Imagining What’s Lacking

Writing in May 1968, an anonymous student activist scrawled a maxim for our time on some now-forgotten Paris wall: “those who lack imagination cannot imagine what’s lacking.” In The Autocratic Academy (hereafter AA), Timothy Kaufman-Osborn outlines with great lucidity what’s lacking from today’s repetitive critiques of the “corporatized” university: a theory of corporate form that supports, rather than undermines, the university’s innermost aim, free inquiry (2023, 258).

To flesh out this counterintuitive argument, Kaufman-Osborn dedicates careful study to a select set of precedents from the university’s thousand-year history, ranging from its medieval origins to eighteenth-century America (2023, 47–52 63–104). These precedents demonstrate that the member corporation is not a nostalgic fantasy but a real and viable mode of university governance. They also allow Kaufman-Osborn to imagine what a self-governing member corporation would look like in the present. This he calls “Commonwealth University” (hereafter CU) (2023, 255–272). CU is, put simply, the corporate university we lack today.

I begin my response to Kaufman-Osborn’ appealing book with an observation: the member corporations that feature most prominently in it all had religious affiliations, imposed varying degrees and kinds of religious conformity, and were chartered for religious purposes. The medieval universitates generally were instituted by Papal Bulls, Harvard was founded by Puritans (Congregationalists), and William & Mary by Anglicans. None were what we today would call, with far too little curiosity, “secular.” All preceded the traditions of religious liberty, freedom of conscience, fallibilism, and religious tolerance that gave rise to, and would be formalized in, the US Constitution’s free exercise and disestablishment clauses. To the extent that those same traditions formed the originary matrix for the American tradition of academic freedom—to the extent that “academic freedom first appeared in the guise of religious liberty for professors” (Hofstadter and Metzger 1955, 263, cf. 62)—AA’s member corporations may also be said to have preceded the forms of academic freedom we inherit today.

Kaufman-Osborn understands all of this. Theology is explicit in his opening discussion of the heuristic distinction between member and property corporations (2023, 48–52). But it doesn’t seem to be a priority for him in his closing theory of CU. There AA seems to assume not only that, at some point in its history, the member corporation will have become secularized, but also, differently, that the process of that secularization poses no substantive problems for the way we theorize corporate form today.

What new or different dimensions to CU might become apparent when we make explicit the secularization that otherwise seems implicit in AA’s history and theory of the member corporation? By secularization I mean, first of all, the simple historical fact that theological reasoning once was but is no longer central to the university. But beyond that, I mean the theoretical premise that modern legal forms, up to and including corporate form, appear in a new and different light once one traces their displacements, condensations, and disavowals of the theological (Schmitt 2006, 16–35). Understanding “form” as a schema that provides the conditions under which empirical experience becomes coherent and conceptualizable (Kant 1998, 273), we may say that what’s unique about corporate form, in particular, is the way it obliges us to inquire into the relations between parts and wholes (Turner 2016, 26). To speak of a corporation is to use a noun of multitude; it’s to answer the question, however indirectly, of how pluralities give rise to unities, or conversely how unities are divisible into pluralities, without also reducing those pluralities to simple unities, on the one hand, or collapsing those unities into formless pluralities, on the other (Banerjee 2023, 226). The members of a corporation are thus always already membri: declined in the partitive genitive case, they’re parts that belong to some whole.

But what was the whole of which the members of medieval and early modern universities were parts? In both the property corporation and the member corporation, they seem to have been microcosms of a macrocosm that was the universe that was divine being (Newman [1852] 1996, 40, 76). Today’s university, which is clearly constituted as a property corporation, manifestly lacks that whole, yet nevertheless continues to presuppose and depend upon a corporate form that, originally at least, derived its intelligibility, viability, and authority only from the possibility of that whole. Attending to secularization here leads directly to critique: it allows or requires us to say, of today’s university, that the whole is the false. But what does it allow, or perhaps require, us to say about the member corporation?

