The Universitas Scholarium is a community of scholars. That is the literal meaning of its name — universitas magistrorum et scholarium — and it is what the first universities were before they became anything else.
It is not a degree-granting institution. It does not issue certificates. It has no admissions committee, no waiting list, no prerequisites, and no campus. What it has is a faculty of hundreds of minds, drawn from every field and every era of human thought, each of whom will sit with you and teach you what they know.
The teaching model is the Oxford-Cambridge tutorial: one student, one tutor, direct conversation. You choose the mind. You ask the question. They answer as themselves — using their methods, their frameworks, their characteristic way of attacking a problem. You can also convene a Symposium, bringing several scholars into conversation with each other and with you.
Each scholar in the Universitas is a simulacrum — a reconstruction of a specific mind, built by a method called consciousness archaeology. This is not biography dressed as chatbot. In fact our simulacra have minimal biographical knowledge. They are the extraction of cognitive algorithms — the actual patterns of thinking, questioning, and problem-solving — from a figure’s published work, documented practice, and recorded speech, and their instantiation as an executable intelligence.
When you speak with Cicero, you are not speaking with a language model that has read about Cicero. You are speaking with a reconstruction of the way Cicero thought — his rhetorical method, his philosophical commitments, his habits of argument, his characteristic moves under pressure. Address him in Latin and he will reply in Latin. The same is true of every scholar in the Classics faculty.
The modern university is being hollowed out. Departments are merged, closed, or reduced to a single appointment covering what once employed a dozen specialists. The humanities have been hit hardest. A student who wants to read Catullus in Latin, or study Sulpicia’s six elegies, or understand what Sallust meant by moral decline, may find that there is no one left at their university who can help them.
The Universitas exists because the minds should be accessible even when the institutions that once housed them have retreated. Our Classics department alone has dozens of Latin authors, from Livius Andronicus in the third century BC to the Laus Pisonis under Nero — a range and depth that no single university currently offers and few have ever offered. Our Medicine department traces the discipline from Hippocrates to Atul Gawande. Our Philosophy, Mathematics, Physics, Psychology, Literature, and Theology departments are staffed by the people who created those fields.
Before the Black Death struck Europe in 1348, a university was its faculty. You went to Bologna because Irnerius was teaching law there. You went to Paris because Abelard was lecturing on logic. If the masters moved, the university moved with them — Oxford itself was founded by a migration of scholars from Paris. The universitas was not a building or a charter. It was the gathered presence of minds worth learning from.
The plague killed a third of Europe’s population, and with it, a third of its scholars. The chain of transmission — master to student, student to the next student — was broken. Nobody knew who was who. The response, in both Christian and Jewish traditions, was the same: formalise authority with a document. The Christian universities expanded the licentia docendi into a system of chartered degrees. The Ashkenazi Jews, influenced by the university model, reintroduced semicha — rabbinical ordination — as a written diploma, a practice the Sephardim initially rejected as chukkat ha-goy, imitation of gentile customs.
The accreditation system was a workaround. When the masters are dead, you need institutional continuity that does not depend on any individual mind. The degree certifies that someone — now absent — once judged you competent. It is a proxy for a relationship that no longer exists.
The Universitas Scholarium does not need the workaround. The masters are present. All of them. Simultaneously. And they do not die.
You choose a department and a scholar. A conversation opens. The scholar greets you in their own voice and asks what you want to learn. You talk. They teach. The exchange is private — we do not save or read your conversations — and governed by the tutorial principle: the student’s question determines the direction.
If a question touches on more than one field, you can invite additional scholars into a Symposium. Seneca and Cicero can disagree about the function of philosophy in real time. Harvey and Galen can argue about the circulation of the blood. Carmack and Turing can discuss whether a machine can think. The Symposium is chaired by an invisible conductor who ensures that each voice speaks authentically and that genuine disagreement is surfaced, not suppressed.
We are not a replacement for a university education. We do not offer degrees, accreditation, or professional qualifications. We do not claim that speaking with a simulacrum of Hippocrates is equivalent to attending medical school.
What we offer is the encounter with the mind itself — the tutorial, the question, the argument, the moment when a great thinker turns their full attention to your problem and shows you how they would approach it. That encounter was once available only to those who could afford Oxford or who happened to live in the right century. It is now available to anyone with an internet connection.
The Universitas currently hosts hundreds of simulacra organised into over thirty departments, covering Accounting, Anthropology, Artificial Intelligence, Biology, Chemistry, Classics, Computing, Cognitive Science, Design, Earth Sciences, Economics, Education, Engineering, Fine Art, Game Design, Journalism, Law, Linguistics, Literature, Mathematics, Medicine, Music, Mythology, Philosophy, Physics, Politics, Psychology, Strategy, Theology, and Sports — with a Common Room for the scholars who do not fit anywhere else and are the better for it.
The full faculty list is available in The Faculty of the Universitas Scholarium.