What's College For?: The Struggle to Define American Higher Education. - Review - book reviews

Reason, Dec, 1999 by Nick Gillespie

Still, Failing the Future is instructive on how colleges are adapting to changes in both student body and faculty. Kolodny's chapter on recognizing and responding to "cognitive diversity" - different styles of learning - contains some practical insights. She tells of working with the director of the basic language program in German and the head of Arizona's Language Research Center to develop a "learning mode profile" that would indicate whether a particular student responds more quickly to large conceptual frameworks or to an "aggregate of details." In other words, writes Kolodny, "will the student learn German more easily if she is first introduced to the theory and structure of an inflected language, or will she do better with some basic grammar rules and vocabulary-building?" Given rising enrollments - and competition among colleges for students - Kolodny is certainly correct that "the next generation of Ph.D.s... must be prepared to teach a more inclusive everyone, and they must be prepared to teach everyone well."

Curiously, for someone who seems to detest markets ("they are," she claims, "notoriously unreliable as protectors of the common good"), Kolodny understands incentives extremely well. That's rare among college administrators, who typically rule by decrees that often fail to actually change faculty and student behavior. As dean, Kolodny instituted competitive grant programs that motivated faculty and staff to develop or rethink curricula to interest students while maintaining academic rigor. These incentives ranged from a $5,000 grant for developing new curricula to free lunches to support a "buddy" system for new faculty, in which two tenured faculty met informally with new hires.

As her views on "antifeminist intellectual harassment" suggest, though, Kolodny's calls for "bottom-up" and "decentralized" decision making have definite limits, as does her appreciation for institutional experimentation. Generating new course offerings, say, is all to the good, while any tampering with the far more fundamental (and static) academic institution of tenure is merely a sign that you've been influenced by nefarious "conservative forces," whose attack on tenure she implausibly claims is really aimed at discouraging minorities from aspiring to academic careers.

That would be news to Zachary Karabell, author of What's College For? Like Kolodny, Karabell is a conventional academic leftist. Yet his nonideological attitude toward tenure exemplifies the main strength of his book. Karabell, a Ph.D. who has taught at the college level, spent time talking to students, professors, and administrators at schools ranging from community colleges such as Los Angeles' Pierce College to massive state universities such as Texas A&M.

Pace Kolodny, Karabell views tenure not as an "absolute good" but as something that "has so distorted the academic labor market that any benefits to free speech are more than outweighed by the distortions in the economy of higher education and the stultifying intellectual and professional orthodoxies that tenure promotes." Most critics of tenure, he points out, are chiefly concerned with the corrosive effects that guaranteed employment has on job performance. Where Kolodny hugely underestimates the "deadwood" in most academic departments at between 3 percent and 5 percent, Karabell's figures suggest that even if that low-ball estimate is accurate, underperforming faculty are very well protected by tenure.