Tenured moderates: universities are not so much lefty as they are resistant to change.

• Author: Carey, Kevin
• Position: The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Issues of Our Time - Book review

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Issues of Our Time)

By Louis Menand

W.W. Norton, 176 pp.

It's axiomatic among many conservatives that universities are, outside of Cuba, the last refuge of unreconstructed Marxism, hippie havens where ideals of eternal truth have been discarded in favor of mindless relativism and the multiculturalist agenda, moral dead zones where students do little more than indulge their basest instincts, all on the taxpayer's dime.

Louis Menand doesn't engage these arguments directly in his new book The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University--he's too smart and serious a writer for that. But he does address many of the legitimate and vexing questions behind them. Part history of higher education, part sympathetic but insistent argument for change, Menand's book is a worthy and admirably succinct exploration of why colleges are so difficult to improve.

Each of the book's main chapters is devoted to one of four issues. The first is general education (a standard conservative bugaboo), the reluctance of most colleges to insist that there are some things every undergraduate should learn. The problem, says Menand, is that while standard curricula are often framed in terms of canonical books and enduring ideas, they have historically been implemented for present-day reasons. Columbia University's famous Great Books-focused Contemporary Civilization course, still required of all sophomores today, was originally called "War Aims" and was created at the behest of the U.S. military for students enrolled in the World War I equivalent of the ROTC. General Education in Free Society, the influential 1945 report spearheaded by Harvard President James Conant, was a "Cold War document." To resist the temptations of fascism and communism (or, as Conant put it, the "Russian hordes"), Americans needed to be connected by shared beliefs. General education has always been defined as what students need in order to contend with the particular world in which they live.

This cuts against the liberal arts' identity as distinct from the vocational and mundane. "In a system that associates college with the ideals of the love of learning and knowledge for its own sake," says Menand, "a curriculum designed with real-world goals in mind seems utilitarian, instrumentalist, vocational, presentist, anti-intellectual, and illiberal." Nonetheless, Menand (who teaches English at Harvard...