Fall 1998
Volume 25, Number 1
The University in Ruins?
by Dominick LaCapra
Just before his untimely death, Bill Readings finished writing a book that will be a center of discussion and an object of critical dialogic exchange for some time to come. The University in Ruins contains an argument that should be considered carefully by academics, administrators, and the general public.1 This argument demonstrates that, while the "culture wars" may not be as heated as they were only a short time ago, the issues they raised are in no sense a thing of the past. Indeed the consequences of polarization and rhetorical overkill are still with us, as is the tendancy of extreme ideological positions to meet in curious and unsettling ways.
I would begin by noting that, in my own judgment, the contemporary academy is based on a systemic, schizoid division between a market model and a model of corporate solidarity and collegial responsibility. (Often one or the other model is invoked in ways that best serve the self-interest of the commentator). The market model is employed in the prevalent idea that undergraduates subsidize research and graduate education and that they are not getting their money's worth, notably at a time when tuition is very high and has been outpacing the general rate of inflation. The market model has also played a significant role in the establishment of criteria for teaching and reward in departments and in the setting of salaries and perquisites for individuals. The idea here is that a department, to be competitive nationally, must conform to national criteria, for example, with respect to faculty that it is trying to recruit. And major increases in an individual's salary or other perquisites have typically depended on the reception of an outside offer from a peer institution.
By contrast there is also the belief that the university is a community made of smaller communities guided by non-market-oriented norms and values. On this model, departments and individuals should be bound by the value of dedicated service to the institution independent of market considerations, even if such service is not directly rewarded in material ways. The solidaristic-collegial model is particularly prominent in the idea that faculty have a special if not quasi-priestly responsibility for the education of nation's youth. Here to complain about tendencies in the academic system may be tantamount to saying that it has become overly aligned with the modified market mechanisms operative in the rest of the economy and society.
The two models are in turn related to two ideal types of faculty member, what might be called the entrepreneurial globetrotter and the local hero. The former is administratively adept, always in the process of putting together some new arrangement or academic deal, and is continually on the move. She or he is a highly marketable commodity, has had many grants or competitive fellowships, changes positions frequently (or at least has the opportunity to do so), spends at least as much time away from a home university as at it, and has a vita the size of an average telephone book. The hipper kind of globetrotter seems to exist in the superspace between the Deleuzian nomad and the Reebok executive. By contrast, the local hero, typically existing in a relation of mutual disdain and grumbling denigration vis à vis the globetrotter, is esconced within the workings of the institution itself. She or he has a large, even cultlike undergraduate following, serves on numerous committees, faithfully attends faculty meetings, and is a nodal point in gossip and rumor mills. These ideal types are of course extremes, but they do have their instantiations--at times schizoid instantiations--whom most of us can furnish with proper names. Fortunately, they do not dominate or even typify the acedemic landscape. It is, moreover, curious that jeremiads about the insufficient attention paid to undergraduate education often come not from local heros but from neoconservative think-tank affiliates who themselves do little or no teaching and seem quite adept at conforming to the market criteria in their own behavior (such as charging enormous fees for lectures bemoaning the way the acedemic market has led to the decline of undergraduate teaching). And the intemperate quality of recent complaints is often attended by an avoidance of more specific and detailed inquiry into the actual activities of those who are objects of criticism, notably the activities of humanists who typically do more teaching, including undergraduate teaching, than any other group on campus. Jeremiads about the decline of teaching may also be coordinated with a beatific vision of the holy family in which academics--especially humanists--spend most of their time in the classroom nurturing youth with motherly solicitude, while administrators govern in fatherlike fashion, and think-tank affiliates have primary responsibility for the production of knowledge and the dissemination of evangelical admonations. 2
Readings stresses only the way in which the university has become a corporation in the modern, market-oriented sense, and for Readings this market model is hegemonic to the point of creating but one dominant identity for the modern university. For him the older corporate or solidaristic idea is anachronistic, as is the so-called university of culture that was its cognate. Readings is not unhappy about the end of the university of culture and all that it presumably stood for, but neither is he happy about its market-oriented replacement. Still, he tries to see the opportunities created by the new university modelled on the transnational corporation, and he places his conception in a larger historical and critical frame of reference. He affirms in his own voice the image of a university in ruins and asks how best to dwell in the ruins of reason, culture, the centered subject-citizen, nationalism, and a sense of evangelical if not redemptive mission. For what is indeed definately ruined, in Reading's eyes, the university of culture that provided citizen-subjects for the nation-state and in which the humanities were the site of liberal education, displace religiosity, and identity -forming culture.
1. See Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); hereafter abbreviated UR. 2. On these issues, see the important article by Ellen Messer-Davidow, "Manufacturing the Attack on Liberalized Higher Education," Social Text, no. 36 (1993): 40-80. See also
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