With every issue of Books & Culture, we send a readership survey to a small number of randomly selected subscribers. We're eager to hear from you, and we appreciate the time and effort invested by those who take the trouble to return the survey forms to us. (You don't have to wait for a questionnaire, of course; we'd be happy to hear from you any time.) In a recent survey, for example, the results of which we just received, we asked about a possible new feature, offering a concise roundup of recently published books on a particular subject. The response was very positive, and you can expect to find that feature in future issues. In the meantime, as a down payment, here's a lightly annotated list of significant books on higher education, the subject of this issue's special section.

John Henry Newman's The Idea of a University is a classic cited everywhere but perhaps rarely read. A new edition, edited by Frank M. Turner (Yale University Press, 367 pp.; $35, hardcover; $18, paper, 1996), has been issued as the second volume in Yale's promising series, Rethinking the Western Tradition. (The first volume, published in 1993, was Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy.) The aim of the series is "to address the present debate over the western tradition by reprinting key works of that tradition along with essays that evaluate each text from different perspectives." So along with an abridged text of Newman's work (comprising the nine foundational discourses delivered at the Catholic University in Dublin in 1852 and published the same year, and four of the ten lectures and essays on university subjects), this volume supplies five interpretive essays, among them George Marsden's "Theology and the University: Newman's Idea and Current Realities" and George Landow's "Newman and the Idea of an Electronic University."

In our own time, Clark Kerr's The Uses of the University (Harvard University Press, 4th ed., 226 pp.; $15.95, paper, 1995) has been the single most influential book on the American research university. Kerr, who was president of the University of California, Berkeley, during the tumult of the Free Speech Movement, gave three lectures at Harvard in 1963 defining the role of the emerging "multiversity." New layers were added to the text in 1972, 1982, and again in 1994; all are included in this edition. Not surprisingly, Kerr begins by contrasting what the university has become with Newman's vision for it, though his version of Newman is close to a caricature. "This beautiful world," Kerr says of Newman's "academic cloister,"

was being shattered forever even as it was being so beautifully portrayed. By 1852, when Newman was writing, the German universities were becoming the new model. The democratic and industrial and scientific revolutions were well underway in the western world. The gentleman "at home in any society" was soon to be at home in none. Science was beginning to take the place of moral philosophy, research the place of teaching.

Where Newman made the case for a theologically ordered education-in which, as Marsden observes in his essay, knowledge of God provides the context for all other forms of knowledge-Kerr concludes that the "uses of the university" are "better knowledge and higher skills."

Bill Readings, in The University in Ruins (Harvard University Press, 238 pp.; $29.95, 1996), sees signs of decay precisely where Kerr sees vigorous health. "The University," Readings says, "no longer needs a grand narrative of culture in order to work"; rather, it has become "a bureaucratic institution of excellence." (Elsewhere he remarks that "the University is no longer primarily an ideological arm of the nation-state but an autonomous bureaucratic corporation.") Indeed, "We have to recognize that the University is a ruined institution, while thinking what it means to dwell in those ruins without recourse to romantic nostalgia." Readings (1960-94), associate professor of comparative literature at the Universite de Montreal, was killed in a plane crash before his book was published. Bristling with references to Derrida, Bourdieu, Lyotard, and their ilk ("While I applaud the exemplary anti-hu manism of Lacan's gesture," runs a typical clause in a footnote), The University in Ruins is representative of one of the strongest ideological currents in the academy today.

For a radically different perspective on the university, see Finding God at Harvard: Spiritual Journeys of Thinking Christians, edited by Kelly Monroe (Zondervan, 368 pp.; $17.99, 1996), a gathering of testimonies by 42 individuals with a Harvard connection (chiefly as students or faculty, though Solzhenitsyn and Mother Teresa are included by virtue of having spoken there). Monroe, chaplain to graduate students at Harvard and founder of the Harvard Veritas Forum, has assembled a diverse and provocative collection. In a few instances she has drawn on published sources, but most of the pieces were written specifically for this volume. At the risk of singling out a few among many strong pieces, Glenn Loury's "A Professor Under Reconstruction," Nicholas Wolterstorff's "The Grace That Shaped My Life," and Lamin Sanneh's "Jesus, More Than a Prophet" (about the Gambian-born Sanneh's conversion from Islam) struck one reader as particularly powerful. And in a moving epilogue, "A Taste of New Wine," Monroe tells of how she herself has found a lively fellowship of Christian scholars, students, and friends, centered in Harvard but extending far and wide. "In my search for God at Harvard," she writes,

I expected to find something new, something beyond Jesus, but instead I have found more of him. I have begun to see how the pure light of God's truth refracts and falls in every direction with color and grace. I found the memory of this truth in the color of crimson, in the iron Yard gates, and in the symbols of the college seal. I began to see him in the work and eyes of fellow students, in rare books, in a friend's chemistry lab, in recent astrophysical abstracts, and in the lives and legacies of founders and alumni who, whether living or beyond this life, would befriend and teach us.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine

September/October 1996, Page 4

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