Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus
Times Books
2010
This certainly isn't the first time that I've admired and agreed with a book blurbed by Diane Ravitch or Vartan Gregorian, but I'm pretty sure it's the first time in??forty-five years that I've found myself in agreement with Jonathan Kozol. In this volume, Hacker and Dreifus, both war-hardened veterans of American higher education (he at Queens College, she now teaching at Columbia), lucidly set forth what's gone wrong in that sector of our education system: The professors don't much teach, the students don't much learn,??demands and calendars shrink,??price tags rise. Today, the authors bluntly conclude, what happens on most campuses isn't worth what they charge for it - including the Ivy League. What to do instead? Most of it's pretty obvious. Get rid of tenure and sabbaticals, make everybody teach undergraduates, cut the frills, stop putting such a premium on research, stop relying on student loans, etc. Pie in the sky? Not necessarily. They also profile ten colleges they like because - more or less - they're doing the things they favor (Cooper Union, Notre Dame, Arizona State, Berea, Ole Miss, etc.) Most of the time, we at Fordham focus on K-12 education. But "college ready" is today's mantra for what schools are supposed to produce. What's the point of being ready for college if most colleges aren't worth getting ready for? Purchase a copy here.
