Eight Books That Explain the University Crisis

The Atlantic

7 days ago

The past 10 years have been among the most tumultuous for higher education since the student movements of the 1960s. The 2020s began with a wave of progressive fervor that swept the nation and was especially notable on America's campuses. Five years later, the cultural pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. After a series of protests against the war in Gaza, followed by police crackdowns and debates over anti-Semitism, American universities (especially elite ones) are having their influential role in political life scrutinized. But arguments over their ideological bent have overshadowed the other major ways these institutions affect the country: Since at least the end of World War II, they have been driving forces for prosperity, social mobility, and world-changing scientific innovation. They underpin a huge portion of the country's sports ecosystem, provide the setting for hundreds of works of pop culture, and shape how Americans understand the transition from child to adult.
President Donald Trump's administration has made unprecedented attacks on America's colleges and universities, and the effects of this onslaught are not limited to degree seekers, faculty, or administration—they ripple across American society, affecting, for example, patients who rely on universities' affiliated teaching hospitals and college towns where academic institutions are the main employers. There is no better time to look with clear eyes at the goals, accomplishments, and failures of these schools. The eight books on this list, taken in combination, tell the story of the historic rise, and current crisis, of the American university.
The University in Ruins, by Bill Readings
One of the most insightful books about the contemporary American university was written in the 1990s by a British professor who taught in Canada. Although Readings's history is not focused solely on U.S. institutions, few works better describe the changes they have undergone. Historically, he writes, colleges and universities aimed to imprint capital- C Culture—especially a familiarity with a nation's great texts and intellectual traditions—on young people. Today, however, students more often are seen and see themselves as consumers who are buying diplomas in order to signal their employability. In this model, the values that animate higher education are job preparation, skill building, and networking, not intellectual engagement or humanistic fulfillment. The University in Ruins is first and foremost a work of scholarship—a readable one, despite being peppered with occasional academese—but it is also a book of uncommon prescience that saw clearly that the rarefied ivory tower, with its idea of academia as a realm detached from the coarse affairs of the material world, was transforming into a credentialing bureaucracy.
The Great American University, by Jonathan R. Cole
Cole, a sociologist and Columbia University's former dean of faculties, offers a doorstop history of the modern research university that doubles as an unusually perceptive defense of these schools. What distinguishes them from other kinds of higher-ed institutions is their first priority, which is, as their name implies, research. They can offer excellent teaching, cultivate an educated citizenry, and help graduates climb the socioeconomic ladder, but these features are subsidiary to their primary mission of increasing human knowledge. Schools such as the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Florida may be most often in the public eye because of their sports teams, but they're also places where things that improve people's lives in ways both big and small—pacemakers, the polio vaccine, Gatorade—were invented. Although Cole is not skeptical enough about the growing financialization and corporatization of higher education, his book makes plain how universities have advanced the interests of people around the world—even when those people might not realize (or appreciate) it.
Ravelstein
Bellow's thinly veiled 2000 roman à clef about his friendship with the star academic Allan Bloom—the philosopher who wrote the best-selling jeremiad The Closing of the American Mind —is a tender portrait of its subject. But Bellow's novel is as much about the institutional culture that shaped Bloom. It is a paean to academia as an enterprise that works to sort ideas that are base and quotidian from those that are noble and timeless, and its titular character embodies this faith in the professoriate as a kind of secular priesthood. Abe Ravelstein is a study in contradictions. Devoted to a life of the mind, he approaches reading the classics as a kind of soul-craft, and he's preoccupied with the wisdom of ancient philosophers, poets, and statesmen; yet he also nurtures an irrepressible fondness for modern luxuries such as Armani suits, Cuban cigars, and 'solid-gold Montblanc pens.' The irony of Ravelstein is that its protagonist's celebrity is a symptom of the same commodification of knowledge that is eroding the things he most holds dear. Read 25 years later, the novel is an artifact of its time: The diminishment of the university's purpose that Bellow witnessed feels much more advanced today.
No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, by Ellen W. Schrecker
