Academy

An academy (Lygene: akadēmeia, from Stanatan aka-dam 'evil house') was an institution of learning, research, and debate originating from Vasarea. Scholars at academies, known as academics, stood as peers in dignity, differentiated (if at all) only by accomplishments treated as contributions to a holistic and shared sense of academic inquiry; research itself was often considered a contest, but this did not preclude a respect for the academics' common vocation. Academies acquired importance such that what distinguished an academy was often the ipso facto pursuit of particular kinds of knowledge, or the hosting of particular groups of scholars. There was independent regard for the academies' freedoms and dignities, and a sense of the academy as a distinct social order.

Lygenes
The Vasarean academy was first created by the Lygenes in approximately the 4th century BCE, emerging as centers for discussing new knowledge in the context of growing Pastic influence under the White Order as well as the rise of native disciplines like Abliology. In this form, the academy claimed importance insofar as it was one of the many social orders and groups that laid out self-evident proof of existence and significance at the sel, and by providing the kind of learning that society had an interest in as part of the Reign of Trials. Despite the fragmented constitution of society, they were nonetheless able to exert considerable influences on Lygene society as much as thought: the philosophers of the academies fermented understandings of Arta no doubt attractive political blueprints in their own right, and they were naturally proximate to or founders of potent networks.

The academy came to function by the 2nd century BCE as the center of cities and kingdoms, with its Artic and Abliological insights becoming systematically followed as legislation, while disputes between academics were seen as offering the possibility of negotiating and revising law. In this capacity it replaced the sel, functioning akin to the dam of the early White Order. Opposing this trend was the alternative model of oligarchical dictatorships under isostates, but they also drew on academic ideas and customs, if not ruling alongside or establishing academies to bolster their power; kingdoms like Lasros benefited greatly from rulers' networks of academics beyond its immediate lands as an instrument of hegemony. The Lasrosian institution of agele provided a testament to how devoted the wider public could be to the academy. This period also saw a narrowing of the horizon of inquiry to that which was strictly legal and political due to Pastic influence, a popular criticism of the academics that rallied behind lone, charismatic teachers and cult leaders.

The Mecessian empire sidelined academies from direct power through the establishment of its own bureaucracy of officials, but continued to hold academic learning in high regard (even as Simonianism held a degree of contempt to academics). After its destruction in the Red Sail Wars, the Vasarean Legations somewhat fancifully treated academies as valid stand-ins for dams as ways to radiate Arta, and proclaimed themselves to be restoring academic powers in the didascalic system. Considerable concessions of power in all aspects acquired a more practical impetus in the era of instability beginning with the Legate wars; by all measures, at the end of Lygene civilization in the 6th century, academies were indisputably one of the independent centers of a polycentric society. The legates also spread academies across Vasarea; in the absence of Experts with enough prestige to found dams, they became the default establishment for Artic learning.

Anamnestism
Though beginning as a late Lygene charismatic teaching, Anamnestism 'returned' to the academy with the work of the Phrenophile movement in the 6–7th centuries, on grounds that Anamnesis and other doctrines of Cosmocles could endure by their verity investigation in a systematic and academic setting, and had to do so to prove its setting within Arta. The Arassian Restoration had a profound effect on southern Vasarean academies, which now embraced Anamnestism as its epistemic basis. Spiritual and logical sciences became the new focuses of inquiry, while with the emphasis on personal cultivation authority was no longer as directly exercised as before, and not merely in political and legal domains. The patronage of academies and deciding the order of their prestige, nevertheless, was a regular cause for religious conflicts among Anamnestic states; the Arassian Symphony was a primary party to many disputes.

The Artaphilian reform of the 9th century marked the beginning of a 'clerical' shift where an academic hierarchy in the Arassian Symphony would be used to settle disputes of seniority and prestige, as well as to regulate learning against heresy. After the Antiphonic Wars, the Stegamenian Order established by the 982 Concord of Stegamenes took another step in this direction, as academies and the specific contemplation of Anamnestism became a key pillar of the Stegamenian system standing against the encroachments of the Jangearean Missions. Until the 13th century, academies were leading institutions of Anamnestic society and unchallenged in their domination of ideas, albeit having become heavily conservative in their learning.

