Idealism Revisited: Michael Oakeshott’s “Conversation” and the Question of Being-Together
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A little more than a decade ago, Bill Readings, in the provocatively titled The University in Ruins, insisted that, in the wake of increasing globalization, the most urgent ethical issue facing educators was what he called "the question of beingtogether." 1 Readings framed "being-together" as a "question," since he believed that its moral and political dimensions could be effectively addressed only by an ongoing sensitivity to significant cultural and political shifts.In the context of higher education, Readings claimed that one of the most disturbing changes was the ongoing erosion of the broader rationales that had traditionally linked the functions of the university with the interests of the liberal democratic nation-state.The conventional idea of the university was in danger of falling into "ruins," argued Readings, to the extent that its role as a state institution was under threat from an increasingly interconnected and cross-bordered world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.085 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.032 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.036 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".