Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus have taken a complicated and difficult subject and boiled it down to platitudes and anecdotes. Few would disagree with most of the truisms that underpin this book, including those who lead and work at the colleges they write about: that higher education is very expensive, that some of what passes as research is frivolous, that reliance on contingent (paid by the course) faculty is shameful and bad for student learning, that sports consume too much of the attention and budgetary resources on many university campuses. But Hacker and Dreifus really offer no solutions to these problems, for they have not done the hard work of thinking about how to change the incentives that have led to them. They are particularly misleading on the pricing structure of a university education, making no distinction between need-blind institutions and those that are not need-blind (and thus chastising schools for not giving merit aid when their mission prohibits it, while cynically misstating the role that family income plays in admissions decisions) and wildly overstating the number of students who pay full freight. They repeatedly say that more than half of the students at elite institutions pay full tuition, while this is simply not the case; the most expensive schools routinely offer financial assistance to more than half the students who matriculate, and need-blind schools do not know family income when they review applications. Further, and most importantly, they do not address the unintended consequences of the reforms they do propose: For instance, if universities stop supporting research, who will step into the breach? Do we really want a society with little to no basic research in the sciences? Even if some research can be made to seem a bit silly (as they suggest by easy shots at such phrases as "stochastic models" and "performativity texts" that are quoted out of context and not even attributed), would we be content with a society in which no new interpretations of the poets and philosophers were being proposed? Without the writing and research that are carried out on college campuses, who will take responsibility for preserving and extending the knowledge of past ages? Who will carry the scholarly conversation into the future? Even the simple facts that support this analysis are lacking -- sometimes incorrect and often contradictory. For example, a faculty member's hourly pay rate is calculated as the number of hours in the classroom divided by the annual salary, leading to the shocking, but entirely specious conclusion that a professor at Yale has an hourly rate of $820; this is because even though the authors acknowledge that some time must be spent keeping up in the field, preparing lectures and new curricula, grading, directing independent work, etc., they have simply decided not to count any of this, because they can't "say with certainty" exactly how many hours are so occupied since professors, unlike lawyers, don't keep track of their billable hours (see pp. 24-25). Later, however, where a different argument is being made and where it suits the authors to make much of the labor of grading papers, they write: "As all teachers will attest, composing 90 ... commentaries is no small task, especially when they must be completed in a matter of days" (pp. 198-99). Well you can't have it both ways - either it's time-consuming work to grade papers or it isn't. Finally, the high-handed tone the authors take becomes increasingly annoying. "Schools We Like" is the title of their final chapter. Well, who cares? Who anointed this professor and this journalist the gods of higher education upon whose every word the reader should hang? "We liked this," they write; "we particularly liked that." "We note x in sorrow and anger...." "Ah, the professoriate! It's an alternate universe," they quip snidely. Such opinions based on innuendo, anecdote, and pure assertion do not constitute an argument. I am confident that, if Hacker and Dreifus had looked closely and with an open mind, they would have found as much to admire at Williams (a school they love to hate) as they do at Arizona State, which they find it refreshing to love. But really in the end they are not interested in the facts. As a final example of their habit of twisting and misleading statements, consider one of the bulwarks of their praise for Notre Dame - that its president, John Jenkins, gives his salary back to his institution (p. 224). Of course he does! He's an ordained Catholic priest, who is required by his vows to return his income. You wouldn't know that, however, from this book, which substitutes inflammatory rhetoric for inconvenient truths.