The university has its possibilities Ronald Barnett, Being a.pdfVIP

Stud Philos Educ DOI 10.1007/s11217-012-9292-9 _ Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 The university has its possibilities: Ronald Barnett, Being a University. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2011 Pavel Zgaga Introduction The idea of a university – the single idea of a university – is dead. Not to worry; there is now a pleasant view as a thousand flowers blossom on its grave: the ‘twenty-first century’, ‘efficient’, ‘world-class’, ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘borderless ’, ‘virtual ’, ‘market place ’ etc. university, but also the ‘moral ’, ‘creative’, ‘critical’, ‘not-for-profit ’, ‘socially engaged’, ‘inclusive’, ‘public space ’ etc. university. It is almost impossible to collect and classify all of these flowers – and yet new ones are blooming every day. A lot of work for botanists from the next century. In contrast, the loss of a hegemonic idea (although, has it ever existed as a hegemonic idea?) seems to produce certain difficulties. Now, thousands of flowers compete for sunlight and fertile soil; in this competitive engagement they accommodate in different ways – better or worse – the local and temporary circumstances while at the same time pretending, almost as a rule, that they all are an emanation of the same essence: a quality, ‘simply-the-best’ university. As they compete against each other, one could arguably say that they simply all cannot be ‘the best ’. The result of this competitive engagement is not only visible in modern university rankings but also in the dichotomies in which they are enchained along with the accompanying contradictions and conflicts: the ‘efficient’ vs. the ‘creative’ university; the ‘entrepreneurial’ vs. the ‘non-profit ’ university; the ‘market place ’ vs. the ‘public space ’ university etc. These contradictions and conflicts produce bad feelings (as well as some ‘bad faith’). On one hand, the university seems to be robbed and discharged of its conceptual clarity and ‘fullness’ while, on the other, it seem