Wild Universities
Reclaiming the Little Tradition of Science
I’m reading a book called Wild Church by Jan Frerichs, a Franciscan monk, right now.
It’s not the kind of book I would order online but the cover somehow caught my attention in the public library in Ulm. When I had a look inside, I was immediately hooked by how similar his experiences were to mine.
Now, the Franciscan monk is of course talking about his faith and relationship to the Catholic Church, whereas I’m thinking about my experience attending university. But still, all the structural problems and personal struggles feel very familiar.
The author entered the Franciscan order as a young man and studied theology, hoping to find truth by reading the Hebrew Bible in its original language.
But after years of studying this way, he was deeply unhappy. He felt spiritually empty despite years of dedicated practice.
The rest of the book is then about his discovery of what he calls “wild church” which is basically an anti-institutionalized church. It’s still Christian but without the institutional baggage that alienates so many people and attracts all the wrong people. Most importantly, unlike, for example, the Catholic Church, it doesn’t reduce its participants to mere spectators. When it comes to the wild church, the participation of its members is all there is.
I went through a similar journey of disillusionment.
I.
I got excited about physics by reading Richard Feynman’s books. It sounded so much fun and so meaningful. But the reality at university couldn’t have been a starker contrast.
I neither found a community of likeminded people there, nor wise professors eager to share what’s needed to advance human knowledge.
It all felt purely performative. The professors going through the motions writing formulas at the blackboard instead of explaining, treating each question from a student as a nuisance. The students solving homework problem after homework problem, never discussing why the frameworks work the way they do. The researchers churning out papers for the sake of collecting citations instead of earnestly looking for answers to deep questions. The PhD students following step-by-step instructions by their supervisors instead of exploring uncharted territory following their curiosity.
I never could shake off the feeling that we were missing the point of it all.
I learned an awful lot about physics. But it was always in the role of the spectator.
How do you actually pick a meaningful research problem and how do you tackle it? How does progress in science happen? What’s the structure of our theories? What do our equations actually mean? How do we know what’s actually real and what is just mathematical ornamentation? What alternative interpretations are there?
We discussed questions like this not even once.
We learned facts and technical skills like how to solve differential equations. But we never learned to inhabit different vantage points and what a physicist’s perspective from the inside truly feels like.
To use John Vervaeke’s terminology, we focused entirely on propositional and procedural knowledge, never developing perspectival and participatory knowledge.
These are the exact same problems Mr. Frerichs writes about. And this got me thinking that the problems here are inherent to the process of institutionalizing.
II.
The fathers of the church and modern academic system most likely did not use the same secret handbook. And yet, the outcomes are so eerily similar.
The underlying force bringing institutions into this weird shape is probably just the consolidation of power.
On the one hand, we got an elite caste of priests and bishops and so on that exclusively inhabit the stance proper to faith.
On the other hand, we got the elite caste of professional researchers that exclusively inhabit the stance proper to science.
Everyone else is left with the propositional and procedural residue. The doctrines to affirm and the rituals to perform. The theories to recite and the equations to solve.
Anything that would help people develop perspectival and participatory knowledge would be a danger.
If the caste’s power rests on its monopoly over the stance, only propositional and procedural knowledge is safe to give away.
Perspectival and participatory knowledge is dangerous. The moment someone learns to inhabit the stance for themselves, to consider alternative perspectives and actually see through a believer’s or a physicist’s eyes and take part from the inside, they stop needing the mediator.
The priest is no longer required to stand between them and God. The professor is no longer required to stand between them and truth.
As a student I was shocked by how badly designed the academic system was. It would be so, so easy to design an alternative that was actually capable of producing new Einsteins.
Now I understand that the system isn’t badly designed at all.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Stated goals or intentions are irrelevant.
Once I looked at what the academic system actually does, it became perfectly clear how brilliant it is. You couldn’t come up with something more effective to make sure the people in power are never threatened.
An education system that produces disciplined minds that churn out incremental paper after incremental paper on the professor’s area of expertise, always citing him, always putting his name to the author list, never putting his life’s work in danger by questioning existing theories.
A research system that funnels all resources towards people in power and silences all outsiders through the predatory journal, h-index, peer review system.
III.
This is why any effort to reform these institutions from the inside is doomed to fail.
As Buckminster Fuller observed, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
This is what Jan Frerichs is doing with his Wild Church.
This is what’s needed for the academic system: wild universities, rebuilt from the bottom up, freed from institutional baggage, community-run by amateurs.
There is an old distinction in the study of culture, drawn by the anthropologist Robert Redfield, between the Great Tradition and the Little Tradition.
The Great Tradition is the version of a faith or a field that gets written down, refined, and guarded by a small class of specialists.
The Little Tradition is the version ordinary people actually live, passed along by doing, owned by everyone and certified by no one.
Science began as a Little Tradition, and for most of its history that is all it was. The people who built it were amateurs in the literal sense, lovers of the thing.
They gathered in voluntary clubs and traded results by letter, and peer review was a respected friend writing back to tell you where you had gone wrong. Nobody assigned them a problem and nobody licensed them to study it. They inhabited the stance because they wanted to, and the discoveries followed.
The Great Tradition of science is what closed in around all of that. Only within the past century the research university, the PhD, the salaried lab, the journal, and the grant locked into place.
In this sense, a wild university is simply a community of people that goes back to the Little Tradition.
IV.
An obvious objection is that universities clearly did produce great science.
That is true, but only while they stayed porous. The breakthroughs happened in the gaps, before the institution had fully solidified around them. Einstein’s story is, of course, the most famous example.
I learned from Adam Becker’s What Is Real? how this shift happened.
Before the Second World War, physics was small. There was no big money, no big status. Just a few hundred people doing it mostly for love.
Then the atomic bomb changed everything. Governments realized that physicists win wars. Physics scaled up almost overnight into departments and grants and Cold War laboratories, and the universities began mass-producing physicists by the thousand to feed the machine.
Suddenly there was big money, big status, and a career to protect. People came for those now, as much as for the work. The deep questions turned into a distraction from the real business of publishing and getting ahead.
Lecture halls started filling with hundreds of students, most of them there for a degree and a job rather than any love of the truth.
V.
An example of a wild university is Fractal University.
People who want to learn something gather in living rooms and borrowed spaces and learn it together. That’s it. Anyone can decide to lead and participate in a class. The only requirement is a serious interest in engaging with challenging ideas.
They also conduct research and build a public research culture by organizing “project labs“ where a group of people commit to investigating bold research questions that would be unfundable in the academic system like, for example, “how did we get here, why did it take so long, how can we see more progress?”.
It’s all improvised and very much looks like the world I described earlier, where people studied topics because they cared, traded results because the results were interesting, and peer review meant a friend writing back to tell you where you had gone wrong. Students spin up their own labs to chase whatever they care about. The wall between learning and research is intentionally porous.
This is a great example of the Little Tradition coming back to life. Learning passed along by people simply for the love of it, certified by no one, kept alive by a voluntary club.
There is no big money, no credentials or prestige involved.
It started in New York City but people have already started their own versions in Boston, Toronto, Vancouver, and other cities, each with its own name and flavor, and each running itself.
Discovering Fractal University, its offspring, and also learning about Jan Frerichs’ Wild Church gives me hope.
Both are reclaiming the stance the institution claimed exclusively for itself, and both are doing it the only way it can be done: by inhabiting it together. Enough people stop waiting for permission, and that is already happening in living rooms and borrowed spaces.