This article charts the crisis of the modern university using Bill Readings' (1996) The University in Ruins. Readings distinguishes three principal ideas underpinning the concept of the modern university: the Kantian idea of reason, the Humboldtian idea of culture, and the technological idea of excellence. The article reviews these three motivating ideas to focus on the last one under the description of the ‘post-historical university’. It investigates this idea giving two examples based on the United Kingdom's Dearing report, The Global Service University, and Australia's West report, The Hollowed-Out University. On the basis of this examination, the article re-imagines the idea of the university in the postmodern condition when metanarratives have lost their narrative unifying power by employing the concept of openness as developed by Wittgenstein.
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