10 Higher Education Reading Group
Readings, B. (1996). The University in ruins. “Ch. 1 Introduction” 1-20. Havard University Press: Cambridge (USA).
Reading the opening chapter of Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins, it is striking how many of his predictions have, in fact, come to pass. We found it fruitful to discuss Readings idea of a historic argument as a the university as a producer of culture, for the nation state.
We agreed that, in contrast, today’s university has become a paragon of multinational, corporate globalism, an institution whose guiding language is no longer Bildung but managerialism. He presents this as a pursuit of “excellence” devoid of substance. This framework prioritizes employability and market relevance over intellectual inquiry. The language shaped by consumerist expectations, university T-shirts for $19.99, employability etc. are all examples of these tendencies.
Despite this broad trend, there remains considerable diversity in how universities manifest themselves in practice. Institutions vary widely in the ways they balance mass education, managerial demands, and the remnants of older academic ideals. Yet we commented that any system of mass education have always been driven by specific political and economic imperatives. The expansion of access does not erase the fact that the university has historically been an elitist institution, and the tension between elitism and massification remains unresolved.
We discussed that this tension also touches the rhythms of intellectual life itself. Thought and scholarship require time, autonomy, and the freedom to follow their own internal logics. When institutional demands override these rhythms, what is destroyed is the very thing the university is meant to cultivate. It is like forcing a plant to grow faster by artificial means: the result is deformation rather than flourishing.
Our discussion lead naturally to broader reflections on reason, democracy, and discourse. On the one hand, facts are not democratic; they do not bend to collective preference. On the other hand, a pluralistic demos can, at least in principle, support rational deliberation. But what happens when the rules of rational discourse themselves begin to shift, when the criteria for what counts as reasonable, valuable, or meaningful are redefined by institutional and market forces, or indeed as “excellence” in Readings’ framing.
Readings situates these developments within a broader “politics of amnesia,” tied in part to the decline of literary culture as a shared national reference point. In earlier configurations of the university, the humanities served as the institution’s soul, shaping its character and anchoring its purpose. In their diminished state, the university becomes emptied of substantive content, functioning more as an administrator of processes than a guardian of knowledge.
That such an analysis was written in the 1990s only heightens its prescience. The portrait Readings paints of an institution drifting away from cultural meaning toward managerial abstraction continues to describe, with unsettling precision, the condition of the university today.
