ABSTRACT
To my knowledge, no book has appeared with the title ‘the death of the university’. Admittedly, Webster’s comment appeared in a symposium focused on a paper from Gerard Delanty on ‘the end of knowledge’; there was, though, a question mark at the end of Delanty’s title. Admittedly, too, a book recently appeared with the title Universities in Ruins (Readings, 1997). Furthermore, in essays on the universities and postmodernity, there have been some skirmishes on the general theme (eg. Smith and Webster, 1998). But we are not being overwhelmed by an avalanche of texts claiming the death of the university. Is the alleged death real or not?
