Bill Readings Research Articles

Uncollegial governance and the restructuring of the University of Alberta

This article provides an account of the undermining of collegial governance at the University of Alberta in relation to the restructuring of the university in 2020 by the senior administration and board on advice provided by the Australian consultancy firm, the Nous Group. The current president of the university has publicly promoted the restructuring in venues including the Times Higher Education supplement as a model for other universities. The model, a disastrous one for collegial governance, demands widespread attention along with the means by which it was achieved. As Bill Readings declared in his 1997 book The University in Ruins, “the changing institutional form of the university is something that intellectuals cannot afford to ignore.” At the University of Alberta, that changing form is being determined by fossil-fuelled academic capitalism. The account of what has happened is provided by a professor who has served on the university’s senior academic body, the General Faculties Council, for almost a decade. It concludes with several concrete recommendations for bolstering collegial governance at universities in Alberta, elsewhere in Canada, and possibly worldwide—wherever collegial governance is being undermined by restructuring, the corporatization of the academy, academic capitalism, or the disrespect of university boards for the authority of faculty and the academic mission.

Black Studies without Excellence

As the Canadian university expands its market to previously excluded populations and areas of study, Black students and scholars take up positions in academia to engage in intellectual work geared toward liberation, knowing that from the perspective of the neoliberal institution, our value is primarily as new categories of institutional consumer and forms of institutional capital. We work from this incongruous position of within and against the academy, simultaneously posited as visible representatives and visual representations of its reformation as “diverse” and “decolonized.” The university has long asserted its excellence, and in sponsoring “Black Excellence” and “Indigenous Excellence” it now claims its excellence at being inclusive—hence “Inclusive Excellence”. This paper draws on the work of Bill Readings in conversation with Black radical thought and my recent research to examine these issues as they are emerging in the much delayed and ongoing development of Black Studies in Canada.

Get in: Rhetoric and Realities of Diversity in the Global University

Diversity – in the nominal sense of widening access to education beyond majority group interests – is a stated objective for many institutions of higher education worldwide. However, different narratives of national and institutional identity play a role in how programmes of diversity are conceived. In recent university reforms initiated in Japan by MEXT (Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology), the drive to internationalize universities through increasing the number of foreign students, faculty and collaborations runs alongside an historical and reactionary othering of rational and critical thinking as “western learning.” By contrast, for universities in the “west” the pursuit of diversity is considered an affirmation of the university as a site of civil and rational discourse, in which the welcoming of different voices is considered in terms of being both a moral imperative and institutional asset. Using Bill Readings’ 1996 critique of the modern university as a bureaucratic corporation, “The University in Ruins” as a reference point, the dissonance between the policy goal of diversity and what may actually happen in a classroom is discussed here from personal experience of teaching the history of photography, and other subjects, in Japanese Universities. Modes of classroom interaction and the role of the teacher, beyond culture-specific models, are interrogated, and finally discussed in relation to a holistic view of education espoused in the teaching methodologies of Charles A. Curran and Caleb Gattegno.

WPD-logy as a tool of the improvement of education in the 21st century

The introduction to the article describes the situation that has developed in the system of higher education in Russia after Perestroika and has led to an unambiguous predominance of administration over professionally significant employees.The objective of the article is to arrange a detailed analysis of the reasons for the inversely proportional relationship between the level of creativity and the level of bureaucratization that is emerging in modern conditions. As an example, such an aspect of bureaucratic activity as the development and implementation of standards, represented, in particular, by the work programs of disciplines (WPD) and work programs of practices (WPP), is taken.The main research methodology is a comparative and comparative historical analysis, which allows to identify the features of the activities for the creation of WPD and WPP, which is considered necessary to improve the level of methodological work and the corresponding improvement in the quality of teaching.The result of the study allows us to show that the organization of methodological work is built hierarchically, with methodologists at the upper levels, and all teachers, including professors, at the lower levels. The work of the making of educational programs has turned, on the one hand, into a separate discipline, and, on the other hand, into a process, completely autonomous from educational and scientific activities. It is necessary not for educational activities, but exclusively for passing confirmations from authorities (attestations). In addition, rigid and constantly changing requirements for standards (including changes of the standards themselves) are reinforced by additional requirements for the quality of teaching staff, which are growing according to the awareness of the ineffectiveness of previous measures. This practice is considered in the context of the global trend of transformation of universities from “universities of culture” to the “universities of excellence” (in Bill Readings’ terminology).The authors of the article come to conclusion that as a result of the ongoing educational policy, a situation arises not just of imitation of education, but of imitation of imitation. The heyday of the WPD-logy is an important modern indicator that the real trajectory of development of most universities in modern Russia actually demonstrates a sign ificant decline of the level teaching.

