Stanley Hauerwas is an inveterate essayist who never met a speaking or writing invitation he did not like. Like most of his books, The State of the University is a collection of occasional pieces disciplined more or less by a central theme. The essays cohere and cluster around two main questions: what is the university for and who does it serve? In modernity, Hauerwas argues, it has become impossible to answer the first question while the answer to the second is invariably: the state (the book's title is meant to have us think about ‘the university of the state’). Even though no university will admit that it serves the state, this is only because it is busy proffering platitudes. Hauerwas carefully dissects a speech given by Yale University president, Richard Levin, in which the latter, for example, claims that Yale students will not be taught what to think but will instead be taught to think for themselves. Hauerwas points out that even though such banalities have become nearly synonymous with liberal education, they actually have very little to do with what goes on in classrooms.

The university's attempt at objectivity with respect to its disciplines is an Enlightenment abstraction against which Hauerwas holds up Wendell Berry's doggedly local and parochial way of talking as its most incisive challenger. Local speech is connected with forms of life which elicit the moral formation of those who learn to speak that way. In contrast, not only will university education fail in moral formation, since its abstraction always runs contrary to the devotion to particularities (with correlative practices) that moral formation requires, but its failure in this respect is by design.

Hauerwas is aware of the irony that historically Christianity is largely responsible for this failure. The Constantinian temptation to ally Christian witness with the power of the state yielded a Christian knowledge more impervious and less vulnerable to refutation. Witness became modelled on scientific proof and so partially propelled the rise of scientific knowledge. Berry's equivalent to this phenomenon is the agricultural expert whose grasp of technology and words like ‘soil types’ and ‘species’ positively preclude the expert's own practice of farming actual plots of land because, so long as theoretical knowledge is already sufficiently produced by and constitutive of an academically sanctioned practice, the original practice must be thought of as a less than worthy pursuit.

If the ‘Constantinian’ abstraction of knowledge is an attempt to wield it instrumentally, it ironically besets the sciences in modern education while it helps to justify their existence more successfully than other disciplines. Hauerwas frequently notes how money for scientific research increasingly set short-term goals for what will benefit corporations. The humanities must follow suit in justifying their own existence on utilitarian grounds, producing ‘good citizens’ who will be responsible contributors to ‘society’ – yet another abstraction, but the only kind available in an ethos where, as Hauerwas argues against Stanley Fish, people no longer know why it is important to read Milton. And even though Fish resists utilitarian justifications for reading Milton (our reading is its own good), Hauerwas thinks the choice between instrumentalised knowledge for the sake of society, whether as technology or citizenship and non-instrumentalised knowledge, simply for its own sake, articulates a false dichotomy. So Fish merely shares with his opponents the same presumption that there are no longer particular practices knowledge is meant to serve. The autonomy of English departments on Fish's model is simply analogous to the modern individual: even its withdrawal still serves the state since the state is premised on the exclusion of a hitherto vast middle territory. Theology is typically in no better position.

Hauerwas' most obvious question – what of the Christian university? – is left largely unanswered. It resembles the question that he has long been asked by critics: where is this ‘church’ you speak of? (To which he now gives an appropriately local answer: Holy Family Episcopal Church, Chapel Hill.) These are related since recovering authentic Christian knowledge will ultimately depend on the church living in such a way – resisting the modern gravitational pulls of individual and state – that it will demand institutions capable of sustaining it. If it succeeds, such a church would be in a position to offer the world its idea of the university even though, apart from the life of prayer, devotion, worship and service which requires a Christian university, a university which ceases to be recognisably Christian also risks becoming unrecognisable as a university.

Still, there is hope for secular universities. Hauerwas does not think that the ascendancy of local knowledges which Christians ought to promote only relates to theology. In this, The State of the University (together with Christianity, Democracy and the Radical Ordinary co-authored with Romand Coles) perhaps offers Hauerwas' most convincing reply to critics who have assumed he is a ‘sectarian’ who must have nothing to say to the world. Hauerwas wants to be seen as advocating a kind of humanism which addresses all knowledge precisely on account of its theological convictions about the world belonging to God. Of course such convictions are ‘local’ to Christian belief, but consigning them to an intellectual ghetto is only a modern habit of mind which will succeed less and less the more Christians refuse to police their own speech. This book is good news for theologians and a call to resolute labour.