ABSTRACT
The rhetoric of "crisis in higher education" has figured its meaning in terms of warring oppositions. If the demographic data and the arguments about curricular and campus life are any indication, diversity has strained to its limit the model of community based on consensus. Yet, paradoxically, the politics of life in academic communities shows, if anything, increased determination to produce community by imposing consensus. Whatever their political stripe, these groups substitute the idea of community for an analysis of social relationships. Moreover, they take community to be an essence, an organization or institution that subsumes its members to some larger project, overcoming the differences that are secondary to the shared existence which binds us together. In the great culture wars, the right and significant factions of the left have converged on the diagnosis that "theory" is both symptom and cause of the decline of higher education.
