Stanley Fish Take This Job and Do It

Take This Job and Do It: Administering the University without an IdeaAuthor(s): StanleyFishSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter 2005), pp. 271-285Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/430960 .Accessed: 10/05/2014 00:18

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Critical Inquiry 31 (Winter 2005)

2005 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/05/3102-0007$10.00. All rights reserved.

271

1. Jackson Lears, The Radicalismof Tradition: Teaching the Liberal Arts in aManagerial Age,Hedgehog Review 2 (Fall 2000): 8, 21; hereafter abbreviated RT.

Take This Job and Do It: Administering theUniversity without an Idea

Stanley Fish

Books and essays about the modern university all have the same plot:once upon a time higher education was a thriving, healthy enterprise; itslandscape was bucolic and lled with bright-eyed young men and womenengaged in the exhilarating task of broadening their horizons and expand-ing their minds; but then a serpent entered the garden bearing the seeds ofcorruption and decay, and now the once-great structure lies in ruins, al-though many of its inhabitants seem not to have noticed. The identity ofthe serpent varies from story to story. Sometimes it is ideology, sometimesit is politics (left or right), sometimes it is big-time athletics, sometimes itis venture capitalism, sometimes it is political correctness, sometimes it isthe military-industrial complex. Recently, however, it has been the mana-gerial class or, more simply, administrators. Here, for example, is JacksonLears:

Contrary to received opinion, the chief threat to intellectual freedomin the academy is not political correctness . . . . The mainmenace ismarket-drivenmanagerial inuence . . . . So this is what we are upagainst in the ght to preserve and vivify the life of the mind in theuniversitynot a handful of old elitists, as left academics charge, buta mob of middle-agedmanagers.1

These middle managers, Lears tells us, preside over faculty members whoare merely employees in a bureaucratic service economy . . . training thelabor force of the twenty-rst centuryunless, of course, they manage to


272 Stanley Fish / Take This Job and Do It

2. Stanley Aronowitz,The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the CorporateUniversity andCreating True Higher Learning (Boston, 2000), pp. 16465; hereafter abbreviatedKF.

become Internet entrepreneurs, marketing Shakespeare online to retireesin Palm Beach (RT, p. 21). (As a soon-to-be retiree to Palm BeachCounty, I take this personally.)

Why do they do it?Why does the managerial class betray the universitysideals and surrender to the false gods of eciency, market value, and pro-fessional training? Stanley Aronowitz asks that question and answers it byattributing to academic administrators the usual set of base motives, no-tably the desire for power and money:

Althoughmost deans, provosts, and presidents . . . begin as scholars andteachers, for many the life of the mind oers paltry rewards in compari-son to administration . . . . For some administrators, the choice is dic-tated by the will to power . . . . For others, the move to administration isa tacit acknowledgment that they have exhausted their academic or in-tellectual contribution . . . . Still others are motivated by the large in-comes theymay earn.2

Once these unworthy ambitions have captured what used to be the admin-istrators soul, he gives up any thought of returning to teaching and schol-arship and instead tends to look forward to the next niche in theadministrative hierarchy. Before long, Aronowitz tell us, he views himselfas a member of a separate social layer within the academic system and seesthe faculty and students as adversaries or, at least, as a dierent stratum(KF, p. 165).

The rst thing to say about this analysis is that it is both thin and tired,a familiar brew of elitism, leftover sixties soft radicalism, and a barely dis-guised sense of envy and injured merit. It is a little late in the game to beproducing diatribes against bottom-line corporate practices and the evilsof specialization or to be issuing a call for reective thinking (KF, pp. 158,171, 159). Dowe need awhole book to tell us that real thinking entailsmarch-ing to your own drummer (KF, p. 159), whatever that means, or even anessay to tell us that there is somethingmissing in higher education . . . someprofound defect of spirit (RT, p. 9)? Plato, Cicero, Juvenal, Augustine,Milton, Rousseau,Mill, andNewman said it before and said it better and saidit in the context of a real point and a genuine vision. All Lears andAronowitz

Stanley Fish is UIC Distinguished Professor of English, political science, andcriminal justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He writes a monthlycolumn for the Chronicle of Higher Education.


Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005 273

3. See Bill Readings,The University in Ruins (Cambridge,Mass., 1996); hereafter abbreviatedUR.

have to oer us is indignation, windy moralism, and cultural dyspepsia, andtheyre not even as good at it as their conservative counterparts like Bloom,DSouza, and Kimball, to whom they pay occasional tribute.

And they cant even get their villain straight. In their analyses, someonewho has become an administrator is simply an enemy of the intellectual life(the life of themind), a parasite on an enterprise he depletes anddestroys.This cartoon gure with shallow motives and unsavory agendas is an easytarget, but in fact the adversary, when correctly identied, is more inter-esting and more formidable. The secret, available to anyone who asks, isthat the administrator is himself a species of the intellectual, although theinvestigative strategies he deploys will be dierent from the strategies hemight deploy were the goal to get an accurate account of a poem or crackthe puzzle of a chemical reaction. On those occasions when I have beenasked, Why did you go into administration? (in a tone suggesting that thereal question is, Why did you go into prostitution?), I have always an-swered, because it is an interesting intellectual task. Just what the task isand how one might prosecute it is something I shall take up, but I can saynow that when administrators get together the word theymost often use tocharacterize what they do is fun.

Because Lears and Aronowitz can only see administrators as obstacles toenergies that would be released if they would just get out of the way, theyhave no account of why this obstructive and superuous class of personsourishes. This is not, however, a criticism that could bemade of Bill Read-ingss The University in Ruins, a book that also begins with the complaintthat something is missing in higher education, but then goes on to explainboth what that something is and why middle managers are an appropriateresponse to its absence.3 Like Lears and Aronowitz, Readings nds himselfin sympathy with a core contention of Blooms The Closing of the AmericanMind, that the adventure of liberal education no longer has a hero. Nei-ther a student hero to embark upon it, nor a professor hero as its end (UR,p. 7). Once upon a time, Readings tells us, the university dened itself interms of the project of the historical development, armation, and incul-cation of national culture (UR, p. 6). The universitys purpose, in thisgrand narrative, was to safeguard and propagate national culture by pro-ducing a liberal, reasoning subject who would be the bearer of that cul-tures values (UR, pp. 13, 9), a subject whose cultivation (in the strongestagricultural sense of the word) gave point andmeaning to the bureaucraticstructures of departments, course catalogues, examinations, degrees, etcet-



era. But now with the nation-state in decline and the globalization of justabout everything, no one of us can seriously imagine him or herself . . . asthe instantiation of the cultivated individual that the entire great machineworks night and day to produce . . . . None of us can now seriously assumeourselves to be the centered [and centering] subject of a narrative of Uni-versity education (UR, pp. 910).

What narrative, then, can replace the narrative of culture in an agewhenthe idea of a national culture embodying values to which the machinery ofeducation is self-consciously harnessed has lost much of its force? Read-ingss answer is the narrative of cultures, not one but many, indierentlyauthorized and oered not as normative benchmarks and imperativesthe best that has been thought and said and that to which we should con-tinue to be truebut as possible modes of being in a eld of possibilitiesalways proliferating. The word culture no longer has a specic content(UR, p. 17); it no longer refers to a particular project identiedby thespecicvalues that impel it. Rather it is an empty placeholder for whatever hotand likely transitory project a group of academics can get resources for. AsReadings puts it, Everything, given a chance, can be or become a culture(UR, p. 17); anything can be taught, anything can nd a place in the cur-riculum, not because of its connection to some moral/educational visionor to a national political project, but simply because it exists and someonewants to study it. All that is required is that the study of X or Y or Z beconducted on a level of sophistication and detail that marks it o from ca-sual, nonacademic observation. There must be data, hypotheses, rival ac-counts of crucial matters, tests, conclusions, suggestions for furtherresearch, and all of these must be presented to the student with the sameseriousness that attends the study of American history, or organic chem-istry, or the eighteenth-century English novel. If this requirement is met,you can proclaim that your course in supermarket inventory or athleticshoes or TV sitcoms of the 1980s (these are not hypothetical examples)meets the highest standards (which have nothing to do with content), andyou can bestow on it the honoric Readings nds singularly appropriate tothe University without an idea (UR, p. 118); it can be deemed excellent.

