The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand

(Norton, 176 pages, $25)

Louis Menand understands better than most academics why universities struggle to make a “clear and compelling” defense of their high cost, said Wilfred M. McClay in The Wall Street Journal. Higher education in general is suffering from a crisis of purpose, and Menand, a Harvard English professor and a writer for The New Yorker, has written a “crisp and illuminating” new briefing about why the ideal of a liberal arts eduction has come to seem hollow. He’s “at his best” explaining how, precisely, we’ve reached a point at which only one in 10 undergraduates chooses to major in the humanities.

Menand’s “wry” view of higher education’s history allows him to grasp that most new problems spring from “solutions to old problems,” said Gideon Lewis-Kraus in Slate.com. He argues that 19th-century Harvard President Charles William Eliot set the template for the American university system, when he made a college degree a prerequisite for Harvard’s professional schools. Soon, all undergraduate colleges defined their mission as broadening minds before specialized training began. Over time, however, the balance shifted. Professors who were trained to pursue knowledge for its own sake forgot that their institutions’ purpose is preparing students for life outside the ivy-covered walls.

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It’s intellectual conformity that troubles Menand most, said Michael S. Roth in the Los Angeles Times. He shows how this manifests itself in politics, noting that, in 2004, 95 percent of humanities professors at elite institutions voted for John Kerry, while 0 percent favored George W. Bush. Menand blames such herd mentality on academia’s training system: In a low-paying field with few jobs, only the students who already think like the gatekeepers will train 10 years to join the club. In a system that should incubate creative thinking, that’s a bad sign. Menand strives to remind us that “it doesn’t have to be this way.”