Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy (review)

Diatribes about what ails the research university abound, many premised, often implicitly, on Cardinal Newman's 1873 The Idea of the University. For it is such an idea—the idea that the university's raison d'être is a liberal education combined with the understanding that knowledge is valuable for its own sake—that allows many of us to question specialization, commercialism, consumerism, globalization, neo-liberalism, and a host of other forces that redirect the university away from its animating purposes.

In Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy, George Fallis, professor of economics and social science and former dean of the the Faculty of Science at York University, tackles this idea head-on; and while he comes down in its favor, he accommodates it to the historical evolution of the "multiversity," a term he accepts from Clark Kerr, as a crucial institution of our times.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, "The Emergence of the Multiversity," contains five chapters situating the university historically. In this section, Fallis discusses four ideas that have shaped the evolution of the "Anglo-American" university (i.e., those in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada), and which are being challenged by politico-economic forces which he explains in Part 2. They are (a) the idea of undergraduate liberal education, (b) the idea of professional schools, (c) the idea of graduate education, research, and pure science, and (d) the idea of undergraduate accessibility and applied science. The "multiversity" is a combination of all of these ideas; it is thus a creature of modernity, and its prominence results from the ascendance of the welfare state.

I think this first section is the strongest part of the book. Not only does Fallis do a nice job of identifying the "bundle of ideas" that led to what we know as a multiversity, but he does so in a very engaging and easily accessible style. Indeed, the whole book is like this. While supporting the arguments with a wide range of literature from multiple fields and addressing very complicated phenomena (e.g., the economics of higher education and international trade agreements), Fallis's writing is always accessible to even a minimally college-educated audience, thus being true to one of his key arguments that academics must make their work accessible to the general (albeit educated) public.

In Part 2, "The Character of Our Age," Fallis addresses five politico-economic forces that have made the multiversity a crucial institution of our times but which also threaten its core ideas and put it at risk of undermining democracy. These forces are (a) the constraining of the welfare state's commitment to higher education as a public good, (b) the predominance of information technology in redefining research and teaching, (c) the emergence of postmodern thought in questioning the tenets of modernity—which are, after all, the tenets of the university; (d) the commercialization of knowledge and research, and (e) the globalization and internationalization of the university.

I found his arguments about the welfare state, commercialism, globalism, and information technology a balanced account of the benefits and consequences of these forces. He does, however, align himself with their critics. These politico-economic forces do lead to a new idea of the multiversity; but that idea sees the multiversity as (and perhaps only as) an instrument of the economy. The result is to convert higher education into a private good, force universities to seek alternative sources of funding, lead them away from a commitment to democracy and disinterested inquiry, and make them pander to the private interests of their new funders.

Fallis, however, is less convincing when he discusses the preeminence of what he calls postmodern thought, which he argues leads to a relativism that threatens the university's core values of reason and democracy. What he calls postmodern thought certainly questions and historicizes the presumptiveness of the tenets of modernity, but one need not conclude from this questioning that one is left with no commitments to...