Being a University (review)
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[Correction]
It was Ovid who claimed that a “faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel” (Ovidius, 1975). However, the impending knowledge society, global economic volatility, and increased fiscal uncertainty, the role and purpose of education (and its institutions) becomes ever more open for discussion. It seems that the Ovidian certainties are more fluid than once thought.
Being a University enters the educational debate amidst these contemporary dilemmas. In a long line of scholars who have attempted to define the “idea” of the university, Ronald Barnett’s latest work stands beside John Henry Newman, John Alexander Humboldt, Karl Jaspers, and Clark Kerr amongst others. However, what initially differentiates this book is its socio-philosophical approach, resting in particular on the Heideggerian notion of “being.” The question of being lies at the heart of the work and purposively stretches a broad range of possibilities within which that being, or institutional logos, may manifest itself.
The book is organized in three sections. Part 1 describes the archetypal “forms of being” that universities have taken up to this point. Chapter 1 describes the medieval or “metaphysical university,” characterized by a conceptual horizontal-vertical axis which positions the university between the intellectual and spiritual worlds. This form of university exists “beyond formal description and certainly beyond measurement” (p. 14) and creates the prototype for every university which followed.
Chapter 2 considers the early modern “scientific university,” taken from the 19th-century German idea of wissenschaft, or knowledge as an epistemologically undivided activity. However, the modern forebear of this university type increasingly formalizes constraints on the broad humanistic vision of knowledge, thus creating a “skewed society” in which we have become “disenchanted with enchantment” (p. 24).
Chapters 3 and 4, on the “entrepreneurial university” and “bureaucratic university,” respectively Barnett’s commentary on contemporary higher education, suggest that continuous exposure to opportunity and risk ensure that the university is “never at rest” (p. 36). Of particular interest here is [End Page 141] the difference between what Barnett names “performative alteration” (i.e., the need to be proactive and competitive), with that of “constitutive alteration” (i.e., the risk the university runs of becoming another kind of institution.
Part 2 deals with rethinking the omnipresent forms that are at the disposal of the university in order to create a fuller idea of the institution. These concepts come as peered ideas and are those of “being-becoming,” “space-time,” “culture-anarchy,” and “authenticity-responsibility.” Barnett premises his argument on the university’s “being,” which holds an infinite number of possibilities, all nascent within these ideal typical forms.
He further explores this concept by using Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) system of “rhizomatic epistemology,” (p. 63), in which positions (or points of view) can and will interconnect in multitudinous, yet always random, ways. The theme of rhizomatic thought is continued into a discussion on space and time in institutional settings. Whereas today we are engaged in “chronoscopic time”—concerned with the ever-present now—the university has the ability to operate within infinite streams of time-space operations.
Of particular importance here is Barnett’s use of four types of space: “intellectual and discourse,” “epistemological,” “pedagogical and curricular,” and “ontological,” all of which delineate the breadth of possibilities that one may further use to develop the idea of the university.
Chapter 7 takes its title from Matthew Arnold’s famous Culture and Anarchy to create an epistemic and structural idea for harnessing both phenomena in the university. By turning Arnold’s original thesis on its head, so that culture lies in anarchy and anarchy in culture, Barnett once again provides an opportunity to rethink the potentiality of the university. This process of creation/destruction is rehearsed again in Chapter 8, “Authenticity and Responsibility,” with the idea of “becoming” as positively correlated to the manner in which the university can be freed from the conceptual constraints of top-down and...
