An idealistic vision of the American university as a place of free thought and socially responsible teaching.
No ivory tower.
Bollinger, the former president of the University of Michigan and Columbia University, has long argued for the power of diversity in higher education and for the autonomy of colleges and universities from political manipulation. Recent assaults on that autonomy provoke this brief, forceful book. Its “intellectual basis” is the First Amendment: Speech is free, and this freedom stands behind the unique status of American universities as sites of protected inquiry. Bollinger has, by his own admission, an idealist’s view of his home institutions. He writes, “Universities are intended to preserve and advance knowledge about the human condition, about life and the natural world, and to pass human knowledge and the capacities to pursue it on to succeeding generations.” Nothing about that sentence, he admits, is straightforward. What is knowledge? What is preservation and advancement? He shows that these are categories always up for debate, always contested and changing. The university must be open to the public, full of teachers with the temperament to share and listen, rich in research that can be, potentially, accessible to all. And yet, freedom is not unconstrained. Just because you have a Ph.D. and tenure does not mean that you can say anything you want at any time. Freedom comes with responsibility, and in the end this book is more a sermon on the latter than a call for the former. “Every single day, universities make judgments in accord with scholarly standards and scholarly temperament about what the nation and the world needs. We should embrace and acknowledge this role.” Those judgments may not always be right, but they should never be rash. Bollinger’s university emerges as a place of thoughtful conversation with a social mission and self-regulating financial independence. Would that it could last.
An idealistic vision of the American university as a place of free thought and socially responsible teaching.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9781324124313
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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