The BBC production of Ibsen’s A Doll's House reminds me of an essay of Lu Hsün (one of the greatest writers in 20th-century Chinese literature) entitled “What Happens after Nora Leaves Home?” At the beginning of the essay, Lu Hsün recalls another play of Ibsen The Lady from the Sea. In this play, the heroine, a woman who has a lover before marriage, is given the freedom by her husband to decide for herself whether to stay or to go with her lover. She finally chooses to stay put. For Nora, she chooses to leave. Rightly so, but what then? Lu Hsün points out that Nora, having neither psychological support nor means of financial support, would have only three choices: to starve, to go to the bad, and to return home. Then the question becomes: what has Nora taken away with her apart from her awakened heart?

Maybe we can pose a similar question to educators who are trying to figure out a way out for today’s universities: what happens after the university breaks away from all the restraints imposed upon it by the logic and imperatives of the capitalist mode of production and claims its independence? Ian Angus makes clear his stance in his book’s preface: “I have tried to balance a realistic assessment of the state of the contemporary university and the forces that would undermine it with a sense of what can be saved, reinvented, or discovered of its potential” (Love the Questions 10). Likewise, Bill Readings contends: “The question posed to the university is thus not how to turn the institution into a haven for thought, but how to think in an institution whose development tends to make thought more and more difficult, less and less necessary.” Yet however down-to-earth Angus tries to be, he, as far as I can remember, does not seem to have come up with any practical solution to the crisis the university is now faced with. Instead, he places his hope on the general public, who will someday, he hopes, “comes [come] to recognize the role that a real university culture can play in society and demands [demand] the political will and financial resources necessary for it to do so” (125). By contrast, Billing does put forward some more specific suggestions – for example, asking students to write essays in course evaluation (though it remains a question whether these essays can be rightly and perceptively interpreted) and persuading administrators to channel the resources liberated by the opening up of a general interdisciplinary space into supporting short-term collaborative projects. I am personally more in favor of the type of criticism of the current state of the university which can ground philosophical discussions in concrete suggestions for action rather than merely remain on the theoretical level.

As to MacIntyre, he envisions a twentieth-century version of the thirteenth-century university, a nostalgic stance which Readings is against. Readings advises that we view the university as a ruined institution, which means “to dwell in those ruins without recourse to romantic nostalgia.” For me, while I agree with MacIntyre’s idea that the central responsibility for the university is to initiate students into conflict, I hope to get a clearer picture of how this idealist thirteenth-century form can adapt to the vastly different social situation of our time. Surely, it is not just a matter of adding more texts to the repertoire. I think any discussion of the contemporary university should have some kind of what Readings calls institutional pragmatism. Only in this way, the problems peculiar to our own age can be more effectively addressed. Perhaps we could discuss a little bit what particular situation our own university, the U of A, is in and what measures it has taken or can take to deal with its specific problems.