The techno-bureaucratic notion of excellence is just the ticket for auniversity conceived without any particular sense of purpose because it isso deliciously empty (UR, p. 14). Just as anything can be a culture, so cananything be performed with a zeal and attention to nuance that make it anexample of excellence. Excellence is like the cash-nexus in that it has nocontent (UR, p. 13). Excellence has the singular advantageof beingentirelymeaningless, or . . . non-referential (UR, p. 22). That is, in applying it, youmake no substantive judgment on the activity or course of study that now



wears it as an epithet. What gets taught or researchedmatters less than thefact that it be excellently taught or researched (UR, p. 13). In a landscapein which some contestable moral or political agenda has been replaced bythe endlessly replicable but vacuous notion of excellence, there is no longerany need to argue about diering denitions of a worthy project becauseeveryone is excellent, in their own way, with no pressure at all to decidethat some ways are more legitimate than some others (UR, p. 33). In a uni-versity committed to excellence, rather than to ideas or specic culturaloutcomes, you can give an award, as Cornell did, for excellence in park-ing, and mean by excellence in parking either restricting the number ofparking places available or increasing the number of parking spaces avail-able. The issue here is not themerits of either option [that iswhat preciselydrops out] but the fact that excellence can function equally well as an eval-uative criterion on either side of the issue . . . because excellence has nocontent to call its own (UR, p. 24).

And that, says Readings, is why Cultural Studies is the perfect curric-ular manifestation of the age of excellence (UR, p. 17). Nothing is aliento cultural studies. Nothing is intrinsic to cultural studies. Cultural studiesis the study, excellently performed, of everything and anything there is: Ifeverything is signifying practice, then the study of signifying practice is thestudy of anything at all; rather than a specic discipline, Cultural Studieswould appear to be the refusal of all disciplinary specicity (UR, p. 98).That is to say, a new bureaucratic universalism substitutes itself for andoverwhelms the specic purposes (to recover the past, to dene and cele-brate great art, to identify the essence of law) that give disciplines theirpointand meaning and provide a benchmark measure for the evaluation of par-ticular performances. Once upon a time, for example, themanyapproachesto literary analysis vied for the prize of being regarded as the method bestsuited to uncovering the meaning and value of a poem or a novel and, in-deed, of literature itself; formal analysis, biographical analysis, thematicanalysis, psychoanalytic analysis, feminist analysis, genre analysiseachhad its champions claiming that it and it alone provided the key. But thereis no point in searching for a key if there is nothing inside the box it wouldunlock, if there is no intrinsic meaning or value of the poem or novel be-cause there is no intrinsic meaning or value either of literary productionorof the study of literary production. There are just signifying practices, someofwhich take as their putative object other signifyingpractices, andnoover-arching perspective from which one might classify and rank them. Unteth-ered from any project of nation building or the cultivation of a certain kindof citizen, instances of the empty and innitely elastic categoryof the literary



proliferate. Every instance will receive its fteen minutes of attention, butthat attention will not be the same as it was in the old days since thewhole does not add up any longer to an organic vision . . . nor does anythingwithin the system of knowledge require that it should (UR, p. 86). All thatthe system requires is for activity to take place (UR, p. 39).Why thisactivityrather than that one? Who knows? Who cares? To be sure, somethingshould be known, but in the brave new world of excellence and culturalstudies, it becomes less and less urgent that we know what it is that shouldbe known (UR, p. 86). More and more research goes on, but the contentof the research comes to matter less and less, as research is ever more in-distinguishable from the mere reproduction of the system, a system withnothing at its center but the self-justifying, self-perpetuating, and self-con-gratulatory routines of professional training (UR, p. 55), training, that is,to be professionally excellent at something, at anything.

