M'gonigle and Starke’s book reads well. It is heavily but intriguingly illustrated, reliably organized on themes and generally well edited. I found a dozen small typographical errors and a few cases of jargon-ridden obscurity, but otherwise I was rarely detained in reading through the work.
     
Still, at about page 20, I was unexpectedly drawn away from Planet U to books from a century ago. I thought of two by Robert Baden-Powell. His Scouting for Boys and the handbook for the girl guides, How Girls Can Help to Build up the Empire, were intended to encourage children in a life of pioneering, camping, travel in the open, pathfinding and modest danger — all in view of later adult careers in the rough business of empire-building. These are books about survival in the rough and survival in interdependence on others.

M’Gonigle and Starke have organized a safari of quite another kind, travelling into the dank forests of academe. Baden-Powell would have appreciated the dangers of that trek. Alas, M’Gonigle and Starke have neglected Baden-Powell’s lessons.
     
Now, few of us would care to revive Baden-Powell’s racist and eugenicist views. But remember how Baden-Powell thought of adult life in the 20th century and later. The Chief Scout thought the social world was a jungle, dark and deep and dangerous. It therefore made eminently good sense to him that we should learn necessary historical, political and vocational skills as early as possible. After all, he survived a tough siege (the Siege of Mafeking, 1899) during the Second Boer War, just because he had the know-how.
     
For young Scouts and Guides, Baden-Powell had just two broad recommendations: be good and (just as important) be prepared. Most of us would disagree with nearly everything Baden-Powell meant by “good” and “prepared,” but his general point remains. If you want to do “good,” by your lights, then you’d best be prepared.
     
M’Gonigle and Starke have followed the recommendation to be good but not the one to be prepared.
     
M’Gonigle and Starke want universities around the world — and especially North American ones — to substitute a world-reconstructive vision for the destructive economistic ideology that drives them today.
     
They call on universities to take a new road, to reconnect with surrounding communities. They mean this in the most literal senses. For example, they want an end to ring roads and freeways, and the birth of a university where people cycle, walk or bus their way to class (their description of enlightened transit covers more than 20 pages). They want citizens to displace business people in the central apparatus of university governance, but not necessarily to replace them.
     
Considering the economic power of universities in OECD countries, the authors say universities have a moral duty to lead urban development. (pp. 95–120) This means densification in the university and in the city centres where many universities are located.
     
This departure in planning (a word M’Gonigle and Starke do not like, by the way) would be the outcome of a new university-community politics — a politics of public participation. M’Gonigle and Starke list anticipated results of that new process: the restoration of pre-urban landscapes, the creation of buildings and practices that produce more energy than they consume and “with a broader community (past, present, and future), the process should be to invigorate a new commons of care that will … enhance social capital through evolving new skills and values in the citizenry.” (p. 127)

The term “social capital” is worrisome. For capital markets — and social capital is exchanged in a market — have not been friendly to “community.” Here M’Gonigle and Starke confuse the issue, and this is not the end of confusion.
     
The authors say that because students pay high tuition fees, they should have more say in university governance. (p. 199) This is market theory by another name. On the same page, M’Gonigle and Starke conclude a sub-argument on the evils of real estate developments on campus (Simon Fraser University’s UniverCity, for example). They ask how universities can justify such developments yet not provide political institutions to give power and voice to the people who live in them.
     
Using the example of Kyushu University in Japan, the authors say it is practical and feasible for universities to recover ancient landscapes as they build their campuses. (pp. 115– 117) Earlier, and in a similar vein, in recounting the development history of the University of Victoria, M’Gonigle and Starke find the roots of UVic’s eco-friendly movement in the pre-European First Nation history of the land, and the pre-urban agricultural history of that land.
     
Then, in discussing Japanese industry, they recall Toyota, Mitsubishi and other companies whose “democratic” practices include “consultation” with workers. (p. 196) This, too, is confusing, as Toyota’s point in consulting is to make money, not run a parliamentary system. Which part of the Japanese example do the authors want us to take up?
     
The book makes still larger points about universities, claiming they have been very nearly ruined by subject specialization. That specialization arose, the authors say, because universities were too anxious to please the elites who built the modern nation-state. Those states needed engineers and doctors and school teachers. Universities obliged, growing fat and rigid as they did. In their latest phase, university bureaucracies have gone so far down this path, they have forgotten the original, organic basis of their very existence.
     
Respect for the land, conservation of energy, environmentally-friendly curriculum and building, all were lost from view in the 20th century movement to build an unsustainable economy. Endless growth means destruction and extinction, the authors say. Few would disagree with that last point, if it is put this way, but what of the strange version of academic history that precedes the point?
     
We come to Baden-Powell’s second recommendation: be prepared.
     
The main historical work on which M’Gonigle and Starke rely is a book by Marcus Ford, a philosopher of religion and culture in Arizona. Ford’s history is of the most derivative variety, but gets nearly 20 pages in Planet U. The reason is that he has an outsider’s critical perspective and never defends the rampant credentialism, the bureaucratic inertia and the stark economism characteristic of OECD universities. In short, he agrees with M’Gonigle and Starke.
     
M’Gonigle and Starke say Ford is a breath of fresh air, but he isn’t. Think of Bergquist, Metzger and Hofstadter, to take three fine American writers of the past 50 years, persuasive in their arguments for autonomous, democratic higher education — yet open to community.
     
Ford’s ideas are derived and contrived, however pleasant they may seem at first reading. His ideas about the history of subject specialties are half-baked. They remind me of Alan Watts’s peculiar attacks on American universities in the 1960s. Watts was a popularizer of Zen Buddhism who claimed academics had wholeheartedly adopted an anti-naturalist and triumphalist view of science and business — and thus were bound for perdition.
     
M’Gonigle and Starke would have done well to prepare, that is, to read more university history than they did. Surely academic specialism and academic professions have contributed directly to academic freedom. Philosophers and chemists and historians, and their professions, have been crucial in the fight for academic freedom. They are imperfect, of course. But even so, I defy Ford (or M’Gonigle and Starke) to read the eight volumes of the recent and powerful History of the University of Oxford and yet conclude the professionalization of academic life has been all bad.
     
M’Gonigle and Starke announce repeatedly their belief in the power of interdisciplinarity to open up the university to society. Interdisciplinarity might just as easily weaken academic associations and institutions whose care is their members’ academic freedom. Interdisciplinarity need not necessarily lead down that road, but M’Gonigle and Starke say little about the strong pressure to deny academic freedom and how interdisciplinarity could help us to resist that pressure.
     
The rise of faculty associations, and the appearance of unions to protect other workers on campus, have helped limit the unending ambitions of university presidents in Canada. When administrations show a mean streak, when government and business work to undermine free inquiry (one thinks of Nortel at Carleton University in the 1980s, and Joseph Rotman’s plans for business studies and Apotex’s interest in medical research at the University of Toronto), it is faculty, staff and student organizations that stop the rot.
     
As Michiel Horn’s book, Academic Freedom in Canada, shows, academic freedom is a relatively new thing. Planet U proposes a new ideology, and a pleasing one, but would that new ideology lead to practical political action that would protect and strengthen academic freedom?
     
If one is to be prepared in the field of university reform, it requires a more nuanced grasp of history and politics than we find in Planet U. The typical university bureaucrat will read this book and yawn. Experienced students of university history and politics will likewise yawn. That’s unfortunate since the ideas in Planet U deserve attention.

William Bruneau is a former president of CAUT and speaker of CAUT Council. He lives and writes in Vancouver.