ABSTRACT
Just what are the prospects for the ethical in the postmodern university? The two previous chapters have offered radically opposed views. On the one hand, on the view of Peter Jarvis, the university has been overtaken by large global forces, forces that encourage an instrumentality in which the ethical sphere is extinguished. On the other hand, on the view of John Strain, the ethical – to the contrary – is all the more apparent as it is called forth by exogenous forces. This set of opposed readings is all the more remarkable since Jarvis and Strain actually alight on similar forces – those of the corporate world – but our two authors read those particular runes in different ways. For Jarvis, the corporate world is blind to ‘the other’ and to the claims of the ethical as such; for Strain, it just may be in the interests of the corporate world to take ethics seriously.