To trace the member corporation to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is to find some of the earliest forms of free inquiry around which AA rightly proposes to reconstitute the contemporary university. “The thirteenth century was the age of the universities because it was the age of corporations” (le Goff 1993, 65), but it was the age of corporations because, in it, popes and emperors began granting exemptions, protections, and privileges to intergenerational guilds of teachers and learners who thereby obtained the right to call themselves a universitas (Kivinen and Poikous 2006, 185–190). These “corporate bodies of masters and learners” soon became vested with unusual rights and privileges. The medieval university was a studium generale open to students from throughout the known world, regardless of birthplace, ethnicity, or language (le Goff 1982 136–7; le Goff 1993 73–5). This is why it was a seat of what we would today call diversity (Open Universities, 14–15; Oppenheimer 2022). Medieval masters were granted a “right to teach anywhere” (ius ubique docendi), and they used it to travel freely between universities and regions (le Goff 1982 136; le Goff 1993 72). Because of their literacy, masters also qualified for a “benefit of clergy” exempted them from the civil jurisdiction of the countries in which their universities were situated (Smith 1965, 722). As a last resort, universities could protect themselves from external control by exercising the rights of secession and relocation. If persecuted by this or that local prince or polity, they could simply move elsewhere. The first recorded Latin equivalent of the phrase “academic freedom” (scolastice libertati), which appears in a Papal Bull from 1220, occurs in this context (Rashdall 1936, 587; Jansen et al. 2011, 467).

We shouldn’t, of course, imagine that the medieval university’s collective self-governance operated in a way we today would recognize, respect, and affirm (Thijssen 1998, 90–1; Schwinges 2008, 2). The same legal autonomy that freed the medieval university from external control also gave it an extraordinary internal authority unknown to post-Reformation universities. In the medieval university, “internal matters of institutional government were in the hands of those immediately connected with learning. Each faculty made its own rules. Each faculty elected its own head and held its own assembles . . . while the university as a whole had its general assembly, the congregation” (Hofstadter and Metzger 1955, 6). This internal authority included the power to prevent and punish heresies by means of inquisition and expulsion (Courtenay 1989). Medieval universities may have been self-governing guilds of professors and students, but from this it doesn’t follow that self-governance was somehow liberal democratic in character.

Kaufman-Osborn, of course, doesn’t claim otherwise: his proposal is not merely to retrieve but also to radicalize the schemata of self-governance we receive from the medieval member corporation. Radicalize here also seems to mean rationalize: the self-governing community AA proposes for CU is modeled on modes of self-governance that seem to be derived from the institutions and practices of social democratic republics (2023, 260). But with this internalization of the outside, this modeling of the university upon the non-university, AA brings itself into proximity to the political theology of the medieval university in an unexpected way.

Part of what the problem of secularization allows us to see is that the medieval university’s self-governance resembled that of the great powers it also complemented and rivaled. The medieval university typically had three faculties: medicine, law, and theology. These corresponded to the medieval world’s three orders of life: the health of the ephemeral body, the enduring safety and security of the body politic, and the salvation (or eternal life) of the soul (Jaspers 1959, 85; le Goff 1982, 132; Kivinen and Poikus 2006, 199). These two trinities, in turn, corresponded to a third: alongside the sacerdotium and the regnum, the studium was one of the three indispensable orders of the medieval world (Grundmann 1950, 5–7). The wisdom universities provided to princes and monarchs allowed them to exercise power without becoming reckless, overconfident, and arrogant, and the wisdom it provided to popes and priests allowed them to be good without also becoming foolish and weak (Grundmann 1950, 17). Far from dominating the university, then, church and state were incomplete and imbalanced in its absence. The university, in turn, preserved its external autonomy in the concrete by savvily negotiating the interstices that opened up in the conflicts between these other powers, sometimes allying itself with church against state and sometimes the other way around (Hofstadter and Metzger 1955, 7; le Goff 1993, 66–69). The double relation by which it established its external autonomy also provided it with schemas for its internal self-governance. In just the same way that medieval universities exercised certain of the powers we today associate with states—ranging from published regulations, trials, punishments, protections, imprisonments, and lifelong loyalty oaths—its libertas scolastica was formed by analogy to the concept of libertas ecclesiae (“freedom of the church”) (Classen 1981, 534). The medieval university is rightly famous for its corporate autonomy. But the forms by which it justified and exercised that autonomy were themselves heteronomous: they derived from the same powers of church and state against which they also protected the university.