Corporation Takes Command: The Project of the Sir John Cass Faculty of Architecture and Design between Complicity and Resistance

In the mid-1990s, Bill Readings compared universities to business corporations, sounding the alarm for an incipient corporatization of the academy that has provoked commentary since. Under neoliberalism, public universities are run as private corporations striving to survive in the increasingly competitive higher education market. The spatial side of this phenomenon is an architectural portfolio consisting of corporate style reception desks, turnstile-controlled entrances, bookable meeting rooms, and café spaces to learn. This article examines “the slow death” of the university as a space of scholarship focusing on the Sir John Cass Faculty of Architecture and Design (or Cass) in Central House (2012–17), London. As a public university acting like a real estate operator in a large metropolis, the Cass displays both complicity and resistance toward the managerial logics of universities. Its resistance lies in the architectural reconfiguration of Central House, which was eventually defeated by the institution’s real estate ambitions.

Идентичность университета в условиях «текучей современности»

The object of the research presented in the article is the transformation of the university's identity in the context of “liquid modernity” (Zygmunt Bauman), as an era of global instability. Despite political, economic and social upheavals and changes, the university remained a fairly stable, albeit evolving, social institution from its inception during the Middle Ages to the second half of the 20th century, to the stage of social development that is commonly called postmodernity or “liquid modernity”. At this time, higher education almost all over the world is faced with a reduction in public funding, and a need arises for universities to search for additional sources of income. As a result, a model of an entrepreneurial university is emerging, the social role and institutional identity of the university in modern reality is blurred (Bill Readings' “the university in ruins”). In the situation of the problematization of the university's integral identity and the emergence of multiple models in which it functions today, it becomes necessary to rethink the uniqueness of the university as a social institution and its place and role in the world. The article carries out a reflexive analysis of the transformation of the university's identity in three key dimensions: first, as an agent for the development of research open to innovation and social activity; second, as an educational project in the era of mass (and possibly universal) higher education; third, as a subject that bears social responsibility for contributing to the sustainable development of a changing world. The study of transformations of the identity of a modern university is based on the analysis of changes in the concept of knowledge from the perspective of the concept of “liquid modernity”. These transformations were indicated by an increase in the need for expert scientific knowledge, simultaneously with its relativization, the accumulation of uncertainties and risks, a paradigmatic shift from a fundamentalist type of science to research in which knowledge is epistemologically and socially constructed. An analysis of the transformations affecting the university in its key areas of activity - research, teaching, and social responsibility - shows how significant they are. Indeed, one might get the impression that the university is losing its place in the world and its identity; however, transformations of the basic functions of the university do not mean the loss of the university's uniqueness, but rather a renewal of the ideal. The authors of the article come to the conclusion that the identity of the university as a social institution is expressed in the unity of the functions of research, teaching, and social responsibility. This unique integrity allows the university to produce and broadcast knowledge as a social good, realizing its responsible research and expert position in the interests of the well-being of the larger world and overcoming civilizational crises, and this is what distinguishes the university from other social institutions.

The University of Crisis

AbstractThis article explores the history of the university as a modern social institution through the epistemological framework of crisis. Starting from the historical understanding that the university has always‐already been in the throes of crisis, and that such crisis (or crises) are cemented into the conceptual architecture of both the university itself and the inherently promiscuous nature of knowledge in society, this exploration of the university in crisis endeavors to show how crisis is as old as knowledge itself. Building on the insights of such social theorists and historians of the university as Samuel Weber, Bill Readings, Jean‐Francois Lyotard, and Gregg Lambert, my hope is to draw out from these writers the intellectual sustenance that is sorely needed (and largely lacking) in today’s discourse on the “university of crisis.”

