Response to Bill Readings

I met Bill Readings in January of 1993 when he invited me to talk to a class of his at the University of Montreal. Even as we tramped through the nasty blizzard that hit the city just as I arrived, I was charmed by Bill’s quick mind and his wonderful wit, which at times took on a delightfully Monty Pythonesque quality. I was looking forward to writing this response to his superb essay as a sort of letter to Bill. I’m deeply saddened now to know that he will never read it.

Bill Readings’s essay makes a distinguished contribution to a discussion that has been going on for a century now on how modern higher education can come to stand for something more than its own bureaucratic and administrative processes. As Readings wittily notes, “the American university faculty has been defined as a loose association of people united by a common interest in parking.” Can the university represent anything more? And if so, what?

Judging from the disproportion between the massive quantities of ink expended on this question and the few new ideas they have produced, the number of available options is limited. On the one hand, we have those like Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind who argue that the modern university can transcend triviality and incoherence only by returning to the unifying tradition embodied in the classic texts—as interpreted by themselves. On the other hand, we have those who argue that education can right itself only by adopting the liberatory program of the cultural left, which helpfully offers to “empower” students whether they want to be empowered or not.

These diametrically opposed prescriptions for saving the university increasingly tend to look alike, amounting in most cases to the declaration that “The problems will be solved if they will only shut up or disappear and everyone will agree with us.” Since the opposing theys show no sign of shutting up or disappearing (and since neither side seems able to liquidate the other), the clashing prescriptions have left things in a state of general paralysis punctuated by periodic attempted coups that only further heat up the antagonism.

A third option, the one I have been advocating, is to recognize that a consensus on the disputed questions is unlikely any time soon and to make use of the most edifying controversies themselves as a principle of curricular coherence. The assumption here is that the only consensus necessary is on the need to make education more coherent and intellectually challenging for students. That is, when dealing with a student body which has perennially been ill at ease with intellectual culture as such (regardless of which side gets to draw up the reading list), the first priority should be to help those students enter intellectual debates rather than to win final victories in them. I will have more to say about this option presently, since Bill has reservations about it.

A fourth option, finally, is to reject the idea that the university needs “coherence” and declare good riddance on the collapse of all unifying metanarratives. Bill seems tempted by this last option but not finally happy with it. He opens with the trenchant observation that the American culture wars are “one symptom of the fact that the decline of the nation-state as the primary instance of capitalism’s self-reproduction has effectively voided the social mission of the modern University.” He says that “the strong idea of ‘culture’ arises with the nation-state, and we now face its disappearance as the locus of social meaning.”

This seems to me a helpful way to put the problem, though somewhat Canadianocentric. Unlike in Canada and Europe, the idea of the nation-state never effectively took hold in United States universities, despite strenuous attempts to enforce it. It is symptomatic that when the Greek and Roman classics gave way to the study of national literatures in American schools and colleges at the turn of the century, it was English literature and not the native literature of the United States that was institutionalized at the center of the humanities...