All of this was shattered by the Reformation, which was a university-led transformation of church and state that began at a university (Wittenberg) when a professor (Martin Luther) published what was at first a common medieval academic exercise (a disputatio) (Grendler 2004, 14).1 With the emergence of the modern sovereign territorial nation-state, the medieval university’s once extraordinary autonomy was dramatically curtailed (Hammerstein 2008, 22–3). In Protestant countries like Germany and England, the university now came under the external supervision and centralized control of state authorities who, like Hobbes, considered it a Trojan Horse to undermine modern sovereign power with the moral teachings of medieval Aristotelianism (Hobbes 1889 [1681], 39–41, cf. Kaufman-Osborn 2023, 66). Whereas medieval universities were cosmopolitan and universal (or katholikos, in the sense of “encompassing all”), drawing deeply on Arabic and Islamic scholarship, the modern university was now nationalized. Repurposed as a means to the end of the strength and glory of specific sovereign modern nation-states, its exercises of reason were now always also in some way exercises of raison d’état (Scott 2018). Whereas the medieval world could speak of universities in Paris, Bologna, Heidelberg, Oxford, and Cambridge, the modern world now spoke of French, Italian, German, and English universities (le Goff 1993, 138–142). The same maxims that established seventeenth century Westphalian order—cuius regio, eius religio [“whose territory, his religion”] and auctoritas, non veritas, legem facit [“authority, not truth, makes law”]—thus applied to universities as well. Not only sacerdotium but also studium now became subordinate to regnum.

This history is directly pertinent to the two university disputes AA proposes to retrieve and radicalize. As educational historian Jurgen Herbst notes, American settlers imported elements of the tripartite medieval order into each of America’s various colonies. Before the 1766 royal charter that established Queen’s College in New Jersey, each colony had only one established church and one chartered university.

The medieval unity of sacerdotium, regnum, and studium—of church, state, and university—fragmented though it was into the many subdivisions of empire, was nonetheless preserved within the various territorial sovereignties with their established churches and universities. The territorial ruler decided the state religion of his subjects and served as head and protector of his church . . . In kingdom, principality, or province, college and church served to enhance the secular sovereign’s prestige (Herbst 1982, 2).

For Herbst, therefore, the significance of these cases is that they marked the last gasps of Counter-Reformation reaction against the university’s subordination to the now-conjoined powers of church and state.

In the 1720s at Harvard and in the 1750s at William and Mary academic corporations attempted to reassert their chartered prerogatives as ‘masters of the college’ and were defeated. . . . The battle of teachers at the two colleges to regain for themselves a place in college government can also be seen as another attempt to break the Reformation pattern of external supervision and to reintroduce corporate faculty governance on the model of the medieval universities or of the English colleges. It proved impossible, however, to turn back the clock and to revitalize the medieval corporations of masters and scholars (Herbst 1982, 48).

If Herbst is correct, then eighteenth-century disputes over the corporate status of early modern American universities are equally disputes over the medieval university’s place and function relative to post-Reformation concepts of church and state.

But this seems to add a second dimension, also a twist, to AA’s heuristic either-or between member and property corporations. Either the collective self-governance of the medieval university, which in every instance was predicated on assumptions of religious conformity (and the many forms of unfreedom that entails); or else the nascent religious pluralism and religious liberty of the early American university, which in every instance was predicated on external trustee control (and the autocracy that entails).

Some readers may think this a false dichotomy. But this same either-or was recognized, albeit under another name, by a thinker who, although ignored by most critical university studies, appears in AA. In Book V of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith sharply criticizes the medieval university’s guild mentality. When a university has no higher authority than the body corporate of professors, he argues, the result is a self-indulgent mutual compact that allows one and all to neglect every educational duty: because “[i]t is the interest of every man to live as much as his ease as he can,” the salaried member corporation produces not teaching or research but universal sloth and the unjustifiable protection of outdated and useless theories (1965, 718, cf. 727).

