Monasteries of Modernity

A Note about Publishing

Since the day I started writing this book, I have been wondering about what to do with it once I am done. The very notion that this book has been written and that it has been done in the way it has means that academia, the place where thoughts like this should be at home, cannot accept it. I did everything in my ability to present these thoughts in the discussion until I simply could not do it anymore. 

The fact is, since I could not find a fertile ground for my work in academia, I do not have great expectations to find it elsewhere. Though I still want to say it and share it with anybody who may be interested. I believe in my work, I know it has merit, and I am sure that there are people who will benefit from reading these thoughts. Even though I really do not have an ambition to start a revolution in education.

Publishing is one of the strangest and sickest parts of academia. It took me two years to publish one article that I only spent one month writing. So far it has a few dozen counted accesses and one citation which, by the way, is completely wrong. Perhaps there is somebody who read my work, I cannot know. Yet, since the day it was published earlier this year, I regularly receive emails inviting me to submit more articles, to do peer-reviews, to present at conferences, and even to be a member of editorial boards. What all these invitations have in common is, that all of them expect me to either work for free or not uncommonly pay a significant sum of money or jump through other sets of hoops to be allowed to be affiliated with the publishing company that I have never heard of and frankly do not see a reason why I should.

I am not opposed to working for free. In fact, some of my dearest memories of work have been of unpaid activity, researching for and writing this book among them. Neither am I opposed to cooperation or partnership with a bigger entity, perhaps a publishing house, but the reality is I do not know any and the whole task of looking for one does not sound any less daunting than the task of doing a PhD.

In the 21st century, information is cheap. It is everywhere. We have open-access and everything worth reading is commonly reachable for free and within a few minutes of search. In some instances even, people are getting paid for watching the content instead of for creating it.  This is the context in which my work is being presented. Here I am writing a philosophical book for people who find it too challenging to read magazines.

So here is my book. It is the conclusion of years of some really challenging work, and it is free for anybody. So let it be so. It is there for anybody to read and enjoy. So please do that. And if you do, please share it with your friends. Or, you know, talk to me if you are interested in what I do. I sure am.

Chapter 1 – My Story

My gruesome university story is not in any way unique or special and many others have a similar one. Perhaps, it is just because I am more stubborn than most, that I have had a chance to witness more, thus I have more to tell. But it is exactly this reason, this lack of uniqueness, why I am so certain it needs to be said. There are stories that are said because they are unique, but I leave those to better storytellers. The reason why I am writing mine is because they say that the best way to learn or to discover anything is through experience, and one can never truly know about something, unless they become part of it. And I also believe that. My story is somehow all I have, all that I am certain about because unlike my analysis that comes later, I have lived through what I write in this chapter. I would never know all the things I want to share at this place, if I have only studied them in the books. I studied many books, I gave much time, attention, and love, and gained much wisdom from them, but many of them could only make sense to me, because I saw those phenomena they talk about with my own eyes. So before I move to what I want to really say, here is why I want to say it.

Can you imagine a place, where people meet in a democratic fashion for the purpose of pursuing knowledge and excellence? A place, where people will spend some time of their life, maybe a few years, or for some even a lifetime, to dwell on the unknowns to transform them into knowledge, that will be transformative toward becoming a fine and respectable human being? And can you imagine all this happening in a productive collegiality among diverse people whose differences will become stimuli towards everybody’s excellence and well-being? Please, remember this image, because I will be coming back to it throughout the book.

I asked you, if you can envisage such an image, because while I can now, a teen aged me most certainly could not. Perhaps, it was for the best, because at least my disappointment with my university experience was not as it could have been, had I had this image in my mind back then. In reality, I had applied to go to college because it was what everybody else would do. As long as demands of high school was not above our abilities, which in my case most certainly were not, and we cared enough to follow through with them, the university would be the next step in our lives. I cannot say I had an ambition to make something out of me or that I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Neither the desire to learn or to know more was a real thing for me at that time. What I wanted was mostly move out of my hometown that I had never gotten to love after my family had moved there when I was 11, and to get out from under the roof of my parents.

I have chosen a major called Mass Media Communication at the school called University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius. I had not known what exactly Media Studies were, but it sounded like something interesting enough for a seventeen year old me to pursue. Also the college was in a city definitely far enough from my hometown and family to not even give anybody a suggestion I could consider a daily commute. Lastly, I had visited the city a year before and I enjoyed the feeling of the place.

The university is named after Cyril and Methodius. These two men are two of the most important historical figures in my country’s history. Or, at least in its official narrative, they are. They were two brothers from Greece, who came to Great Moravia, according to historians the first reasonable state in the geographic location of my country, to bring religion and literacy to Slavic people. They created their own alphabet, later after leaving Great Moravia they have further developed it into Cyrillic, whose some version have been used until today, in some Eastern and South-Eastern European countries.  

