A law school should not train—or be concerned with training—lawyers, judges, prosecutors, or diplomats. A law school should focus all its attention and resources on training and on the formation of jurists.
By the end of the fourth and final year of their Bachelor's Degree Programme, Law students know by heart numerous articles of the Civil Code, the Penal Code, the Constitution, the Code of Administrative Procedure... They are, however, unable to discuss at lenght the concept of guilt, unable to discuss the concept of incarceration, and, what should shock anyone the most, unable talk about the concept of Justice, completely lacking deep theoretical foundations .
Getting a degree in Law without knowing what Justice is should be as impossible as becoming a priest without knowing what God is, or becoming a physician not knowing what a brain is. All three scenarios are equally appalling.
The most perverse face of the university educational system is evidenced by the fragile humanist clothing created for almost aesthetic and certainly political reasons. The so-called "Method of Socratic Education", an expression that has come and repeated incessantly since the Bologna Process, is referred to, defended and "applied" by those who have never studied Socrates and thinks that he was Prime Minister of Portugal.
The Bologna Process (PB) represents the twenty-third stab at the Academy. For the latter coup, they held the knife, at the same time, the Market and the European institutions, with the full intention of killing the Academy to replace it with training centres of the (and the) Market. Revealing employability as one of your main concerns—In fact, the biggest concern—, the PB positive and officializes a promiscuous and immoral relationship between the Market and the Academic World, this immoral relationship being not accidental consequence of the equally promiscuous and immoral relationship between the Market and European institutions.
From this perspective, originating from the PB, the knowledge transmitted by universities must be useful and applicable in the Labour Market. Through this utilitarian notion of teaching, good knowledge is useful knowledge. In other words, good knowledge, and worthy to be taught and learned, is the one that the Market values. Thus, anyone who gathers the least neural connections will be able to infer that who determines, who dictates, the curriculum plans of the different courses of the different universities of the different European countries is the Market.
We are facing the transposition of the capitalist logic of consumption and production into the Academic World. With the import of employability as a permanent longing, the University loses independence, even to determine its concerns. So learning becomes a mere means. The Bologna Process—being the twenty-third, and last, stabbed in the Academy—killed the noble ideal of learning as an end, that is, learning simply, to satisfy intellectual curiosity, something that has always been at the heart of Teaching.
The standardization imposed by BP also extinguishes the plurality and diversity that once existed and were so important in the Academy. Even though it is a recent trauma, we could already classify it as prophetic, if it were not so obvious, the statement "No society can endure without its own system of education.[1]”
One figure we must also examine is that of the Rector. We see the castration, in abstract, of the position of Rector, while those who occupy such a position, or happy, become Brutus, or, cowards, accept perverse impositions. According to the aforementioned, Lucídio Bianchetti, "(...) of the condition of protagonists [the rectors], become supporting, responsible and responsible for the execution of decisions taken heteronomously.", being bound, for example, to the Bologna Declaration of 1999, through the signatures of the Ministers of Education of their respective EU Member States.
Thus, in Europe after the Bologna Process, the post of Rector is clearly more political than ever, and its holder is a diplomat.—who travels and receives prizes according to purely political issues. Of course, this type of award does not have any value outside the political dimension in which it exists, and there is no concern in honoring serious academics that contribute in an unceasing, rigorous and intellectually honest way to the maintenance and creation of Knowledge. With accumulation of functions, the rectors are also charged with ensuring that the knife remains stuck in the heart of the Academy and its pillars.
The Process "materializes a betrayal of the Enlightenment, Humboldtrian and Republican ideals of the university. "[2] This betrayal will certainly go undefeated by the critical analysis of future graduates because of the simple fact that this ability to critically analyze the world is in extinction and the great probability that future graduates do not even know what Enlightenment is, or who Humboldt was.
Thus, those who invoke the idea of "Socratic Teaching" as a contribution of the PB or are merely ignorant, true useful idiots, servants of the educational system who have the Market as king, or are bitter cynics.
