476
PARTISAN REVIEW
Higher Education
THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY: A REEXAMINATION.
By
Jaroslav
Pelikan.
Yale University Press.
$30.00.
THE IDEAL OF THE UNIVERSITY. With a New Introduction.
By
Robert Paul Wolff.
Transaction Publishers.
$19.95.
LOOSE CANONS: NOTES ON THE CULTURE WARS.
By
Henry
Louis Gates, Jr.
Oxford University Press.
$19.95.
For all the recent flood of books about conflict within the university,
comparatively little has been written about the university itself. Much the
greater part of the outpouring is about contemporary disputes and con–
troversies over the curriculum of the humanities, mainly in the depart–
ments ofliterature, or over the racial and female representation in faculties
and student bodies and the treatment minorities have received. Subjects of
this kind have been given generous attention in these pages and have suf–
fered little neglect in other journals.
In the meantime universities, together with institutions calling them–
selves universities, have multiplied in number and their students enrolled
at an unprecedented rate. And with their proliferation, confusion and
doubt have increased about what the university really is - about the very
idea of the university - its mission and purpose, its values and responsibil–
ities, its component parts and their relation to one another, even relations
between faculty and students, not to mention those between university
and society, the state, the military, and corporate enterprise. All this in
addition to staggering budget deficits that threaten the university's future
and its very survival.
These are the kinds of subjects addressed by Professor Jaroslav Pelikan
ofYale in
The Idea of the University : A Reexamination .
The subtitle has ref–
erence not only to the antiquity and perennial recurrence of such ques–
tions, but also to the classic work on them that dates from the middle of
the previous century and the title of which Pelikan consciously para–
phrases for his
Reexamination.
This is of course John Henry Newman's
The Idea of a University.
Jacques Barzun calls Newman "the greatest theo–
rist of university life," and
J.
M. Cameron says that "modern thinking on
university education is a series of footnotes to Newman's lectures and es–
says." Pelikan thinks of his predecessor's work on the subject as the most
important "ever written in any language," and describes his own book as
a "dialogue with Newman."
