I want to focus on something that somewhat relates to Camille's comment that McIntyre might be ultimately conservative in his reconception of the university as a territory of conflict. What disturbed me in the text was his constant insistence on morality and theology as the fundamental topics of university life: with the liberal university, "moral and theological truth ceased to be recognized as objects of substantive inquiry and instead were relegated to the realm of privatized belief" (217).

If he's going to advertise a model based on Thomist thought, then I suppose it makes sense that morality and theology should be at the heart of it. But who goes to the university for specifically moral or theological training? I feel like his analysis implies the belief that the current university model is amoral and atheistic, and that it is a bad thing. When he talks about "adapting the university to a modern context", he never says what that might entail, especially concerning theology. In our field, we are taken to task to deconstruct the structure of religion, "conventional" morality and everything they represent: racism, homophobia, etc. How do you reconcile a mission such as McIntyre envisions it with the reality that it is the university's (or at least the humanities') role to break apart the oppressive systems around us? I feel like a Thomist university would simply take us back instead of bringing us forward. And, there's plenty of confrontation in the humanities! He decries the fact that there is no consensus in reading the Great Books curriculum, and yet he says consensus is a bad thing.

I agree with Camille that his model just reinscribes the patriarchal system that the last decades have done so much to take down (not that it's all gone, but at least we're trying). Which is where I find some hope in Readings: while he doesn't propose anything specific, I think he is also trying to deconstruct the system around the perception of the university and its profoundly patriarchal (and capitalist) basis in "excellence". Of course as professors we'll always have to ascribe grades to papers and evaluate the status of a student's learning, but I'm sure we could reflect on ways to mitigate the competitive approach to grades, especially in the humanities.

Which brings me to Nora and A Doll's House, I suppose; one of my favourite lines is when she exclaims at the end that she doesn't know what religion is. Does she need to go to a Thomist-style university where she'll be forcefully fed, through a masculine confrontational system, different doctrines (and hence the "right" doctrine depending on who wins the argument) or should she instead go in a space where relative freedom from oppressive systems (or at least a space where she can discover and deconstruct them) will let her make up her own mind through the experience of a variety of texts and methods? If I am to reach "excellence" in one of the two systems, I'd rather it was the second.