Here's Stanley Fish in today's Chronicle:

In a key sentence in the final and climactic chapter of his book The Moment of Complexity (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Mark C. Taylor declares that "the university is not autonomous but is a thoroughly parasitic institution, which continually depends on the generosity of the host so many academics claim to reject." He continues: "The critical activities of the humanities, arts, and sciences are only possible if they are supported by the very economic interests their criticism so often calls into question." The standard rhetoric of the academy may be anti-market, but the "university and the people employed in it have always been thoroughly implicated in a market system."

As a description of the university's inevitable involvement with, and dependence on, the forces and investments of the larger society, this seems to me exactly right. But the prescriptive conclusion that Taylor draws from this description seems to me to be exactly wrong:

"Education is too important to remain confined within the walls where many people would like to keep it. Colleges and universities are not, and should not be, autonomous institutions devoted to the cultivation of useless knowledge."

Here, as elsewhere in the book, Taylor hesitates between two arguments. In one, the walls between the academy and the "real world" are becoming "permeable screens," with the effect of rendering "the university as we have known it for two hundred years ... a thing of the past."

In the other, the walls between the academy and society have never been anything but permeable; globalization and the Internet merely make what has always been the case perspicuous and impossible to ignore.

Either argument -- the one that begins, no longer is it possible to maintain the divide, or the one that begins, there never was a divide in the first place -- leads Taylor to the same conclusions: Let's stop pretending that we can operate in a splendid (but fictional) isolation from everything that enables us; let's accept the fact that we are in, and of, the market and "find new ways to turn market forces to [our] own advantage"; let's prepare "students for life and work changing at warp speed"; let's go beyond the kind of critical analysis that does little more than "promote organizations and institutions whose obsolescence is undeniable"; let's adapt to the real conditions of our existence and eschew "a politics that is merely academic," a politics that is "as sterile as theories that are not put into practice."

I have two objections to his conclusions, one practical and specific to the situation of the academy, the other theoretical and capable of being generalized.

If we are worried about obsolescence and the loss of relevance, the surest way to court both is to
become so attuned to the interests and investments of other enterprises -- the market, global politics, the information revolution -- that we are finally indistinguishable from them. If there is nothing that sets us apart, if there is nothing distinctive about our task or the criteria for accomplishing it, if there is nothing that marks our work as ours and not everyone's, there will be no particular reason to support us by giving us a room (or a franchise) of our own. We will be exactly what Taylor suggests we are -- a wholly owned (and disposable) subsidiary of something
larger than ourselves.

Distinctiveness is a prerequisite both of our survival and our flourishing. Without it we haven't got a prayer.