Introduction: Comparative Studies in a Precarious Present

Introduction:Comparative Studies in a Precarious Present Joshua Synenko This special issue of Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée (CRCL/RCLC) bears the pain and scars of COVID-19, having been repeatedly postponed during the first and second waves of the pandemic. During this time, many others had initiated efforts to turn the pandemic into an object of research in the humanities, with prominent journals devoting their own special issues to aspects of the crisis (Erni and Striphas; Ironstone and Bird; Nunes and Ozog). The articles in Comparatism Now! were also edited and revised at the height of the lockdowns, and while all but one makes an explicit reference to it (Lourdes Arciniega's "Archiving the Future"), the immediate pressures of the time, on both scholarly research and teaching, became a significant factor in completing this project. Having said that, despite the constraints of publishing in unique circumstances, it may be important to acknowledge that many of these pressures are hardly new. The pandemic has built on existing convulsive changes that were identified even decades prior, for example, as Bill Readings wrote in his groundbreaking work The University in Ruins in 1997. The true impact of COVID-19 is still unknown to us as the crisis continues in different forms. Yet the specific "pivoting" that it has required of academic labourers coincides with a much more deliberate destabilization -and technological acceleration -that is currently at play in all university disciplines. This larger and much older pattern of change hasn't proven to be an existential risk to fields in the humanities, as many have warned in the past. But it does affect the specific [End Page 153] production of knowledge that we as humanities scholars can lay claim to. In fact, this concern was part of the initial motivation for assembling this special issue. In 2019, the Association Canadienne de Littérature Comparée/Canadian Comparative Literature Association (ACLC/CCLA) gathered at the University of British Columbia to determine how comparative literary scholars have been forced to "pivot" amid the overlapping circles of knowledge that have emerged in recent years. These include the epochal changes in encyclopedic knowledge transfer that have now, almost definitively, pushed aside the study of literature from the central role it once occupied (Rajan). Before and beyond the pandemic, conditions inside the university have inspired many successful and unsuccessful attempts at totalization, rationality, governmentality, and systems logic. Where, then, does literary study fit in these current formations? Consistent with the annual theme of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences/Fédération des Sciences Humaines in 2019, "Circles of Conversation," we explored the circle as an important metaphor of power as demonstrated by the existence of academic boundaries, centres and peripheries, exclusions, and forms of inequality. While acknowledging Tilottama Rajan's forewarning about the onset of the coming hegemony of academic "culturalism," we recognize something in literary study that remains critically attuned to these changes, a kind of listening ear on the present that may indeed signal the potential for a critique of those hegemonies. Some may even argue that literary study is urgently needed in times of destabilization, such as the one we are experiencing now. Comparative Literature, then, which is part of literary study, belongs to a collective effort of responding to the larger crisis by navigating its own internal crisis; and, as an inevitable result of this process, of staking a claim for its continued existence. The demand of Comparatism Now! aligns with Susan Ingram and Irene Sywenky's 2019 edited collection Comparative Literature in Canada: Contemporary Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Publishing in Review, which speaks to the urgent need for reappraising the discipline with a focus on the Canadian context. We also align with David Palumbo-Liu in "Ethics Before Comparison," his keynote address at the fiftieth-anniversary meeting of the ACLC/CCLA at UBC in 2019. In his presentation, Palumbo-Liu urged Canadian comparatists to remember that while our scholarship is founded upon critical evaluation and judgement, an important part of this effort is paying respect to the material challenges involved in "ethical reckoning," which, as he says, often takes "the shape of a...

Is John Henry Newman's Nineteenth-Century The Idea of a University Relevant in the Twenty-First Century?

