March 9, 2011

NYRB Assesses Recent Higher Ed Literature

The New York Review of Books has published a high level review of the recent spate of ‘higher education in crisis’ books. In Our Universities: How Bad? How Good?, Peter Brooks takes a look at common themes contained in four recent publications on the state of higher education in the US.

Read the whole piece if you get a chance, but we have pulled out a couple of passages that especially struck us:

• “On the whole, one has to say that the relative autonomy of the American university has been far more beneficial than the contrary. American higher education is a nonsystem that is messy, reduplicative, unfair—just like American society as a whole—but it has made genuine commitments to quality and to a greater degree of social justice, to the extent that is within its control, than most other institutions of the society.”
• “Research and teaching have always cohabited: anyone who teaches a subject well wants to know more about it, and when she knows more, to impart that knowledge. Universities when true to themselves have always been places that harbor recondite subjects of little immediate utility—places where you can study hieroglyphics and Coptic as well as string theory and the habits of lemmings—places half in and half out of the world. No country needs that more than the US, where the pragmatic has always dominated.”
• “[Universities] often fail, they need reform and course correction, but they are not, at their best, merely venal and self-serving. They deserve better critics than they have got at present.”