Abstract
1996 saw the publication of Bill Readings’ posthumous monograph The University in Ruins. This landmark text offered a bleak diagnosis of North American higher education in the late 20th century, suggesting that the traditional Humboldtian ideals of culture and learning had been replaced by the managerial imperatives of ‘excellence’–a concept so lacking in content that it is just as easily applied to staff parking as it is research quality. Such a shift involved opening up academia to the whims of the market and imposing the structures of corporate administration on the university, to the extent that the University of Excellence is ‘not just like a corporation; it is a corporation’ (Readings, 1996: 22; emphasis in original). The regime of excellence fundamentally calls into question the traditional role of the university as a means for the nation-state to connect Wissenschaft (scientific knowledge) to Bildung (personal development or cultivation) through research and teaching. What we are left with is a commercial organization plugged into global flows of capital and labour, run by professional managers with an eye on the bottom-line.
The University in Dissent explicitly sets out to develop Readings’ insights and apply them to the context of the UK. This is certainly a timely publication given the spread and intensification of the regime of excellence within British institutions of higher education over the last decade and a half. First of all, the introduction of undergraduate tuition fees–which currently stand at a maximum of £9,000 a year in England and Wales–now encourage students to view their bachelor’s degree as an economic investment to increase their human capital, serving to reduce the university to one of many competing ‘service providers’ in the liberal-capitalist knowledge economy. Secondly, UK-based academics are presently undergoing a large-scale assessment exercise in the guise of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), due to be completed in 2014. Rolfe, a Professor of Nursing at the University of Swansea, sees this as another example of the encroaching hegemony of excellence within the academy. To be sure, by focusing on quantitative measures such as research grant income and journal impact factors rather than on the intrinsic quality of scholarly work, the REF serves to bring academic research ‘into the realm of efficiency, profitability and administration’ (p. 9). What is at stake in the corporate university, for Rolfe, is the very demise of scholarship itself–understood as basic theoretical research in contradistinction to applied empirical research (p. 18). While The University in Dissent may lack the sweeping historical scope of Readings’ original study, its opening chapters make a convincing case for viewing the contemporary British university (with some minor variations in the level of tuition fees and the nature of research assessment exercises in Scotland and Northern Ireland) as ‘moving away from the values of the academy towards the rules and rigours of … the production line’ (p. 11).
In addition to examining the nature and purpose of knowledge production in the corporate university, The University in Dissent also provides a manifesto for subverting the regime of excellence within higher education. Towards this end, Rolfe draws on the resources of 20th-century Continental philosophy, notably the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, in order to find a way to dwell productively in the ruins of the contemporary university without lapsing into either ‘romantic nostalgia or cynical despair’ (p. 22). In particular, Rolfe suggests that we need to develop a counter-institution–which he calls the ‘paraversity’–that operates invisibly and subversively within the University of Excellence. What this amounts to is a rhizomatic organization that effectively has ‘no formal membership, no command structure, no recognizable academic disciplines, no departments or departmental heads, in fact no overt outward signs of its existence’ (p. 44–45). This wholly virtual entity simply offers scholars the opportunity to think within a ‘community of dissensus’ (p. 42). How precisely this loose affiliation of academics across different departments might disrupt the hegemony of excellence remains somewhat opaque, but perhaps for Rolfe this is exactly the point: one gets the impression that his text is meant to stimulate and incite rather than to resolve and foreclose. Certainly, it is difficult not to feel invigorated by Rolfe’s impassioned call for meditative thinking within an institution that has become tragically opposed to anything other than cold hard calculative rationality. But we might also wonder whether this is quite enough, especially as the three ethical imperatives of the paraversity–namely, ‘be good’, ‘be collegiate’, ‘be radical’ (p. 62)–are so general that they risk replicating the same kind of emptiness and non-referentiality that characterize the notion of excellence itself.
The final part of the book is comprised of three short chapters on the nature of the essay, the seminar and the book respectively. Here we find a series of ‘attempts’ to open up a space for critical reflection on academic practice, with the ultimate aim of revitalizing the scholarly mission of the university. Dipping variously into the work of Adorno, Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Barthes, Derrida, Descartes and Montaigne among others, Rolfe invites us to join him in this task by thinking ‘in an undisciplined way’ (p. 91)–that is, outside of conventional disciplinary constraints. But the text is also undisciplined in the sense of leaping from one set of ideas to the next, barely pausing for breath. This is no doubt in keeping with Rolfe’s ethos of dissensus, but it is rather disheartening to imagine that all we will be equipped with in the ruins of the university are glittering fragments of thoughts rather than anything more weighty and substantial. If the task for Rolfe (citing Heidegger) is to reassert the primacy of the collegial scholar over the project-based researcher in the corporate university (p. 17–18), then we may need to look for strategies other than postmodern bricolage to achieve this objective–strategies that will be able to pose a real threat to the regime of excellence rather than allow it to operate more or less unimpeded. Put bluntly, it is not sufficient simply to change one’s reading habits if one wishes to short-circuit the commercial logic of higher education; one also needs to change one’s academic practices in a more profound way. While Rolfe does provide us with a few clues about what this might look like–for example, targeting lower-ranked journals, publishing with fewer co-authors and applying for research grants from charitable organizations (p. 63–64)–his performative attempt to instantiate the paraversity in the final part of the book leaves him a little lost, metaphorically wandering the galleries of Borges’ infinite library (p. 119).
Overall The University in Dissent is a much-needed intervention in debates around the future of academia in the UK and elsewhere. For all its flaws, the book succeeds on its own terms by presenting, à la Readings, ‘the act of reading as an incitement to act’ (p. 120; emphasis in original). For this is a book that should certainly be read by anyone who seeks to understand the rise of excellence in higher education; and while this may not necessarily result in the formation of a covert paraversity that operates beneath the radar of the University of Excellence, it could have the even greater effect of provoking others to act against the market-based principles that currently guide research and teaching in more immediately disruptive and unruly ways. This may ultimately allow us to meet the challenge originally set by Readings and only partially answered by Rolfe–namely, how to be a scholar in an institution that no longer seems to value scholarship.