The Nihilistic Crisis of the University
- Samuel Loncar
- Oct 26
- 10 min read
Samuel Loncar
Nihilism is killing the university, and not for the first time. The German university was the crown jewel of European culture in the 19th-century, the pinnacle and vanguard of scientific progress, and the exemplar of what a wise partnership between state-funding and education could be. As I document in my report on the university and its crisis of values, The Enlightenment’s Apocalypse: Harvard, Antisemitism, and the Future of Science, by the 1870s, which saw the birth of academically legitimated “secular” antisemitism, European science, philosophy, and religion were in crisis. Put simply, relativism had come knocking, and no one knew how to welcome the guest without it wreaking havoc, or keep the door shut without it being broken down.
The result is that some of the world’s most impressive academics, including Martin Heidegger, were talking by the mid-1930s about the unique destiny of “Aryan science” and mocking the idea of disinterested and universal knowledge as an infection of “Jewish” science, which had no place in the new Reich. We want to dismiss such an outcome as the raving of lunatics but this is a dangerous delusion. The fate of the German university in the Third Reich represents not intellectual stupidity—quite the opposite—but the leering face of nihilism, which often arrives with the fierce energy of Thrasymachus. As W.B. Yeats put it so perfectly in “The Second Coming,”
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
The German university a century ago was full of immense energy and great scientists and scholars, but the new ideological idea of the university, rooted in relativism and Realpolitik, destroyed the proper direction of their talent, wasted their intellects, corrupted their results, and led a great nation of scholars to justify genocide as a moral and scientific ideal. For a harrowing summary of where German academia ended, one should read the historian Niall Ferguson’s essay, “The Treason of the Intellectuals.”
When a relativist sneers at the idea of ultimate values, one must politely ask: how would they would critique the idea of a uniquely Aryan science? What is wrong with a special Soviet form of knowledge, necessary to make the New Man? Why should there not be a unique destiny for Germany, such that it alone knows the true spirit (Geist) and future of science?
The heads of universities had better have excellent philosophical answers to these questions. They do not. And that is why bureaucracy, left to itself, is not neutral or indifferent. Rather, it becomes the primary vehicle of nihilism. One may disavow truth with a Nietzschean scoff, but to realize one’s goals requires organization and money, the calculated coordination of means-and-ends. What does it matter where the trains go, so long as they go smoothly? It is imperative we stop pretending that this is a rhetorical question.
Thus, as I argue in the report, the future of science, of scholarship as a whole, depends on the capacity of Harvard, and the university system, to overcome this longstanding crisis of contested values and their validity. Since the early 20th-Century, universities have struggled and, as we can now see, failed to articulate their own value to themselves, the public, and their societies. Rather than scorn this failure, which serves no one but those deluded into thinking they have gained nothing from the university, and will lose nothing by its decline, we should recognize its meaning. The university’s crisis is not incidental to, but the most consequential manifestation of, the existential crisis of the world today. Absent a shared commitment to a vision of what human beings are and what they are for, defending the value of anything demands navigating deep conflict.
The Marginalia Review of Books is an academic institution for the public good, and thus we share the academic ethic of the university, but, unlike many universities, we are unashamedly committed to that ethic. It is not controversial, to me, as the Editor-in-Chief, to say I personally believe in truth, science, and scholarship and direct the institution accordingly. These are the proper lowercase “gods” of any scholar or university, and to abandon them is to deny the only system in which we can meaningfully, because rationally, debate our deepest values.
Peter Harrison, the former Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, and Co-Director of Marginalia’s Meanings of Science Project, recently gave a lecture series and published a timely essay on this theme, “How our universities became disenchanted: Secularization, bureaucracy, and the erosion of values.” In it, Harrison draws attention to the fact that many universities, and books defending them, speak of the “good,” noting the that such
“[R]eferences to “the good” highlight the fact that, ultimately, questions about the meaning and purpose of universities comes back to the things that we value as a society. But there have been major historical shifts in what we imagine “the good” to consist in, and there is now unprecedented disagreement about how to answer that question.