The university without an idea, the criterion of excellence, the imperialproject of cultural studiesthey all go together and indeed are, quite lit-erally, made for each other. This is the point made brilliantly in Readingssreading of our present condition; and it is because his account supplies uswith a starting point for analysis that we can nally understand what in thepolemically shrill accounts of Lears andAronowitz remains amysterythegrowth innumbers and inuence of themanagerial class, themobofmiddlemanagers. If the reasons and rationales for decision making (and makingdecisions hour after hour, day after day is what administrators do) do notcome from some large vision of education or some grandly conceived na-tional project or some burning desire to correct injustices and save theworldall sources of energy that are now themselveswithoutenergytheymust come from somewhere; and the somewhere they come from is thenecessity of fusing into a unityeven if the unity is nally spuriousthemyriad enterprises that just happened to have collected together in the samespace. No longer understood as an ideological systemwhether national-istic, religious, reformist, or revolutionarythe university is understoodasa bureaucratic system. No longer organized around ametaphysical value ofwhich all activities are to be the reection, theuniversity isorganizedaroundthe imperative that it be organized; it is a contentless imperative that sup-ports and is supported by a set of contentless bureaucratic valuese-ciency, maintenance, expansion, resource allocation, development. To thequestions, Eciency to what end? or, Maintenance of what? or, Expansiontoward what goal? or, Development in what direction? the ethic of bureau-cratic management can only give a variation of the answer Marlon Brandogives in The Wild One when he is asked, What are you rebelling against?and replies, Whatve you got? If what youve got is a heterogeneous col-



lection of enterprises tied to nothing but their own blind ambitionsabureaucratic system whose internal regulation is entirely self-interested(UR, p. 40)what you need, more than you need scholars and students, issomeone skilled at creating and maintaining procedures that will satisfythose ambitions just a little without allowing any one of them its naturalHobbesian desire to gobble up the faculty lines, laboratories, oces, andresearch dollars of the rest of them.What youneed is an administrator.Thatis why the growth of the managerial class is neither an unfortunatemistakenor a Machiavellian design, but an honest response to the new conditionsof theUniversity of Excellence. As Readings observes (in sorrow), Thecen-tral gure in the University is no longer the professor . . . but the provost. . . to whom the professors are answerable (UR, p. 8). And again, theUniversity of Excellence is one in which a general principle of administra-tion replaces the dialectic of teaching and research, so that teaching andresearch, as aspects of professional life, are subsumed under administra-tion (UR, p. 125). I trust that by now none of you will ask, Administrationof what? Administration of anything that happens to be there. Administra-tion of anything youve got.

Now if you preside over a ramshackle structure distinguished by the ab-sence of any informing values, then talk of valuesexcept for those thatcan bemeasured by the entirely formal benchmarks ofU.S.News andWorldReportwill make you very nervous, and you will want to stay away fromit, clinging, for dear life, to the procedural shell of whatever bureaucraticexercise you are engaged in. At many institutions of higher learning,mem-bers of the university-wide promotion and tenure committee never get tosee the work of those whose promotions they are voting on. And indeed if,as a member, you happen to have read the work and you begin to say some-thing about it, you will immediately be admonished and told that the com-mittees charge is not to make judgments but to make sure that thedeterminations of other committees lower downon the administrativefoodchain were reached in the way specied by university regulationsyouknow, things like getting outside letters from the right institutions, collect-ing and arranging into tables and statistics a sucient number of studentevaluations, determining whether or not the candidates publications ap-peared in refereed journals, counting and averaging the courses taughtdur-ing the probationaryperiod, and soon.The reasoningbehind this fastidiousavoidance of value and value judgments is well known. Given that everydiscipline has its own standards and criteria, how can a professor of Englishwhohappens to serve on this committee judge theworkof amathematician,and, conversely, how can a mathematician judge the output of a languagepoet? An answer to this question would require some overarching vision of



what the university as a whole was for, a vision one might employ as a testof individual performance; but no such vision exists (which is why visionstatements proliferate) because nothing like the whole university exists. Inits place are innumerable sites of activity, each with its own traditions, im-peratives, priorities, goals. The only value they share is the value of auton-omyno administration is going to tell us what to doand the only safecourse, and indeed the only real job, of any administrator is to honor thatautonomy and protect it both from the rival autonomies of its coinhabitantsand from the presumption of someone who actually has an idea and thinksthat he is going to implement it:

