ABSTRACT
The appeal to a generalized notion of excellence, Bill Readings argued in his influential book of 1996, The University in Ruins, marks the fact that there is no longer any idea of the University, or rather that the idea has now lost all content. 1 The modern university is no longer primarily an ideological arm of the nation-state, as it was in its formative era in the nineteenth century. Unlike Humboldt’s university founded on the principle of reason, today’s university, Readings observed more than a decade ago, functions like any other autonomous bureaucratic corporation. For the humanities, traditionally organized on the model of national culture, the decline of the university’s role in educating its citizens to serve the nation-state brings a grim financial prognosis. Sam Weber speculates on the university’s diminishing role in the present era of transnational corporate capitalism that much will depend on the ways in which the established humanistic disciplines define their future practices. 2 Disciplines that continue to conceive of their activity in terms of self-contained and sovereign “fields” will find themselves faced with increasing difficulties, both in terms of their attractiveness to outside donors, and in terms of finding an internal constituency among incoming students.
