A serious, although informal, introduction to the realities of the university world today. A scientist who writes about a university is about as rare as a duck in a tree. Most recent reflections on changes in the academic world have come from humanists and social scientists—and most of them have been disgruntled, many bitter. Rojstaczer, a geologist and environmental engineer (Duke), shares their concerns but, by contrast, is refreshingly balanced and calm. His chatty style never betrays anger or despair. He humanizes his subject where others have often parodied it. He recognizes that a brief postwar “golden age,” perhaps a third of a century long, in universities’ wealth, confidence, and freedom from accountability is forever gone. He doesn’t like many qualities of today’s research institutions: grade inflation, a reduction in course loads and requirements for the major, students who won’t work hard, universities’ failure to live within their means, the corruption of athletic programs, the dependence upon fund-raising, and the difficulties of attracting graduate students and getting research grants. But who does like them? If his concerns about intellectual fashions, faculty politics, and lazy students are scarcely unique, what is distinctive is Rojstaczer’s refusal to succumb to nostalgia and his recognition that today’s universities face realities that didn’t exist in the 1960s. Yet his book would have been improved by more extended reflections about what has in fact improved in American higher education since the 1960s—its greater diversity of students, faculty members, and concerns, and its greater openness to ideas chief among them—even if these improvements have exacted their costs. An anecdotal yet insightful tour of American universities by an insider.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-512682-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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