The Invisible College of the Future

John Pistelli on the university escape pod option

Dear Republic,

Substack ironman

John Pistelli

leads off the discussion of the future of universities by arguing that… they have no future. Or — more precisely — that the university has to migrate into digital, and more informal spaces, as part of a pursuit of life-long learning.

The Republic of Letters welcomes thoughtful responses to this post — as to all posts. If you don’t like what John is saying — or want to add to it — please feel free to send your own post to republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com and The Republic of Letters can pay to run it. The deadline is ticking down for the contest on “What Has Happened to Literary Men?” (Sunday is the last day to submit.) This piece by

Henry Oliver

may provide more fuel for thought.

-The Editor

THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE OF THE FUTURE

When I began offering a series of literature courses for paid subscribers to my Substack last year, I chose, more out of whim than careful calculation, to name the initiative The Invisible College. The phrase refers historically to an unofficial group of 17th-century proto-scientists who corresponded to keep up with one another’s research. In that sense, it has little to do with my remarkably unscientific project of trying to perpetuate discussion of the best classic, modern, and contemporary literature in the age of the declining or dying English major. But inasmuch as the natural philosophers of the original Invisible College were attempting to produce modern knowledge outside a still-medieval university system, the name fits. When the visible college fails to meet the needs of the moment, an invisible one must take its place.

Arguably, in letting the humanities die, the visible college is meeting the needs of the moment. As Jean-François Lyotard pointed out as far back as 1979 in his classic The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, the centralizing modern university, with its goal of training an elite corps of rational citizens to manage the Enlightenment nation-state, was already giving way to a postmodern university, a series of knowledge hubs as decentered as its globalized student body, and dedicated to training its pupils in how to perform effectively in an ever more computerized and relativistic world. The postmodern world, Lyotard judged, held an “incredulity toward metanarratives,” including the modern university’s metanarrative of rationality and progress. While Lyotard can be abstruse, and while his research for his “report” was largely made up, his theory is almost enough to explain the ethos of practical vocational training overseen by administrators acting in loco parentis that tends to govern higher education today.

As for my academic specialty of literary studies, its historians, such as Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) and J. Hillis Miller in On Literature (2002), point out that it once fit into the modern university as the part of the curriculum that would see to the students’ Bildung, their development into cultured and self-governing citizens, as well as uniting the nation, divided by class, around shared cultural objects, i.e., the classics. Its role in the postmodern university, if any? As Lyotard, Eagleton, and Miller all imply, a properly postmodern literary curriculum will first deconstruct all extant metanarratives and then erect the new one of respect for difference; this, too, fits today’s ethos of higher education, one where even the Trump administration justifies its heavy-handed initiatives against student protestors and radical curricula with reference to protecting students of marginalized identity groups from prejudice.

It probably sounds like I am criticizing the postmodern university, and I suppose I am. I am not only the first person in my family to get a Ph.D. but was even the first to get a B.A., and I was always dazzled, like any parvenu, by the splendor of the great world I was attempting to enter, typified in my case by the Gothic Revival spire of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning — the second tallest university building in the world — as it rears into view when you come out of downtown and enter Oakland, the city’s university neighborhood. I was horrified when I read Virginia Woolf’s proposal for a flammable university of the future in her late radical tract, Three Guineas (1938) — a university that “must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions.” This struck me as a typically patronizing gesture from a member of the privileged progressive intelligentsia who can’t imagine that the children of the working- or lower-middle-classes might ever concern themselves with magnificence, might ever want to repurpose tradition for themselves. Then again, another glory of the University of Pittsburgh is that it’s not so much a campus — a cloistered set of educational and residential facilities set apart from the life of the city, like the University of Minnesota, where I went to graduate school — but an institution very loosely occupying its neighborhood, a university pieced out through two wide avenues and their many cross-streets and byways, in among stores and restaurants and bars and cafés and apartment buildings and professional buildings and public libraries and museums, as if you might run into a major poet or theoretical physicist around any corner, nestled between a Starbucks and a florist.

From these fragments of history and autobiography, I want to assemble a vision of the future university, an ideal or utopian university. The modern university is almost certainly gone for good, gone with the dream of secular progress embodied in the modern nation-state it was created to serve. The postmodern critique of this dream is easy to deride, but for too many over the course of two centuries marked by imperialism and totalitarianism, it proved a nightmare, which, above all, was Lyotard’s point in the first place. But the postmodern university, in the name of respect for difference and of pragmatism, has, like the incendiary Woolf of Three Guineas, surrendered the beauty and wisdom that may be recovered from the nightmare of history and put to new uses by new constituencies and new generations. The students of the future don’t need bureaucratic pseudo-parenting by a neurotic succession of overbearing maternalist-liberal and paternalist-conservative governments; they need to have “the best that has been thought and said” put into their own possession for their own purposes.

For now, this education in the humanities — I am unqualified to comment on the sciences — may have to happen largely outside the university walls, invisibly, disseminated in online channels, subscribed to voluntarily, without official “homework” or grades — these only ever existed anyway to prepare the student for a lifetime of office drudgery, deadlines, and assessments — and attended at leisure by those of any age wishing to fortify their minds with knowledge or augment their experience with beauty. The university of the future will be the invisible accompaniment of lifelong learners, not a four-year resort for belated adolescents. And who knows what such students will discover? It is the mind wandering at leisure, not the mind chased by moralists or subjected to metrics, that stumbles across new forms of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

John Pistelli writes

Grand Hotel Abyss

and offers courses on literature at The Invisible College. His novel — serialized on Substack and published by Belt — is Major Arcana.