Teaching as Justice

Abstract

The notion of ‘excellence’ has emerged as the contemporary telos of higher education. But, as Readings argues in The University in Ruins, excellence is a vacuous idea which is a function of a globalising, neo-liberal discourse. The way this discourse has infiltrated the corporatised university signals the severance of the intimate relation between university and nation-state in which the former historically functioned as production facility for the kind of subjects/citizens required by the latter. In this paper I argue, first, that bell hooks' description of her pedagogy illuminates Readings' grand-narrative about the historical transformation of the university. Second, I advance a reading of hooks' pedagogy in deconstructive terms. This allows me, in the third instance, to re-imagine the possibility of a post-historical education towards justice in which a quasi-transcendental notion of justice (Derrida) can still be retained as telos – an immanent or introjected telos that counters the vacuity of excellence. The benefit of this is that it may yet enable lecturers to excite students beyond the apathy that Readings argues is symptomatic of the loss of telos and the reconfiguration of the university in post-historical terms.

Notes

1. The university as such, of course, predates the rise of the nation-state (de Ridder-Symoens, 1996).

2. Also relevant here is Biesta (2001), to which I will not make any direct reference.