The University in Ruins (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: homo academicus, kantian university, pedagogic relation, Cultural Studies, United States, University of Excellence (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Books on the future of higher education are a booming business these days. Readings situates his discussion of the modern university in the context of decades of debate over the role of education in the 20th century. He draws on Kantian ideals of the university as a unit dedicated to a single agenda to demonstrate how the modern university's pursuit of "excellence" is a meaningless search. In fact, the very idea of "excellence" is devoid of meaning, he argues, merely a rallying cry to unite the academic troops as bureaucratic administrations attempt to keep their universities financially sound. Once the university was the repository and defender of national culture, but now it is an institution whose decline coincides with the rise of postmodernism. How can universities teach truth and objectivity when the relation between subject and object is in doubt? Unfortunately, there are no new answers here. For decades, academicians have sounded the death knell for culture; Marxist critics long ago decried the corporatization of the university; and discussions of the aim of pedagogy, even those like Readings's that stress the importance of community and obligation, are easy to come by. Readings's proposal, which does not make its full appearance until the final 10 pages of the book, is that the university adopt a course of study that emphasizes how we think and how such thinking intersects with and affects the outside world, but it is incomplete and too optimistic and makes for a disappointing ending to a largely disappointing work.

Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Readings argues compellingly that the university has outlived its purpose--a purpose defined two centuries ago, when the nation-state and the modern notion of culture came together to make the university the guardian of national culture...What, Readings asks, "is the point of the University, if we realize that we are no longer to strive to realize a national identity, be it an ethnic essence or a republican will?" What happens when the culture the university was meant to preserve goes global and transnational along with everything else? This is an intriguing argument. And...it helps to explain much. From this perspective, for example, Readings is wonderfully insightful on the "culture wars" that have wracked universities and bewildered the public for two decades...Readings offers a call to arms to those of us who live and work in universities as well as to those on the outside--a call to better understand our position in a changing world, to come out of our professional shells, stop pining for a lost world, and actively seek to construct something different...[This is] a remarkable contribution. -- David Harvey "Atlantic Monthly" --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (October 30, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674929535
• ISBN-13: 978-0674929531
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #369,471 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Faculty will read this book and say, "Ah, yes!", January 18, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The University in Ruins (Hardcover)

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

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An important book on the university situation with few flaws, May 20, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: The University in Ruins (Hardcover)

Bill Readings' book is an important contribution to the growing debate about the functions of the University in the present world. It was published posthumously as Bill died in that tragic plane crash of the American Eagle flight between Indianpolis and Chicago on October 31st, 1994. Readings' book is important because it carries us beyond and above the usual debates about excellence to bring us to a different level of analysis. After recounting the German foundations of the current conceptualization of the university, Readings show how the present obsession for excellence betrays these 19th-century ideals under the guise of of preserving them, and how excellence has actually become a management tool which, in actuality, refers back to a principle of performance. But Readings' book is also important because it does not suggest we should simply hark back to Humboldtian ideals or those of the German idealists; instead, he invites us to construct new meaning to words that have perhaps been used too lightly and cynically in the recent past -- namely "value" (instead of excellence) and "thought" (instead of performance). Readings' suggestion - or rather challenge - is to propose the construction of a materialistic content to such idealistic terms. His untimely death has transformed a challenge into a legacy - an important one, I might add. Based on a wide knowledge of university conditions (Germany, France, Britain, the U.S.), armed with the critical tools of contemporary philosophy (in particular Derrida, Lyotard and some of the best practitioners of cultural studies), yet constantly skeptical of any one line of thought, this book displays considerable erudition, yet adorns it with much wit and a lightness of touch that academics should practice more often. Sometimes, however, the analysis moves a bit too quickly as when the author brashly criticizes the French sociologist Bourdieu on the basis of a confusion between culture and institution. But these minor irritants notwithstanding, Readings' book remains a trailblazing exercise that must not be ignored. Highly recommended.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still stage two, July 7, 2008

By	W. Jamison "William S. Jamison" (Eagle River, Ak United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The University in Ruins (Hardcover)

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".