More Thoughts on Replacing College

Yes, nuke the universities… but it’s not enough that we escape the university system or destroy it.

We must also invent alternatives that accomplish similar ends and do it better, more cheaply, more efficiently, and in a way that forms virtuous culture instead of a depraved one.

Basic goals of college:

. forming intellect and habits of soul in the youth

. networking

. maintaining cultural memory through the transmission of texts

. providing access to libraries and knowledge through teachers and peers

. access to cultural leaders from all other nations

. sexual matchmaking in an intelligent, filtered environment

. rewarding the talented with special honors and positions

Surely, we can come up with an institution that helps facilitate these desirable goals much more effectively than is being done currently under communist-feminist-managerialist administrations.

Some churches could help in these tasks, but likely can only do so much when sectarian and without national support. Besides, churches should be wary of getting distracted with prestige tasks.

There are many other things to be concerned about regarding the nebulous state of colleges in American public life. I am primarily concerned with raising up a generation of thoughtful scribes for the kingdom of heaven. To do so, apart from aurally memorizing hundreds of pages of scripture and poetry, I assume we must be literate.

The old foundations are cracking because schools are losing access to students who know how to read visually or who have any sense of intellectual independence, having surrendered it variously to television, algorithmic feeds, or lately AI chat tools. Civilization cannot sustain itself given the current critical-reading ability of the young. Even if it might convey a memory of its present state and some of the 20th century well enough to future generations through video, I do not think it will be able to sustain itself while losing mass access to all the memories which have only been preserved with the written word.

We must found new literary societies that can function on a smaller scale in this great decay of letters. To keep the English language alive with treasures old and new, drawing upon forgotten poetry and histories, first and foremost from the sacred Christian scriptures… but also for the cultivation of elite missionary literati and cosmopolitan negotiation, gleanings from all canons of poetry, literature, and history. It’s not enough to make cold dissections of the past — the literate must must actively interrupt the new media and provide gateways of memory for the young and the creative to grab ahold of.

These societies should be able to professionally certify that individuals are literate on multiple ranks, whether at the functional level of visually interpreting text, or to having a deep cultivation in scripture or other historical literatures, or are actively engaged in creative writing, or writing of a professional academic nature, or in other forms of intellectual and journalistic contributions of essay, magazine, and blog culture.

Guild fellows would most likely consist of those latter advanced categories, either being refugees from collapsed humanities programs or practicing, public authors. (This may include famous posters.) And they will be distinguished from the decayed and confused university bureacracies by having something approximating good taste, and deep political urge to see the university system dissolved. And presumably they will vet and recruit one another.

Literary societies Christian in nature could place an especially heavy emphasis on scriptural hermeneutic ability.

The crucial difference of these societies from colleges is that they will seek prestige by DENYING as many people as possible who take their certification tests full rewards, to make attainment that much more valuable and access to guild seals something fiercely comptitive. Maybe they let you retake the test once a year to gauge your progress.

That will make it hard for them to launch in unofficial and bootstrapped ways, just as it is very difficult to weave prestige out of thin air. Nevertheless, we must begin preparing now.

Forgive me if I’ve already floated these ideas so many times and beaten this horse to death on here

Tests could take a variety of forms, either handwritten or in oral defense and presentation, with or without source texts present, etc. Some tests might resemble something like the CLT; others might be closer to a mini bar examination — the bar for babies. But it should be an honor to win the approval of the league. (To prepare young people in secondary education to qualify for this test, perhaps we should return to something similar to that classic American practice of Reading Law, starting with reading through the Law of God.)

Now, once this core testing practice is established, around this society may develop more traditional collegial activities — tutorial services or mentorship, symposia and lecture series, live readings, recruitment. Events with well read women present. Wowzers!

Maybe even some people intrigued by the life of the mind.

Who simply want to read because they want to know what was thought centuries ago.

Once a young person has proven themselves in those basic tests, then different teachers, writers, associations, or subtly distinct schools of thought might compete over them to win their loyalty as readers and listeners. Much the same way that any coach would seek out star performers. Or at the very least, the way a moderator wants to cultivate good group chats.

To do this, there must be some basic social respects that we pay to those who read publically — no shame on those who don’t, just as there’s no particular shame on people who can’t perform in an orchestra or make a touchdown.

Insofar as the act of visual reading and longform original writing becomes a prestige task reserved for an elite few, we might even call these associations conservatories.

I am assuming that despite all that will change, young men and women who can read and write will still be valuable for public life. And they will not be able to do this without societies that are devoted to the active remembering of the past through both speech and the written word, preserving not just literacy but true literary skill, criticism, poetry, and historical memory as something that is an active and creative force, to be applied to modern life not just in observing and recording but the authoritative utterance of truth and justice within the civic square.

Possible names:

ALMS - Applied Literary Memory Societies

Conservatories of Classical Learning

Shuyuan

Or maybe we’ll just call them “new colleges.”