Administration involves the processing and evaluation of informationaccording to criteria of excellence that are internal to the system: thevalue of research depends on what colleagues think of it; the value ofteaching depends on the grades professors give and the evaluations thestudentsmake; the value of administration depends upon the rankingof a University among its peers. [UR, p. 126]

Once this is clearly understood, a common criticism of todays admin-istratorsthey have forgotten that at bottom they are faculty membersturns out to be a tribute to their sense of professional responsibility.Administrators are obliged by their titles to forget that they were once fac-ulty members; for should they remember too strongly they will confuse thejob they used to do with the one they are now paid to do. As a scholar, oneof whose elds is political theory, I have a strong view of what a politicalscience department should be likea good-sized bunch of theorists of theJohn Rawls, Tom Nagel, William Connolly kind, a smaller-sized group ofStraussiansgenerally very smart and always very crazyand a couple ofquantitativemethodologists capable of putting their colleagueshigh-ownmeditations to the test of some actual data. As dean of the College of LiberalArts and Sciences at UIC, I did not inherit that department, but anotherone that I wouldnt have chosen to design. But what I as a faculty memberwould have designed is beside the point for the dean who must administerwhat he has. As a dean it ismy job to adopt thedepartments self-conceptionas if it were mineindeed if Im really doing my job, it becomes mineand then to do what I can to help that self-conception get realized. That isto say, my skills and motives are instrumental rather than normative, and,in exercising them in the context of disciplinary spaces I did not colonize,I become the very type of Readingss administrator in the University of Ex-cellence whomoves eortlessly from the lecture hall, to the sports stadium,to the executive lounge . . . without publicly expressing any opinions orpassing any judgments whatsoever (UR, p. 55).



4. See Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (New York,1995).

It is to Readingss credit that he knew this about me before I did. Thatis, he knew that I would read his account of the University of Excellenceand applaud its accuracy without wishing that the conditions it describeswere otherwise. I make a few appearances in the book, always as an illus-tration of the kind of thinking that has brought us to this (for him)unhappymoment. First Readings critiques my notion of the interpretive commu-nity, which he characterizes as a call for business as usual that appealsto a horizon of rational institutional consensus rather than a cultural iden-tity: Fish describes the profession as a deliberative institution that is au-tonomous and self-regulating, an argument that works only at the price ofa certain circularity: the interpretive community determines what countsas university discourse, but the identity of that community is itself onlyconstituted by such acts of determination (UR, p. 83). In other words, in-terpretive communities do not form in response to normative criteria butin response to the accidental convergence of professional energies. Any-thing can be an interpretive community; both as a locus of activity and asan object of analytical attention, an interpretive community is nothingmore than a circumscribed level of attention a sucient number of per-sons decide to pay to something; its identity and value are entirely self-determined. The same expense of energy without an external constraint,says Readings, characterizes my notion of rhetoric in which the act of rhe-torical persuasion is an agonistic contest of subjective wills who continueto use language instrumentally, as the instrument . . . that will create aneect of conviction (UR, p. 159). Conviction of what? Conviction of any-thing. Nothing but an endless scene of contestation that is its own point.And the same is true, according to Readings, of my version of pragmatism,which, rather than grappling with the institutions lack of external refer-ence, accepts and glories in it (UR, p. 167). My pragmatism, like Rortys,adds up to its own alibi (UR, p. 168), refuses questions that would seekjustication outside of itself.

All of this is exactly right, and had Readings lived to see it he would havefound conrmation inmyProfessionalCorrectness,which,under thebannerof the distinctiveness of tasks, celebrates disciplinary insularity andresistsall eorts to explain or evaluate what we do in the academy bymeasures oraspirations larger or more general than the measures (again internal) andaspirations academics stipulate for themselves.Hencemyslogan,TheAcad-emy, Love It or Leave It.4

It turns out then that I am the perfect dean for themodernposthistorical



university, the University of Excellence (with excellence a local matter oflocal judgment), the perfect dean for the university without an idea, or theuniversity with as many ideas as you can get funding and space for. If youask me which interpretive communities are of more value than the othersand therefore should be better supported, I will be unable to say. If you askme what underwrites or waits at the end of the rhetoric of disciplinary con-test, I havent the slightest idea. If you ask me in the service of what do youperform your pragmatic acts of middle management, I will respond with ablank stare and a glassy eye. And if you askme what is your theory or visionof educationthe question behind all the othersI will immediately runin the opposite direction. No theory, no urgent mission, no sociopoliticalcause. I do, however, have a motto, borrowed from an old TV show: HaveSkills, Will Travel.

When I get there, the last thing my new institution will have to fear isthat I will impose anything on it; I havent got a thing to impose. Just lookat the track record. At Duke University I had two managerial tasks: rst tobring a traditional and somewhat sleepy English department into the bravenew world of feminism, theory, postcolonialism, and so on. Andwhen thattask was nished I was assigned another: to raise the prole andprotabilityof a barely visible university press. The two jobs were very dierent becausethe two organizations were very dierentan academic department and anonprot commercial enterprisebutwhat characterizedmyperformancein both situations was an absolute unconcern with the content of the prod-uct I was refurbishing. None of the people I hired into the English depart-ment did the kind of work that I did. I hired them because I thought theywould attract students and help raise the departments national ranking,which they did. In the same way, I was not personally committed to thebooks published during my tenure at the press, most of which were aboutparts of the body usually notmentioned inpolite society.Thesebooks,how-ever, attracted a great deal of attention (much of it usefully negative) andsent a signal to the best and brightest younger scholars that if you wantedto be with it and trendy, Duke was the press for you. In both contexts I tookwhat was givenme in theway of strengths andweaknesseslargelymarket-denedand set about increasing the former and removing the latter.Thatis, both my goals and my strategies were set by the situation I had chosento enter (you can always say no) and not by anything I carried with me or(God forbid) within me, except of course some managerial skills and theneed to deploy them.

That need is the same I display when I feel compelled to vacuum myapartment at least twice a day orwhen I volunteered to be the garbagepolice



inmy building. I just like to clean things up, nomatter what they are.WhenI arrived in the spring of 1999 to become dean of humanities at the Uni-versity of Illinois at Chicago, I found low institutional and personal esteem,a problem of identity at a commuter campus surrounded, at least psycho-logically, by Urbana, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago, an in-adequate infrastructure left over from an earlier time when a two-yearcollege hadnot yet become auniversity, a style ofmanagement thatwithheldinformation and thereby grew an annual crop of suspicion and distrust,no bookstore to speak of, no fund-raising oce that actually raised funds,no admissions oce that knew how to recruit students, and, above all, nostrong sense of what it means to be a professional. The result? Bitternessand a feeling of hopelessness were deeply ingrained in a faculty that tolditself a sad story, at once self-serving and self-subverting: I am in this sit-uationwhere promises aremade andbroken regularly andwhere thedignityof my labor is never acknowledged; why then should I produce that labor,except in the most minimal terms? It will never get better.

