Volume 52, Number 5 · March 24, 2005
The Endangered University
By Andrew Delbanco
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE
Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education
by Derek Bok
Princeton University Press, 233 pp., $35.00; $16.95 (paper)
The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle,and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment
by Geoffrey Kabaservice
Henry Holt, 573 pp., $30.00
Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges
edited by Steven Koblik and Stephen R. Graubard
Transaction, 318 pp., $29.95 (paper)
Stover at Yale
by Owen Johnson
Ross and Perry, 386 pp., $34.95 (paper)
Liberal Education and the Public Interest
by James O. Freedman
University of Iowa Press, 146 pp., $29.95
Along with freedom, the other sacred word in today's college is 'diversity.' Nearly sixty years ago, the Harvard 'Red Book'—the famous faculty report on general education published in 1945 when the end of World War II was in sight but not yet at hand—identified the coming challenge of postwar America in a chapter ominously entitled 'Problems of Diversity.' By using that word, the authors were not exactly prophesying the impending influx of women, as well as racial and ethnic minorities, into historically white and male institutions; they had in mind no clear picture of demographic change, but they did anticipate what they called 'differentiation' in the 'inner sphere of ability and outlook' of future students. With a sigh of Brahmin realism, they conceded that the old economy in which 'thousands of lighter jobs...used to call for a brisk young pair of hands' was disappearing, and that unprecedented numbers of young people would finish high school and want a chance to go to college.
Review, 4020 words
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