The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education

by Warren Treadgold

Overview

Though many people know that American universities now offer an inadequate and incoherent education from a leftist viewpoint that excludes moderate and conservative ideas, few people understand how much this matters, how it happened, how bad it is, or what can be done about it. In The University We Need, Professor Warren Treadgold shows the crucial role of universities in American culture and politics, the causes of their decline in administrative bloat and inept academic hiring, the effects of the decline on teaching and research, and some possible ways of reversing the downward trend. He explains that one suggested reform, the abolition of tenure, would further increase the power of administrators, further decrease the quality of professors, and make universities even more doctrinaire and intolerant. Instead, he proposes federal legislation to monitor the quality and honesty of professors and to limit spending on administration to no more than 20 percent of university budgets (Harvard now spends 40 percent). Finally, he offers a specific proposal for the founding of a new leading university that could seriously challenge the dominance of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley and attract conservative and moderate faculty and students now isolated in universities and colleges that are either leftist or mediocre. While agreeing with conservative critics that universities are in severe crisis, Treadgold believes that the universities’ problems largely transcend ideology and have grown worse partly because disputants on both sides of the academic debate have misunderstood the methods and goals of higher education.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594039904
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	07/10/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Warren Treadgold is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Byzantine Studies and Professor of History at Saint Louis University. With a BA and PhD from Harvard, he has taught at UCLA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Hillsdale College, and Florida International University and has held research fellowships at the University of Munich, the Free University of Berlin, All Souls College at Oxford, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. He has published ten books and many articles on Byzantine, medieval, and late ancient history and literature and published articles on higher education in Commentary, The Weekly Standard, The Wilson Quarterly, and Academic Questions.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 Do Universities Matter? 1

The Power of Universities 1

Universities at an Impasse 9

2 The Problems 17

The Decline of the University 17

Sources of the Problems 21

Problematic Solutions 32

3 The Origins of Campus Leftism 41

A Vague but Powerful Ideology 41

Leftism and Postmodernism 47

4 What Is Good Teaching? 55

Students Grading Professors 55

The Elusive Criteria 61

Elements of Good Teaching 68

5 What Is Good Research? 77

The Issue of Tenure 77

Types of Academic Research 82

How Research Is Judged Now 87

How to Judge Research 94

6 Proposals for Legislation 99

Two National Boards 99

Possible Objections 104

Other Legislation 111

7 A Proposal for a University 119

A New University 119

Establishing the University 126

Possible Objections 137

8 Inspiring a Renaissance 145

Cultural Brilliance 145

Encouraging Brilliance 150

References 159

Notes 163

Index 177

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The acclaimed scholar of Byzantine culture and history Warren Treadgold offers a concise dissection of the pathologies of the modern university, from administrative bloat and record student debt to political intolerance and a therapeutic curriculum. But he offers more than the usual condemnations of the politicized campus, by systematically explaining how pernicious ideas ripple throughout society, politics, culture, and the economy—and what can be done to restore the integrity of higher education. A learned diagnosis by a scholar who knows the contemporary campus agenda inside out, and how to counter it.”

—Victor Davis Hanson, the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, author of The Second World Wars


“Warren Treadgold has spent a lifetime in the academy and now gives us the book of a lifetime about how to rescue it.”

—John Podhoretz, Editor, Commentary Magazine