Also of interest ... in campus feuds and fashions

Higher Education?

by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus

(Times Books, $26)

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The authors of this bold critique of America’s overpriced colleges and universities “set themselves apart” by offering advice to students, said Paul M. Barrett in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. An intriguing top 10 list names the University of Mississippi as the school offering the best undergraduate education per dollar in the country. The Harvards of the world are advised to end tenure, eliminate most varsity sports, and try admission by lottery. Such propositions are interesting, but “entirely unrealistic.”

Crisis on Campus

by Mark C. Taylor

(Knopf, $24)

Ending tenure is also atop the to-do list recommended by Columbia University professor Mark Taylor, said Naomi Schaefer Riley in The Wall Street Journal. Taylor predicts that the nation’s economic crisis will make cost-cutting reforms necessary for higher-education institutions, but he fails to seriously confront their implications. He sees tuition costs dropping as online classes proliferate and students take more responsibility for their educations. Unfortunately, 18-year-olds “often don’t know what a good education looks like.”

True Prep

by Lisa Birnbach with Chip Kidd

(Knopf, $20)

Preppiness still meant something in 1980, when Lisa Birnbach published The Official Preppy Handbook, said Mark Oppenheimer in Slate.com. Though she’s tried gamely in this witty update to once again inventory the defining habits and customs of the preppy style, it’s clear that prepdom no longer really exists as an exclusive and mysterious subculture. “It’s all irony now.” Sure, many Americans still send their children to prep schools and some even still wear Top-Siders, but they’re all “just performing prep.” In reality, “there are no true preps” left.

Take Ivy

(powerHouse Books, $25)

This once “nearly unattainable” 1965 photo volume has inspired most every clothing retailer who ever aimed to peddle preppy style, said Guy Trebay in The New York Times. The result of a “fact-finding trip” commissioned by a Japanese menswear producer, the original edition became a fashion-industry cult item because it captured what men at Ivy League colleges actually wore in the early ’60s. The arrival of a reprint democratizes the cult classic: “Anyone with $24.95” can steal enough ideas to launch their own J. Crew catalogue.