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Publishers Weekly Review
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. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
CHOICE Review
Posthumously published, clearly in defiance of providence, this book provides insufficient insight to redeem its strident partisanship. Better editing might reduce the repetitiveness that alone helps one triangulate through the author's muddle to his meaning. The university, which has served the mission, the author contends, of supporting nation-state ideologies, has since the nation-state's demise lost its raison d'etre. Concerns with excellence, necessarily of a globalistic, therefore capitalistic corporate nature, have supplanted the university's original mission to promote its own national kultur. But "excellence" is meaningless because it has no ideology as a referent. Because criteria of excellence are contestable, they are inevitably decided by bureaucrats. Readings's "university" exists chiefly in his rhetorical imagination. An aficionado of common parlance that rationalizes any vague expatiation as "philosophical" discourse, the author displays his skill by dismissing definitions of excellence defined in terms of excellences as a "category mistake." Neither Aristotle nor Wittgenstein nor Ryle would agree with him. Readers would be far better served by the discussion of excellence in Alasdair McIntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (CH, Nov'88). Faculty. E. G. Rozycki Widener University
Booklist Review
Where interest in higher education is strong, these focused, challenging studies are worth considering. Feagin (of the University of Florida), working with other sociologists, uses focus groups with African American students at a large state university--and African American parents from cities near that school--plus studies of minority students' experiences on other campuses to challenge the myth that racism is no longer a problem at U.S. universities. While documenting the routine discrimination these students experience, the authors view as even more harmful the assumption "by most white administrators, faculty, staff, and students that the campus is a 'white' place in which blacks are admitted, at best, as guests." Our approach to diversity remains one-way assimilation of out-groups into white culture, they argue; campuses (and society) can hope to heal racial wounds only "when well-implemented multicultural policies . . . incorporate recognition of and respect for the cultures and views of many different peoples into predominantly white institutions." Readings, a British-born comparative literature professor at Syracuse University and then at the Universitede Montreal until his death in a 1994 airplane crash, sees the decline of the nation-state as destroying the cultural project of the modern university, turning the postmodern "University of Excellence" into one more transnational corporation striving to justify its existence in terms of cost-benefit analysis and consumer satisfaction. "The modern University," Readings observes, "has had three ideas: the Kantian concept of reason, the Humboldtian idea of culture, and now the techno-bureaucratic notion of excellence." Readings traces these ideas' history and their current "dereferentialization," then suggests alternative approaches to pedagogy and community within "the University as a ruined institution, one that has lost its historical raison d'etre." --Mary Carroll
