This review begins with Clark Kerr’s extraordinarily influential 1963 critique of American higher education in The Uses of the University. Writing in the aftermath of World War II and the rapid increase of university enrollments made possible by the GI Bill, Kerr understood that the structure and function of higher education were bound to diverge radically from their prewar norms. Kerr coined the phrase “multiversity” to describe how large, complex, and ungovernable higher education had become. The twin influences of expanding access and expand-ing research efforts both tended to the same result: the elevation of university education to the center of American politics and culture.
While Kerr noted that the role of higher education had been expanding for some time, he argued that it exploded in importance in the 1950s. Administrators responded by trying to placate all divergent stakeholders simultaneously, an effort that would seem impossible. Contradictory demands for undergraduate education and for greater attention to research faculty and graduate education spread institutional budgets very thin. And yet, Kerr affirmed that the effort succeeded to some degree on most fronts.
Continuing pressure to keep all parts of these massive bureaucratic structures afloat ultimately proved impossible. In the fifth edition of The Uses of the University, published in 2001, Kerr noted how a lack of external re-sources proved to be the undoing of humanities and social sciences programs and led to the favoring of lucrative STEM research efforts, which became the bread and butter of large universities. As prescient as Kerr is in his book, one key insight outweighs the others: universities now are almost exclusively influenced by external ra-ther than internal factors. Presidents and boards of trustees look outward and react. Faculty and students adapt.
By 1968, the academic landscape had changed almost beyond recognition, setting the stage for even greater trans-formations as universities adapted to rapid social changes. In Academic Revolution, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman explain how the social upheavals of the 1960s were centered on university campuses, where the activities of faculty both in and out of the classroom became the central focus of the dynamism of higher education. Jencks and Riesman call this “the rise of the faculty,” noting that the institutions themselves had become support centers for the real work of the university, which was centered in the faculty. The 2002 edition of this book provides important updates to the original thesis, noting how trends in faculty activities, especially regarding undergraduate education, had evolved in response to changes in the demand for undergraduate degrees. In 1968, Jencks and Riesman predicted a higher rate of college attendance and graduation than actually occurred. By the end of the twentieth century, “uncritical enthusiasm” (p. xvi) for formal postsecondary education waned, resulting in a slow-ing propensity for young people to attend college and graduate, especially for men.
The surprising popularity of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind in the mid-1980s arose partly due to its penetrating, and rather stark, portrayal of what Bloom saw as the decline of universities as guardians of the inherited traditions of a classical liberal education. It is not too much to say that the book caused a sensation, evidenced by the many book clubs devoted to exploring such topics as Bloom’s ideas regarding Nietzsche’s immense influence on contemporary culture, Tocqueville’s model of democratic intellectual life, and how vacuous the term “lifestyle” can seem compared to the immense literature devoted to virtue, among other weighty subjects. But the success of the book came mainly from Bloom’s critique of higher education and the intellectual decline he wit-nessed through nearly thirty years of teaching at some of the top universities in the world. Bloom admitted a bias in favor of the higher end of higher education, but this bias did not prevent him from grounding his critique on topics relevant to all young adults, such as music, relationships, sex, equality, and love. Tying the cultural milieu of the late twentieth century to changes in intellectual life resulted in a holistic conclusion not narrowly tailored to an academic audience. This connection between culture and higher education, incidentally, animates most of the books reviewed in this essay. The insight that “there is no real education that does not respond to felt need” (p. 19) may not have begun with Bloom, but Bloom cemented this idea into ongoing discussions of higher education.
Often misunderstood, Lukianoff and Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) borrowed the essence of Bloom’s title and extended his analysis into the twenty-first century. Whereas Bloom explained changes in university culture arising from philosophical revolutions, Lukianoff and Haidt connect the higher education landscape to psychological phenomena. However, like Bloom, they ground their understanding of higher edu-cation in socially pervasive attitudes, in their case three attitudes they term “untruths”: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” “Always trust your feelings,” and “Life is a battle between good people and evil people” (p. 4). In university curricula, Lukianoff and Haidt found that all three attitudes, when taken together, amount to a coddling of young people in a way that they argue derails serious intellectual pursuits. The confusion over the book’s thesis arises from the same doctrine of fragility the authors painstakingly document and under-writes, rather than damages, the argument. If taken as an entry point into the conversation over the current state of universities, this book has few rivals due to its prominence and its wide coverage of the social conditions that universities must adapt to. In the end, “an unstated premise of this book is that thinking is social” (p. 271), and that higher education has no choice but to follow changes in social thought, regardless of the impact on university mission statements.
Unprecedented and rapid change in society has resulted in foundational changes that have revolutionized the demands placed on universities as cultural institutions. The title of Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt’s 2021 book The Great Upheaval reflects these new demands. Their analysis identifies the processes by which universities were transformed in the Industrial Revolution and applies them to the processes now driving universities to fit into the knowledge economy. Readers could be forgiven for doubting how nineteenth-century solutions matter today, but the need for institutional transformation is as acute today as it was then.
Two important insights come from Levine and Van Pelt’s work. The first is the changing expectations of students, who now view universities from a consumerist perspective, demanding “convenience, service, a quality product, and low cost” (p. 135). If students view themselves as customers, then it is only natural for universities also to view them as such, breaking a fundamental tenet of higher education as networks of collaborative relationships. The second insight is that universities need to change the definition of college credit, which has long been dominated by the Carnegie time-based model. Levine and Van Pelt envision an emerging competency-based model with learning outcomes as the standard. If outcomes really determine achievement, the length of time it takes to earn a degree would not matter. The first set of insights about student demands meshes easily with the interests of university administrators, who have been adapting to those demands for some time. The second insight, replacing the Carnegie unit model, would be so disruptive that it cannot be adopted any time soon. A competency-based model would further support consumerist students, who increasingly expect practical educational outcomes with help from the universities they pay. Thanks to Levine and Van Pelt’s solid research grounded in fascinating and extensive historical analysis, it becomes clear that present circumstances are a new chapter in an old story. The book’s subtitle, Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Future, points to the importance of longitudinal analysis for envisioning how change may manifest.
For those seeking a more generalist perspective, the fifth edition of American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century (2023), edited by Bastedo, Altbach, and Gumport, provides researchers with comprehensive coverage of scholarship on American higher education. Thirty-three writers and three editors, almost exclusively professors of higher education, contribute to this volume using a variety of approaches and covering most of the topics that dominate contemporary discussions of higher education. As with other books on this topic, the role of higher education in broader social trends unites the nineteen chapters. The explicitly social perspective aids in continuity but diminishes opportunities for more innovative critiques of higher education. Analyzing the social, economic, and status benefits gained through attendance at a postsecondary institution matters im-mensely, and this book provides a multitude of excellent examples of such analysis.
But these analyses do not capture other intangible benefits, such as the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity, confidence gained by expanding mental acuity, and exposure to new perspectives. Moving from opinion to knowledge remains a central purpose of higher education and a well-lived life, even 2,500 years after Socrates. Such analyses would have helped round out the book. However, this critique is not quite fair, as the editors re-fused to weaken the book’s focus by straying from their instrumental, analytical framework. For this reason, Bastedo, Altbach, and Gumport’s new edition is an indispensable addition to any library seeking the best scholarship on the state of American higher education.