Arguments based on the intrinsic good of universities or a university education often assume values that turn out not to be widely shared, or which are simply vestiges of a previous era. Appeals to instrumental goods do not obviate this problem either, since arguments about what things are good for must ultimately terminate in some, often tacit, notion of intrinsic good (as Aristotle insisted). Arguments based on usefulness, in other words, simply postpone what must eventually be an appeal to what we ultimately value…”
This is the crucial point from which any meaningful discussion of the university crisis must begin, yet it is often ignored. Why? Because people do not want to deal with ultimate values, perhaps because they lack them, lack confidence in them, or fear that by professing them, they will endanger their reputation. So instead of practicing the necessary philosophy that anyone serious about running an institution devoted to knowledge must practice, we turn to a failed proxy for ultimate values: relative and instrumental values, which amount to what “we” happen to care about at the moment, the “we” here being the directors of academic institutions.
In place of substantive debates about the good, the instrumental values of bureaucracy reign supreme, masked under whatever the fashionable ideology of the moment happens to be. But behind the ever changing fads, what sociologist Andrew Abbot identifies as “generational paradigms,” the scholarly trends that allow each generation to be apparently original and ignore past work, there lies the core logic of bureaucratic systems. What is that logic? It is easiest to understand by putting it negatively: No bureaucracy naturally shrinks.
This may be as close to law of nature as one can find in social science. The logic of bureaucracy, then, is expansion and measurement for their own sake. Measurement, the bureaucratic proxy for rational assessment, increasingly dominates education, just as the sociologist and philosopher Max Weber predicted. Harrison suggests with compelling evidence the tendency of the bureaucratization of the university is to measure what is easy to measure, not what is most valuable.
Academic administrators thus do not think it is their job to solve apparently insuperable philosophical problems, like relativism, but they are wrong about that. And that is why they have, on the whole, failed to steward the enormous and invaluable resources in reputation, libraries, and faculty at their disposal. New ventures focused on the students of the university, like the University of Texas at Austin, should be applauded, even as systemic reform of the research university itself remains essential. Such reforms must be rooted in a compelling philosophical defense of the research university for an era dominated by digital technology, AI, and the decline of literacy.
Deferring debates about ultimate values means in practice caving into to whatever sector of society is most ruthless and effective in imposing their ultimate values on the university, and this means betraying the ethic of the university. A university does not have to know, or say, whether God exists, but it must know, and confess with genuine commitment, why it exists. The answer, to create and communicate knowledge, only has meaning practically if it shapes the ethic of knowledge creation and communication.
The University of Chicago sociologist Edward Shils was one of the most attentive scholars of the university in the 20th-century, and in his extended essay, “The Academic Ethic,” he says:
“When one has entered voluntarily into the academic profession, one commits oneself to observance of the norms of disinterested scrutiny of evidence and of logical reasoning. It is an obligation to which one submits as a condition of entering the profession. Of course, this is not done in the form of an oath but that does not make the obligation less binding. This obligation extends to every sphere in which the academic acts in a capacity in which academic knowledge is involved and in which the academic intimates or asserts explicitly that his opinion carry the authority of disciplined study.”
As I document, however, in The Enlightenment’s Apocalypse (and in greater depth in the book I am writing), this academic ethic is not accepted in the university today. And when the basic ethic of a profession is denied, the capacity for the profession to maintain its professional standards erodes. This erosion predicts that over time, a profession without an ethic will gradually, and then rapidly, fail to realize its core value, in this case, creating and communicating knowledge. On any fraught subject, whether antisemitism, anti-Zionism, religion and politics, religion and violence, or science skepticism, there exists a body of excellent scholarship. That is one of the beautiful realities of the university system.
But that knowledge exists like a needle in a haystack, or, as Max Weber put it, like a drop in the ocean of knowledge. Similarly, the value of the university, of science and scholarship as a whole, has been studied fruitfully and impressively for generations. But actively valuing that knowledge, and investing the money and skill needed to communicate and develop it, is an entirely different matter. That has not happened, at any level, with any subject, in the university, leastwise its own purpose.
Thus we have the baffling reality that the university, science, the humanities, the arts, and poetry all seem self-evidently valuable to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of individuals, yet there has been no persuasive communication of this value to the public or other stakeholders.
