The University: An Owner's Manual [Paperback]

Henry Rosovsky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 1991 | ISBN-10: 0393307832 | ISBN-13: 978-0393307832

"Superb. . . . Rosovsky has written an important book—probing, wise, shrewd, fair. . . . Deserves to be widely read." —James O. Freeman, Washington Post

A view of America's colleges and universities and how they are run, the challenges they face and the issues that affect their "owners" - students, faculty, alumni, trustees and others. Among the issues covered are tenure, the admission process in elite institutions and curriculum.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The liberal arts curriculum is praised, the tenure system defended and teaching's hazards and rewards accounted for in this guide by a Harvard economics professor and former campus administrator. "An uneasy mix of self-congratulatory personal memoir, college admissions guide for students and parents, and vigorous defense of American higher education," said PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

An extraoridnary gift for discerning major issues. . . . Mr. Rosovsky tackles the big public issues about postsecondary education today—curriculum and the dread canonicity, tenure with its potential stagnation, research versus teaching, the admissions process in elite institutions—in set pieces that are unfailingly informative. (Linda Bradley Salamon - New York Times Book Review )

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (June 17, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393307832
• ISBN-13: 978-0393307832
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #393,234 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Breezy style is both readable and irritating, April 12, 2001

By 

Christopher Weaver "weaverc" (Wayne, NJ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The University: An Owner's Manual (Paperback)

The best thing that I can say about this book is that it's highly readable. Rosovsky has written what is essentially a defense of higher education in the face of increasing impatience over everything from curriculum to tenure. He takes the reader through a Dean's eye view of higher education and he concludes that criticisms are mostly a matter of misunderstandings and that things in the academy are mostly humming along fine.

I agree with Rosovsky that much criticism of higher education is based on misinformation; however, he never really turns a critical eye on his own institution. For instance, he dismisses questions about the emphasis on publishing over teaching by blithely saying, nobody who isn't a good teacher would get tenure. This is a startling statement--one that Rosovsky never backs up, and one that, frankly, just isn't true. Nor does he examine deeper questions about publishing--like whether the pressure to publish doesn't produce a lot of garbage--articles that are driven not by the urge to say anything but by the fear that the writer won't get tenure if he doesn't find something to say. Rosovsky's complaceny on these and other issues turns what might have been a searching, intelligent book into a collection of easy reflections. The book is certainly not empty but neither is it entirely satisfying.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting, Informative, but Limited Book, June 15, 2010

By 

Richard B. Schwartz (Columbia, Missouri USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The University: An Owner's Manual (Paperback)

This is an interesting and informative book. Written by the former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, it is a useful introduction to research-university and research-college culture. It is written with grace and humor and includes sufficient data to support its authority and sufficient anecdotal material to support its wisdom.

It is also a very limited book. It offers a sense of the `feel' of administration, the daily life of a dean, the nature of university relationships, principles and values. It is an account of university `culture'. It has almost nothing to say about the external forces that impinge on universities and the individuals (and share of the budget) devoted to dealing with them. It acknowledges the presence of university critics but opts for optimism rather than pessimism, even as it notes that some of the critics' claims are legitimate (grade inflation, trendy curricula, e.g.). Rosovsky's personal impulses are `old Harvard': moderate/liberal, northeastern and boosterish with a dab of sherry here and a love of crimson, silk robes there. The fact that he is an economist with an Asian area studies emphasis adds both rigor and breadth to some of his insights. The thrust of his comments is one of reassurance. "Here are the reasons for our procedures; they are rational and both tried and true."

The book should be of great interest to keepers of the Harvard flame. He describes the book as an `owner's manual'; it is actually a stakeholders' manual. Stakeholders are not the same as owners and the stakeholders here (Harvard students, Harvard faculty, Harvard alumni/ae, Cambridge residents and so on) will be interested in how the academic core of this particular University functions.

The problem for the rest of the reading public will be that Harvard is such an exception to the experience of nearly all other American institutions, including those whose stature approaches Harvard's. Its endowment, for example, offers it opportunities which few others enjoy; at the same time its dependency upon its endowment makes it subject to far greater threats when the market tanks. Its tenuring procedures are similar to a tiny handful of other institutions but markedly different from nearly everyone else's, including the 60+ members of the Association of American Universities--the top private/public research universities in America. Harvard does not tenure associate professors; nearly everyone else does. Harvard thus has a longer probationary period for junior staff, but then it requires candidates for tenure to compete with anyone and everyone outside of Harvard in the field in question. Harvard's every-tub-on-its-own-bottom budgeting is enormously expensive because it is duplicative. Its traditional `section man' teaching format, with large lectures presided over by tenured faculty with breakout sections managed by graduate students makes for larger class sizes than its cost and reputation would lead one to expect. Its size is relatively large and the number of professional students there creates an ethos that is not only vastly different from that of research colleges but also differently-proportioned than, e.g., top public institutions.

These are more descriptions of the book than criticisms of the book. I believe that nearly all of the author's values, instincts and principles are solid ones. He has actually written a superb book, but one whose title should have been something like "The Culture and Governance of the Arts and Sciences at Harvard University--A Stakeholder's Introduction."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good overview, October 17, 2008

By 

D. Johnston (Costa Rica) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The University: An Owner's Manual (Paperback)

I enjoyed the book immensely. I found it to be a very good introduction to the fundamentals of the US university system. I would recommend it to anyone who is considering higher education either for study or as a career.