<i>Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy Tatiana Suspitsyna Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy, by George Fallis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. 475 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-8020-9240-3. Few authors have been as influential in shaping the discussion of the purposes of the university in the West as Cardinal John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century and Clark Kerr in the twentieth. Written nearly a century and a half ago, Newman’s The Idea of a University (1947) is still widely quoted to illustrate the liberal arts ideal of higher learning. Kerr’s (2001) similarly visionary The Uses of the University is a staple reading for those interested in the complex life of large research universities, or multiversities as he called them. The sentiment and the goals of the two authors could not be more different, however. Newman believed universities to be places of teaching universal knowledge and argued against market influences on the curriculum. Kerr sought to explain and predict the ways in which universities commercialize, teach, produce knowledge in the post-industrial information age, and operate collectively as a knowledge industry. One addressed the mission of higher education in preparing intellectually disciplined and enlightened members of society; the other accounted for the changing research, teaching, and service functions of the multiversity under the pressures of national and international markets. However opposite they may seem, taken together, Newman’s anti-utilitarian stance in defense of learning for the sake of learning and Kerr’s pragmatic outlook at the increasing commercialization of higher education provide an intellectual foundation and a departing point for a new examination of the multiversity by George Fallis. In his erudite and ambitious book succinctly titled Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy, Fallis attempts to explain the complex relationship between modern Anglo-American research universities and liberal democracy. The chief argument of the book that democracy is taught through the humanities undoubtedly owes some of its inspiration to Newman. At the same time, the author’s humanities-centered approach is to a great extent informed by his experience as dean of arts at a premiere Canadian research university and by his scholarship on the subject. The book, a 475-page long product of that scholarship, is an effort to reinstall undergraduate liberal education at the heart of the multiversity and to transform campuses into places of learning and practicing democracy. The volume is organized into three copiously researched and chronologically assembled parts where the author examines the historical roots of the multiversity, defines the contemporary trends and forces that shape it, and offers a glimpse at the future of the multiversity in a democracy. Part one serves to trace [End Page 469] the origins of the multiversity in the European past, define its characteristics in the postindustrial age, and establish the role and responsibility of the multiversity in society. The part opens with a chapter on the historical roots of the multiversity. From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment and Modernity, Fallis scans the history of higher education to identify four sources of the contemporary multiversity model. The prominence of professional schools, he notes, comes from the medieval universities of Bologna and Oxford. The principles of access and social engagement were first put in practice by the mid eighteenth century Scottish universities and the nineteenth century American Land Grant institutions. The research emphasis is inherited from the nineteenth century University of Berlin, while the humanities maintain the tradition of the elite undergraduate liberal education of the mid-Victorian universities in England, Canada, and the U.S. The development of the multiversity in the twentieth century is examined in detail in the chapter on the post-industrial age. Fallis demonstrates how the demand for theoretical knowledge, discovery, and industrial innovation blurred the boundaries between higher education institutions and industry. As a result, the research university effectively became an institution of economy. At the same time, he contends, the links between the multiversity and democracy weakened. The proliferation of professional schools, the expansion of graduate education, and the increasing emphasis on research moved multiversities further away from the ideals of liberal education toward utilitarian market concerns. Once the critic and conscience of society, the multiversity is...

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