Copyright @ 2013 International Society for the Study of European Ideas. This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 18(1), 24 - 41, 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10848770.2013.748119.As an institution, the “postmodern university” is central to the canon of today's research on higher education policy. Yet in this essay I argue that the postmodern university is a fiction that frames and inhibits our thinking about the future university. To understand why the postmodern university is a fiction, I first turn to grand theory and ask whether we can make sense of the notion of “post”-postmodernity. Second, I turn to the UK higher education sector and show that the postmodern university is a chimera, a modern artefact of competing instrumentalist, gothic, and postmodernist discourses. Third, I discuss competing visions of the future university and find that the progressive (yet modernist) agendas that re-imagine the public value of knowledge production, transmission, and contestation, are those that can move us beyond the palliative and panacea of the postmodern university
