I guess that makes me…Horace Slughorn?

The Economist, having surveyed the current state of European higher education, has decided that the most significant problem is that the specialized graduate school where I work is insufficiently “relevant.”

Two objections so far. First, please please please let’s move on from the Harry Potter references. We’re talking about a campus headquartered in an abbey in Florence, the real-life birthplace of the Renaissance.

And second — there’s no need for a pastiche that places the Duomo just behind the main hedge maze, it’s lovely enough as it is.

Maybe this is what The Economist means be “relevance”? Adapting actual historical events and locations into the language of a children’s novel? Engaging in a sort of soft plagiarism of EUI’s visual assets to create a non-existant point of view?

Soon after its founding, however, it became apparent that the EUI’s splendid digs might be distracting its scholars. As one insider explained to Charlemagne: “Left to their own devices, the academics began producing studies of the wool trade in 15th-century Flanders and suchlike.” He was joking—up to a point. A search for recent articles on the EUI’s database produced a list headed by “Silk consumption and dressing practices in late-medieval Catalonia”.

This is rank anti-intellectualism by someone who is apparently just finding out about both the concept of academic freedom and the discipline of History. “Left to their own devices” indeed — who exactly does The Economist think should be directing the energies of academic historians? Linda McMahon? Farage’s Reform UK party is promising a “Patriotic Curriculum” — perhaps that’s a preferable alternative to giving academics discretion over what they study?

Let me grant two of the article’s premises:

1. “EUI is among the world’s foremost graduate schools”
2. EUI has a remarkably beautiful campus

To the first point — EUI was ranked sixth in the world in the 2024 Shanghai ranking of Political Science departments. Independently, a recently published ranking of the “Research Productivity of Political Science Departments” puts EUI second only to ETH Zurich in Europe (including the UK) on the dimensions of Citations and Top Publications. (These are the “per-faculty” rankings; EUI has a very small political science department and thus doesn’t rank in the top 10 without this per-capita adjustment. An excellent argument for increasing funding and expanding the size of the department, in my view.)

Perhaps more importantly, it is one of the only truly trans-European University in the social sciences and humanities. Oxford and the LSE once played this role but the decade post-Brexit has made them less integrated with Europe; CEU aspires to this but illiberal attacks by the Orbán regime has weakened the institution. Other elite schools remain rooted in national systems, particularly as the Dutch and other northern countries impose national language requirements in a move towards nativism.

The EUI is genuinely, flamboyantly international. It serves a crucial role as a hub of European academic integration. This isn’t just window dressing: professors here forego the perk of tenure in favor of a rotating system which provides a constant churn of perspectives and nationalities. The Max Weber Fellowship is a melting pot of the best and brightest recent PhD graduates from across the continent and indeed the world.

And to the second point — guilty as charged. I hope you can come visit soon.

A primary criticism The Economist raises is that EUI faces a tension between its two primary goals: it’s supposed to be an elite graduate institution and also a feeding ground for European officials:

over the past 15 years or so the channels between the EUI on the one hand and the European Commission and Council on the other became clogged. To be sure, some alumni went on to become commission officials or national politicians. But overall, Europe’s Hogwarts was producing too few practising wizards.

A PhD in the social sciences and the humanities — until recently, the only degree that EUI offered — is simply unrelated to the task of running a government. The EUI was designed to offer a practical degree in conducting specialized research. As Alberto Alemmano points out, this was explicit: this “followed the creation of two older sister institutions: [the] College of Europe and [the] European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA).” Wikipedia tells us that the College of Europe “was the most represented alma mater among senior EU civil servants”; the EIPA is explicitly devoted to the “development of the ability of civil servants to deal with European affairs.” To criticize the EUI for not being a carbon copy of existing European institutions is inane.

The article’s other primary criticism is that the EUI is unsuitable to today’s populist age. This directly contradicts the first criticism — are we to understand that populists would be mollified if only there were more people with EUI PhDs in Brussels? I’m picturing Geert Wilders tearing his hair out in frustration that EU governance is being conducted by people who are insufficiently educated and cosmopolitan.

To be clear, there is a genuine conflict on the table:

It is not clear that the EUI, an institution anchored in the liberal tradition of the EU, can accommodate ideas rooted in Eurosceptic nationalism. Yet the populists are now an inescapable force in the continent’s politics. They have intellectual outfits and erudite pontificators of their own. Their visions of Europe, rooted in religion, ethnicity, conservative sexuality and cultural purity, may be winning out. Why would they come to the EUI to discuss them?

Liberalism involves a bundle of commitments: to individual freedom, minority rights, toleration, rule of law, private property, civil liberties, academic freedom, constitutionalism, human equality and the promotion of opportunity. Liberals tend to view these commitments as mutually reinforcing rather than dimensions on which tradeoffs are possible.

Neoliberals, like The Economist, tend to put the economic freedom bits first and assume that the other dimensions will take care of themselves. Populists are opposed to pretty much everything in that list other than those economic dimensions. As the latter rise in power, the former seem more and more willing to let their social and political commitments fade into the background.

Genuine commitment to liberal principles, like those in EUI’s the founding charter, does not permit this kind of appeasement. It is a mistake to think that if only EUI were to compromise a bit on those commitments*, then the populists’ “erudite pontificators” would come to Fiesole and participate in a genuinely constructive dialogue. They have no use for us; the only solution is to demonstrate our usefulness to our fellow citizens.

It is undeniably the case that liberals need to focus on winning democratic elections and that the best way to do this is to deliver policies that allow our fellow citizens to participate in the good life we envision. “Relevance” is an important goal, but it must be a proactive relevance, a collective construction of a better future, rather than a reluctant reactive relevance to political forces incompatible with our vision.

*And by the way, what concretely do we have in mind here? Should we get rid of the gender studies department? Call our end-of-year event a “Christmas party”? Y’all, I have great news on all both counts.

More generally, having worked in US academia for over a decade before moving to EUI, I can say that the former did in fact have a serious issue with left-illiberalism (since obliterated by the second Trump administration). My experience at EUI has been quite different; there are many conflicts, including on sensitive social issues, but the triumph of liberal values has been inspiring.