The politics of discourse: Academic responses to the Dawkins reforms of higher education, 1945–1991

Abstract

What is at stake here first of all is discourse: from the side of the universities it is important not to absorb the economistic and bureaucratic language of the White Paper, just as from the side of the bureaucrats it is important not to use the legitimating idealist notions by which the humanities have known themselves. Neither side can win in the language of the other. (Simon During, 'Woodchipping in the Groves of Academe', Arena, 81, 1988).