The importance of communicating the value of the university is directly connected to what the Marginalia Review of Books is. You may have noticed that we are much more than just a magazine; we are also a think tank advocating for and embodying the values and vision needed to bring the university into the 21st Century. Above all, this requires making scholarship accessible to everyone who needs it, including other academics, the public, and policy-makers, and that means an intensive input of editing, integrating insights across disciplines, asking people to focus on the meaning of their work, and actively commissioning large-scale projects, like our Forums, to bring sustained focus to critical concepts and issues.
There is far too much knowledge for it to mean anything or be effectively communicated unless there is an integrative function, like the central nervous system, focused on the value of this knowledge for the whole system.
Marginalia is the evolution of the research university for the digital age, and we exist at the crossroads of journalism and scholarship, democratic accessibility and rigorous knowledge creation, because the university failed to naturally evolve such a mechanism to explain, interpret, and advocate for its own value. The medieval university was an artifact of manuscript culture. The research university was founded on print culture and the need to sift and integrate and overwhelming mass of new information and knowledge.
But the shift to the internet has not produced an effective evolution of the university to the radically new technological and social conditions of knowledge, in which the costs of access have been dramatically reduced, yet the mass of information and knowledge has been correlatively increased. This makes the most valuable and essential role of the university today the meaningful synthesis, communication, and evolution of knowledge for the world. In short, the university, and science, require the poetic touch, the moment of wholeness that turns an assemblage of parts into a living whole. When we truly understand anything, we see not a variety of disconnected data points, but a unity. That is the poetic perception that knowledge, at its highest level, achieves.
That is why we are here: Marginalia exists to meaningfully integrate, communicate, and advance knowledge for the digital age. This is not a project separate from art, but it is itself an aesthetic project of a higher order. I have been inspired for 20 years by my first scholarly love: German Romanticism and Idealism. The German Romantics’ vision to “poeticize the world,” inspired by J.G. Hamann and articulated in “The Oldest System Program of German Idealism,” has guided me throughout my own scholarly evolution, marrying my research in German Idealism, Kierkegaard, and theology to my work in the history and philosophy of science and the university.
Marginalia thus has a focus on fields as a whole, their cutting edge debates and evolution, and the high-impact work that may need to be created and synthesized to address major issues. My work as the editor and director of research at Marginalia has been inseparable from the book I have been writing, in which the integrated history of philosophy, religion, and science centers a new story of what it means to be human after the decline of traditional religion, the loss of science’s original religious foundations, and the growth of techno-religions seeking to eradicate human meaning.
It is not an accident we publish extensively on the historiography of science, religion, and history, because these areas together define practically all lower-level debate in journalism, politics, and society. Having access to the world’s best thinking on these topics is essential for a flourishing and free global society, and I am interested in what the most considered experts, read together, have to teach us. My response to nihilism is not an assertion, but an institution, proving how much meaningful work humans have already done to resolve their own deepest crises.
Truth has never been in crisis. Humans are, because they have lost faith in it. That is understandable.
History has a brutal streak, and hope wears a crooked smile, but the university is the guardian of truth, and that is not a job for bureaucrats (whose skills I admire) as such, but for lovers of wisdom, who should use the tools of bureaucracy to advance the pursuit of wisdom, not to neutralize debates or avoid difficult questions.
If we cannot defeat nihilism in the university, where can we go? It will follow us home. Nihilism has long ago taken hold of our religions and our social reform movements, and is now threatening the last bastion of American hope and optimism, Silicon Valley, cynically marrying marketing with technological tyranny, bureaucracy and social engineering.
The last embers of the spiritual passion for knowledge do exist, it must be admitted, far more in Silicon Valley than in the university, and thus a viable future depends on its West Coast idealism and its love of science and learning. Whether the university system as a whole can embrace this and learn from it, remains to be seen.
Samuel Loncar earned his Ph.D. at Yale University, where he received a Baron Foundation Grant for his research on antisemitism. A philosopher and historian of science, religion, and technology, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the Marginalia Review of Books, the Director of the Institute for the Meanings of Science, and the Founder of the Center for Jewish Christian Understanding. His speaking and consulting clients include the United Nations, Flagship Pioneering, Trinity Church Wall Street, Shabtai, and Oliver Wyman. His work focuses on integrating separated spaces, including philosophy and poetry, science and spirituality, and the academic-public divide. He is currently finishing his first book, Philosophy as Science and Religion from Plato to Posthumanism, for Columbia University Press. Follow him on X@samuelloncar.
