Rethinking the Future of the University ed. by David Lyle Jeffrey, Dominic Manganiello

REVIEWS David Lyle Jeffrey and Dominic Manganiello, eds. Rethinking the Future of the University. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1998. xiv + 134. A better title for this collection of essays, mostly McMartin Lec­ tures presented in 1995 at the University of Ottawa, might have been “Rethinking the Past of the University.” Notwithstanding a concerted dismay about the future of an academy seen as be­ trayed to shallow nihilism, the contributors offer some cogent reflections on the historical development of the modern (and, as one terms it, “transmodern” ) university. At many points that evolution provides contexts for re-understanding the crosscur­ rents of organizational politics, privilege, and desire shaping and reshaping the academic world from the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth-century emergence of postmodernism. Much less persuasive and useful is the volume’s persistence in caricaturizing our more recent (and future?) climate of flux and ferment as an intellectual, moral, and cultural malaise corrigible only by re-investing in stabilizing and idealizing mythologies from a more hegemenous past. Reviving the edifying moral and spir­ itual ethos of Christianity is in particular considered here the way to restore lost “identity” and “truth” to an institution long rooted in that ideological tradition. The best and least nostalgic piece is perhaps the first — Carlos Bazan’s “The Original Idea of the University,” which ac­ tually emphasizes the practical corporatism and alliances, not simply the presumed ideals, of the mediaeval universitas. It was an association formed to secure for its members certain rights and privileges in education over against the interference of the Church or local government. It created and controlled “a struc­ ture of knowledge capable of inspiring structures of teaching” (19), and fostered thereby a particular notion of intellectual and critical life as a hermeneutically-disposed culture centred on textual study. By eliciting and historicizing evidences (analo­ gies, really) that cut both ways in today’s dissonance between “radical” and “conservative” philosophies of higher education, and by acknowledging the “efficacy” (rather than “truth” ) of common interests and objectives, Bazan makes a valuable schol­ arly contribution to that ongoing debate. 381 ESC 26, 2000 Elsewhere in this volume, the disintegration of specific con­ ceptions of common or communal identity and unified edu­ cational purpose is instead the basis of sustained lament. As its title indicates, co-editor David Jeffery’s own paper, “Can Humane Literacy Survive W ithout a Grand Narrative?,” re­ lates our current academic disarray to the “coming undone” of consent to any “commonly possessed community story” (54). Jeffrey foresees a “staggering” (64) university milieu manag­ ing to help shape a culturally securing future only by restoring shared mythic narratives, by renewing commitment to “truth or common understanding,” by releasing more hopeful voices from politically-correct constraints, and by declining “the pitiable ba­ nalities of confused self-idolatry” (59). This perspective and this sort of rhetoric often fail in charity and intellectual fairness to­ wards diverse “common understandings” of “truth” and “self” that differ from those of a hitherto amply dominant (and more than amply “constraining” ) hierarchy of values and set of in­ stitutional practices. Deconstructing (not simply reproducing) the “grandeur” of the ideological work and moral conformities of that (or any other) undoubtedly serviceable myth is surely the critical responsibility of critical scholarship and university studies. A great deal of Jean Bethke Eshtain’s essay, “The Politi­ cization of the University and its Consequence,” is likewise dis­ appointed, likewise a call for definitive “strong stories” and “the notion of truth,” and likewise frequently sarcastic about styles of thinking she considers “trendy” or dangerous. Understand­ ably so, perhaps — after all, perfectly respectable conservative thinking has endured its share of ill-informed sneers on our campuses and in our classrooms and at our conferences — but, still, it is the pot calling the kettle black. It is inaccurate and unhelpful to say, for example, that identifying something as “constructed” means declaring it “entirely up for grabs” (47). A third essay in this vein is co-editor Dominic Manganiello’s “W ill Technology Save Us,” which yearns amid our “cultural Babel” (123) for a return to shareable stories and truths — no­ tably T. S. Eliot’s “the mind of Europe” (126) and, ultimately...

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