Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) attacked the universities as agents of the “Kingdome of Darknesse” in Leviathan (1651), with the complaint that they didn’t teach genuine philosophy nor enough geometry. It was an attack on Aristotle, and a support of the new math tied to his thoroughgoing materialist philosophy:

“And for the study of Philosophy it hath no otherwise place, then as a handmaid to the Romane Religion. And since the Authority of Aristotle is onely current there, that study is not properly Philosophy (the nature whereof dependeth not on Authors), but Aristotelity. And for Geometry, till of very late times it had no place at all; as being subservient to nothing but rigide truth. And if any man by the ingenuity of his owne nature, had attained to any degree of perfection therein, hee was commonly thought a Magician, and his Art Diabolicall.”

A Puritan radical reform plan for the universities, from John Webster, agreed that Aristotle was the problem:

“The Philosophy which the Schools use and teach, being meerly Aristotelical, [has been] imbraced and cryed up more than all others: he should be accounted the Prince of Philosophers, the Master-piece of Nature, the Secretary of the Universe, and such an one beyond whose knowledge there is no progression.” [1654, Academiarum Examen, 52]

This kept the universities from studying nature:

“This School Philosophy is altogether void of true, and infallible demonstration, observation, and experiment, the only certain means, and instruments to discover, and anatomize natures occult and central operations; which are found out by laborious tryals, manual operations, assiduous observations, and the like, and not by poring continually upon a few paper Idols, and unexperienced Authors. [ibid., 68]

The remedy was to banish Aristotle and study chemistry [“Pyrotechny”], grounded in the hermetical Paracelsus and Fludd. Thus the schools

“would leave their idle, and fruitless speculations, and not be too proud to put their hands to the coals and furnace, where they might find ocular experiments to confute their fopperies, and produce effects that would be beneficial to all posterities.” [ibid., 71]

The study of the scholastics in theology had produced

“a confused Chaos, of needless frivolous, fruitless, triviall, vain, curious, impertinent, knotty, ungodly, irreligious, thorny, and hell-hatch’t disputes, altercations, doubts, questions and endless janglings, multipled and spawned forth even to monstrosity and nauseousness.”[ibid. 15]