Dear Commons Community,

Carlin Romano, critic for The Chronicle of Higher Education, has an essay in this week’s edition entitled, Will the Book Survive Generation Text!.  It is a fairly balanced treatment of the future of the book as required reading in the not too distant future (say 10 years).  He cites several of the books that predict the end of the university as we know it as it accommodates the high-tech lives of our students (Generation Text) who are losing their ability to focus long enough to read a lengthy book.  He is concerned that in the coming “extreme academe”, students will be unable to disconnect from their other connections to concentrate and endure the contents of a substantive book.  He refers extensively to Robert Darnton’s, The Case for Books:  Past, Present and Future, that compares how the younger people approach reading and that they are wired “differently from their elders.  For Romano, the implication is that faculty in the “extreme academe’ will change their reading assignments to chapters and articles rather than whole books and texts.  The best line in the essay is:  “the next generation of professors…will wonder why anyone ever wrote a book longer than John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.”

Tony

The Chronicle article is available at:

http://chronicle.com/article/Will-the-Book-Survive-Gener/124115/

Dear Commons Community,

I hope all of you are enjoying the Labor Day weekend.  In yesterday’s NY Times Book Review, there was an essay entitled, End of Tenure by Christopher Shea who writes for the Boston Globe. It raises several issues related to higher education including costs, tenure, teaching load, research v. teaching, etc.  He references two books: Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It by Andrew Hacker, a professor emeritus of political science at Queens College, and Claudia C. Dreifus, a journalist, and  Mark C. Taylor’s Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities .   The last paragraph in the essay is most insightful:

“the widening inequality among institutions of various types and the prospects of the students who attend them. While the financial crisis has demoted Ivy League institutions from super-rich to merely rich, public universities are being gutted. It is not news that America is a land of haves and have-nots. It is news that colleges are themselves dividing into haves and have-nots; they are becoming engines of inequality “

Lots here for us academics in public universities.  The complete essay is available at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books/review/Shea-t.html?ref=books

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd has a superb column today on the Iraq War that is most appropriate given the ending of American military involvement this past week.  The column centers mostly on Tony Blair’s decision to enter the war that in turn gave credence to President Bush and Dick Cheney’s Iraq policy.  However, perhaps the best comment belonged to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.   Asked by a reporter if Iraq would have to be a democratic state for the war to benefit U.S. national security, Gates cut to core:

“The problem with this war for, I think, many Americans is that the premise on which we justified going to war proved not to be valid — that is, Saddam having weapons of mass destruction.” He added, candidly: “It will always be clouded by how it began.”   Iraq will be “a work in progress for a long time,” Gates said, and, “how it all weighs in the balance over time, I think remains to be seen.”

So true!!!!

Tony

Maureen Dowd’s column is available at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05dowd.html?th&emc=th