If there is a transformation in higher education, what should it be? Is there a need for a set of values that transcend group values, for a vocab- ulary that will speak to all groups within the academy? Or should there be a wide open conglomeration of presumably incommensurate values, ethics, standards? Some poststructuralist thought seems to indicate that we already have this incommensurability among discourses. The destruction of the belief in eternal verities and the attenuation of the drive to search for truth mean that higher education's task may be to pay much more attention to values, what they mean, where they come from, what their function is, and how to forge new values that fit the higher education world and its mission. Because the borders of colleges and universities are becoming more permeable in the postmodern world and the great sustainers of the in- dependence of higher education, the state and governments, are becom- ing weaker, institutions need to find ways of maintaining autonomy in the face of multinational corporate resources and power, the debilitat- ing effects of the increased proliferation of active interest groups, and the encroachment of extreme local power. In the world of simulacra and the power that comes from creating images, the universities' task may be to seek and sustain a kind of au- thenticity of information and knowledge. In this it needs to create a con- sistent and useful concept of merit; it cannot rely as heavily upon the strictures of science or the rules of a broken canon. But it needs to sus- tain the value of merit and find with all the contradictions, the plural voices, the lack of a sense of progress, and the continual tension an in- terest in and pursuit of means for measuring, judging, and rewarding merit. As the boundary between higher education and the market collapses, some means for organizing and sustaining autonomous sanctu- aries, oases, or enclaves in universities should be found that do not sim- ply respond to the drive for performativity and the standards of the market. Institutions of higher education need ways to construct and sus- tain community, and community at several levels: community on the campus and community in the larger society, a commitment to citizen- ship. The emphasis upon the other, the marginal, the outsider, in postmod- ern thought needs to be kept in the foreground in higher education. Colleges and universities need to find ways of encompassing the other, of taking in marginal people and ideas. However, it should not be done in the usual liberal strategy of simply adding courses on multinational- ism, women's studies, and cultural studies. These need to be included in academia more on the basis of their own standards. But the argument here is that this inclusion does not mean that the search for and crea- tion of standards of merit is compromised. An important means for en- suring this is to follow the advice that a number of postmodern writers have offered, namely, to listen very hard and openly. As Cornell West has written, "I hope that we can overcome the virtual de facto segrega- tion in the life of the mind in this country, for we have yet actually to create contexts in which black intellectuals, brown intellectuals, red in- tellectuals, white intellectuals, feminist intellectuals, genuinely struggle with each other" [98, p. 696]
If there is a transformation in higher education, what should it be? The destruction of the belief in eternal verities mean that higher education's task may be to pay much more attention to values, what they mean, where they come from, what their function is, and how to forge new values that fit the higher education world and its mission. Because the borders of colleges and universities are becoming more permeable in the postmodern world the universities' task may be to seek and sustain a kind of au- thenticity of information and knowledge. But it needs to sus- tain the value of merit and find with all the contradictions, the plural voices, the lack of a sense of progress, and the continual tension an in- terest in and pursuit of means for measuring, judging, and rewarding merit Institutions of higher education need ways to construct and sus- tain community, and community at several levels: community on the campus and community in the larger society, a commitment to citizen- ship. The emphasis upon the other, the marginal, the outsider, in postmod- ern thought needs to be kept in the foreground in higher education Colleges and universities need to find ways of encompassing the other, of taking in marginal people and ideas.