A sound, enthusiastic look at the crucial vitality of the American university system.
An elegant, comprehensive examination of how American universities became the best in the world, and why research matters.
Former Columbia University provost and current sociology professor Cole begins with the transformation of the earliest provincial colleges aimed at educating the elite for the ministry—such as Harvard and Yale—into the first engines of original discovery and research. This transformation was exemplified by the founding in 1876 of Johns Hopkins, the “first university to emphasize research rather than undergraduate teaching.” American industrialization was driven by invention and innovation, and captains of business like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller injected enormous amounts of money into institutions for this purpose. With the emergence of organized academic disciplines and the introduction of doctorates, the American university evolved into a “hybrid”—combining the English system of undergraduate residential colleges with the German emphasis on graduate specialization—and created research laboratories and a “new breed of empirically oriented scientists.” Cole lists 12 core values that were internalized by American universities as of 1930, involving free inquiry, openness to talent and ideas, academic freedom and peer review. He also enumerates a baker’s dozen of “factors that predict greatness” for a research university. The author provides plenty of examples of the “building of steeples of excellence,” such as Stanford’s Frederick Emmons Terman and Clark Kerr and his three-tiered California system, and draws heavily from Vannevar Bush’s seminal work on “big science.” Cole ably moves through the years, from the enrichment of American universities with the influx of European Jewish scholars during World War II, to the challenge and growth of the 1960s, especially in the health sciences, to the recent restrictions on academic freedom and underfunding during the Bush era. Especially compelling are examples of innovation emerging from research centers that have profoundly changed our lives, from genetics to Google.
A sound, enthusiastic look at the crucial vitality of the American university system.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58648-408-8
Page Count: 624
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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