While these two men sound like pretty cool people to whom a tribute should be paid in the name of an institution of higher education, my alma mater hardly shares with their heritage much more than the mere name. The story of the background of the university, as it has been shared in its corridors goes along different lines. After the post-socialist transformation of the economic and political system in Czechoslovakia, there was a need for more Universities. Among these, in 1992, the catholic right-wing intellectuals have successfully re-established the historical university - University of Trnava, or in its Latin name Universitas Tyrnaviensis. With the separation of Czechia and Slovakia, the political situation in Slovakia became quite unfriendly to such groups of intellectuals; therefore this university could be a nuisance to the ruling political forces in the country, who were also known to be rather corrupt and linked to organized crime. Thus, the more pragmatic intellectuals, who were connected to the government, decided that there was a need to establish another university in the same city (understand a mid-sized town with some regional importance), that would adhere to the proper ideology unlike those friends of the Slovak archbishop (also operating from the same city). Thus the University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius was born. Now one that is a bit older would ask, is this story true? To answer that, I am not completely sure. However, the little we could see about the political background of the key figures of the institution at the time, when I studied there was quite supportive of the narrative. Just adding to the curiosity of the establishment of this school is the fact, that in a nearby city, in the same year, a university was established, named after the first one of the brothers, also know as Constantine the Philosopher. That is the name this other university carries. This other university would not be established all new, but merely transformed from a former teaching college into a full-scale university and adopted the name. I could not say that the other school would be any less awkward though.

Nevertheless, the political background of the university or the people in charge of the institution mattered to us very little. In fact, it had absolutely no connection to our overall university, merely just gave us another topic for a gossip, to entertain ourselves while eating, drinking beer or just waiting for another class to happen. What I mean by dismissing the political background as something unimportant is not that we received a good quality education despite  this controversy, merely that our university experience was not too different from the experiences of people in other universities in Slovakia, that may have less questionable background, as I could tell from talking to my peers enrolled in the other institutions.

Till this day, I clearly remember the first day of my university. I came to a building that used to be a former cinema; only then there were crammed hundreds of uncomfortable chairs equipped with folding tables, similar to the ones you could find on some for long distance intended vehicles of public transportation. As I did not know anybody I just took a random seat and waited for something to happen. In this unappealing room, there were crammed several hundred students just like me waiting for the class to begin. The first class, at 7.30 in the morning, was called Theory of Marketing. The connection between Marketing and Media Studies was not too clear to me at the time, but since it was told to us that it is connected, we took their word for it.

The lecturer introduced himself as an Assistant Professor and the Dean of our Department. He was an elderly man, then in his 60s and for 2 hours he just kept talking. While now I remember nothing of what he said back then, I remember the way how he was speaking. His speech was extremely slow, monotonous – in fact too monotonous for anybody to actually be physically able to follow his lecture, and he would deliver his never-ending speech in a strong local dialect, which some of us would even at times struggle to understand.

The next class was called History of Journalism, something I would be quite interested in. Another, even an older man, came in. He was a very charming old man, when he introduced himself, his resume was quite impressive, he had been a Professor for something like thirty years, had published several books, had translated many influential literary works and probably some other things; I do not remember anymore. Even in the age above seventy, he had much charisma and was an impressive man to meet for the bunch of eighteen year olds such as myself. Unfortunately, though, his best years were already definitely behind him and what we got to witness was just whatever was left. Anyway, he spent his first lecture speaking to us in a very slow manner about how to reference other literature, where exactly should commas go, where a full stop, which letters should be capitalized, which ones should be in italic, how to reference a book, how to reference a chapter, how to reference a journal article and so on.

After another 2 long hours, another old man walked in to teach us a class on the Theory of State and Law. While again, the connection between law and media studies was quite arbitrary, as he was  another important figure at the university politics, we had to study what he told us. Unlike the previous man, who was a true gentleman, this professor was rather an aggressive figure. He would show us his impatience, introduced his friendship and collegiality with the president of Slovakia, highlighted how he had been a part of the team that put together the Slovak constitution and introduced us to his most recent book, and strongly advised us to purchase a copy from him. Later, I found out, he was famous for harassing female students, even though that is another hearsay and I did not have anybody’s firsthand experience that would confirm it. I only remember, some of my female friends would take a chance of wearing more revealing attire when coming to his final exam, hoping for a better result. In all fairness though, I do not have awareness of anything sinister ever to happen to anybody I knew, other than him being an unpleasant person to be around. However,  from my perspective as not an expert of law, he seemed to me as a person with deep knowledge and with lecturing skills surpassing the previous two men by a large margin.

After his lecture finished, we had to move to another building for a seminar in the same subject. We walked for another ten minutes or so, to an abandoned pavilion of a local primary school. In a former classroom there were crammed about 50 of those uncomfortable chairs with attached tables. We sat down. An attractive young woman with revealing attire walked in. This Doctor shared the same unfriendly manner with her supervisor and for another one hour kept barking