Some pages from Stéphane Louryan's book
Autopsy of the University: A Look at University Education and Its Evolution
Editions F. Deville, Brussels, 2023.

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 messages that are generally well documented.

Another thing is to let political issues and societal quarrels into the institution; this is unfortunately a strong trend at the moment.

It began with the events of May 68, the Vietnam War ^[1] and the major student protests; it continues today with societal debates such as those concerning feminism, harassment, the issue of the veil, migration, climate change, the question of "gender" (which led to the adoption in universities of so-called inclusive writing, an insult to grammar conveniently condemned by the French Academy), etc. These subjects crystallize antagonisms, generating "debate-conferences" that are only so in name, since it is common for some speakers to be prevented from expressing themselves by agitators for whom freedom of expression is meaningless. One example that remains in people's minds is the sabotage of a lecture by Caroline Fourest at the Free University of Brussels (ULB) by agitators. I also remember a difficult debate during a conference by the philosopher Alain Renaut, also at the ULB, which went badly after a question from the audience about the issue of the Islamic veil.

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, risks fostering the establishment, even unintentionally, of a kind of thought police within the university. For example, you are ostracized if you have the misfortune to believe—and to say—that the mere fact that activists, supported by certain politicians and gutter journalists, desecrate the statues of former rulers is not enough to justify the automatic "return" of scientific objects taken during the colonial era to their country of origin. This deserves a debate, one in which the scientific value of preserving this material in an institution capable of studying and promoting it should be given priority. Anyone who would contest the ill-considered decision to repatriate the remains (often under conditions such that the country receiving them would lack the scientific infrastructure to collect them; their fate would be, at best, to be buried and, at worst, to be trafficked) taken under pressure would quickly be labeled a “racist” ^[2] , the ultimate ostracizing insult that denies the accused any right to speak and immediately disqualifies them. In a similar case, woe betide anyone who, with scientific and historical evidence to back them up, attempts to challenge the current journalistic disinformation campaign that seeks to attribute imaginary, or at the very least extremely rare, abuses inflicted on African populations by Belgian colonizers, and this without proof. For example, by peremptorily asserting, without analysis, that medical amputations of the hand or leprosy lesions are in reality "hands cut off" as reprisals. Must we also accept that anthropologists, especially Anglo-Saxon ones, under the influence of postcolonial theories, are setting themselves up as censors and even categorically rejecting the possibility of using anthropometry, or even genetics, to characterize specific populations in museum collections? Whether one denies it or not, this is a return to the Inquisition. " Cancel culture " and " woke culture " are modern forms of obscurantism ^[3] .

The same observations apply to other issues such as gender policy, affirmative action (which is itself discrimination!), environmental issues, “mobility” (one would be more inclined to speak of immobility, given current urban policies, particularly those of the Brussels Region), etc. An increasingly dominant orthodoxy is taking hold within the institution and contributing to a considerable reduction of academic freedom, and indeed freedom of expression in general, from the moment it is understood that a proven fact, if disseminated, risks provoking violent protests if it contradicts the general idea held by the average person, political figures, or the journalistic world, or even some of our colleagues. It can be said that it is taken for granted 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 ^[4] .

Add to this the current tendency to general guilt over past events, 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 the destruction of the sacred tree of Irminsul by Charlemagne, at the same time as for the beheading of the Saxons who refused to convert.

In all these issues, social media, which disseminates anything and everything and leads everyone to believe they are supposed to possess all knowledge, plays a more than detrimental role. The beginnings of this were already perceptible in the late 1960s. Lucien Morin, a student of Gusdorf, denounced in a book what he called " opinionitis ," that is, the tendency to believe that an opinion is automatically legitimate and worth expressing simply because it is "mine" and I therefore have the right to express it without verification, even if it is wrong. This tendency has spread like wildfire since the advent of social media and the internet, and it sometimes generates systematic distrust of professors, but also of healthcare professionals and experts in general. The result is that from the moment an idea, even a false one, 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.

Thus, we see that the intrusion into the university of passionate issues that agitate society is likely to disrupt the institution's fragile equilibrium, shatter its serenity, and curtail its freedom of expression both within its walls and beyond. It would therefore seem legitimate for universities to question the wisdom of continuing to engage so actively in these issues in such a militant and sometimes simplistic manner. Indeed, one only needs to peruse the newsletters published by universities to see how the prevailing ideology of the bourgeois/environmentalist movement and political correctness has replaced erudition, critical thinking, and a certain kind 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, that it denounces untruths, that is very good, that it takes a position in an institutional capacity (and that it 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".