolution.} : “Your job is to create a place of comfort and a home for students […]. You didn’t do it!”

Stéphane Louryan introduces us to the founding principles of the Belgian university, which was created according to the German model of the Humboldtian university of the 19th century.^e century: academic freedom, autonomy, "free reign of thought" according to Hegel; it provides us with a wealth of fascinating references drawn from authors such as Georges Gusdorf who shaped Western thought in the 20th century^e century. One of the interests of Stéphane Louryan's approach lies in his knowledge of secondary education and its articulation with university education: we must certainly seek the excesses of the Belgian or French university in the resignation of the rectorial and academic administration and the "no waves" erected as a system up to the top of the hierarchy.

Another interesting point, which would deserve a thorough study, is the fact that Belgium has not considered the separation of Church and State. The concept of secularism that serves as our guide^{[2]Kintzler C. Thinking about secularism. Minerva, 2014.} does not apply in Belgium, where religions are financed by the public authorities. Certainly, Stéphane Louryan tells us (p. 119) that representatives of the episcopate sit on the management committee of the Catholic University of Louvain; but this is not the case of the Free University of Brussels, where he taught for several decades, which was created on the principle of free examination but which, due to certain well-meaning (and well-known) pressures, seems to be moving away from it. Why tolerate "what free thinkers rebelled against in the XNUMXth century"?^e century? asks Stéphane Louryan. And we can only agree with him.

Finally, the problem of the necessary integration between teaching and research opens a necessary discussion. I personally believe that the creation of the CNRS (and INSERM) was an excellent thing, which Stéphane Louryan seems to doubt. CNRS and university, in France, are much less separated than he thinks, and the CNRS comes to fertilize many laboratories under the university. The recent political will to transform the CNRS into a "resource agency" is a dramatic error that will transform French research into a mosaic of small chapels subject to the good will of local potentates: instead of raising the university to the top, it will level the whole to the lowest level.

A mass university that came to replace the "community of scholars", an entrepreneurial university where administration triumphs, domination of the student-king who shapes all by himself what he wants to learn in predigested handouts and does not hesitate to resort to fraud, atomization of programs and frenzy of reforms^{[3]The mathematician André Weil had proposed that an article of the Constitution should be worded as follows: "There will be no reform of education during the hundred years following the promulgation of the Constitution."}, intrusion of the legal system into the university, deficient evaluation of careers, power of mandarins and warlords, myth of university autonomy, Stéphane Louryan spares us nothing: I am only citing the different chapters, brief and incisive, which follow one another in his work that I invite you to discover.

The conclusion is clear and lies in the title of the book: if the author performs an autopsy of the university, it is because it is dead… I do not think we need to go that far. The French university has survived, since the 13th century^e century, to multiple aggressions that it has been able to dominate. It is a process used in France since the Middle Ages: the Sorbonne and the Collège de France were created in the 13th century^e and in the XVI^e centuries respectively, in reaction against the University of Paris, the High Council of the Francophonie against the French Academy whose missions it took over, INSERM and the CNRS to compensate for the shortcomings of the universities, etc. I am undoubtedly more optimistic than Stéphane Louryan, and I hope that the university, Belgian or French, will know how to "digest" the protean monsters that are trying to stifle it...