NAS Blog

Charles Murray’s latest book is entitled Coming Apart and in this Minding the Campus essay, Rich Vedder argues persuasively that our higher education system has played an important role in that.

In today’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I review Richard DeMillo’s book Abelard to Apple. In the last few years, there have been quite a few books written on the theme of impending, revolutionary change in higher education and I think DeMillo’s may be the most persuasive. It’s also very well written and chock-full of fascinating history and details. Highly recommended.

IndyWeek.com Photo by D.L. Anderson

This fall the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hosted several events related to its common reading assignment, Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer. The book is a non-fiction argument by the author in favor of not eating animals, primarily because of his compunctions over their treatment in factory farms.

Not one that especially lends itself to stage adaptation, I’d think, but it looks like UNC students made do with rubber chickens, dance, and multimedia in a multi-performance play this month. The adapter and director, UNC professor of communication studies Tony Perucci, said, ”As much as this show intends to be a critical reflection on how we engage with daily practices, it’s also intended to be abundantly silly and absurd. And beautiful.”

In October UNC sponsored as guest speaker animal activist Gene Bauer, who “told his audience there are no humane ways to raise animals for food.” The News & Observer reported that “None challenged Baur at the UNC-CH gathering.” At least one reader of the News & Observer, however, disapproved of the uncritical coverage of Baur’s presentation.

Two other institutions, Duke University and St. Michael’s College in Vermont, also chose Eating Animals as common reading assignments this year, as documented in NAS’s report Beach Books: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class?

No, but it’s responsible for much that is wrong in higher education, argues Naomi Schaefer Riley in her recent book The Faculty Lounges. In today’s Pope Center piece, Duke Cheston reviews the book. He agrees with the author’s conclusion that tenure has high costs but does little to uphold academic freedom, its principal justification.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Jane Shaw writes about the recent book by Clay Christensen and Henry Eyring, The Innovative University. The authors foresee a great deal of change in the higher education market, catalyzed by improvements in distance learning. They contend that many colleges and universities will be left in the dust unless they figure out how to adapt, much as companies have crumbled when innovative technologies hit their markets and they couldn’t rapidly adjust to it.

That sounds right to me. The college degree has its origins in bygone centuries, when students were captive to the institutions where they enrolled, with no choice but to “buy” the bundle of educational good that comprised their degrees. The problem is that some, often much of what was in that bundle was of scant value. New learning technologies change all of that. Most people would rather get just the things they want at a low price than to accept a large bundle of things, many of which they don’t want, at high cost.

Professor Brad Birzer, a man of unbounded energy, asked several of us to contribute a “top ten” list of books that make us human. Quite a challenge: limited to ten books, what would you (dear reader) choose and why?

See my list at The Imaginative Conservative web site. It starts with a book by this man:

The higher education bubble was inflated by various pumps and gases:  expensive but useless degrees, an ideological straitjacket, grade inflation, administrative bloat, and proliferating programs, centers, and offices of enigmatic, malign, or Kafkaesque purpose.  As FIRE’s Robert Shibley recently wrote, “. . . tuition and tax dollars are funding an ever-growing army of bureaucrats that police everything from free speech to dating. Administrators now outnumber faculty on our nation’s campuses, and even students’ innermost thoughts are subject to their oversight.”  Basically, ye olde sheepskin has become a product whose cost in dollars and nuisance far exceeds its value.

Textbooks play their own part in this carnival.  For one, it’s not clear what textbooks are for in 2011.  Some students won’t buy them, preferring rent-a-texts, e-books, library reserves, Wikipedia, SparkNotes, et al.  Other students won’t read them because they can pass anyway after a Google click-a-thon.  Thus, M. W. Klymkowsky says, “Clearly, the issue of whether to use a textbook is complex,and it is dependent upon course and curricular goals. Students(and colleagues) expect a textbook; yet often, the textbook is not used, except as a reference.”

Jane Shaw, President of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, goes even further, suggesting that a textbook may often be nothing more than a security blanket for the professor.  In an email, she says, “I think that most faculty members still want a textbook because it provides an instantaneous organization for the course.”

Still, there are some courses students can’t pass without the textbook, and those are the jackpot for publishers and authors.  At $100+ per book, constant revisions and new editions, websites, CDs, and DVDs keep that money pump humming.  James Stewart made so much money from his Calculus textbook that he built a showplace home/performance space for an estimated $30,000,000 after auditioning architects such as Frank Gehry.

In an email, Evergreen Valley College’s Sterling Warner says, “Publishers . . . like the idea of electronic textbooks—not because they will serve students as well or better than paperback texts (or reduced costs per textbook).  No, publishers are asking for paper and electronic rights to reprint works because they can make greater profits.”  Warner continues:

I see publishers rushing after the glitz, bells, and whistles (maybe even clickers!) placing pedagogical substance second. Soon they’ll all be using Go-Daddy girls to use a bit of sex to straighten out slumping sales . . . .”

Enter Zachary Mason, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, computer scientist, artificial intelligence theorist, and author of the celebrated The Lost Books of the Odyssey.   Mr. Mason has just launched a new company in what seems a virtuous attempt to shrink textbook prices by using a mixture of new methods and new technology.  Zach, a very bright and talented man, is interested in hearing from all the players in the textbook casino:  teachers, administrators, students.  If you have ideas and/or needs you would like to share, just shoot me an email at dclemens@mpc.edu and I will forward your contact information to Zach.

Go-Daddy girls need not apply.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call,  John Moore, who served as president of Grove City College, discusses the recent book by Professor Robert Martin, The College Cost Disease. He thinks that Martin’s analysis is mostly correct, but argues that it is possible for colleges to overcome the disease or never contract it in the first place. Smaller institutions with a clear educational mission and careful oversight from trustees can maintain high academic standards while keeping costs down.

As the Borders stores close their doors and Kindles are creeping ‘cross our beaches, books are on our minds. So for a short summer series at NAS.org, we asked some of our friends to tell us their favorite books – top ten fiction and top ten non-fiction. We asked them for the titles of books they most enjoy, not necessarily books that are, as one friend put it, “good for you.”

Check them out this week and next week. What are your favorite books?

Over at The Beacon, I have a post on the latest requirement that Something Else must be taught in K-12 history textbooks. This time it is gay history but the real problem is the politicization of textbook content. Result: history is just “one damn thing after another.”