The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Issues of Our Time) |  | Author: Louis Menand
Creator: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
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Rating:  11 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 176
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Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.8
ISBN: 0393062759
Dewey Decimal Number: 378.01
EAN: 9780393062755
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Product Description
Has American higher education become a dinosaur? Why do professors all tend to think alike? What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects should be required? Why do teachers and scholars find it so difficult to transcend the limits of their disciplines? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for one hundred years, while faculties and student bodies have radically changed and technology has drastically transformed the way people produce and disseminate knowledge. At a time when competition to get into and succeed in college has never been more intense, universities are providing a less-useful education. Sparking a long-overdue debate about the future of American education, The Marketplace of Ideas examines what professors and students—and all the rest of us—might be better off without, while assessing what it is worth saving in our traditional university institutions.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
 Fascinating and well written study January 7, 2010
Wanda B. Red (Boston, MA)
54 out of 56 found this review helpful
Louis Menand makes a powerful argument in this book that the bright line separating the education and research within the academic disciplines from the world outside the ivory tower is very much blurrier than most academics believe. He offers a fascinating history of the modern university as a series of compromises and maneuvers that from their very start were negotiated across that line while trying to patrol and enforce its boundary. The four long chapters of this slim volume trace this topic and its implications through arguments over general education (ch. 1), the (r)evolution in the humanities (ch. 2), the fetishizing of interdisciplinarity (ch. 3), and the socialization of the professoriate (ch. 4). Some readers may recognize parts of ch. 2, which appeared in an earlier version in "The New York Review of Books."
While Menand refrains from making many specific recommendations (his goal is to describe the paradoxes and anxieties of the liberal arts academy rather than to advocate for a particular response), one gets the strong sense that he thinks academics should make their peace with the university's inevitable role in the world and stop trying so hard to tilt against it. Such a conclusion is implicit in pithy statements like the following: "To the extent that this system [American higher education, with its roots in the 19th century] still determines the possibilities for producing and disseminating knowledge, trying to reform the contemporary university is like trying to get on the Internet with a typewriter, or like riding a horse to the mall" (17). These are the words of a reformer; though exactly what reforms Menand wants remain unclear, it seems obvious that they will involve higher education embracing its role in the world more self-consciously and vigorously.
In that sense, he forms a kind of mirror image to another prolific writer on the higher education scene, Stanley Fish, who also focuses on the fragility of the wall that divides the independent and disinterested quest for knowledge from the yearning many in the contemporary world feel to tear down that wall. Fish, though, is for shoring up the divide (hence, his book "Save the World on Your Own Time"), while Menand accepts that the wall must come down.
Menand is a brisk and persuasive writer, and one wants to agree with him. He seems to be on the side of history (and though an English professor, he is also truly interdisciplinary in being a Pulitzer prize-winning historian too). One thing, ironically, that he leaves out of his argument for change, however, is the long historical view. Although the modern American university began in the 19th century, universities existed far earlier than that (going back to the 12th century), and their consituencies are not just present-day students, faculty, politicians, etc. They also serve to link the distant past with the unforeseen future. Universities are thus conservative in the root meaning of that word. Too much attention to the contemporary marketplace of ideas, to which Menand is so sensitive, could be very destructive to the mission of preserving and transmitting cultural traditions like those that belong to the classical past or the Middle Ages. Though Menand acknowledges that his analysis could be considered "presentist," he doesn't really address the full challenge that this accusation represents.
For Kindleheads January 22, 2010
John Uhr (Boulder, CO USA)
17 out of 24 found this review helpful
For the reviewers who give bad reviews based on irrelevant factors like whether it's available on kindle: how about reading the book and leaving a comment based on the quality of the book itself. You're doing the author and potential readers a disservice.
An Interesting Think Piece June 24, 2010
Richard B. Schwartz (Columbia, Missouri USA)
This is an interesting think piece on contemporary higher education. Three of the chapters originated as lectures at the University of Virginia, but the book does not feel disjointed or thrown-together. The issues addressed include the problem of general education, legitimation within the humanities, the homogeneity of professorial political orientations, interdisciplinarity and the university's resistance to change, particularly with regard to seemingly intractable problems.
Menand's approach to the issues is historical and the history which he charts is carefully delineated. The writing is lucid, his positions clear. You may disagree with him on a number of points but you always have a clear argument/narrative with which to disagree. When he faces difficult issues he does not hesitate to offer answers and possible explanations.
The chapter on general education is, in my judgment, the best and it could well serve as the starting point for further discussions of the subject or further explorations of the issue by college curriculum committees.
If there is an overall flaw it is one common to nearly all of the studies of the history of higher education in America. Historians must give significant attention to elite institutions, particularly institutions whose decisions have been watched and replicated by other institutions. And it is fair to ask `what did Harvard decide?' or `what did Yale do in this case?' since American higher education is very imitative.
Therein, however, lies the problem. Institutions may have imitated Harvard, but Harvard is such a special case, such an outlier among the 4,000+ institutions of higher education, that the imitation has proven to be extremely wrongheaded. If, for example, Harvard largely abandons general education it is much less of a problem for Harvard than for its imitators, for Harvard has such deep applicant pools that its prep-school and one-of-a-kind-genius public school matriculants will have come to Harvard with a great deal of foundational knowledge/cultural literacy in hand. Students at less-selective institutions will not enjoy these advantages and may be in significant need of general education coursework. The fact that "we" have decided to do something in a particular way may have proven catastrophic for our students, but not for Harvard's, whose ways "we" have been imitating.