Is John Henry Newman's Nineteenth-Century The Idea of a University Relevant in the Twenty-First Century? Allan Patience (bio) First published in 1852, John Henry Newman's work, The Idea of a University (henceforth The Idea), has been lauded down the years as a signal defense of what constitutes (or should constitute) a modern liberal university education. It remains in print today.1 In recent years the book has come under critical scrutiny. Newman is admonished for his English provincialism and his commitment to his Catholic faith. His views about the necessity to include theology in university curricula are written off as outdated and anti-liberal. His high Victorian prose style and misogynist defense of universities as bastions of male entitlement are easy targets for parody. His critics argue that his "idea" is principally an outdated defense of a privileged patriarchal ivory tower, aloofly distanced from the harsh realities confronting universities in the twenty-first century. His indifference to research in universities is seen as especially problematic. These criticisms, however, underestimate the nineteenth-century cultural and academic constraints within which Newman was defending what, in his time, was a radical view of a university. It was (and remains) a view that laid the foundations for future reforms. Moreover, his Catholicism is far more subtle than many of his critics appear to understand. This article aims to show that the essentials of his nineteenth-century defense of a liberal university are still relevant to the challenges facing the public university in the twenty-first century. [End Page 70] This article is divided into six sections. Section one provides a brief account of recent critiques on The Idea. Section two surveys some signal calls for university reforms advanced in the eighteenth century by scholars as diverse as Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, and Edmund Burke, paving the way for The Idea. Section three focuses on The Idea and its arguments against Utilitarianism and a purely defensive clericalism. Given their critical force, section four addresses Professor Stefan Collini's reservations about The Idea.2 Section five briefly surveys Newman's liberal legacy extending from the nineteenth century to the present. Section six draws the article to its conclusion—viz., that The Idea still has much to offer in defense of the idea of the university today. CONTRA NEWMAN Alasdair MacIntyre has wittily summarized the growing contemporary discontent with The Idea: "To criticise contemporary universities from Newman's standpoint would be, on [his critics'] view, like blaming a jet engine for not having the excellences of a windmill."3 However, windmills are not to be sniffed at. Their "excellences" as the precursors of the wind turbines that are generating significant amounts of today's clean energy should not be forgotten. Moreover, as the discipline of the history of ideas teaches us, old ideas, like old technologies, are often the necessary precursors of new ones. Nonetheless, calls for dispensing with The Idea have been steadily increasing. In 1990, for example, J. M. Roberts stated: "As I reread the Idea it seemed to me that its doctrines were narrow, exaggerated, and likely to be sterile as sources of institutional reform."4 In 1996 Bill Readings complained that, "for Newman the teaching of secular culture is a palliative preparation for a sinful world, a world whose redemption is a matter of religious faith rather than scientific knowledge."5 Sheldon Rothblatt has even warned of Newman's "dark and dangerous side."6 In 2012, the former president of the University of Chicago declared: It is quite surprising to find how often Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University is still invoked in writing about higher education. The belief that [End Page 71] such an idea should guide the forms and reforms of universities remains seductive even as it would appear challenged by the reality of today's intensely multitasking university.7 Meanwhile, given the contemporary context and pressures of higher education, Stefan Collini wrote: "Those who wish, nostalgically or defiantly, to cling to what they believe to be the values of the good old days tend to turn to their Newman for support and comfort. . . . I do not intend to encourage or endorse that reaction...

О постмодернистской гносеологии в социокультурных исследованиях «УНИВЕРСИТЕТ В РУИНАХ»

О постмодернистской гносеологии в социокультурных исследованиях «УНИВЕРСИТЕТ В РУИНАХ»

The deconstructed ethics of Martin Heidegger, or, the university sous rature

Could there be a better instance of ethical conflict at the scene of the modern Western university than the case of Martin Heidegger, who in 1933 became a Nazi, arguably to elevate his own standing and career? In this article I examine the opposing ethical forces that animated Heidegger’s brief foray into Nazism, to ask whether the same forces continue to be found in the technocratized university described by Bill Readings. I address Heidegger’s own philosophy as a context in which these conflicting ethical forces are confronted, using metaphorical references to Pollyanna and Cujo. This absorption of literary allusions within a contribution to educational philosophy seeks deliberately to break the stranglehold that empiricism has on the discipline of education. It regards the hegemony of empiricism as an ideological fetishism. I am using the work of Jacques Derrida to deconstruct the idea of the university, with Heidegger’s political opportunism as symptomatic of current patterns of self-marketing, self-promotion, and entrepreneurialism amongst academics.

