Customer Reviews

The University in Ruins

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4 star:		(4)
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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

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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