15 Higher Education Reading Group
Duvergier, Lois, vol. XVI, Decree for Organizing the Imperial University, March 17, 1808. pp. 238-248.
The text presented a formidable challenge, primarily due to the historical distance of the original decree and the semantic drift inherent in a 19th-century translation. Culturally and historically, the decree emerged in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, with the horrors of the Reign of Terror still within living memory and the establishment of the Napoleonic regime. Arguably, it represents a profound anti-Enlightenment backlash against "too much freedom," masquerading as a rationalized administrative structure.
Our group identified that the "University" described here is not a single campus, but a militaristic blueprint for the entire French national education system. It functions as a totalizing system that seeks to legislate the fundamental nature of its members. The decree positions the institution between the authority of the State and the Church, striving to maintain self-determination while making concessions to both. For instance, while it mandates the "precepts of the Catholic religion" as a basis for instruction, it places the entire body under the "exclusive" trust of the Imperial University. This system micro-manages human existence to such a degree that it even dictates living arrangements.
A central theme of our discussion was how this organizational structure externalized cognitive load among this university elite. The decree occupies the leadership, specifically the Grand Master and the Council, to manage staggering amounts of trivial detail. They are tasked with approving every library book, managing individual promotion lists, and deciding upon the colors for different faculties dress code, for example. As such, by externalizing cognitive bandwidth into a rigid, micro-managed structure, the leaders become mentally taxed by administrative minutiae. They become ‘experts’ of these minutia rules, yet are left ‘blind’ to larger, shifting social patterns.
Such a structure creates a double bind of correct silencing, where any deviation is met with a specific disciplinary penalty. This ranged all the way from arrests to removal from the roll. While each action may be ‘correctly’ applied in isolation, according to the law, the process silences the collective signals the system needs to update itself. This results in the erasure of organic innovation. At the same time, this rigid adherence transmutes human tribalistic tendencies and reconfigures them as allegiance to the structure. Organic bonds like friendship and reciprocity are replaced by rigid "civil obligations" and a mandated "fidelity to the Emperor".
Arguably, the decree embodies a tension between Anti-Enlightenment wariness of chaos and Enlightenment optimism regarding the possibility to govern all aspects of human life. We could label it an "institutionalized fanaticism." In a sense, it was a codification of the martial spirit that enabled the Napoleonic wars, coded, translated and applied to institutional design. Our own contemporary blindness and biases may make it difficult to understand why such a tradeoff was acceptable. Because to give the devil its due, it does create stability. A stability, and trade-off, that the French public and elite maybe were willing to make, after the horrors of the Reign of Terror and recent successes of the campaigns of the Napoleonic wars.
