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Description
At the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the 2007 Frederick W. Ness Book Award was presented to James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield for their book, Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (University of Virginia Press, 2005).
Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money is a critique of the pernicious syndrome set in motion when the means and concomitant benefits of higher education--money and prestige, in particular--became increasingly accepted as its most important and fundamental ends. The book contends, on the basis of extensive evidence and documentation, that such a distorted perception of the functions of higher education became far more widespread in the last three decades of the twentieth century than ever before historically, and that its influence has continued to accelerate. This trend is not sustainable. The subjugation of ideals of learning, curiosity, and scholarship to the primacy and glorification of monetary reward will, if allowed to continue, deal a crippling blow to higher education, which, ironically, produces greatest economic, competitive, and social benefits only if grounded in the intellectual and ethical objectives that brought it into being and inspired its highest achievements in the first place.
We argue that the entelechy of higher education, the web of interlocking goals that join to compose the total function and purpose of higher education, is capable of answering all reasonable demands placed on the system: within that entelechy is room for colleges and universities to make education an instrumental economic good, an aid to careers, professions, and business enterprises; an instrumental social good, a nursery of improved communication skills and worthy social integration; and an instrumental civic and political good, too, one that fosters a deeper appreciation of civic life and the multitude of ways citizens can enliven and strengthen it. All of these goods are obtainable within the entelechy of higher education and are reasonable to expect--so long as we remember to cherish and protect what under-girds and precedes them all. And that is the love of learning itself, the desire to know, the desire to impart knowledge, and the desire to regard any application of knowledge through an ethical lens.
Yet, this very love of learning, which, in a healthy ordering of priorities, should nourish and renew higher education, is now endangered by indifference, neglect, and even contempt, while many institutional energies and resources are diverted to aims that cannot, on their own, sustain themselves, let alone higher education as a whole. We analyze and document this perilous shift of institutional emphasis under the rubric of the "Three Criteria." We use this term to denote a set of policies--sometimes deliberate, sometimes unwitting--whereby any field or discipline that (1) promises (accurately or not) higher income to participants; (2) studies money, finance, or business; or (3) receives external funding in large amounts has consistently flourished and been favored relative to those fields and disciplines that don't. This flourishing or favoring can be demonstrated by any measure: undergraduate enrollments and majors; faculty hiring, salaries, and teaching loads; reliance on adjunct faculty; health of graduate programs; student attitudes; alumni giving; establishment of new programs; or building and capital investment. Over the past thirty-five years, all indicators point to a massive shift in favor of the Three-Criteria disciplines and, correspondingly, against those that don't fit the bill: some sciences, especially in their theoretical pursuits, a good many social sciences, and all of the humanities. The teaching of reading and writing--arguably one of the few absolute necessities of undergraduate education and the propaedeutic for mastery of almost any intellectual discipline--has suffered... |
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