From Experiment to Institution: a reflection on the Lyceum’s Journey and Future.
Recent years have seen a rapid decline amongst Americans in the perceived value of a college education. Earlier this month, Gallup reported that, compared to 70 percent in 2013, now only 31 percent of Americans consider a college education “very important”.
Does this mean we no longer value education itself? Or is it that the institutions—the colleges and universities—are no longer trusted to provide it?
Consider. Why does someone today go to college? The most obvious answer is not “to learn” but “to get a degree”. That degree, those credentials, have been understood to be pathways to a better career, financial security, some training under valid authorities in one or another art or science. But it seems a twofold problem of legitimacy confronts the institutions today. For one, technological change and the career landscape have outpaced the educational models and structures. They no longer appear secure pathways into a better life. For the other, at the same time, the institutions themselves have long been suffering a pervasive fragmentation that undermines their claims to genuine authoritative knowledge.
What we need, therefore, is not only to recover forms of common intellectual life, but to find ways of instilling them within the new technological environment.
Seven years ago, the Lyceum Institute began as an experiment to see whether such recovery and extension could be realized. That experiment has produced a real intellectual community. Now we ask: how can this community not only endure but continue to grow and deepen in our pursuit of wisdom?
Genuine liberal education, the Lyceum has shown, can flourish beyond the university. But it flourishes best within an institution.
Education, not Schooling
To give full disclosure, the Lyceum began from a certain frustration. When I began teaching in the university, I found something I love—learning, studying, discussing great ideas and bettering ourselves through them—to be met with a certain apathy. Such disdain, I began to realize, was present not only among students, however; I found it present, in varying degrees and forms, amongst other faculty, as well. A certain cynicism about teaching had settled on their souls, weighing them down.
It was not the education itself that was the problem, however. Students still responded well to the search for and disclosure of truth. Professors still held their research, scholarship, and pursuit of knowledge in high regard, still believed in the nobility of teaching.
It was the surrounding atmosphere that drained everyone. It was the structure of the university. We all came to inhabit two realities: the idealized world of study and the “real world” of grades, degrees, careers, and the practical aims of a time-constrained and expensive undertaking.
When I gave up on teaching in the university, I did not give up on teaching. One thought kept rolling around in the back of my mind: “There has to be a better way.” Does the love of learning have to be compromised by environments that have become, ultimately, hostile to it?
The Lyceum was, accordingly, conceived around the principle not of schooling-to-credentials, but of educating-for-habits. I did not want to “prepare” students for something else. Rather, the aim has always been a community that allows us each to support one another, throughout the whole of life, in bettering our habits of thought.
Necessity of Intellectual Community
This communal dimension is not incidental to education. Our habits may belong to us as individuals, but they are seldom cultivated properly in solitude. Our confusions become clear to us through the questions and challenges raised by others. The limits of our understanding unveiled when pressed to explain ourselves. And our horizons expanded by the shared insights of not only teachers but also peers.
Here it seems that the digital environment provides both a difficulty and an opportunity. Having easy access to a community, in fact, tends to devalue it: something easily joined and easily left, easily entered and just as easily abandoned. The ability to make connections in no way guarantees that we will, especially if we might give up on them when they prove challenging to us.
But at the same time, the ability to gather as a communal group, across great distances that once rendered such common endeavors deeply impractical—to find flexibilities of time, place, and cost that allow real study without enormous detrimental costs—this could be such a great benefit. It can be hard, as many will attest, to find a flourishing intellectual community amongst one’s physical locale. Efforts to build one from scratch prove far more difficult than often imagined.
From Experiment to Community
The experiment of the Lyceum has been to discover whether these possibilities could be realized without succumbing to the tendency of digital associations toward superficiality and impermanence. Seven years later, there is great cause for hope in believing they can.
We have not simply gathered an audience for listening to lectures or consuming “content”. Through our seminars, language study, the Trivium, and countless live conversations, faculty and members have come to know one another through the common endeavor of learning (and indeed, teaching at its best is always a re-learning, a re-discovery of the truth). Questions raised in one discussion find their way into others; shared interests develop into mutual respect and friendship; and the pursuit of knowledge becomes a daily habit.
This September, at our first in-person conference, Human Formation in the Digital Age, something of this became especially evident. People who had known one another through years of digital communication met face to face, often for the first time. This encounter did not at last make their existing relationships “real”; rather, it revealed new dimensions, new depths, to those real relationships which already existed.
There was something particularly fitting in this gathering. We had come together to consider how technology shapes our human lives, while demonstrating through our very presence how technology used rightly could serve to build a genuinely human community.
But this success has also brought another question into focus: how can this community build the continuity necessary for enduring well into the future?
From Community to Institution
There seems a bit of irony, here. The Lyceum arose from frustration with the university as an institution. Now the Lyceum’s own next goal is to establish itself more securely as an institution. Irony; but not a contradiction. What misled the university was not the fact that it had institutional structuring, but that these structures had morphed, over time, away from their true purpose.
In fact, a well-ordered institution alone gives continuity to goods across generations. Teachers invariably come and go. Although students may learn their whole lives long, the time that can be dedicated to study will vary throughout the years. And new students must come after them, as well. We can build friendships at a distance, but our lives are always subject to changes. Building traditions, practices, and providing resources that can be handed on and developed—something we have been seeding these past seven years—will mean the Lyceum outlives us.
Put otherwise, we are not just looking to add members and course offerings. We are looking to provide proportionate compensation for our faculty, to develop the access to courses and texts and other resources for learning, to strength our communal bonds through further in-person gatherings, and to establish real foundations for decades to come.
What would it actually mean for the Lyceum to succeed as an institution? Not just that it continues to survive, nor that it comes to be simply an alternative to the current university. Rather, it would mean that the intellectual habits we are cultivating together become traditions that are passed down to people we will never meet. The Institute does not think for its members, nor will strong institutional structures provide an education. But building those structures gives the conditions in which what we have already built can continue to grow and flourish for a long time to come.
The Lyceum has reached this point through the dedicated efforts of its faculty and members, and the generosity of those who believe in what we are building. To carry this work forward—to compensate our teachers, expand access to our educational offerings, develop our intellectual resources, and establish a lasting home for liberal learning—we need your help.
As we prepare for 2027, I ask you personally to take part in this next stage of the Lyceum’s development. Through the end of the year, our Beyond the University campaign invites support in establishing the foundations for the generations to come.
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