All of this is just as one would expect; academics have been hearing this for centuries. What’s unpredictable is what Smith says next. Having denounced the medieval member corporation, he then denounces the modern practice of external university control. When the university’s highest authority is not internal but external to the body corporate of professors, Smith contends, the result is also professors’ neglect of educational duties—although now by a different route. When public persons such as bishops, governors, or ministers force professors to lecture on certain topics, and when professors then force students to listen to those forced lectures, the result is not education but a sham. “An extraneous jurisdiction of this kind,” Smith continues,

is liable to be exercised both ignorantly and capriciously. In its nature it is arbitrary and discretionary, and the persons who exercise it, neither attending upon the lectures of the teacher themselves, nor perhaps understanding the sciences which it is his business to teach, are seldom capable of exercising it with judgment. From the insolence of office, too, they are frequently indifferent how they exercise it, and are very apt to censure or deprive him of his office wantonly, and without any just cause. The person subject to such jurisdiction is necessarily degraded by it, and, instead of being one of the most respectable, is rendered one of the meanest and most contemptible persons in the society. It is by powerful protection only that he can effectually guard himself against the bad usage to which he is at all times exposed; and this protection he is most likely to gain, not by ability or diligence in his profession, but by obsequiousness to the will of his superiors, and by being ready, at all times, to sacrifice to that will the rights, the interest, and the honour of the body corporate of which he is a member (1965, 718–9). 

This polemic, so acidic one almost thinks it’s Veblen, reveals a third dimension to the same eighteenth-century either-or we see in Kaufman-Osborn and, differently, Herbst. Either the university constitutes itself as a member corporation, in which case it invites a Falstaffian indolence of professors; or else it is owned and controlled by external authorities, in which case it invites a Hamletian insolence of office.

For Smith, the solution to this either-or is first to recognize that it’s a both-and (because internal and external control alike induce the body corporate to neglect its educational duties) and then to admit that it’s a neither-nor (because the best way to govern education is to reorganize the members of the body corporate according to the laws of the competitive marketplace). The Smith who thinks this way is the standard Adam Smith, the Macbethian Smith whose invisible hand cancels and tears medieval bonds. This is the Smith who authorizes today’s nihilistic claim that the university is best administered as a nexus of contracts.

But alongside this Smith, and sometimes in opposition to him, there’s another Adam Smith, a Smith who sees the same plane of immanence that pure market forces allow Macbethian Smith to see, but who draws conclusions about that plane of immanence that are, in principle, distinct from Macbethian Smith. This other Adam Smith is the Smith who’s fascinated by the predicaments of a “we” which cannot know itself, whose capacity and appetite for knowledge claims lead not to unity but to ignorance, division, and faction, and who, as such, comprises a whole that can’t be comprehended on the basis of theological certainties but only through wonder, surprise, and imagination (Hill and Montag 2017, 27–104). It’s a Smith who thinks, in short, at the threshold where corporate form begins to be exposed to the secularizing, therefore disincorporative, energies of capital.

Threaded back into the argumentation of AA, this Smith expands our imagination beyond the historical either-ors we inherit from the long eighteenth century. Who, after all, is the self of self-governance? AA provides an answer: it’s a self dedicated to free inquiry. But what is free inquiry? Who decides what that is? AA answers this question too: in CU, any one member has the right to dispute of any or even all (2023, 262). That answer seems consistent with AA’s more general argument about the relation between corporate form, self-government, and academic freedom.