Origins
The academies introduced by legates to eastern and northern Vasarea preserved the rich diversity of schools, interests, and involvements that characterized the early Lygene forms, in part as sel-based patchwork societies remained strong in those areas. Pastism, Anamnestism, and various other doctrines such as Conradianism or Tiritism all became mere fields and topics of discussion for scholars, who identified first and foremost with simply being academics. The Rudic dynasties of the Reign of Urges established academies as part of the superior order in cliobism, further reinforcing exceptionalism that laid with the academy itself. To the extent the hierarchical features of Anamnestic academies were borrowed, they were put in service of pursuing the eastern academy's mundane interests.

Upclearing
In the 12th century tendencies towards abstracting overarching principles coincided with reforms informed by the Jangerean Missions and the Stegamenian system, which directly called for new unifying ideologies as well as subordinating the academies to a project for producing them. The Tenure reform created a model where academies became an arm of the Wedric government through special cliobic license for grants and liberal enterprise, building on its already preeminent position among the estates. A growingly Instructionist academia, however, was critical of the project they saw this as being intended to assist, and thus schemed to usurp the state to implement Instructionist visions instead. This was accomplished tremendously with the birth of the Edifice in the Great Upclearing: college states were established by the Sede's followers across the continent, and the Edificial model of the academy would from now on define nearly all developments of the institution.

Golden age
The ideal of the college state was rebuked by ordinalism and academies were made subordinate to the petitor-empires for the 14th century, but this was mainly a matter of political philosophy, while in administrative terms academies were handed supervision if not direct power over practically all governance under (or rather, as part of) those same bureaucracies. The Sede-established colleges in the Anamnestic lands were even more enthusiastic as to the potential of theory-led government, producing the Pegadians whose intellectual agitation and activism eroded and eventually dismantled the Stegamenian Order.

Instructionism became the definitive science of the eastern Vasarean academy, and even among Anamnestics it was being engaged with favorably in Phasmatism, soon becoming a trend that even the most traditional of Anamnestic academies had to confront. However, as a formal idea and religion, Instructionism was much less relevant than the methods and realities men most devoted to Edificial civilization saw it to represent &mdash; governance by the academy as an abstract institution and force, along scientific-Artic principles that need not explicitly identify with Instructionist culture. Presence of the academy itself, conceived of as the technology of a particular way of finding Arta the Instructionists and Edificers believed in, thus became the foremost banner of the spread of the Edifice.

Decline
With the rise of the polymath-entrepreneur universalists in the late 14th century, academies' importance to experimentation and administration was already being eroded. Aluarian power in particular became exercised mainly by universalists, and its academia was becoming dominated by more personal and charismatic Influents. The Anamnestic world's own incorporation into the Edificial world was also not built on academic government, as the Pegadians' idealism and long-time subversive reputation made them settle for a more ambiguous 'guidance' by Edificial principles, and the academy there seemingly remained in its consultative, clerical role; this similarly happened in Ausarea under the Silent Conquest. In the 15th century formalist denunciations of the 'forsaking' of the academies became tied up with attacks on the Aluarian-led Celitine system, combining with concern from within Aluarian academia to result in a major formalist reaction after the Institution Crisis of the 1480s. The Exhamian Sublation in Aluaria, which saw Influents use half-appropriated academic authority to wage a brutal civil war, was particularly horrifying to the rest of the Edifice.

However, swept up into the political realities of the period and lacking in those truly committed to it as an ideal, the endowments made under the Avelnian-led Celitine system turned academies into tools of patronage without restoring their prestige, and to the extent liberal admissions restored activity they merely provided followers for a new generation of Influents. In the 16th-century crisis, the rise of the Elpian Synthesis made the academy as a tool of rational government obsolete with the Synthetic administrative system, while in Avelna the Gannean Sublation caused widespread condemnation academics as dangerous threats to order. The tumult of the Fifty Years' War and drastic centralization under the combinates saw the decaying academies rapidly swept aside amidst wider civilizational collapse. Anoratism, the most influential of the new era's philosophies, promoted a new idea of learning as being primarily based on intuition and reception, which showed itself in the ways of the institutions that replaced the academy.