ABSTRACT
In preparing to write this essay I thought to reread as much as I could of the vast literature on the university written during the past fifteen years. In one way that proved to be a terrible mistake, in that the hope of saying something new simply shrivels. All positions have been occupied, all explanatory strategies explored, or so it seems; to strive for novelty is to court eccentricity. In another way the exercise, though hardly inspiring, is at least instructive, in demonstrating the short half-life of rhetorical fashion. Much of the writing now seems mawkish beyond belief; one watches the life cycle of a genre—what someone has termed The Beatification of The Young—one watches it germinate, grow, thrive, flower, and then, relentlessly, wither and die. One reads this journalism in a state of numb amazement: how could there have been so widespread a belief, only five or six or seven years ago, that the young were the builders of a New Jerusalem? And what do the believers believe now? Are they disenchanted, or have they moved to new enthusiasms, or have they simply forgotten?
