Gerald Graff suggests that Bill Readings’ vision of a University of Dissensus has already been realised in the existing pluralistic university in which academics tend to their own, separate gardens, tacitly ignoring one another. For Graff, Readings’ ideal dissensus has already been institutionalised, contrary to Readings’ belief that dissensus cannot be institutionalised.
Dissensus is institutionalised in the form of the live-and-let-live ethos that operates as a second-order consensus governing academic staff, at least among those who are permanently employed. The problem, in Graff’s view, is the way in which academic dissensus has been institutionalised, i.e. within isolated and self-protected spaces, rather than operating as a public sphere of debate inside the curriculum.
Thus, what Readings celebrates as a means of warding off consensus, Graff argues is simply a disconnected structure that blocks both consensus and conflict by keeping parties isolated from one another.
Reference
Graff, G. (2007). Professional literature: an institutional history. Twentith anniversary edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.