From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Will Bunch, a deeply reported look at the broken state of college in America, arguing that access to college is
the defining political issue of our time, propelling everything from Occupy Wall Street to the election of Donald Trump to the George Floyd protests.
Today there are two Americas, separate and unequal, one educated and one not. And these two tribes—the resentful “non-college” crowd and their diploma-bearing yet increasingly disillusioned adversaries—seem on the brink of a civil war. This conflict is the culmination of an almost secret history of the United States since World War II—centered on the college diploma and how it devolved from a symbol of America’s commitment to learning, science, and social mobility into a kind of Hunger Games contest to the death that has infuriated both the millions who got shut out and millions who got into deep debt to stay afloat. How did we get here?
In After the Ivory Tower Falls, Will Bunch, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and national columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, embarks on a deeply reported journey to the heart of the American Dream. The book opens with the story of a small college town. Gambier, Ohio, is home to affluent, liberal Kenyon College, a tiny speck of Democratic blue amidst the vast red swath of white, post-industrial, rural midwestern America. To understand “the college question,” look no further than Gambier, where a world-class institution caters to elite students, amidst a sea of economic despair.
From there, Bunch traces the history of college in the US—from technical schools, to the landmark GI Bill, to the culture wars of the 60’s and 70’s that found their start on college campuses. He takes a question we need to ask all over again—what, and who, is college even for?—and pushes it into the 21st century by envisioning ways we can invent a new model that works for all Americans.
The sum total is an extraordinary book that stands alongside some of the best zeitgeist-explainer works of our time: Strangers in Their Own Land, The Unwinding, Democracy in Chains, and others. After the Ivory Tower Falls is a stunning work of journalism, both laying bare the root of our political, cultural, and economic division—and charting a new path forward for America.