Postcritique and the Leakiness of Spheres

Postcritique and the Leakiness of Spheres1 Frida Beckman (bio) In the final essay in Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski's edited collection Critique and Postcritique from 2017, Eric Hayot summarizes the status of critique as it has presented itself in this volume: "What we know is that something has been lost, that literary criticism, today, floats adrift on an open, darkling sea, which the sailors search desperately for new compasses" (2017, 279). But what is it that has been lost exactly? I will suggest in this very brief intervention that perhaps it is not critique's usefulness to literary practice that has been lost. Neither, I will propose, is it the political import of critique that has been lost. Rather, I will argue, what are at stake are the forms—the spaces, the spheres—that make critique possible, visible, viable. At least if we follow the Kantian, Arendtian, and Habermasian traditions, critique and the public sphere are inseparable. From this perspective, it makes very little sense to discuss the one without the other. Failing to pay attention to the changing role of the public sphere, I suggest, constitutes a troubling feature of most literary debates on postcritique. As always, there is much more to say about the public sphere and its changing conditions generally and historically but here, and as the debates on postcritique are not only academic but tend also to turn inward, that is, to focus precisely on critique as an academic practice, I will limit myself to saying something about the university and its changing conditions for critique. Historically, the university has been a key space in which a vital public sphere has been fostered. Henry Giroux maintains that higher education is one of an increasingly few public spheres where knowledge and learning promote public values and critical hope (2016, 9). But while the university is thus recognized as harboring a lingering possibility for critique, many, not the least Giroux himself, have also noted how this public sphere is under serious threat. Universities, traditionally crucial spaces for producing critical citizens and the public spheres essential to the democratic ideals [End Page 523] of civic society, are increasingly forced into the instrumental, measurable, and market paradigms characteristic of neoliberal principles. In addition to decreased funding, the diminished influence of faculty, and the intrusion of market mechanisms, Giroux also recognizes the current and unprecedented scope and strength of the attack on higher education "by religious fundamentalists, corporate power, and the apostles of neoliberal capitalism" (6). In the mid-1990s, when middle-brow media suggested that university research was out of touch with the "the demands of the real world," this occurred, Bill Readings argued, primarily because of an "uncertainty as to the role of the University and the very nature of the standards by which it should be judged as an institution" (1996, 1). At this point, the University had gone, Readings maintained, from being "a microcosm of the pure form of the public sphere"—to one that has lost much of this function, becoming, instead, increasingly governed by economic imperatives. In this "posthistorical university," the appeals of rankings and the appeals to "excellence" seem to surpass all other criteria. Since then, the neoliberalisation of universities has, Gregg Lambert notes, continued to pushed U.S. universities from a more industrial—or perhaps disciplinary—model of students passing through programs, classrooms, and offices to students being placed rather "to the side" of the production process, and given the freedom to pick and choose. In this "cafeteria model," as Readings called it, students become customers who are expected to choose and also to be able to determine the criteria for what makes a good choice. Crucially, for the present argument, the university is thus transformed from a place that has previously been seen as somehow separate from society, and as a space that holds a particular expertise that might not always translate directly into its logic, into an increasingly integrated part of a general buffet of neoliberal self-realization. Wendy Brown speaks to this same situation when she notes how scholars in the humanities and the liberal arts find it increasingly difficult to defend their work. The vocabulary of...

University Ruin and the Contested Usefulness of the Humanities in Japanese Higher Education

At Japanese universities, the standing of the humanities has declined considerably over the last two decades. This decline is reminiscent of Bill Readings’ account of American universities as articulated in his University in Ruins (1996). In Readings’ analysis, American universities are ‘ruined’ because they have abandoned their intrinsic cultural mission in a shift that greatly undermines the standing of the humanities. His recommendation in the American context of the time is the adoption of a certain rhythm of disciplinary attachment and detachment, such as giving more weight to short-term collaborative projects on the assumption that every collaboration has a certain half-life. The manner in which Japanese universities are dealing with the shift against the humanities is more complex than Readings’ recommendation. While the government’s policy makers favor short-term usefulness in a sense superficially similar to Readings’ recommendation, scholars in the humanities tend to insist that the usefulness of humanities is undeniable but needs to be evaluated on a longer timescale.

Deconstruction and the Transcultural Uncanny

Deconstruction and the Transcultural Uncanny

Critical discussion on "discourse on University of excellence" of Bill Readings

Critical discussion on "discourse on University of excellence" of Bill Readings

“Cash Is Better than Tenure”: (De)Constructing the “Posthistorical University” in James Hynes’s Gothic Academic Satire The Lecturer’s Tale

Abstract This article analyzes the manner in which James Hynes’s novel The Lecturer’s Tale (2001) can be read as a satire of what Bill Readings identified in his influential The University in Ruins (1996) as the “posthistorical university.” I argue that, in the contemporary context in which higher education establishments are becoming more like corporations and the idea of culture is replaced by the “discourse of excellence,” Hynes’s novel offers an insightful discussion of universities’ negotiation of the Scylla of the pursuit of profit and the Charybdis of self-absorbed literary theorizing and its association with political correctness, the exploitation of junior and non-tenured faculty, and the quest for academic stardom. At the same time, I discuss the way in which the Gothic elements that permeate the novel fittingly double and deepen the critique of contemporary educational establishments and professors.

