Volume 7, Number 6 · October 20, 1966
The American University: Part I
By Henry David Aiken
The Reforming of General Education
by Daniel Bell
Columbia, 320 pp., $7.50
The University in Transition
by James A. Perkins
Princeton, 90 pp., $2.95
Bureaucracy in Higher Education
by Herbert Stroup
The Free Press, 242 pp., $5.95
It has become a sociological commonplace that we have been moving into a post-capitalist, even a post-industrialist era in which, along with much prestige and money, residual power now passes to the university men. From this one might infer that we also are witnessing at last the decline of the nation-state. But the nation-state remains a powerful institution, and those who serve it or receive its aid, even on a per diem basis, generally wind up as state's men. This is as true of academicians as of lawyers, corporation presidents, or poets. It is arguable indeed that the academicians have given the nation-state a new lease on life. For they make possible, for the first time, the conversion of a mode of government into a politico-social organism, a true Republic as it were, whose educator-guardians supply the rationale, the indispensable training, and the continuing fund of personnel for its maintenance and protection. All this and the open society too. For all his worries about alloys, Plato, the ur-academician, would have been enchanted.
Review, 5293 words
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