ABSTRACT
The characteristic problems and crises of higher education resist the formularies of administrative planning and public policymaking. Who does not know that questions of subject matter, terms of participation, and relative power, deriving from intractable “culture wars,” vitiate each harmonizing attempt to fuse the intrinsic characteristics of higher education with the robust divisiveness of contemporary democracy? What rhetoric can embrace the feminist and the canonist, the ethnic chauvinist and the common heritage advocate, the technology as progress exponent and the liberal educator?