In the 1960s, we had Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, Deleuze, Badiou, Moscovici, Rancière, Bourdieu, Sartre, Camus and Beauvoir in one city. In the same century, we had T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Hemingway, Didion, Sontag, Pound, Frost and so many other geniuses. Today, we have half a dozen thinkers around the world, and these are already septuagenaries, octogenarians and some are already almost centuries old, like Chomsky. Even these few still alive intellectuals, with advanced age, produced their own magna opera In the last century. It is not enough to be intellectual and to be alive to be an "intellectual of today", it is necessary to produce knowledge today, it is still necessary to have what to say and to speak. If you're not a writer anymore, let him stop writing.
In view of this terrible shortage of working genius brains, we must not—like the mediocre romantics—simply lament and seek comfort in dust accumulated in old books. We must state categorically that it is the fault of the universities and European institutions that have submitted to the power of the Market, accepting the honour of striking violent blows against the conditions that enable the emergence of critical spirit and intellectual curiosity.
It was the University that agreed to give up its own status University to become a grey factory of custom-made technocrats for the Market. It was the Law Schools that agreed to form technocrats who know how to quote, by heart, articles of the Law and who use Excel spreadsheets like nobody else.
In addition to the already analyzed idea that "good knowledge is useful knowledge", another notion that should be analyzed is that valid knowledge, credible knowledge, is only that which comes from science.
This idea, which has already metastasized as the cancer it is, transforms areas of philosophy and the Natural Knowledge, such as Law and Economics, in science. These are not even branches of social sciences. Nope. Each area of knowledge now corresponds to a different science. Thus, law is a legal science and economics is, of course, an economic science.
Knowledge, dear reader, is dead. But I refuse to take the blame and complete the sentence with "and we kill him."
Where do legal assets come from? Where does the concept of crime come from? Where does the notion of wickedness and cruelty that are so important to criminal law come from? Where does the Principle of the Most Favorable Penal Law come from? Where does the idea that human life is inviolable come from, as Article 24 of the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic states? Where does the idea that a citizen should have a broad right of defence come from? Where does the idea that the judge should be impartial come from? The answer to all these questions is: from Philosophy and its various areas!
With much intellectual legitimacy, the graduates of the great Legal Science did not read Plato, did not read Aristotle, did not read Hegel, did not read Kant, or Foucault. A jurist, with his still new title as a factory, asked about philosophical concepts, such as those cited in the previous paragraph, answers, as Álvaro de Campos, "I am a technician, but I have technique only within the technique", not even having the decency to be "crazed with every right to be so.[3]”
Those who have genuinely academic aspirations are quickly castrated by the Market, University and European institutions, acting together, and even by their peers.
With this crude, violent and destructive impetus, transforming into science what is Philosophy, or Sociology, or Anthropology (in the final analysis, more specialized branches of Philosophy), transforming academic experience into something unrecognizable, the University achieves the goal imposed by the Market: the neutralization of Intellectual Freedom, Creativity, Teacher Curiosity—processed into Technocrats-trainers—and students, transformed into training technocrats.
However, there are still some teachers and students who did not have such elements removed. There are still students who are moved by curiosity and willingness to learn. There are still teachers who are moved by the will to teach and produce knowledge. These figures, increasingly rare—and invariably cynical—They sustain, like Atlas, the enormous weight of the dying Academy. These figures constitute the "little thread of freedom and saving initiative"[4] that makes it possible to exist, however small, the hope that the Academy will claim, occupy, fill the space that is itss by Law.
Studying what is useless has never been so subversive and revolutionary.
Long live useless knowledge!
Porto, 2024.
[1] MESZÁROS, I. (2006) apud BIANCHETTI, L. (2016).
[2] Ibidem.
[3] CAMPOS, A. (1923).
[4] BAPTISTA MACHADO, J. (1961).
This text was originally published by the Catholic Policy Society (CPS), defunct since 2025.
Academy and Education, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Policy