by Bill Readings
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Product Description
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. The author cautions, however, that we should not embrace this techno-bureaucratic appeal 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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Average Customer Review:
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Still stage two, 2008-07-07
One reason why the critic from Publishers Weekly may be right about the book being incomplete is because Bill Readings died before finishing it as explained by Diane Elam in the Forward. This is pointed out as well by several other reviewers. The interpretation of the situation in the universities seems useful and interesting to me. My question concerns its applicability to many students and many universities. From my own experience it seems the second stage of university life as he describes it was still applicable to my student experience in the seventies but still in many ways appropriate to my own students today. What seems to create difficulties is the transition both for universities and individual students in them. Many students still expect the university of their choice to model a culture and assign them the role of the hero of the educational process, as BR describes it. But they are surrounded by students of the sort in the third stage and faced with a university that wants to cater to that third sort for all the reasons he points out. A question then remains, can a school within a school maintain that second sort of program in the face of such social momentum and if so, how can the right students be recruited and reassured that their goals are still viable?
This seems like the focus of his suggestions and it would have been great to see what specific practices he might have thought would have worked. Anything to avoid the sort of environment depicted in Tom Wolfe's book "I am Charlotte Simmons".
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
how it really is for us in the ruined university, 2006-02-03
it's a stupid and banal thing to say that a book "changes" you, but readings' book has not only validated my own experience in many university classrooms in many different institutions -- private and public, in the northeast, middlewest, south and west of this country (a word one hesitates to use after reading readings) -- but it's a book that challenges me personally and politically and artistically to think beyond the boundaries of a situation that has no solution, towards soemthing else in my own work as a teacher, scholar, actor, writer. one reviewer of this book objected to the emphasis on procedure and administration in Reading's critique of the university as yet another corporate burocracy. But anyone in the university knows that that's just about ALL the university is -- procedure and administration. what we DO with that, as educators, intellectuals and writers is another story, and in my opinion this book is daring and inspiring in its desire for those of us in the university to let go of certain illusions -- messianic, heroic, preservational and so on -- in order to get on with the work we can do -- inquire, dialogue and express/explore our obligations to students in an ongoing and unending discovery/problematization of thought/justice/freedom.
i was blown away by this book, and i am grateful to the author for putting into words, what i have experienced on a subterrantean "matrix" like level for years.
5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
The Canon Debate, 2002-02-04
Another aspect of the University scene that Readings explores is the importance of the canon debates in this present time that Yeats foresaw: "The centre cannot hold: Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." In the internecine struggles to control the cultural center of the universities, each separate group that (ironically) gains its status from its marginalized distance from the pre-1960's white-euro-male literary canon tries to define the country's culture through its own canon. The irony is that there is nothing left to control since the University--along with the country--no longer has any interest in the content of any culture. Whatever shiftingpatterns may emerge are simply commercial products of the free market of ideas. Hence the "Americanization" of the University.
7 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
 So what?, 1997-09-17
Bill Readings makes an interesting analysis about the modern university, the "university of excellence", which focus more on administration than other areas. However, the book doesn't talk about the role of searching the truth in the University. That was so related to the first universities of the history that I think there is still a lot of space to discuss and talk. I think the problem of the university goes beyond the administrative procedures. What is the goal of researching
37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
Faculty will read this book and say, "Ah, yes!", 1997-01-18
Readings describes why he feels that universities are in ruins and what faculty might do about it. He traces the history of the university from Kant to the present time and argues that it has gone through three phases or forms: the University of Ideas (Kant), the University of Culture (Humboldt), and now the University of Excellence (based on measuring quality). His argument is that the U has now become a business, and "excellence" is now being defined in business, rather than in intellectual, terms. Perhaps the most important point that he makes in the book is that he feels excellence has no intellectual reference point.
His conclusion is that there is no turning back. If faculty do nothing, then the option is for them to mourn or to be scorned...unless they make the attempt to look for "open spaces" where they can focus their work on Thinking (he uses an uppercase T on purpose). He especially encourages Thinking that spans disciplines. He also argues that scholars need to be aware that, in the University of Exellence, accounting systems prevail. In pursuing these open spaces, scholars must still be able to provide what he calls "techo-bureaucrats" with the numbers that they need to run their accounting systems.
Sadly, Readings believes that the University has lost its soul and, today, is no longer the pivotal cultural institution that it once was. To the contrary, he suggests that it is now a business that is being evaluated as a business and is in competition with other businesses.
This book will not be an "easy read" for many. Readings' meanders: making a point here and drawing a conclusion there. Some administrators might not finish reading it for that reason. Having said that, anyone who is interested in the present status and future direction of higher education should read this book. It is a sobering and important piece of work.
Frank Fear,
Michigan State University
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