What's College For?: The Struggle to Define American Higher Education.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Review

by Zachary Karabell, New York: Basic Books, $24.00/$14.00 paper

Few topics inspire as much doom-saying, declinism, and nostalgia as U.S. higher education - a recurring motif neatly summed up in the title of the recent academic memoir, Gone for Good: Tales of University Life After the Golden Age. Not coincidentally, few institutions have proven as adaptable, open-ended, and robust as American colleges and universities. Indeed, it's nothing less than astounding that all the colonial colleges - Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Rutgers, and Dartmouth - are still up and running more than 200 years after their foundings.

Of course, those schools barely resemble their former selves. It is precisely that ability to morph into new and varied forms that underlies the continuous pronouncements - from the right and the left, the old and the young, the smart and the stupid - on the "death" of the university, the "decline" of college, and the ongoing "crisis" in higher education. Colleges and universities are always dying, declining, and lurching from one crisis to the next. But they are also always being reborn, getting restored, and resolving problems.

In the early 19th century, administrators wrung their hands over whether to teach modern languages and, even more scandalous, "modern" literature (e.g., Voltaire and other Enlightenment authors); in the late 19th century, they vociferously debated whether students should have the right to pursue elective courses and to study science; in the early 20th century, they fretted over the "Jewish problem" (i.e., too many smart Semites) and whether American literature was worthy of study; during the 1960s and '70s, they debated assigning letter grades, killing foreign language requirements, chucking fiats and ROTC and in loco parentis, and going coed. Nowadays, heated, intense, and ugly debates abound over every conceivable topic related to higher ed: corporate and state funding, curriculum, speech codes, academic standards, preferential admissions, campus alcohol policies - you name it. These ongoing battles are best understood as signs of life, however, not death.

Our country's loosely knit system of post-secondary education is a study in decentralized and continued change, a forceful example of Schumpeterian creative destruction, with all sorts of models proliferating and competing, some flourishing and others failing (some colleges even go out of business). In 1800, there were 32 colleges in the country, none of which regularly admitted blacks or women and most of which had religious affiliations. Today, there are more than 3,600 post-secondary institutions, including about 1,500 two-year colleges, 2,200 four-year colleges, and about 450 Ph.D.-granting institutions. The huge growth in schools has been more than equaled by a huge increase both in the sheer number of students and in their variation. In 1900, less than 3 percent of adult Americans aged 25 or older had a bachelor's degree; by 1970, that figure stood at about 10 percent. In 1997, it was about 25 percent. In the past, students were overwhelmingly affluent males. In 1997, according to American Demographics, fully two-thirds of graduating high school seniors - including 70 percent of women, 64 percent of men, 68 percent of whites, and 60 percent of blacks - immediately matriculated at a four-year college.

These are healthy numbers and they reflect a basic health in higher education: More people can go to more schools that are more or less to their liking. That's not to say there are not problems with higher education, or that some trends are not better than others, or that there is no room for criticizing specific policies at specific schools. Rather, it is to underscore that precisely those issues are constantly being raised, debated, and worked through. Contrary to appeals to a fabled Utopian U. and jeremiads predicting certain and imminent doom, higher education in the United States must be considered a huge success, one inextricably bound up in colleges' and universities' willingness to change.

In different ways, Alvin Kernan's In Plato's Cave, Annette Kolodny's Failing the Future, and Zachary Karabell's What's College For? explore how schools adapt to new circumstances. These books document significant changes that have occurred, suggest possible directions for the future, and add something significant to the ongoing discussion about the future of college and university life. Anyone interested in the evolution of American higher education...