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The University We Need:
Reforming American
Higher Education
By Warren Treadgold
Though many people
know that American universities now offer an inadequate and incoherent
education from a leftist viewpoint that excludes moderate and conservative
ideas, few people understand how much this matters, how it happened, how bad it
is, or what can be done about it. In The University We Need, Professor Warren Treadgold shows the crucial role of universities in
American culture and politics, the causes of their decline in administrative
bloat and inept academic hiring, the effects of the decline on teaching and
research, and some possible ways of reversing the downward trend.
In The University
We Need, you’ll learn:
· How conservative think tanks and journals have
developed a wider range of ideas on trade, immigration, taxation, foreign
policy, and other issues than leftists will tolerate on campus;
· How black, gay and feminist studies are
sacrosanct, while Shakespeare and the American Revolution are mentioned, if at
all, in courses on women and slavery as examples of sexism and racism;
· That every year many more professors with
conservative or moderate views retire than are hired;
· That campus leftists, with strong support
within the Democratic Party, still insist on the prevalence of racism, sexism,
xenophobia, and Islamophobia in America;
· That American college degrees have never cost
more and never meant less;
· That colleges keep expanding their use of
badly paid adjunct professors hired after only a perfunctory look at their
credentials;
· That nearly half of college students seem to
be studying very little and learning very little - surely not enough to be
worth anyone’s spending $100,000 or more for it;
· About the vague but powerful ideology that
dominates American campuses today - how “socialism” fails to capture much of
what this ideology is about;
· How “inclusivity” and “diversity” are favorite
terms on campus, but they call for a striking amount of exclusion and
uniformity;
· How the dominant doctrine has become that
oppressive groups like whites, men, and heterosexuals cannot possibly
understand the oppression endured by the oppressed groups;
· That many professors give good grades for
little or no work; the majority of students will do the least work for which
they think they c an get an acceptable grade;
· How online education has failed to take the
academic world by storm so far, and will probably fail to dominate it in the
future, except perhaps as a low-quality substitute for low-quality courses;
· How abolishing tenure, often suggested as
a solution to the problems of universities, would probably make those problems
worse; and much more...
Prof. Treadgold
explains that one suggested reform, the abolition of tenure, would further
increase the power of administrators, further decrease the quality of
professors, and make universities even more doctrinaire and intolerant.
Instead, he proposes federal legislation to monitor the quality and honesty of
professors and to limit spending on administration to no more than 20 percent
of university budgets (Harvard now spends 40 percent).
Finally, Prof.
Treadgold offers a specific proposal for the founding of a new leading
university that could seriously challenge the dominance of Harvard, Princeton,
Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley and attract conservative and moderate faculty and
students now isolated in universities and colleges that are either leftist or
mediocre. While agreeing with conservative critics that universities are in
severe crisis, Treadgold believes that the universities’ problems largely
transcend ideology and have grown worse partly because disputants on both sides
of the academic debate have misunderstood the methods and goals of higher
education.
“The acclaimed scholar of Byzantine culture
and history Warren Treadgold offers a concise dissection of the pathologies of
the modern university, from administrative bloat and record student debt to
political intolerance and a therapeutic curriculum. But he offers more than the
usual condemnations of the politicized campus, by systematically explaining how
pernicious ideas ripple throughout society, politics, culture, and the economy
- and what can be done to restore the integrity of higher education. A learned
diagnosis by a scholar who knows the contemporary campus agenda inside out, and
how to counter it.”
--Victor Davis Hanson, the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University, author of The Second World Wars
“Warren Treadgold has spent a lifetime in the
academy and now gives us the book of a lifetime about how to rescue it.” --John
Podhoretz, Editor, Commentary Magazine
