University Students, Humanists and Lightweights

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THE GREAT SCAM. Opinion section by David Cerdá

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David Cerdá

Javier Aranguren has published a book on the university and its uses so astute that I can hardly do better than borrow its title for my own article, by way of homage: Universitarios, humanistas y cantamañanas (literally, University Students, Humanists and Lightweights), Rialp, 2025 is an autopsy of today’s university so brisk, incisive and substantial that it ought almost to serve as the starting point for a full-scale rethinking of higher education in Spain—if there were ever a genuine willingness to look ourselves in that cracked mirror and change course. Let us take the three sections into which the short volume is divided, each of which calls for serious reflection.

Aranguren asks what the university is for and discovers that its true ends bear little resemblance to what is routinely advertised to lure in students (with their parents’ tacit complicity): from employability to sports facilities. The author even has the temerity to remind us that “knowledge is what properly constitutes a university community” and that “there can be no knowledge without work”. Could it be that the university is meant to be a place where, out of a love of learning, there are people who know and inquire in order to know more, and who are eager to pass that flame on to those who come to learn there as well? For some time now—and increasingly so—the university has become a place where knowledge serves merely as a pretext for trading in qualifications that open the door to the labour market, when it ought to be the other way round: a shared life built around knowledge. And the truth is that the world is in desperate need of this “ought”, because, despite the trompe-l’œil of Artificial Intelligence, what the world still needs—now as ever—is the widest possible diffusion of knowledge at the highest level.

The university must therefore recover its purpose: to form leaders—an elite not of wealth, but of understanding—and to rise above the short-termism of the age (that threadbare pragmatism). It must also shape fully formed individuals, capable of critical judgement, alive to higher things and committed to sustaining an educated conversation. There are those who regard all this as mere ornament beside the real business of getting a job and starting to pay a mortgage (or, more likely, the rent on a shared flat); yet the truth is that self-cultivation lies at the very heart of what it means to be human—if properly understood, that is, as something that goes beyond mere survival. We shall never outcompete viruses and amoebae at survival; they have no need of universities. Humanism consists, in no small part, in wanting to go beyond survival.

As we often say here, the educational mess—in this case at university level—is not the fault of the young, but of their elders, who designed it. But we should not forget that a university student is an adult and a citizen preparing to inherit their polis, and that it is their duty to improve it. Hence Aranguren’s reminder that intellectual honesty is not optional. The student is neither customer nor user, but a member of a community whose excellence depends on their own. For this, no disposition is better than that of “knowing in order to learn”. There is an indispensable epic to it: wisdom and beauty are accessible only through effort, and that is the real adventure. It is all very well to rail against the world we have inherited—against successive crises, against the unsettling twenty-first century we inhabit—but it is an act of cowardice not to take the matter in hand and play one’s part.

Finally, the lightweights. This is the most entertaining part of the book, and so I shall not spoil it. Suffice it to say that the author has perfectly taken the pulse of postmodernity and has captured, with considerable wit, its distortions—from “cultural studies” to cancel culture, via gender ideology—ills which, fortunately, have been felt more acutely across the Atlantic; nightmares from which we may at last be waking. There is still some tidying up to be done before the university can once again become a place where debate is conducted freely and with intellectual courage—I share the author’s nostalgia for the medieval disputatio—but the damage has been so extensive that all signs suggest we have at last recognised it and may be ready to turn things around.

Here I have done little more than sketch the headlines: the book is written with Aranguren’s customary mastery and deserves to be savoured paragraph by paragraph. So do not hesitate—get hold of it and enjoy it. It is not a bitter book; all its ironies are suffused with affection for the institution and with a deep love for what it ought to serve, even if, for now—save for a few honourable exceptions—it scarcely does so. Its subtitle is Los verdaderos y los falsos humanistas (literally, The True and the False Humanists); it is high time we looked one another in the eye and asked who is who. There are far too many people smiling with quiet self-satisfaction—even a certain relish—as they stand by and watch the ship sink.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons