Feasible Utopias, Frustrated. Trevor Holmes

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1 effort, which are not always readily given up. Conversations about disability are often put aside for a later time. Titchkovsky summarizes this well when she writes that the inclusion of disability into an environment that has yet to critically reflect on the meaning of this inclusion has led to a form of non-disability-flexibility being implemented that continues to exclude, marginalize, and stigmatize disabled people (121). We return finally to Titchkovsky s call for a politics of wonder. What she proposes is that we step outside of our certain ties and the status quo that continually reproduces disability s absence in our society. Instead, we must reimagine disability as something different from the way in which it is perceived at the moment. How is it that we have come to perceive disability in one way and not another? Titchkovsky calls on the discipline of disability studies to employ this politics of wonder and question how disability has been thematized as a problem for and by others (140). We should perhaps refocus our energies on questioning the certainties that appear to exist when it comes to the meaning and perception of disability, as these inherent certainties actually reveal many ambiguities regarding how we see and understand disability. Trevor Holmes 335 Feasible Utopias, Frustrated A review of Barnett, Ronald Being a University. London: Routledge. Canada s higher-education debates are ripe for a coherent, reparative and inspirational response from the critical humanities. Entities like the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario have appeared recently to fund research about tertiary education systems; former administrators, current professors and self-appointed external experts have written books telling us what is wrong with our universities and what we ought to do about it which usually ends up being a call for continued command and control by external forces through administrative excess. Through an ever-increasing focus on accountability and efficiency, what we could call (after Jean-François Lyotard) a performative managerialism threatens to further erode

2 faculty members and students agencies in making meaning. There seems, anecdotally and empirically, less time to do anything but scramble for the next grant, the next paper, the next quality assurance or visioning exercise. And all this is subtended by a creeping insistence that university workers must make job-ready the students who come to purchase a credential. As a response to similar issues in the U.K., rather than another text about what is wrong with the university today, Ronald Barnett s Being a University invites us to think about what could be right with tomorrow s universities. The test of such a book, which is, self-admittedly, in pursuit of some universals, is its applicability outside its U.K. context. Readers in the U.K. and in many other countries will find familiar echoes of dissatisfaction with the way things are, and the loss of what might have been or what once was. If anything, Barnett underestimates the lengths to which governments, including his own, will go to bring universities into line with neoliberal austerity agendas (168n10). 336 After some historical explanation and a series of conceptual interrogations, he offers four apparently feasible utopias that we are asked to judge against concepts such as universality, authenticity, ethics and spirit. This kind of spirited imagining is even more important in 2013 than it was in 2011, as we do seem under continued and increasing assault from news media outlets and self-serving reformers, ministry audits and economic agendas. Barnett approaches the utopian with guarded optimism, and is quite accurate about the variety of coexisting discourses vying for attention in international contexts. For everyday evidence in Canada, any given week s worth of tweets about #cdnpse (the Twitter hashtag commonly used for Canadian postsecondary education) contains questions and commentary, both formal and informal, pertinent to each of Barnett s descriptive categories and his imaginative possibilities. Barnett explains the provenance of this pressure under various rubrics, all of which make good, if idiosyncratic, sense. His story of historically dominant and currently emergent forms of the university works sequentially by chapter: the metaphysical university, the scientific university, the entrepreneurial university (the one that seems inescapable at the moment) and the bureaucratic university on the horizon. Although these are successive, one can see the residue of each coexisting in the latest, and the seeds of the newest in the penultimate. Along the way, Barnett hints at the next two parts of the book the conceptual middle and the imaginative end. The status of being and knowing (and for whom) begun in his reconstruction of Western universities roles is perhaps the most consistent thread throughout the book. As a framing for the utopian third section, the middle section sets up concepts from an eclectic range of philosophies: being and becoming, space and time, culture and anarchy, and authenticity and responsibility. Readers will need to extract for themselves what is useful here from a seemingly random and impressionistic deployment

3 of theory. Barnett moves, for example, across Martin Heidegger, Jürgen Habermas, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Zygmunt Bauman, Paul Virilio and Slavoj Žižek with a recklessness that promises to be explained in footnotes, but rarely is. Thus we get the jarring introduction of Deleuze and Guattari s rhizomes, used in this case as a metaphor to illustrate the Bauman-inspired liquid university, only to be dispensed with in favour of a brief discussion of squids as a better metaphor (111 12). Names and concepts arise like waves throughout and, like waves, recede immediately. I would have appreciated a sustained engagement with any of the theories; as it stands, I find it unlikely that unfamiliar readers would hunger for more (Barnett invites us to find pathways to more via the notes and bibliography: see page 5), and equally unlikely that familiar readers would be at all convinced by the haphazard and impressionistic conclusions drawn here. I would contrast this approach with work informed by similar traditions. Stephen Brookfield, for example, and Patti Lather, education specialists both, manage to explain critical theory and postmodernism very clearly for intelligent readers from any discipline; Barnett s attempt at simplicity results rather in vague gestures not helped by encapsulations, assertions or questions at the end of each chapter, which only seem repetitive instead of clarifying. Still, to be fair, Barnett is imagining here rather than doing critique, and he wishes to leave us with some possibilities. He asks us to follow him as he takes up his own challenge: an ethical obligation to consider the role of universities (110). He presents four feasible utopias that he orders in his own hierarchy (least to most promising). The Ecological University is the last, and the one he prefers, as it sheds light best on the other possibilities and is itself a way to unify and universalize without being dictatorial and monolithic. It is a bold move to talk of universals, and we ought not to shy away from the attempt. There is much to be taken seriously in this last utopia; the others, alas, do not seem so compelling except as description, again, of the state of things now. The Liquid University, the Therapeutic University and the Authentic University have more against than for them, although Barnett seems to think they are neither virtuous nor pernicious in themselves. If you find yourself wondering how to frame the multiplicity of competing discourses and rapid change around us, or the infantilizing tendencies of contemporary pedagogy, or our persistent striving toward learning and inquiry in spite of the odds, these first three utopias will provide some explanation. I agree, however, with Barnett that the notion of the Ecological University is his most compelling utopia. This latter model takes the commitment and responsibility to human beings and the world in which we do our work as its primary concern. It is Other-oriented, embodying a gift to the world but, equally, learning from the world (143). He is so sanguine about the boundlessness (151) of the gift s possibilities that, surely inadvertently, he echoes the language of the colonizer, albeit in a sort of pluralist mode, validating diverse ontologies and epistemologies as sustainable parts of a larger and unfinished enlightenment project with a difference: ecological spirit (150). 337

