Within academia, I’m a rare breed: a conservative Republican who twice voted for George W. Bush. I supported the invasion of Iraq, and I deeply admire Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas for their originalist approach to interpreting the Constitution. Yet I am first and foremost a scientist whose singular devotion is to Truth. Whatever my ideological instincts, I have an obligation to examine social scientific phenomena impartially, striving at all times to form opinions based on empirical evidence rather than ideological articles of faith.
Since 1965 an increasing preoccupation with has resulted in the inversion of its role in higher education, from a practical means to an end that crowds out all others. No longer do students and parents choose the best education that money can buy. Instead, they are faced with choosing which college or university will buy them more money. This comes as no real surprise, as the cost of attending a four-year college has doubled since 1985. Yet the question persists: at what real cost are we sending our students to college? Renowned educator James Engell and coauthor Anthony Dangerfield explore the answer to this question in Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money. They argue that the counterbalancing attitudes that used to temper a focus on with other equally legitimate and more fundamental goals have steadily weakened, resulting in a new consensus that elevates and the marketing of oneself and one's institution to the foremost ambitions of the intellectual world. This new minimization of higher education to the category of an investment to be repaid has damaged all disciplines not directly associated with money, particularly the humanities. Students often now are told they face a choice: between the practical sciences, business, and economic success, or the traditional liberal arts and sciences and expected poverty. In their comprehensive analysis of admission practices, institutional rankings, salaries, hiring practices, scholarships, student attitudes, tuition costs, research programs, library budgets, and class barriers, Engell and Dangerfield expose the major changes that the Age of Money has wrought in higher education while also offering a practical method of understanding and prioritizing the various elements involved in choosing the right school. Focusing on liberal arts and sciences colleges, private research universities, and flagship public institutions, the authors provide an explicit and coherent model of what an academic institution should offer, while encouraging individual institutions to retain their unique identities. Written for a general audience as well as for professionals, Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money will appeal to teachers and administrators, parents of students and prospective students, students and faculty in schools of higher education, and anyone interested in intellectual life.
Shortly after the University of Virginia Press published Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, Bill Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and I participated in a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution. One of our colleagues on the panel, Amy Gutmann, President of the University of Pennsylvania, and a distinguished political philosopher who has written widely about education, democracy, and human rights, prefaced her remarks by referring to a New Yorker cartoon portraying a little boy tugging at Thomas Jefferson’s coattails, looking up at Mr. Jefferson and saying: “If you hold these truths to be self-evident, then why do you keep harping on them so much?”
By Lee Hardy was recently afforded an outsider's view of the Christian liberal arts college by the American author Wallace Stegner. In his novel Crossing to Safety, the narrator enters the academic job market but finds his initial efforts both meager and unpromising. A dozen letters had produced only a nibble, he writes. It came from a Lutheran college in Illinois, and I might have pursued even that possibility if they had not wanted me, before further discussion, to declare my belief in the Apostles' Creed, the Augsburg Confession, and the principles of higher Christian education.