Morality, Inquiry, and the University

Given that human suffering persists globally on a massive scale, are scholars doing all they ought to be in the pursuit of knowledge? To explore this question, the author analyzes works by Alasdair MacIntyre, Nicholas Maxwell, and Bill Readings. Based on implications derived from their moral critiques of higher education, an alternative, broadened conception of inquiry is proposed that would include explicit consideration and development of values based on dialogue and debate.

BZP-‘Party pills’, populism and prohibition: Exploring global debates in a New Zealand context

In New Zealand, the debates surrounding legal highs have been developing for approximately a decade. New Zealand’s historical grappling with the problem of legal highs reflects a global problem in addressing the issues related to new psychoactive substances. The focus of this article is the prohibition of BZP-based party pills under the Misuse of Drugs (Classification of BZP) Amendment Act, 2008 (hereafter the 2008 Act). This article reports on a qualitative study of the banning of BZP-based party pills in New Zealand, using thematic analysis of the discourses contained in the 2007 Parliamentary Bill readings of the 2008 Act. Six key themes were identified from the bill readings: prohibition is not an effective way to deal with drug use; BZP has a ‘gateway effect’; availability and accessibility means young people can access BZP-PPs too readily; young people are at risk; BZP has contributed to establishing a pill popping culture in New Zealand; and BZP has the potential for harm/has a moderate risk of harm. The thematic analysis revealed that evidence was often not fully represented in parliamentary debates, and that many of the concerns raised about BZPPs could have been dealt with through regulation rather than prohibition. A punitive moral populism aimed at drug use and drug users was also identified, driven by fears of drug using groups, and the symbolism associated with drug use.

In the Ruins of the University

My title is a conflation of two sources that would appear to mark two ends of a cycle between promise and petrification. The first a bowdlerization of Bill Readings’, now two decade-old work, The University in Ruins published after his untimely death. The second the title of a course taught by Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the College de France in 1954-1955. By reaching back towards Merleau-Ponty's exploration of meaning, how meaning in instituted, how it is transformed, how sense is ‘deposited’ as Merleau-Ponty puts it in beings and institutions, and importantly how innovation can arise in such relations, I would wish to historicise a moment of threat to any such expectation of innovation, any hope that institutions might be expected to institute anything. Bill Readings’ eloquent work chimes with that accord for a ‘threatened field’, it echoes for me and in me, still, in its insights for the University today: “We have to recognise that the University is a ruined institution, while thinking what it means to dwell in those ruins without recourse to romantic nostalgia.” There is, as Claude Lefort explained when considering Merleau-Ponty's course, but equally might have been channeling Bill Readings’ principle theme: ‘[ … ] no call to the future which does not imply a decline of the past.” In this essay I would like to put Merleau-Ponty's lecture within a University, and Bill readings’ book about a University into play with each other to understand something about my own institutional history, working alongside the theatre makers Forster & Heighes, at Dartington College of Arts, at Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop, at the London International Festival of Theatre, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, at Roehampton University, and at King's College London. Institutions where nothing need happen, but something, apparently, did.

Entrepreneurial U, or Bildung in the Ruins

This article addresses the rise of entrepreneurship as a hegemonic mode of contemporary postsecondary education. It revisits Bill Readings's arguments about the corporate “University of Excellence,” which framed universities as ruined institutions that had abandoned their mission of subject formation as skills training gained prominence. It suggests that in the entrepreneurial university this problem has been resolved, as a global culture of entrepreneurship has replaced national culture as the guiding concept within them. The article traces the academic framing of the term “entrepreneurial university” from its genesis in the 1980s to its instantiation in current modes of pedagogy, managerial policy, funding, and social action within the university system. Although the focus remains on North American institutions, the article suggests that the hegemonic nature of entrepreneurship dispensed by entrepreneurial universities has a broader scope and has become the dominant global model of advanced education.