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
An agreeable account of a year spent studying at Cambridge and Oxford. Feiler, after graduating from Yale and teaching for a year in a rural Japanese school (described in his Learning to Bow, 1991), pursued graduate studies at Cambridge. He arrived in 1990 with stars in his eyes; memories of Milton, Byron, Newton, and Darwin; and an eagerness ``to row, to debate at the Union, and to have a date for the ball.'' Feiler achieved all three goals—``but by then my stars had already faded.'' He found a Cambridge still ``trapped by its past''; a student body overwhelmingly content, disinclined to demonstrate, and looking for its place in the Establishment—a complacency perhaps arising from the fact that Cambridge is ``a laboratory of love'' where students are ``virtually bombarded with occasions to drink and excuses to get pissed.'' In the course of his social rounds, the author met and fell in love with a Canadian Rhodes Scholar from Oxford who eventually threw him over because, she said, he wasn't an original thinker. She might have reconsidered if she'd been able to read Feiler's analysis here of the similarities between the Japanese and the British: Both, he notes, inhabit isolated islands of roughly the same size and roughly the same weather; both boast largely homogenous peoples and unifying national religions; both speak languages characterized by a similar emphasis on courtesy, hierarchy, and indirection; and both display a powerful national pride verging on xenophobia. Feiler believes that the two nations' educational systems largely explain their different fortunes in this century, with Britain suffering from an antibusiness bias (fewer than eight percent of Oxbridge graduates go into industry, compared to two-thirds of Japanese college grads) and a hierarchy of intellectual values that stresses the abstract and philosophical while regarding the practical almost with contempt. A delightfully witty complement to Ved Mehta's Up at Oxford (p. 841), full of anecdotes and food for thought.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41492-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
Are teachers resourceful, industrious, and dedicated—or uninspired, pessimistic, and unwilling to be held accountable? All of the above, of course, as this balanced collection of impressions from Los Angeles Times writers Collins and Frantz (From the Ground Up, 1991, etc.) makes clear. The authors interviewed close to 150 teachers in 70 schools around the country on a variety of pertinent subjects—''Children,'' ``Parents,'' ``Discipline,'' ``Respect,'' ``Trade Secrets''—and have come up with insightful, if unsurprising, conclusions. Teachers in general, Collins and Frantz find, are committed and hard-working but stymied—by unresponsive bureaucracies, large class size, diminished school budgets, and changes in society that add other jobs to the teaching load. Many feel a sense of mission (``I believe in the sun, even when it doesn't shine'') and work despite constant hurdles and the prospect—or experience—of violence (a particularly chilling chapter). In addition, most regret how little they're consulted, not only about school policies but also on academic issues like bilingual education and curriculum content. Collins and Frantz, as well as many teachers, believe that the top-to-bottom management style, based on the 19th-century factory model, no longer applies, and that teachers must assume new roles and renegotiate the school scenario, turning education into a ``shared enterprise,'' with parents and other staff included in the decision-making process. Candid observations, presented in a satisfying and serviceable format.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-316-29266-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
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