Books in Brief. - Review - book review

National Review, Nov 6, 2000 by Tracy Lee Simmons

Reaffirming Higher Education, by Jacob Neusner and Noam M. M. Neusner (Transaction, 209 pp, $29.95)

It was Dr. Johnson, I think, who once said that mankind needs more often to be reminded than informed. This is an observation taken to heart especially by the erudite Jacob Neusner, a professor of religious studies, and his son and coauthor Noam in their latest book on higher education. This is, in fact, their second such book. Throughout the first, entitled The Price of Excellence (which I reviewed in these pages in 1996), the Neusners explained how higher education had fared in America in the aftermath of World War II and been transformed by national policy during the Cold War, a transformation that seemed a diffusion, if not dissipation, of purpose. Now they step back to reflect more sagely upon what essentially should be going on within those ivied-or cinder blocked-walls.

This book is well timed for an election season noisy with blather about "putting education first," though it's highly improbable that either of the major candidates or their paper-pushers would heed its message, even if they read it. Education is a slow process and notoriously averse to sound-bite nostrums. But in a larger sense, it's a book for all time, as the Neusners reidentify-and yes, reaffirm-the life of the mind and the central role the university has played, despite recent bouts of political correctness, in feeding that life. In a time when the researching professor is attacked for ignoring his teaching duties, the authors boldly reassert the traditional union of teaching and scholarship as the twin pursuits distinguishing a professor from a teacher conveying nothing beyond information.

The sell is a hard one, but the Neusners make it ably. Good professors should "educate, rather than train." Yet the Neusners also realize the difficulty entailed by students' lack of preparation upon entering college. Many students must be remediated before they can graduate to "critical thinking"; their minds must first be furnished with something to think about. But once they do so progress, the authors tell us, nowhere but in a college or university, where practicing scholars teach eagerly, can students achieve the one thing for which they should hunger most: intellectual formation and coherence. It's an old belief newly articulated, and the authors are their own best evidence for its truth.