4 The biggest problem I see, though, is that there is no we it is the university that is doing the action, whether it be striving, inquiring, gifting. For me, a book like this should inspire the math professor, the environmental studies student, the psychology grants administrator, the fine arts lab technician, the residence life coordinator and so on. Neither the style nor the substance of Being a University is likely to do this. But perhaps that is not the project here. Perhaps it is as important to define the identity of a contested institution as it is to inspire collective action by agents within it the latter might follow from the former. Yet even reading generously, the book fails to deliver even in its own context. 338 Being a University is in many ways an extension and a corrective to Barnett s highly cited earlier work, Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity. Since this latter text s publication in 2000, supercomplexity has become a kind of trademark for Barnett with his followers (among whom I count myself, as part of a writing collective that attempts to theorize against the grain of our work mostly teachingcentre staff and faculty at tertiary institutions around the world see Holmes and Grant, 2007). As a metaconceptual means of handling the multiple determinants and effects of higher education under late capitalism (or, if we prefer, the postmodern era Barnett is not a postmodernist, although he does dine with them throughout his books), supercomplexity has had real traction. The original book and related articles suffer from an inconsistent shorthanding of the theories on which they are based (a mix of Frankfurt School critical theory and continental deconstruction), a commitment to thought experiment without the requisite sustained logic, and a reification of the institution rather than a playbook with which subjects might change things. Unfortunately the newer book repeats some of these shortcomings even as it adds helpful concepts like the Ecological University. As Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, U.K., Barnett s work both in print and as a generous colleague has influenced countless others. My sense is that Being a University has the urgency, boldness and scale of a career s statement. That is, Barnett is tying together many threads from his previous work and giving us his vision for a future toward which we can strive around the world in university settings. One clue that this is in the genre of a retirement swan song is the ending: rather than a conclusion, we have a Coda about the spirit of the university, and a Finale. Yet I am left wanting more. A book intended to inspire persistent striving needs to capture our imaginations with its content and its prose, rather than be something to which we can so easily raise objections as to substance, style and, it may as well be said, practicality. How, in the midst of increasing bureaucracy, can we (scholars, staff, students, communities) find the time and the inclination to learn to debate fruitfully across disciplines with which we are set up to compete? This is but one example of impractical, if desirable, action on our part as university citizens.

5 It is fitting for TOPIA s concerns that one of Barnett s sources for a language with which to name higher education s bureaucratization is Lyotard s The Postmodern Condition, which was originally a report commissioned by the Quebec Ministry of Education. We would do as well to reread this report as a report, and to act accordingly, as to spend time with Barnett s determined and earnest but ultimately repetitive and vague suggestions. As a philosophical and critical text, I would have liked to have gained from Barnett s post-retirement work a deeper understanding to consider recent events in Canada of why it is in Montreal that thousands of students and supporters took to the streets and banged pots each Wednesday in their neighbourhoods for a principle of higher education, whereas in Vancouver, Saskatoon, Waterloo and Corner Brook, no such demonstrations have been thinkable. That is to say, more generally, the relative paucity of explanation and inspiration in Being a University results in a frustration born of expecting so much more from a key contributor to the field of critical higher education studies. References Barnett, Ronald Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity. Maidenhead, Berkshire, U.K: Open University Press. Brookfield, Stephen The Power of Critical Theory for Adult Learning and Teaching. Maidenhead, Berkshire, U.K.: Open University Press. Holmes, Trevor and Grant, Barbara Thinking Otherwise in Academic Development. International Journal for Academic Development 12(1): 1 4. Lather, Patti Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy with/in the Postmodern. London and New York: Routledge. Lyotard, Jean Francois The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 339

International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies (2014): 5(4.2) MATERIAL ENCOUNTERS. Sylvia Kind

International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies (2014): 5(4.2) MATERIAL ENCOUNTERS. Sylvia Kind MATERIAL ENCOUNTERS Sylvia Kind Sylvia Kind, Ph.D. is an instructor and atelierista in the Department of Early Childhood Care and Education at Capilano University, 2055 Purcell Way, North Vancouver British