Heidegger's attempts to reform the university are usually dismissed out of hand or not taken seriously. The Rectorial Address is generally not taken seriously, other than to condemn it as an example for all that is wrong with philosophy connecting up with politics.

A primary reason for this rejection is that the claim that Heidegger has attempted to politicise the liberal university, and that this is not on. This is a very common response in Australia: it is held by liberals the university should be autonomous institution in civil society and not be an instrument of the state; and by conservatives that it the university should not be transformed by a movement of radical politics (as with the 1968er's).

Yet this is what has happened to Australian universities through the neo-liberal mode of governance of the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms were designed to ensure that the universities' intellectual and material resources were to be treated as standing reserve for the Australian economic machine in a global world.

The crude reading of Heidegger is that he politicised the German university by turning it over to the Nazi movement: he beheads the autonomous liberal university and turns it into an instrument of Nazi politics.

Heidegger does make the university the site for a radical transformation in culture through the process of questioning our culture. However, this history transforming questioning of our philsophical culture involves reforms to education and provides the ethico-philosophical ends of Nazi politics, and so redirect the Nazi movement into becoming a part of Heidegger's ontological revolution. Heidegger understood his role as guiding the Nazi movement as their spiritual leader!

Update
Derrida recognizes Heidegger's conception of the process of philosophy questioning a national culture. He has some sympathy for it, given his role in establishing a lefty (1968er) version of this project in the International College of Philosophy. He says this institution was set up to try

"...to teach philosophy as such, as a discipline, and to discover new themes, new problems which had had no legitimacy, which were not recognized as such in the given universities. That was not simply interdisciplinarity because interdisciplinarity implies that we have given identifiable proper identities - we had a legal theorist, we had an architect, a philosopher, a literary critic, and they joined, they worked together on a specific type of academic object - that's interdisciplinarity. When you discover a new object, an object which up to now hasn't been identified as such or has no legitimacy in terms of any academic media or academic field you have to invent a new campus, a new type of research, a new discipline. The International College of Philosophy granted a privilege to such new themes, new disciplines which were not up to then recognized or legitimated in other institutions."

Derrida says that these paragraphs have three readings, evaluations or interpretations. The author cannot exempt himself from any responsibility; the responsibility is exercised according to a strategy with an extra suprise in reserve-- spiritualizing the earth and blood of Nazism and setting apart Heidegger's commitment and breaking an affiliation; and speaking of the destiny of the west as a spiritual force.The price of the latter strategy is contamination by the racism, and biologizing of, 'blood and soil.'

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