Having been away of late, I am only now able to respond to Simon Blackburn¡¯s review of my book Imagining the University (¡°Creative steps to po-po-mo heaven¡±, 31 January).

First, the role of any reviewer is surely to provide a summary of the book¡¯s contents, but Blackburn doesn¡¯t really offer that. (A non-technical summary is set out in the book¡¯s introduction in the form of 15 theses.)

Second, Blackburn rather misconstrues the argument. The ¡°orgy of adjectives¡± is not my own but is my identification of different terms depicting the university that are to be found in the literature and which I critique in the book.

Third, Blackburn informs readers that dislocations of grammatical categories are common in the book, ¡°knowledge¡± being mainly used as an adjective while ¡°imaginary¡± becomes a noun. The first example is mistaken; the second is curious, to say the least. Blackburn seems either not to know or to care that both Jean-Paul Sartre and Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor have used ¡°imaginary¡± as a noun (and done so in the titles of books of theirs). In Imagining the University, I draw on their meanings of ¡°imaginary¡±, as well as making a distinction between it and ¡°imagination¡±. Being charitable, Blackburn is at best misguided here.

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Fourth, Blackburn suggests that ¡°universities are about educating a new generation¡±. Some might think that they are about rather more than that, including research and contributions to wider society. However, a matter that Imagining the University seeks to address is the future development of such institutions: that this is not picked up in the review could be said to be indicative of a certain complacency on the reviewer¡¯s part.

Finally, there is no intimation in Blackburn¡¯s review that he is aware of the literature on the university or on higher education. I do not apologise for the use of some technical terms in the book, but to suggest that it is marked by abstraction is unfair. I believe that a reader opening it at random would be met by an accessible prose (described as ¡°elegant¡± in a recent THE column).

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Ronald Barnett
Emeritus professor of higher education
Institute of Education, University of London