Who could want more? I had recently said no to a deanship in the Uni-versity of California systembecause everythingwas already in goodorderexcellent facilities, a faculty secure in its reputation, nationally ranked de-partments, a sparkling campus dotted with architectural gems, studentswith 1400 SAT scores, grand ambitions already largely realized. What self-respecting xer-up-of-whatever-youve-got would take that job? Therewould be nothing to do. But here at UIC was Gods plentynothingworked, everything was broken, no one believed. Let me at em. Five and ahalf years later, the tally is just about what youd expectsome successes,some failures, and a lot of things not yet addressed and therefore lots ofwork left to do, especially in the context of the budget cuts that have (tem-porarily, I hope) stalled the train. And a bonus: the universitys idea ofwhatit is and what it would like to becomeready-made and in place before Iarrivedjust happened to mesh with an intellectual project to which I hadlong been committed. For some time, I have been arguing that themodernacademy has impoverished itself by marginalizing and quarantining reli-gious thought, religious materials, and religious texts, even though it is inreligious traditions that one nds the most rigorous consideration of mat-terslanguage, interpretations, signs, epistemology in generalnow end-lessly debated in the most raried of our journals. It just so happened thatthe signature program of UIC is something called Great Citiesa public-relations device behind which stands the project of making Chicago thelaboratory of the university. In practice this means linking up with the nu-merous ethnic populations that give the city its vitality, and thatmeans link-



ing up with the religions that still occupy the center of neighborhood life.The strategy was obvious and I have been pursuing itthe establishing intandem of ethnic studies and religious studiesand to date the strategyhasborne fruit in the area of Catholic studies, Jewish studies, Polish studies,Asian-American studies, African-American studies, Greek-American stud-ies, Native American studies, Arabic studies, with more to come to makeUIC the center of hyphenated-American studies of any and all kinds. Ishould add, although by now it may be unnecessary to do so, that this co-incidence of personal interest and administrative opportunity is entirelyserendipitous. Its nice, especially at the close of a career, but its not nec-essary. Had the history and ambitions of UIC been dierent, I would haveadapted to them and embraced as my own the projects they entailed, andI would have done everything I could to bring the university into whateverglorious future it had chosen for itself. In the end I take my stand with thatmultinational corporationI cant remember its name, and that is, I sup-pose, its pointwhose boast or antiboast is, We dontmake the things youbuy; we just make them better. My version of that is, I dont dictate orinspire your teaching and research activities; I just try to create conditionsthat will permit you to devote your energies to them with the least possibleinterference from the bureaucratic structures I am paid to administer.

Let me pose the inevitable question before anyone else does. Whatswrong with this style of administration, committed to nothing substantive,but dedicated to xing and managing anything assigned to it? Well, whatswrong with it is whats right with it, at least from an instrumental point ofview: theres nothing inside it; its empty. It exhibits and encourages energy,but to noparticular end. It depends onperpetualmotion,ontheproductionof ash and excitement. It has local goals: improving salaries, raising mo-rale, increasing visibility, refurbishing space, creating community (dontask, Community of what?). The good thing is that these goals are realizable.The bad thing is that these goals are realizable, for once they are realized oreven halfway realized, there is nothing for you to do since you stake yourclaim only on the instrumental task; and if you hang around too long, tin-kering with the product and trying to make the trains run even moresmoothly, those who welcomed your arrival and applauded your early ef-forts will begin to resent you and want you to get out of town.

That is why I frequently return in my thoughts to a scene in a lush 1950swestern called Warlock. The plot centers around the character played byHenry Fonda, a professional gunghter who hires himself out as a kind ofunocial sheri to towns where the ocially appointed sheri is either vehundred miles away or has been run o by the local bullies and corruptranchers. Early on, Fonda meets with the good townspeople who have



brought him in and who welcome him eusively and ply him with home-baked cookies. He speaks to them, thanks them, and explains to them thatin order to bring about the conditions they desire, he will have to take cer-tain measures, impose certain restrictions, and arrogate to himself a greatdeal of authority. At rst, he tells them, you will be pleased because thesemeasures will in fact remove some of the causes of your distress. But then,he adds, something curious will happen. As things get better and you beginto feel more secure in your persons and professions, youwill experiencemyauthority as an imposition on yourselves, and my presence will cease to bea comfort and will be perceived as a burden. And when that happens, heconcludes, I will be on my way because we will have had our satisfactionof one another.

