ABSTRACT
As early as in 1810, Wilhelm von Humboldt spoke of the ‘idea of a university’, in order for it to be then appropriated into an official Euro-American manifesto for centuries. This ‘idea of the university’ has routinely commissioned analytical rigours and hermeneutic anxieties in many a thinker and philosopher of modernity, alongside Humboldt – namely, John Henry Newman (1852), Karl Jaspers (1923), Helmut Schelsky (1963), Jurgen Habermas (1987) and Jaroslav Pelikan (1992), among others. My re-cycling of the same phrase to mark the appearance of a volume of contemporary essays does not in the least suggest an ideological continuity of positions expressed herein, but is a necessary reference to the history of public discourse that precedes the ‘here and now’ of an intervention. In this, the current essay participates in a strategic avowal of debt and difference that might singularly serve as the starting-point for any rethinking of the university today. What follows, by way of an introductory passage into the book proper, will argue that the university’s history through modernity is concurrently a history of twin losses – not just of an ‘originary’ idea that necessitated its own crisis, but also of an ontological self-presence of what a university means. The story that unfolds, through historical detours, is of the modern university receding into a zone of conceptual impossibility in the present-day ‘world-class’ institution of World Bank lore.
