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BRIGHT COLLEGE YEARS

Name: BRIGHT COLLEGE YEARS
Author: Anne Matthews
ISBN: 0-684-81541-9

INSIDE THE AMERICAN CAMPUS TODAY

by Anne Matthews ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 1997

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A whimsical, informal account of American university life as it now stands. Matthews (Journalism/New York Univ.; Where the Buffalo Roam, 1992, etc.) structures her book as a journey through the academic year. It runs from summer to summer, beginning with a look at how colleges and universities make their (often undignified) pitch to high-school students and ending with a reunion of old-timers at Princeton. The author's ambition is sweeping. She aims to touch on all kinds of four-year institutions, leaving no part untouched: student drinking, faculty salaries, academic standards, tenure, mathematicians who dress funny, and so forth. The result is an entertaining glimpse of what goes on behind the ivy-covered walls of elite schools (which are likely to conceal faulty plumbing), at state-financed mega-universities (``where you can get a good education, if you want one,'' she writes in evident innocence of her prejudice), and in the hardscrabble world of small and marginal institutions with trailer-park dorms. There is Sinte Gleska, for example, a college in South Dakota that is struggling to carve a niche for itself in the already competitive ``academic marketplace'' of Native American higher education. Matthews gets a good deal of mileage out of anecdotes from student life, with punch lines like ``I told him there was a pizza under the sofa!'' Faculty are good for laughs, too: ``How can she whine for money to the dean when she wears two-hundred-dollar shoes?'' (overheard at a Renaissance scholars' conference). ``After tenure,'' Matthews notes, ``a campus asks only one thing of its professors: keep your brain alive. Many do not, will not, cannot.'' Over the long haul all Matthews's knowing cuteness wears pretty thin. Her touch is informed but light—the result is less journalism than infotainment.

Pub Date: April 10, 1997

ISBN: 0-684-81541-9

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997

Categories:

EDUCATION

- BOOK REVIEW
WILD NIGHTS
by Anne Matthews

- BOOK REVIEW
PATTERNS
illustrated by Anne Matthews

- BOOK REVIEW
WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM
by Anne Matthews

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MEMOIRS OF A MINOTAUR

FROM MERRILL LYNCH TO PATTY HEARST TO POETRY

by Robin Magowan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1999

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MEMOIRS OF A MINOTAURFrom Merrill Lynch to Patty Hearst to PoetryMagowan, Robin

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1999

ISBN: 1-885266-79-0

Page Count: 276

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BUSINESS | EDUCATION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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THE STUDENTS ARE WATCHING

SCHOOLS AND THE MORAL CONTRACT

by Theodore R. Sizer & Nancy Faust Sizer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 16, 1999

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A passionate argument that moral education should be seen as an intrinsic part of high school life suffers from the very abstraction the authors seek to avoid. Sizer, noted author of a trio of school-reform books (Horace’s Hope, 1996, etc.) and his wife, who trains teachers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, believe that most educators view character education as an “extracurricular” activity designed around a series of “absolute” nouns: respect, integrity, honesty, and so forth. The authors, on the other hand, insist that “the routines and rituals of a school teach, and teach especially about matters of character” and that becoming an ethical person ought to be an active struggle that engages students’ minds as much as calculus does. For even as the typical high school preaches a “civil religion” intended to turn out young people of good character, the Sizers point out, the sights and sounds of a typical school day may undermine these same values. Students who walk into broken-down school buildings learn that their education is not a priority. Teachers who come to school ill-prepared also teach their students how to cut corners. Schools with predominantly white honors classes teach that academic winners and losers break down along racial and class lines. Though the Sizers do a wonderful job of highlighting the hypocrisy that students see all too clearly, the authors frequently use “real-life” situations as springboards for airy theorizing. Rather than discussing the frightening rise in student violence, for example, the chapter on “Shoving” contemplates pushing in the hallways, dirty jokes, and rudeness, before redefining ’shoving” past the point of absurdity to mean breaking new intellectual ground. This book makes an eloquent case that schools need to practice what they preach. But because the authors define their moral categories so broadly, the values they champion lose their power. When words mean too much, they ultimately mean too little.