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The University in Ruins
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by Bill Readings
Harvard University Press
Due/Published
October 1997, 256 pages,
paper
ISBN
0674929535
It is no longer clear what role the University plays in society. The structure of the contemporary University is changing rapidly, and we have yet to understand what precisely these changes will mean. Is a new age dawning for the University, the renaissance of higher education under way? Or is the University in the twilight of its social function, the demise of higher education fast approaching? We can answer such questions only if we look carefully at the different roles the University has played historically and then imagine how it might be possible to live, and to think, amid the ruins of the University. Tracing the roots of the modern American University in German philosophy and in the work of British thinkers such as Newman and Arnold, Bill Readings argues that the integrity of the modern University has been linked to the nation-state, which it has served by promoting and protecting the idea of a national culture. But now the nation-state is in decline, and national culture no longer needs to be either promoted or protected. Increasingly, universities are turning into transnational corporations, and the idea of culture is being replaced by the discourse of "excellence." On the surface, this does not seem particularly pernicious. The author cautions, however, that we should not embrace this techno-bureaucratic approach too quickly. The new University of Excellence is a corporation driven by market forces, and, as such, is more interested in profit margins than in thought. Readings urges us to imagine how to think, without concession to corporate excellence or recourse to romantic nostalgia within an institution in ruins. The result is a passionate appeal for a new community of thinkers. |
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Review
Whither the university? Readings’ view of today’s university avoids denouncing it as Allan Bloom did in The Closing of the American Mind, and resists the temptation to indulge in a kind of romantic nostalgia exemplified, Readings argues, in Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Idea of the University. Instead Readings convincingly argues that in order to think about the university it is first necessary to explore how it has historically been perceived and acknowledge its connection with the concept of the nation-state. Readings maintains that the United States and Western Europe, influenced by 19th century German philosophers and the writings of Newman and Arnold, viewed the university as a protector and promoter of culture and more specifically a national culture. With the idea of the nation-state being replaced by a globalization dominated by the cash-nexus, the university itself is beginning to mirror a trans-national corporation. Instead of culture, today’s university pursues “excellence”, a non-ideological pursuit (when contrasted with national culture) in which what gets taught matters less and less, replaced by how well something is taught or researched. Thus, without a precise cultural function, Readings suggests the university can function, “...no longer [as] a model of ideal society but rather a place where the impossibility of such models can be thought— practically thought, rather than thought under ideal conditions.”
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