THE ROLE OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: The Creation of the Future - Review

THE ROLE OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: The Creation of the Future by Frank H. T. Rhodes Cornell University Press, $29.95

Alma Matters

LAST MAY, I LEFT MY DORM Broom and made the long trek across the University of Connecticut's attractive and sprawling campus to the English department to have my adviser sign my degree-completion forms. This was the last document I needed to graduate. After he signed, my adviser asked me bluntly, "Did you enjoy your time as an English major?" Of course, I told him. I was proud of my degree. His face lit up. "That's terrific," he replied. "Most people really regret it."

His comment shook me. What did he mean most English majors regret it? Should I have picked a different major? And most important, where was this sagacious advice when I was a freshman? Indeed, in all the meetings I had with my adviser over four years, at which he signed off on my course schedule, I don't remember ever getting any useful academic advice. Had Frank H.T. Rhodes been my adviser, he might have summoned the following defense of the oft-maligned liberal-arts degree: "From ancient Egypt and Greece to Renaissance Italy ... it has been in the most literal sense the embodiment of insight, an assertion of the human spirit ... Education, unleavened by the sense of beauty and luminosity that art can provide, is a wasteland." Now that would have made me feel a whole lot better.

The inadequacies of the academic advisory system are just one of the many university shortfalls that Rhodes chronicles in The Role of the American University: The Creation of the Future. Rhodes, president emeritus at Cornell University, argues that, although the American university system is the best in the world, there are pressing issues which must be addressed if we're to maintain this dominance in the next century.

He picks a wide range of targets for his critique. But he is a bit short on specific solutions. For instance he condemns the ever-increasing size of research universities for eroding a sense of community. UConn is a big research university, and I sometimes felt like I spent my time wandering, not really a part of anything more than my circle of friends. Rhodes calls this a "catastrophe" for it "undermines the very foundation on which the universities were established." And Rhodes' answer to this problem, drum roll please: establish a "meaningful dialogue" with students, professors, and administrators.

He also takes on the problem of grade inflation. The supposedly average mark, C, has become a rarity nowadays. This creates a perverse incentive. The worst students can rely on a "reasonable grade with inadequate work," while the best students watch their classmates receive similar grades for slacking off. What Rhodes misses, perhaps because he has not taught a class in some years, is the souk-like bargaining that often drives grade inflation today. I personally quibbled with teachers about grades, much like haggling over the price of a trout at the local fish market, and sometimes I got a better deal. But the only solution Rhodes seems to provide, that "the university must demand higher standards of its students" is, like much of the book, little more than vague suggestion.

Rhodes rightly notes how basic science courses are often so math-intensive that they overwhelm nonscience majors. I can attest to that. I spent four years shucking and jiving stringent math and science requirements. I didn't want to go to med-school; I just wanted to be broadly literate in the sciences. If we want to prepare the not-so-scientific to become exalted "citizens of the world," as Rhodes does, then we must make these courses more user-friendly. This makes sense, but he offers no specifics on how to do this. Why not put under the microscope the average Physics 101 curriculum and explain to us precisely how it could be made more "user-friendly"?

Early on in the book we are told that Johns Hopkins is the model research university. Later on we find out again, and later still, the fact appears once more. Not unlike an undergraduate essay, Rhodes' book has a tendency to ramble and repeat itself. It appears padded, almost as though the author had mastered the late-night trick of toying with the font size to make a paper appear longer.

Rhodes offers some good profiles of outstanding teachers such as Mary Sansalone, the young hotshot Cornell professor of civil and environmental engineering, whose exciting classroom technique creates such a clamor that her colleagues have to knock on the door and ask her to quiet down. I had a few of these inspired professors, and they made all the difference. Such stories breathe life into what is sometimes a tiring read. I wish he had included more.

I also wish he had spent more time in the kinds of classrooms I sometimes found myself in, led by teaching assistants with limited English skills. Rhodes does acknowledge that many TA's are foreign-born and speak with accents. He displays downright denial, however, about the severity and frequency of this problem when he remarks, "They could never get into graduate school if they were unable to speak English." Tell that to the student in my freshman math class who, after months of struggling to understand our "foreign-born" student-teacher, finally unleashed a fusillade of profanity and ran shrieking from the classroom.