Book Summary:
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 18th 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.”
Editorial 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 Bill Reading’s University
in Ruins (Harvard UP, 1996), Gregg 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, University of Missouri at Columbia, editor of the minnesota review |
  Table
of ContentsI.. THE UNIVERSITY IN THE EARS OF ITS PUBLICS Abstract of Part One II. THE POSTMODERN CONDITION Y2K Abstract of Part Two III. ON LYOTARD'S WAR Abstract of Part Three CONCLUSION & SUMMARY
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