Anyone who has worked in higher education the last decade or more will recognize and respond to Readings' analysis of the university as a bureaucratic organization. Satisfying the consumer, or in academic jargon 'the client population,' has become the goal. Thus accountability boils down to tests and evaluations that produce statistical measures of how much value has been added to the clients and how satisfied they are with it. Knowledge itself becomes quantified as information easily presentable on a bar graph or pie chart. Administrators are enamored of projecting overhead charts to show faculty, who left to their own devices might construe the figures as evidence of deplorable learning conditions, how well their college stacks up against other benchmark institutions.
Value becomes the product of accounting.
Still, Readings recognizes more fully than Karabell that, apropos of the 'history standards,' the professors were probably better informed than their political opposition. History is a set of problems and questions more than it is a set of heroic tales and myths shaped by the popular culture and transmitted through the marketplace, more than an animated Pocahontas and action figures. Readings shares with Plato the belief that the purpose of an education extends beyond the search for truth to the seeking of justice.