HIGHER EDUCATION IN AMERICAN IS IN DEEP TROUBLE

One of the first things I did when I opened Derek Bok, Higher Education in America (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) was to turn to the "Index". Strikingly absent from the index is an entry for "intellect" or 'intellectual," as though higher education has little or nothing to do with developing the intellect, or with being a place where intellectuals might be found in significant numbers, or where intellectual active may be, with a little luck, encountered. Bok, though a critic of aspects of higher education in America, is mainly a cheerleader. He does not hear the strong, loud, persistent anti-intellectual drumbeat which is increasingly being heard and adopted in an increasing number of universities. It is not just that liberal arts education is being killed off, it is that the intellectual life, the life of the mind, has been greatly devalued. Americans are doer, not thinkers. I would wager the typical college graduate has never read Kant, or Plato, or Aristotle, or, for that matter, Moby Dick),  Sad to say, it is better to have on your resume, or in your cover letter, your having read John C. Maxwell, Thinking for a Change: 11 Ways Highly Successful People Approach Life and Work than having read John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. To know enough of second language to get through a business meeting, but not enough to read its its classics.