GONE FOR GOOD

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.