Review by New York Times Review
Louis Menand ponders four big questions about American higher education. IN the four rigorously reasonable essays in "The Marketplace of Ideas," Louis Menand takes up four questions about American higher education: "Why is it so hard to institute a general education curriculum? Why did the humanities disciplines undergo a crisis of legitimation? Why has 'interdisciplinarity' become a magic word? And why do professors all tend to have the same politics?" Menand, a professor of English at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker, offers answers notable in part for what they don't contain: namely, the complaint that it's all been downhill since 1970 because of feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, deconstruction and queer theory. Yes, humanities enrollments have declined since 1970, as have enrollments in the social and natural sciences. But as Menand points out, that's partly because departments of business administration and computer science have drawn students away from all fields in the liberal arts and sciences and partly because the decades following World War II were anomalous in the history of American higher education - a "Golden Age" of tremendous expansion, when the number of undergraduates increased fivefold and the number of graduate students ninefold. To assess the American university by starting from 1970 is to take the high-water mark as if it were the mean. Menand's discussion of general education starts on a wry note: "The process of designing a new general education curriculum and selling it to the faculty has been compared to a play by Samuel Beckett, but the comparison is inapt. Beckett's plays are short." One usually hears that general education courses are in a parlous state because hyperspecialized professors disdain teaching broad introductory courses. But the real story is more complicated. Menand shows that general education curriculums have been criticized since their inception less for being too broad in focus than for being too narrow in intent, more invested in making education socially "relevant" than in encouraging the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The earliest exponents of general education - John Erskine, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Mortimer Adler - believed in teaching students the wisdom of the ages to prepare them to confront the pressing issues of the day, and their critics considered the enterprise at once dilettantish and crudely instrumentalist. In other words, it's not just that faculty members don't agree on the content of a gen-ed curriculum; they don't agree that universities should offer a "general" education in the first place. MENAND argues plausibly enough that the crisis of confidence in the humanities, together with demographic changes in the professoriate and the student body, has "helped to make the rest of the academic world alive to issues surrounding objectivity and interpretation, and to the significance of racial and gender difference," and that interdisciplinarity actually relies on and reinforces disciplinary knowledge. Things get more interesting in the final chapter, where Menand explains how academe's training and hiring system works and suggests, unconvincingly, that the preponderance of liberals in academe is partly a function of "increased time to degree." It now takes a decade on average to get a Ph.D. in English, and surely that fact discourages risk-taking. But it does not explain, say, why Democrats outnumber Republicans 10 to 1 in departments of physics. Along the way, Menand notes that most graduate students don't earn Ph.D.'s, and that most Ph.D.'s don't get tenure-track jobs: "There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs" - graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations - who can teach introductory courses for a pittance. Students (and parents) who may not notice the creation of a new Interdisciplinary Institute on campus may well wonder whether a system in which instructors' annual reappointments are dependent on student evaluations is likely to produce professors willing to challenge their students and uphold high academic standards. But that is a question for another book, perhaps, a book less sanguine and more pugnacious than "The Marketplace of Ideas." It now takes a decade to earn a Ph.D. in English, which surely discourages risk-taking. Michael Bérubé is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and the author, most recently, of "The Left at War."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 29, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A Harvard English professor, Menand focuses on humanities professors at elite liberal-arts schools, regarding their educational plight as particularly acute and viewing them as the natural leaders in meeting the broader challenge of affirming the teaching authority of the university and of determining the contours of the curriculum. But humanities professors have struggled to orient themselves since a late-twentieth-century revolution in interpretive and philosophical principles shattered their traditional pedagogy. Menand indeed highlights the acute perplexities such professors face when trying to determine what courses belong in a general education program and when attempting to conduct interdisciplinary programs. Yet despite their pervasive uncertainty in handling curricular issues, humanities professors have coalesced into a troublingly inflexible left-liberal monolith on political matters. In a concluding prescription far more tentative than his diagnosis, Menand suggests that perhaps universities need policies making it easier for new socioeconomic groups to earn a PhD in the humanities, thus making academe more ideologically diverse and more socially connected.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Like Charles Muscatine's Fixing College Education, below, this work examines issues related to the curriculum and the approach of the faculty; unlike Muscatine, Menand (English, Harvard; staff writer, The New Yorker) focuses on selective colleges and universities and especially on the humanities, explaining the importance of general education for all undergraduates, even though they may be more interested in career preparation than ideas. He links the difficulties for universities in promoting general education to tensions in academic careers emerging from faculty selection and training, uncertainties about disciplinary and interdisciplinary frameworks, and the strong frustrations in current academic career patterns. Menand puts these issues in a historical perspective in a thoughtful and graceful style but offers little hope that the structure of academic knowledge production and dissemination will support reforms. Verdict An important, if traditional, view on the content of higher education. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/09.] (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
