A Book of Maddeningly Safe and Temperate Proposals
George Roche is the president of Hillsdale College and author of The Fall of the Ivory Tower.
George Dennis O’Brien, retired president of Bucknell University and the University of Rochester and author of What to Expect from College, has addressed himself to a vitally important subject—the many myths and misconceptions surrounding American higher education. Although he identifies serious problems and sometimes makes telling observations, the book ultimately proves to be maddening because the author will not for the life of him make hard decisions. His proposals are always safe and temperate. O’Brien’s book circles at 30,000 feet over the major issues confronting universities and the reader exclaims, “Land somewhere! Take a position! Offer a solution! Act in some principled way even if it might create some enemies!”
At almost every turn, O’Brien takes the safe road, trying to keep establishment friends happy through equivocations and conciliation. One example: “If faculty are to administer—as I believe they should. . . .” This is a “respectable” position, but one that I view as entirely mistaken. The faculty should no more administer the institution than the players should manage the team. Many schools started to go horribly wrong when they tried mixing teaching and administration. But the author declines to challenge this conventional idea.
In another place O’Brien writes, “I think that multiculturalism is dead wrong.” The reader earnestly hopes for a tough position and suggestions for curing this intellectual cancer (or at least halting its spread). But no, he does not want to offend his politically correct colleagues and thus adds, “However, if multiculturalism is bizarre in astronomy, it is not so in the area of the lost moral curriculum. It starts in the right place.” He thus criticizes without really criticizing at all. This reminds one of Yogi Berra’s saying, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” O’Brien usually follows this advice and manages to take both paths.
Near the end of the book, O’Brien writes, “The issue that faces higher education is whether current faculty expectations and education will allow them to join in with administration or cause them to fight a generally losing battle against the social and economic forces that have created the need for decisive institutional direction.” Indeed, we might wonder how the largely overpaid and underworked faculty of the typical American university will react when confronted with the need for “decisive . . . direction,” but exactly what this “decisive . . . direction” must entail, the author will not hazard to guess.
A book that is to deal sensibly with the many problems of higher education in the United States must inquire about the real causes of exorbitant college costs, high drop-out rates, the dumbing-down of academic standards, the perversion of the curriculum, the short-changing of students in universities where teaching takes a back seat to “research” (which often means abstruse writings that are never read and no one would voluntarily pay for), and of the spreading politicization of courses, to mention just the top of the list. It must then propose solutions.
Unfortunately, All the Essential Half-Truths about Higher Education comes up short. O’Brien says that his purpose “has been to raise issues.” He does raise a number of them (nine “half-truths”), but misses others and, more important, semantically skirts the issues without offering any real solutions. And he unwittingly tells the reader why he adopts this inoffensive approach, when he writes, “The political cost of changing entrenched interests is staggering.”
That is unquestionably true, and anyone who proposes more than minor, cosmetic tinkering with higher education will certainly incur the wrath of the entrenched interests, comfortable as they are with the status quo. O’Brien, sad to say, is like so many in the education establishment who readily sacrifice principle and correct action to popularity.
A reading of this book will give one who knows little about the terrible state of higher education some familiarity with the issues, but for deep analysis and tough solutions, it is a disappointment, reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s description of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley: “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”
