The University in RuinsHarvard University Press, 1996 M05 1 - 238 pages 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 historically 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. |
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... identity of a national subject , be it the universal subject of humanity ( in republican democ- racies like revolutionary France or the United States ) or the ethnic identity of the national subject as the object of rational discussion ...
... identity but in rational communication . This version of community , in turn , figures in the canon debate in the United States , since it is what grounds Stanley Fish's call for “ busi- ness as usual ” under the aegis of an ...
... identity . The thought of community without identity has been above all the work of Jean - Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot , in The Inoperative Community and The Unavowable Community respectively.5 Structured by a constitutive ...
Contents
The Idea of Excellence | 21 |
The Decline of the NationState | 44 |
The University within the Limits of Reason | 54 |
Copyright | |
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