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Gregg
Lambert, Report to the Academy (re: The NEW Conflict of the Faculties)
Critical Studies in the Humanities
Report to
the Academy
addresses the signs of the perceived crisis of the
first-world university as the result of its take-over by a new model
of administrative rationality.
Rather than seeing this as an entirely new development, Professor
Lambert reveals the striking similarities between the present day
conflict over the idea of the university as a social and cultural
institution, and the conflict over reason first outlined by the
eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Taking up the original argument
of Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties, as well as more
recent arguments by philosophers and cultural critics such as
Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jurgen Habermas, Fredric
Jameson, and Bill Readings,
Report to the Academy
offers a
lively and compelling interpretation of the most critical issues
underlying the contemporary debates over the fate of higher
education. Lambert concludes his “report” by framing these issues in
terms of two guiding questions, which he addresses to faculty and
administrators alike: “What should count as “critical” social and
cultural knowledge?” and “Who should have the authority to decide?”
These questions, Lambert argues, return us to the very heart of the
university’s mission for the larger society, and should become the
occasion of “a new conflict of the faculties.”
Parts one and two of
Report to the
Academy attempt to familiarize the reader with the principle issues
involved in the discussion over the past ten years (particularly
with regard to the role played by “theory”), while part three
engages in a more technical discussion of a notion of critical
knowledge that underlies competing discursive camps in the academy
today. As the subtitle suggests, the primary objective of the work
is to examine the nature of “the conflict of the faculties” that now
conditions the relation between power and knowledge in the
contemporary first-world university. Such an examination, as argued
explicitly in part three, should cause the “critical faculties” in
the university to scrutinize some of the more dogmatic and even
mythological elements that belong to their understanding of
“critical social knowledge.”
Reviews
Report to the Academy is a major reflection on the state of the
university today, especially on the vexed question of the role of
the humanities in the new transnational and corporation-dominated
university now coming into being. Anyone teaching humanities today
will be aware of the changes that are taking place with
unprecedented rapidity, but it is not all that easy to reflect with
objectivity on just what those changes are or to explain them.
Lambert's book does a superb job of accomplishing that, through
careful readings of work by Kant, Lyotard, Derrida, Jameson,
Habermas, Luhman, and Readings. Of special importance is his
recognition of one important factor not made salient in earlier
work. The university library used to be the major repository and
data-base for the accumulated learning of our culture. You have to
have proper credentials to have access to that data-base. Now the
Internet is replacing the library as a kind of universal data-base,
and one major function of the university is fading. You don't need
to be in the university to have access to more and more material,
for example the illuminated manuscript books of William Blake, once
available only to a few specialists. Among many other astute
insights, Lambert's book recognizes what a major change this is in
the social role of the university.
— J. Hillis Miller, UCI Distinguished Professor of English and
Comparative Literature,
University of California, Irvine.
In the wake of the culture wars, the academic job crisis, the drive
for corporate sponsorship, and the increasingly prominent place of
college sports, the contemporary American university, perhaps our
most vital public institution, seems to have lost its bearings.
Gregg Lambert’s Report to the Academy takes a timely step
back from all the brouhaha to conduct an analysis of the
philosophical grounds of the university, from Kant to Derrida,
Lyotard, and Readings. Next to Reading’s
University in Ruins,
(Lambert’s) Report to the Academy is an important statement
advocating the “postcritical” university, one that productively
questions both current disciplinary and administrative logic.
— Jeffrey J. Williams
Professor Lambert's
Report to the Academy is at once the work of a public intellectuall concerned about the institutional and
intellectual future of the humanities, and the work of a fine
literary scholar commenting upon recent discussions of these issues
by Lyotard, Derrida,
Readings and others. On both counts it is an outstanding
contribution to an important debate.
— Paul Patton, Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney
Author
Gregg Lambert teaches in the English
Department at Syracuse University. In addition to
Report to the
Academy, he is the author of
The Non-Philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze,
The Return of the Baroque, and
The Culture of Strangers (forthcoming). His
articles and papers have appeared in such diverse journals as
Strategies (UK),
minnesota review,
Angelaki,
Literature and Theology,
Crossings,
Journal of
Cultural and Religious Theory,
Postmodern Culture, and
the Routledge Encyclopedia of Postmodernism.
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