Currently reading: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon 📚

On a central problem identified by German university reformers in the 1830s:

This is what the student experience of “academic freedom” has come to: freedom from all authority, guidance, information. Universities are no longer sacred communities held together through the shared sources of authority and common purpose. They have become modern institutions in which individuals pursue their own purposes, largely unaware of and so uninterested in the desires of others much less those of a community. (p. 70)

A common meme related to current events commentary I see on my various social feeds is to compare the U.S. to Weimar Germany of the 1920s and early 1930s. At least in my realm of U.S. education policy and ideology I think we are more frequently re-litigating the 1820s and 1830s.