49 of 49 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
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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37 of 38 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
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.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
What it is and what it isn't, August 1, 2010
This review is from: The University in Ruins (Paperback)
Actually 4 and a half stars.
What it is not is what the title implies: a culture-war polemic. This is a heavily theorized account of the state of higher education. Moving from Kant, though the German Idealists and Humboldt, Readings traces the notion of a university anchored in rationality to one anchored in culture, in particular the culture of the nation-state, which the university is to inculcate in its students. In Germany this happens through philosophy, in England through English literature. Now, with the decline of the nation-state because of the triumph of transnational capitalism, there is, in effect, no nation state with a culture to inculcate. Hence, we have the university of `excellence', a nonreferential term that can mean anything.
Since this `excellence' subsumes everything previously considered counter-cultural, it turns all to a marketable commodity. (You want radical professors? You want radical cultural studies? Come to Old Siwash. Ours are Excellent. Just like our excellent dormitories and excellent exercise facilities.)
Ultimately this is an assault on the technocratic/bureaucratized/commercialized modern university, which measures all with quantifiable `metrics', accountability always being equatable with accounting, but what Readings offers in its place is somewhat vague, highly theoretical, unintelligible to bureaucrats and unlikely to ever happen: a community of `dissensus' rather than a search (as with the Germans) for not just the truth but its underlying unity.
The book is very provocative, deeply-considered and interesting. It is fair to say that it is most heavily tilted toward the German side of things rather than the English side of things (American higher education having been heavily influenced by both). It is also, as he acknowledges, heavily tilted toward the humanities. Life is very different in the physical sciences and engineering, e.g., though much of what he says with regard to `excellence' is applicable to the ethos of professional schools.
It is written from a leftist perspective. He is contemptuous of the arguments of all conservatives as well as actual liberals, such as Hirsch, and trivializes their arguments. He assumes, e.g., that core curricula are dead, never to return, that the historical method in the humanities is largely dead, never to return in anything like its former state, that black studies, women's studies, cultural studies, etc. are all a priori good, that the entry into the professoriate of individuals dodging the draft was a good thing and that high theory is a `project' decidedly worth pursuing. In other words, the book is very much of the 1980's and 1990's. What is interesting about Readings' critique is the fact that he acknowledges that multiculturalism and postmodernism have helped to create the `university of excellence'. They are causes as well as symptoms.
There are many things which he does not consider: e.g. the growth in student populations and the changes in student demographics. Was the curriculum demolished because the `new students' couldn't handle it? Or didn't want it? He notes that student passivity results from their feeling `parked'; they are not being educated; they are being self-accredited through the collection of credits and the meeting of requirements. But what is the etiology of that? Global capitalism? Universities hungry for tuition revenue? Antinomian faculty? The belief that all should go to college (for professional advancement), but a consequent dumbing down of elementary, secondary, undergraduate and graduate education? Many more now `go to college', but the credentials for professional advancement have been ratcheted up as the requirements for professional credentials have been ratcheted down. Students don't just feel `parked'; they actually have been parked. His theory is very subtle and thoughtful, his historiography less so.
All in all, this is a very interesting book. Tragically, Readings died in a plane crash just before it was completed. I wish he had survived and had decades more of experience with the `university of excellence' so that he could write complementary books on the subject.
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