Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [81]
During a recent conversation, a friend who is an experienced writer and accomplished journalist said to me, “Editors no longer edit; they spend all of their time going to lunches and dinners with the hope of finding authors and manuscripts.” I am fortunate enough to have an editor who not only edits but really edits. Jonathan Segal originally suggested that I write this book and has consistently demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to it. He has pushed and pushed me to express my ideas clearly and accessibly, and if I have succeeded, it is in no small measure because of Jon. Jon’s unusually able colleague Joey McGarvey has also made many valuable suggestions and contributions.
There is no one with whom I have had a longer and more meaningful friendship and a more sustained intellectual dialogue than Jack Miles. We began talking over forty years ago, and hardly a day goes by that we don’t communicate. Jack reads and responds to everything I write and his comments always improve my work. Like all true friends, Jack is willing to tell me what I don’t want to hear.
Finally, I want to thank my family: my brother, Beryl, with whom I learned the virtues of teaching from our parents, who were lifelong teachers; my wife, Dinny, who is always the one who first reads what I write and who has taught me most of what I know about technology and much else; our daughter, Kirsten, our son, Aaron, and his wife, Frida, who began as my students and have become my teachers.
I have dedicated this book to our grandchildren, Selma Linnea Taylor and Elsa Ingrid Taylor. Their future as well as the future of children throughout the world in no small measure depends on our ability and willingness to fix higher education.
—M.C.T., November 2009
Notes
2. Beginning of the End
1 “There has never been a year”: Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), xvi–xvii.
2 “There is one thing”: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 25.
3 “The students’ wandering and wayward energies finally found”: Ibid., 50–51.
4 “an academic version of Oliver North”: http://www.answers.com/topic/allan-bloom.
5 Nationally, from 1975 to 1987: Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 32.
3. Back to the Future
1 “Whoever it was that first”: Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 23.
2 “While only the scholar”: Ibid., 27.
3 “In my master’s program”: Jennifer Williams, “Hard Work, No Pay,” The New York Times, October 4, 2009.
4 “unforced and non-purposeful”: Quoted in Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 118–19.
5 “called on Harvard to reform”: Quoted in Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Knopf, 1962), 236.
6 “We need to produce”: Quoted ibid., 65.
7 “We have cheapened education”: Quoted ibid., 219.
8 “engage in mercantile”: Quoted ibid., 135.
9 “purposefully obliterating”: Quoted ibid., 331.
4. Emerging Network Culture
1 “This generation swallowed computers”: Quoted in Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 150.
5. Education Bubble
1 “These findings suggest”: David Swensen, Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment (New York: Free Press, 2000; revised 2009), 58.
2 “On December 16, 2008”: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/04/09/wolfston. © 2009 James H. Wolfston Jr. All rights reserved.
3 “There are going to be a hell of a lot”: Nina Munk, “Rich Harvard, Poor Harvard,” Vanity Fair, August 2009, 108, 111–12.
4 “The first Faculty meeting”: Bonnie Kavoussi and Lauren Kiel, “Faculty Meeting Lacks Usual Cookies,” The Harvard Crimson, October 7, 2009.