Schrecker's No Ivory Tower is a granular account of the effect that the Red Scare had on American universities, as well as a broader meditation on the nature and history of academic freedom. Published almost four decades ago, the book remains among the best accounts of the period when the House Un-American Activities Committee led anti-Communist witch hunts into Hollywood, the government, and colleges. In our own moment of neo-McCarthyist panic, as repression and speech crackdo wns again sweep the higher-education system, it has much to teach us. Schrecker reminds readers bluntly that 'the academy did not fight McCarthyism,' before adding the coup de grâce: 'It contributed to it.' Today's faculty and administrators would do well to recall how institutions such as the University of California system implemented loyalty oaths, and administrations worked to accommodate, rather than contest, the state's assault on intellectual freedom.
R, by Lauren Lassabe Shepherd
Thanks to a nearly century-long campaign by right-leaning pundits, writers, commentators, and media celebrities, the phrase 'campus activism' is almost exclusively associated with the political left. Shepherd shows that this is only part of the story: Her book examines how in the late 1960s, at the height of radical campus politics and the backlash against them, conservatives created student groups and movements of their own, backed by wealthy funders and organizations such as the Mont Pelerin Society and the Foundation for Economic Education. This campus organizing, she argues, not only produced many of the conservative leaders and intellectuals who would go on to shape the 20th and 21st centuries (including Karl Rove and Pat Buchanan); it also set the template for the right's approach to universities today. The now-familiar conservative move in which occasional examples of left-wing student excess are intensely spotlighted in order 'to create suspicion around campus antiwar and civil rights initiatives,' as Shepherd writes, was pioneered more than 50 years ago.
After the Ivory Tower Falls, by Will Bunch
Bunch's book was an instant classic of the time-honored 'academia is imploding' genre, but its apocalyptic title is also slightly misleading. Yes, it offers a bracing tour through the crises and failures—the explosion of student debt, the devaluing of expertise—that have plagued academia in the last 50 years. But After the Ivory Tower Falls is also a moving, even idealistic account of what higher education can be when it works. Invoking the G.I. Bill, which made a college education available to more of those in the working and middle classes, Bunch forces us to remember that the phrase 'paying your way through college' is derived from the fact that you actually used to be able to pay your way through college. He points out that when postsecondary schooling was politically prioritized and economically democratized, however partially and however unevenly, it increased both national prosperity and the financial prospects of many Americans. 'A college diploma became the shining symbol of a nation's promise—the American Dream,' he writes, lamenting that today, for too many, it can be a perfunctory piece of paperwork that saddles its recipient with unpayable debts.
Kent State: An American Tragedy, by Brian VanDeMark
The Naval Academy historian VanDeMark's recent book on the Kent State shooting, in which the National Guard fired on and killed four Vietnam War protestors, reminds readers that last year's spate of campus protests, which brought students and faculty into contact with militarized police, was not unprecedented. Kent State is an empathetic, politically dispassionate look at that massacre in the spring of 1970. VanDeMark largely sidesteps the received wisdom about the event, instead bringing fresh reporting and details to bear on 'the full story,' which, he writes, 'has remained elusive.' He casts a human (though not exculpatory) eye on all of the involved parties, including the students who were shot dead and the National Guard troops who raised their rifles. He explains that some of the Guardsmen were avoiding Vietnam duty themselves, and he provides a new account of the precipitating event that led the assembled soldiers to fire. As a whole, Kent State offers a powerful and lamentably topical reminder of how easily things can go wrong when protestors and uniformed squads with guns come into conflict.
The Adjunct Underclass, by Herb Childress
In the 21st century, academic work has been transformed by the rise of the hustling part-time professor, or 'adjunct.' These jobs often have more in common with shifts for gig employers such as Lyft than the tweedy image of the tenured academic we get from soppy campus movies. You cannot understand the contemporary university if you do not understand the acceleration of adjunctification. Childress draws on interviews and an intimate understanding of academia's management and financial model to lay bare the predatory and often inhumane labor practices —poverty wages, lack of health care, job insecurity—that are now common in an industry that fancies itself a bastion of progress and virtue. The Adjunct Underclass does much to disabuse readers of the fantasies of professorial life while exposing the considerably grimmer reality: At a time when universities were home to administrative bloat, poor management, and soaring tuition fees, they were also adopting employment practices that have left their faculty hanging by a thread.