Liberal Arts College Professor February 7, 2010
Liberal Arts College Professor (Colorado Springs, CO)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Useful in understanding how we got to where we are now. If you are involved in
curriculum debates on your campus, you will find this helpful and interesting.
Louis Menand on the Marketplace of Ideas January 30, 2010
Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States)
22 out of 23 found this review helpful
In 1903, the philosopher William James wrote an essay, "The PhD Octopus", available in the linked Library of America volume, William James : Writings 1902-1910 : The Varieties of Religious Experience / Pragmatism / A Pluralistic Universe / The Meaning of Truth / Some Problems of Philosophy / Essays (Library of America) in which he expressed concern about over-specialization in the academic world and about the increased and not entirely beneficial effect on students and teachers alike resulting from efforts to pursue the PhD. Lois Menand wrote about James and his pragmatist colleagues in his Pulitzer-prize winning study "The Metaphysical Club" which broadly examines changes in American intellectual life during the period of roughly 1870- -- 1920. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America Menand's most recent book, "The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University" (2010) makes no mention of James or his essay. But Menand uses the history of the reform of the American university system during the late 1800s to suggest how and why the structure of American higher education established over 100 years ago may not be entirely conducive to the educational role of the university in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. The book is succinctly and engagingly written but also difficult and challenging. Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University.
Menand addresses four questions about contemporary higher education in the United States: "Why is is so hard to institute a general education cirriculum? Why did the humanities disciplines undergo a crisis of legitimation? Why has 'interdisciplinary' become a magic work? And why do professors all tend to have the same politics?" (p. 16) Each question is discussed in a detailed chapter drawing on both history and on contemporary studies of the state of the American university. As he did in "The Metaphysical Club" Menand pays much attention to the educational reforms in post-Civil War Harvard under its president, Charles Elliott. Elliott drew a sharp distinction between professional and liberal education. Under his administration, a baccalaureate degree became a prerequisite for education in law, medical and other professional schools. Undergraduate education was not intended to be career-oriented. Rather, during this phase of their lives, students were encouraged to pursue knowledge and learning for their own sakes. Liberal arts faculty, the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences to a degree, were not expected to be career oriented but to encourage the pursuit of disinterested knowledge. The partial exception to this would be in the training of other scholars in graduate PhD programs who would carry on the research and teaching of their disciplines. The lines of the various disciplines themeselves, such as English, philosophy, history, social sciences, were themselves established in the universities during the late 1900s. Through a process Menand develops, they assumed a degree of fixity which was became both useful and problematic.
Menand applies his historical approach to the questions he addresses. The demands on the university have stretched beyond the reforms of Charles Elliott and others. Thus, from the earliest years of the 20th Centuries, some universities tried to counter trends towards academic specialization by establishing either distribution requirements in courses students were required to take or a core curriculum separate from a departmental major in which all students were to be exposed to seminal books and ideas in literature, history, or science. These programs, particularly the latter, are difficult to establish and maintain because they cut across entrenched lines of academic disciplines and specializations. But the purpose of these programs is to show students how education and ideas matter in life and to socialize students, to a degree, by exposing them to a range of books and methodologies deemed valuable. Disciplinary lines and disinterested research in part are in tension with this idea.
So as well, Menand shows how each ostensibly separate academic discipline, again mostly in the humanities and social sciences, is in part predicated upon assumptions and upon human experiences arising from outside the boundaries of the discipline. He finds that this point has been made sharply in recent years by deconstruction and less notorious forms of critical theories. While each field of academic study has tended to become more intensive and ingrown, it faces challenges from other forms of thought. Menand takes this difficult tendency and uses it to explore what he calls the "crisis of legitimation" in the humanities and the difficulties of "interdisciplinary" programs, in which specialists from different academic fields try to team-teach or to create an academic program crossing narrow lines. These programs, Menand believes, usually have unsatisfactory results as specialists in different programs find themselves talking past each other.
In the final chapter of the book, Menand presents statistical evidence that shows that most American professors are remarkably similar in sharing a highly liberal political outlook which varies substantially from the overall political outlook of other Americans. He asks why this might be the case and tends to find the answer in the long process of education in the liberal arts leading the the PhD. Professional education, including PhD education includes socialization as well as intellectual functions. Many humanities students require twice the length of time to earn the PhD in their chosen field than do law or medical students. They compete for academic positions that are becoming increasingly scarce with the deemphasis on the liberal arts. The training, paradoxically, inspires both a great deal of personal independence in thought and a great deal of conformity. The situation does not admit of a ready answer. On the one hand, there is a need for a degree of independence in the academy from the community at large as the role of the university is not to be a "mere echo of public culture." (p.158) On the other, hand, the self-selection and self-replication character of the various PhD programs, Menand argues, creates its own biases and prejudgments among the university community. Menand suggests either shortening the PhD program or restructuring it to make it more accessible and less specialized to a specific discipline.
I was a liberal arts (philosophy) major many years ago but did not pursue an academic career. But I have continued to read and, I trust, to reflect, through my life. My education may have contributed to what I became. From outside the university, I remain interested in the life of the mind and its relationship to human life and needs. Menand has written a difficult book, but one that will be of interest to those concerned with, both in and out of academia, education and its purpose.
Robin Friedman
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
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