Comparative Education Review, vol. 46, no. 3.  2002 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved. 0010-4086/2002/4603-0004$05.00 Comparative Education Review CHECKED 1 Thursday May 30 2002 03:10 PM CER v46n3 460305 BTW Essay Review Universal, Entrepreneurial, and Soulless? The New University as a Contested Institution HEINZ-DIETER MEYER Higher Education and Lifelong Learners: International Perspectives on Change edited by Hans G. Schuetze and Maria Slowey. New York: Routledge/Falmer, 2000. 244 pp. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 0-415-24794-2. The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia by Simon Marginson and Mark Considine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 272 pp. $25.00 (paper). ISBN 0-521-79118-9. Learning from Change: Landmarks in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education from “Change” Magazine, 1969–1999 edited by Deborah DeZure. Sterling, Va.: Stylus Publishing, 2000. 460 pp. $35.00 (paper). ISBN 1-57922-002-9. Higher Education: A Worldwide Inventory of Centers and Programs by Philip G. Altbach and David Engberg. Phoenix, Ariz.: Oryx Press, 2001. 316 pp. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 1-57356-480-X. With the possible exception of the courts of law, the university is likely the most thoroughly theorized and self-reflective of our modern institutions. Ever since John Henry Cardinal Newman penned his Idea of a University (1854), hundreds of books with the same title have been (and continue to be) written. Many more address the same subject—the “is” and “ought” of higher learn- ing—under different titles. But even though scholars everywhere have loved to use the tools of their trade to provide a running commentary on the shape and direction of their home institution, the discourse has been predomi- nantly local. Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of the French higher education system as a machine for the reproduction of cultural capital and for the production of a “state nobility” has not resonated much outside France. 1 Allan Bloom’s lashing of cultural relativism and liberalism among America’s professorate has made an essay in cultural criticism a best-seller but only in the United States. 2 While cross-national institutional borrowing in higher education has 1 Pierre Bourdieu, State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 2 Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).