Interrogating the “Idea of the University” Through the Pleasures of Reading Together

Abstract

How and where do university staff – academics and professionals – learn about, and encounter, the interdisciplinary and critical scholarship about the idea of the university? What mechanisms are currently available for them to engage with that scholarship? And why might they want to do so? Drawing on Jeffrey J. Williams’s appeal to “teach the university” and Ronald Barnett’s theorising about how we come at understanding the university, this chapter describes and interrogates an emergent initiative we have been involved in establishing – a Reading Group – which aims to resuscitate the pleasures involved in university colleagues reading together. By doing so, we are not only schooling ourselves in the scholarly literature, we are learning how to make the university a place we want to labour in.