Even if you're a cursory reader of newspapers or magazines you probably know that books decrying the contemporary state of American higher education are legion. Reading some of these volumes or the reviews may lead casual perusers to believe colleges and universities are circling the drain. Generally speaking a signature of democracy is the freedom to criticize anything and why should post-secondary Ed be exempt from the fray?
One day almost thirty years ago I had lunch with the Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky. We were talking about the joy of idiomatic expressions. I said in the US we can tell the President of the United States to go to hell in a hand basket. We agreed the trouble with idiomatic utterances is of course they seldom make a difference.
My feeling is that suspicion of higher education is healthy. Contrarianism is healthy. When colleges are subjected to scrutiny they can change in productive ways. Lord knows we wouldn't want anyone studying the Harvard “white man's burden” curriculum that so disastrously influenced Theodore Roosevelt's genocidal occupation of the Philippines. A healthy democracy grows and progresses and so too the healthy university.
Is college too expensive? Yes. Is this solely the fault of college presidents? No. Investing in student assistance and bringing down the crippling effects of loans ought to be a bi-partisan slam dunk.
There is much that's right with higher education. As we critique so should we celebrate.
Here are, for my money the best three books about higher education I've read lately:
Andrew DelBanco: College: What It Was, Is, And Should Be
Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux: Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civl Rights Era
Ellen Condlifee Lagemann and Harry Lewis: What is College For? The Public Purpose of Higher Education
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