Essential reading for university presidents and all those who hope to influence them.
The research university the way it ought to be.
Cornell president emeritus Rhodes offers a sanguine yet tough-minded analysis of the complex problems facing today's major research universities. Their current state has inspired a torrent of jeremiads: students are failing to learn, professors are failing to teach, administrators are failing to lead, etc. Taking aim at this onslaught of academic nay-saying, Rhodes muses over an impressive array of academe’s problems with a critical eye and an optimistic outlook. He begins with a slapdash summary of the creation of five major institutions that profoundly influenced the development of the American research university, aiming to give the reader a historical perspective before proceeding to his considerations of the ills currently bedeviling the system. The heart of Rhodes’s message is that the university, warts and all, plays an essential role in the creation and maintenance of today’s society; it provides an invaluable resource to the American people, he argues, even when those benefits are not readily apparent. After a lifetime in the academy, Rhodes’s perspective is unflinchingly biased, but he deploys his partisanship effectively by taking tough stands on critical issues. He may make no friends at professorial cocktail parties with his belief that tenure should be granted rarely, but this ability to see beyond the constructs of the university to its core provides the true merit of the book. Deep in the academic woodlands, Rhodes can still see the forest. His calls for involved students, committed professors, affordable education, and a socially-minded community of scholars should resonate both with the most jaded of professors counting down the days to retirement and with the most lackluster of freshmen barely caring to get out of bed for class. In sum, Rhodes gives the research university a B+, while he himself earns a solid A.
Essential reading for university presidents and all those who hope to influence them.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8014-3937-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
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
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