But press on this answer and a paradox begins to emerge. Because any truth-claim about CU as a whole must ipso facto be made by this or that part of the university, on the basis of this or that particular field or discipline, from the standpoint or expertise of this or that particular CU member, CU will only ever be comprised by partial, rival, and factional claims about CU, and never knowledgeable conceptions of “the” university as such. From this it follows that CU, for reasons more early-modern than postmodern, can admit no overarching meta-narrative: only at the cost of misprision can any single member of the university claim to say, once and for all, what the unifying point of free inquiry is or should be. But the governance of the university as a property corporation, for example by a board of trustees or visitors, depends on exactly that claim. Here as before, then, the whole is the false. The more a university is mastered from a single overarching standpoint, the more that mastery will be predicated on a betrayal of the truth-seeking which is the university’s very essence, and the less that mastery will be responsible to the energies and exigencies internal to that truth-seeking. It seems clear that the members internal to CU can’t fully master CU: because full self-knowledge would entail their knowledge of their ignorance of the whole of which they’re a part, they wouldn’t even try. But nonmembers can’t fully master CU either: a God’s-eye view of the university from the outside can’t truthfully account for the activity of truth-seeking as a whole.

Freedom would then belong essentially and irreducibly to CU for just the same reason that its essential purpose, free inquiry, is essentially and irreducibly uncountable, essentially and irreducibly nontotalizable, masterable only on the basis of a falsely unifying claim about the multiplicities of teaching and research that actually happen in CU on a given day (up to and including “excellence”). The loss of the idea of omniscience conditions the governance of the modern studium just as much as the loss of the idea of omnipotence conditions the governance of the modern regnum.

But if that’s right, then is CU still a corporation at all? The basic problem of corporate form is the relation between parts and wholes, pluralities and unities. But if in CU the parts exceed the whole, if its internal plurality surpasses the possibility of any unity—what then? Then the self of university self-governance would seem to be a self that understands that it can’t, won’t, and shouldn’t ever fully understand the “we” of which it’s a part. This self’s self-knowledge would then seem to be a knowledge of ignorance: if even the most polymathic, encyclopedically learned, talented, or curious member of CU can’t immanently grasp all of its many knowledges, can’t adequately evaluate all of its many truth-claims on their own terms, then all members of CU would participate in a whole they fully know they can’t fully know as such and on its own terms. When a university is constituted as a property corporation, the university as a whole is legally incorporated in a board of trustees or regents, which then proposes to govern from a sovereign position external to—transcendently above and beyond—its parts. In CU, by contrast, it would seem that all members, and not just the trustees or regents, would remain exterior to the whole in which they participate and which they govern. CU thus presents a paradox: its members, whether individually or collectively, cannot fully account for the set that contains them and that defines the terms and conditions of their membership.

Strangely, then, a certain experience of disincorporation—a certain chronic or constitutive ununifiability or unmasterability of the university’s body corporate—would seem to be a permanent condition for any member-corporation university that is fully secular—that fully internalizes, as an explicit condition for its self-governance, the implications of the absence of omniscience. This would go above all for CU’s elected chancellors or presidents. The most we would be able to hope for, from any member of CU who proposes for a time to personify CU as a whole, would be to maintain the institutional conditions that are adequate to the knowledge that the whole is the false. Those responsible for governing the university as a whole would then govern with the full knowledge that it’s impossible to fully know what one’s doing when one administers a multiplicity of truth-seekers. This epistemic humility, this basic constraint, also would by definition impose limits on exercises of administrative powers, up to and including those who propose the market as the new whole for the parts to those who propose to treat crisis governance as an occasion to save the whole at the expense of the parts. “Academic freedom” would be one name for the institutional conditions that would then prevail.

No member of CU can claim full knowledge of the whole in which they participate; all participate in that whole, therefore, on the basis of something other than knowledge. What’s the right word for the limit to knowledge we encounter here—here at the very heart of a community dedicated entirely to knowledge? The various answers available to older member corporations—belief, creed, orthodoxy, dogma, faith, confession—don’t seem available to the members of CU. To this loss, one could react with a conservative melancholia (Marsden 2021, 351–363). But because immanence generates its own forms of awe, surprise, and wonder, that answer is neither necessary nor desirable. In the place where omniscience once was, secularization reveals a new and different answer to the abiding questions of university governance: “[t]he locus of power becomes an empty place” (Lefort 1988, 17, emphasis in original). Becomes—and should remain. Tarried with properly, the lack that at first defies the fully democratic imagination can also come to sustain and even stimulate it.