Volume 37, Number 19 · December 6, 1990
The Storm Over the University
By John R. Searle
Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education
by Roger Kimball
Harper and Row, 204 pp., $18.95
The Politics of Liberal Education Winter 1990, Vol. 89, No. 1).
edited by Darryl L. Gless, edited by Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Duke University Press, 236 pp., $8.00 (paper)
The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education
edited by Timothy Fuller
Yale University Press, 166 pp., $9.95 (paper)
I cannot recall a time when American education was not in a 'crisis.' We have lived through Sputnik (when we were 'falling behind the Russians'), through the era of 'Johnny can't read,' and through the upheavals of the Sixties. Now a good many books are telling us that the university is going to hell in several different directions at once. I believe that, at least in part, the crisis rhetoric has a structural explanation: since we do not have a national consensus on what success in higher education would consist of, no matter what happens, some sizable part of the population is going to regard the situation as a disaster. As with taxation and relations between the sexes, higher education is essentially and continuously contested territory. Given the history of that crisis rhetoric, one's natural response to the current cries of desperation might reasonably be one of boredom.
Review, 11066 words
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