Our Universities: How Good, How Bad!

Dear Commons Community,

There has been a fairly vibrant discussion occurring on the Hunter College LISTSERV regarding several recently published books commenting on American higher education and its effectiveness in teaching undergraduates.  Several colleagues (John Wallach, Manfred Kuechler, and Jack Kenigsberg) have referred to an article entitled, Our Universities:  How Good, How Bad? by Peter Brooks in the New York Review of Books, which compares four recent publications on the topic, three of which are fairly critical.  The books reviewed are:

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
University of Chicago Press, 259 pp., $70.00; $25.00 (paper)

Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It
by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus
Times Books, 271 pp., $26.00

Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities
by Mark C. Taylor
Knopf, 240 pp., $24.00

Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
by Martha C. Nussbaum
Princeton University Press, 158 pp., $22.95

Brooks sets the stage by establishing that the alleged or real “crisis” in higher education centers on:

”… the American university of failing to educate (variously, failing to train the mind and to prepare for the workplace), of losing its place in international competition, of being an institution top-heavy with administrators and pandering to a faculty that does very little, as well as to students who care more about expensive cars and state-of-the-art fitness rooms than about Socrates. Above all, the university has become unjustifiably expensive, inaccessible, and unaccountable.”

To his credit, Brooks recognizes that the “crisis” of higher education is situated in the crisis of American society:

“If crisis there is, it surely has something to do with the larger crisis in American society: the increasing gap between haves and have-nots, the retreat from any commitment to economic fairness, the sense that the system is rigged to benefit a tarnished elite that no longer justifies its existence. The affluence gap between Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, plus a few others, and the rest of the universities has indeed increased, and permits a degree of luxury to both students and faculty in those institutions that are the envy of the rest. (Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley—generally considered the greatest public university in the world—had their telephones removed from their offices last year, in a nicely symbolic gesture of their helplessness under the budget knife.)

For faculty, the treatment of tenure and academic freedom as unwarranted protections afforded few other professions is of specific interest.   Brooks comments are fairly balanced:

“Neither Taylor nor Hacker and Dreifus think tenure is necessary to protect academic freedom: the former sees no threat,…. Do they consider whether the dark days of McCarthyism would have produced even more casualties without it; nor do they anticipate what things could be like in a political culture of Tea Partiers and Palinites. To be sure, tenure can protect the careers of some mediocrities. On the other hand, the selection of faculty by peers empowered by the permanence of their appointments still seems the best way to ensure that they are chosen on the right grounds. And the weightiness of this decision—attaching someone to your institution for an indefinite future—at least means that almost all universities have created reasonably careful and solemn procedures of review.”

In sum, I highly recommend this review for those who would like to catch up on this topic.

Tony

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