In the world of Peter Emberley, there are cannons to the left and cannons to the right, and they are firing like mad on Canada’s universities. Speech codes, dwindling government funding, companies putting their corporate names on libraries – it’s all coming to a head.

When, one wonders, have universities not been under attack? Town-and-gown tensions are as old as the hills, and virtually every Western political movement has had some nasty thing to say about university “elitism.” Even as far back as the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer was depicting scholars as charlatans, rapists, and lunatics.

Emberley, nevertheless, has a point. He argues that Canadian universities are facing two new major threats: one is the rise of postmodern critiques of professorial authority, which has paralleled the creation of speech codes and programs designed to entice women and visible minorities into universities. The other is the rising demands from the corporate right that universities act like businesses – forgoing intellectual play and churning out grads with marketable skill sets.

Though he’s quite convincing, he never makes it clear why these two foes are considered equally worthy of a counterattack. The small handful of radical feminists and minorities on Canadian campuses don’t formally wield much power; business lobbies, with their chequebooks, do. His focus on the issue of “political correctness,” long since beaten to death by pundits, sidelines his genuinely subversive perceptions about why universities shouldn’t be treated like companies.

Emberley’s at his best when he offers an expansive paean to scholarly culture – not an easy thing to do, since explaining intellectual development is like nailing Jell-O to a wall. At their best, he argues, universities encourage ambiguity and contrarian approaches in thought, continually presenting us with the classic Socratic “yes, but …,” and their leisurely, sometimes counterintuitive pace balances society’s demand for quick answers to complex problems. Neither trait is terribly attractive to business leaders, or to those looking for radical, progressive political action.

Or to a reader, for that matter. Emberley’s book is a bit like the university culture he praises. He never comes to solid conclusions about how to save universities, other than for the public to be more tolerant of scholarly culture, and for scholars to be more aware of public concerns. His vacillations are frustrating, but they’re also consistent with his praise of ambiguity. Maybe that’s what makes the book useful – it presents us with a good snapshot of the issues, from which we can make up our own minds.