THE ROLE OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: The Creation of the Future.

• Author: Zalinger, Jason
• Position: Review

THE ROLE OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: The Creation of the Future by Frank H. T. Rhodes Cornell University Press, $29.95

Alma Matters

LAST MAY, I LEFT MY DORM Broom and made the long trek across the University of Connecticut's attractive and sprawling campus to the English department to have my adviser sign my degree-completion forms. This was the last document I needed to graduate. After he signed, my adviser asked me bluntly, "Did you enjoy your time as an English major?" Of course, I told him. I was proud of my degree. His face lit up. "That's terrific," he replied. "Most people really regret it."

His comment shook me. What did he mean most English majors regret it? Should I have picked a different major? And most important, where was this sagacious advice when I was a freshman? Indeed, in all the meetings I had with my adviser over four years, at which he signed off on my course schedule, I don't remember ever getting any useful academic advice. Had Frank H.T. Rhodes been my adviser, he might have summoned the following defense of the oft-maligned liberal-arts degree: "From ancient Egypt and Greece to Renaissance Italy ... it has been in the most literal sense the embodiment of insight, an assertion of the human spirit ... Education, unleavened by the sense of beauty and luminosity that art can provide, is a wasteland." Now that would have made me feel a whole lot better.

The inadequacies of the academic advisory system are just one of the many university shortfalls that Rhodes chronicles in The Role of the American University: The Creation of the Future. Rhodes, president emeritus at Cornell University, argues that, although the American university system is the best in the world, there are pressing issues which must be addressed if we're to maintain this dominance in the next century.

He picks a wide range of targets for his critique. But he is a bit short on specific solutions. For instance he condemns the ever-increasing size of research universities for eroding a sense of community. UConn is a big research university, and I sometimes felt like I spent my time wandering, not really a part of anything more than my circle of friends. Rhodes calls this a "catastrophe" for it "undermines the very foundation on which the universities were established." And Rhodes' answer to this problem, drum roll please: establish a "meaningful dialogue" with students, professors, and administrators.

He also takes on the problem of grade inflation. The...