Of course the story of building something that is sustained for a whileand then falls apart under pressures internal and external is a familiar oneand not limited to the academy; think of the cycles of boom, bust, and re-building that characterize sports franchises and corporations. What goesup must come down (the reverse is not true) or at least level o; and whenit does the key catalysts, who like to think of themselves as the onlybegettersof the grand enterprise, are either sloughed o ormanage to get out of townjust in time. Thats what I did at Duke, says Aronowitz, who takes somesatisfaction in the fact that after thirteen years ofwell-publicizedgrowththeDuke English department suered the loss of ve senior professors includ-ing me. To Aronowitz, this should be a cautionary tale to universities whoseek to improve their national standing in highly visible eldsof scholarship(and not incidentally boost their endowments as well) by hiring stars (KF,p. 87). No, it is a tale of improbable success. How many academic depart-ments sustain any level of excitement for thirteen years? The fact that theDuke English department, which remains world-class to this day, has notmaintained the roster or conguration it achieved in the eighties and nine-ties can hardly count as either a surprise or as evidence of failure. On theother hand, Aronowitz is probably right when he chargesmewith not leav-ing behind the genuine procedures thatwouldhave allowed things tocon-tinue uninterrupted (KF, p. 88). That is because there are no genuineprocedures; there are just moments of opportunity, entrepreneurial typeswho seize them, and the accidents that upset or alter their best-laid plans.Aronowitz of course thinks theres anotherway, andheoers a two-prongedprogram, a core curriculum consisting of a list of great books beginningwith Plato, and a system of rotation in which, as in the good old days, noadministrator is allowed to occupy any position formore than a short time.Thus department chairs, deans, provosts, and college and university pres-



idents serve for limited terms, after which they are expected to return to theclassroom and to writing and research (KF, p. 167). The lameness of thissuggestion, supported by no account of how the multitask university of themodern age could be sustained by such a genuine procedure, is matchedonly by the emptiness of its nostalgia. Back to the future. It is also incrediblywrong-headed. Absence of continuity in university administrationaturnover rate higher than that ofNational Football League runningbacksis one of the prime contributors to academic malaise and one of the chiefreasons that progressive eorts of all kinds are not sustained.

Curiously, Readings, who is so much sharper than Aronowitz (or Lears)on these matters, comes up with a similar strategy, though more sophisti-cated in the articulation. Given that the university is in ruins and given theunlikelihood of repairing them,whynot, he says, accept andaccentuate thatcondition by not allowing any structures to settle and become rmly estab-lished: projects of both teaching and research . . . would be disbanded aftera certain period, whatever their success because after a certain half-life. . . they sink back into becoming quasi-departmentswithbudgets toprotectand little empires to build. Or to put it another way, they become modesof unthinking participation in institutional-bureaucratic life (UR, p. 176).God forbid that institutional life should be institutional. God forbid thatanyone should ever complete anything or raise any funds. God forbid thatthere should be any structures. Rather, the loosening of disciplinary struc-tures has to be made the opportunity for the installation of disciplinarityas a permanent question (UR, p. 177). With that italicized phrase, Readingsurges on us the project of endless critique, a project familiar to us in a tra-dition of liberal thought stretching from John Stuart Mill to Judith Butlerand Habermas (with Milton and Augustine and the Robert Burton of theAnatomy of Melancholy in the background). If we all engage in that project,Readings predicts, we shall together form a community of dissensus inwhich nothing would be presupposed in common and no goal of fullself-understanding or agreement as to the nature of a unity would exertits pull. Instead, the community of dissensus would seek to make its het-eronomy, its dierences, more complex (UR, p. 190). Heteronomy, dif-ference, complexity. As descriptions of our situation, these words seem apt;as the components of a programlets do heteronomy, lets do dierence,lets do complexitythey are spectacularly empty, as empty as the criterionof excellence of which they are the negative mirror image.

So after 190 pages, Readings oers us a version of what he rejects. Finally,not much of a yield, although the analysis leading up to it is nuanced andsupple. And have I anything better to oer? What can I do with the idea of



a university without an idea?Well. Heres something.Why not give a courseon it? Why not teach a few conicts and then follow up the course with ananthology and then by a big conference, which, if successful, canbe thebasisof a program of study and eventually of a department, the department ofthe end of the end of ideas on the model of the end of history. Then wellreally be in business!


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