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What's College For?: The Struggle To Define American Higher Education

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Karabell addresses truly urgent concerns which have always tormented me as a young tenured college professor. He is quite right that most tenured elite faculty have little or no concern with the utter and increasing irrelevance of most academic humanities scholarship to anyone but a few hundred of their colleagues. I have also quite often been discomfitted at the contrast between the rarified world I research and teach in, nicely paid and perked to do so, and the community college classes I occasionally guest lecture in, where the stark contrast between today's American demographic reality and what I have chosen to devote my career to is painfully evident.

But Karabell's presentation is unfocused. If professors are to communicate more with the general public as he rightly urges, then editors at popular publishing houses need to give more thought to the throughline of books like this. What I glean from the book is that 1) elite professors' scholarship means nothing to the general public, who today are the heart of the student body rather than being a small white elite, 2) that we need to rethink what an education preparing students for "the world out there" really is, and that it is not lit crit theory and "There is no truth", and that 3) professors are trained to research rather than teach, and that this is perilous for undergraduate teaching as well as graduate student training. Okay. But all of this is spread over several chapters which, while interesting and tight in themselves, overlap too much as a general presentation and leave an overriding impression of a hopeless casserole of entropy and smugness that it would be impossible to cut through.

Yet this is supposed to be a policy book -- and thus I am left with the question in the title unanswered: what can we do? I do not expect 200 pages of specific policy -- but Karabell's call for universities and faculty associations to just "be open to experimentation" offers no real basis for decisive action.

Karabell appears to hold off on confronting the obvious upshot of his findings: that ALL undergraduate education ought be more vocationally geared, from the Ivies on down, and that we need to go back to the old-fashioned approaches to literature and history. I highly suspect Karabell believes something along these lines, and this would be a great book -- rather than an engaging but scattered critique -- if he had come out with this, or some more concretely constructive guidelines.

What are we to think, for example, of his vignettes of college classes where students are encouraged to opinionize from the gut rather than digest facts and think rigorously? Karabell gives the sense that this won't do -- but then what will? If this is what students like -- and they certainly do tend to chalk up classes like this as great experiences -- then what are we to make of Karabell's charge that universities are at fault in not catering to students' needs? What's college for?, indeed. We need another book to guide us to how to decide.

Zachary Karabell set out across the nation to answer the simple,yet nebulous and all-encompassing question "What's College For?" He returned to compose an elegant, intelligent panoromic view of the widening expanse of American higher education. The book lacks real focus, but you get the feeling that Karabell wasn't really after that. He merely wanted to paint a broad view of American higher education. His work is all encompassing and, in the end, prescriptive; ultimately calling upon graduate schools to place greater emphasis on teaching and less significance on the pressure to publish. Karabell also considers the plight of adjunct faculty, the instituion of tenure, the widening gap between professors and society, the commodification of education, and the place of the humanities in the future of educaiton. It is an intelligent book which should be useful to anyone related to or considering American higher education.

This book asks the titular question "What's College For?", and tries to answer parts of the question from the perspectives of various parties.

This book is not, as I first feared, an opinion piece about what doe-eyed 17-year-olds should extract from their humanities education. Instead, it's the author's attempts to discover and consider opinions on the purpose of college, in the minds of various kinds of people -- society at large, undergrads (both right out of high school or "non-traditional"), grad students, tenured and untenured faculty, and so on.

The book raises many difficult questions, and points out many basic (and worsening) flaws in the US college system, flaws that are, more often than not, never raised in discussions of the system you hear elsewhere.

Karabell's method is to answer the larger question in the title via some smaller bites at it, which you could paraphrase as "what's grad school for?", "what's tenure for (and why are so few people getting it)?", "what're adjuncts for (and why do they get paid slave wages)?", "what's the history department for?", "what's research for?", "what is undergrad education for?", etc.

The point of this book is that the parties involved often have very different, even contradictory answers to these questions, reflecting different goals about every aspect of college in the US. The book succeeds in establishing this very important point, as well as in suggesting that the current situation requires readjustment (with there being multiple ways to readjust it, not just one big answer that'll suit everyone), so that everyone (undergrads, grad students, adjuncts, and faculty of various kinds) gets at least some of their goals fulfilled.

There are some notable and basically inexcusable flaws to this book:

* The question "what's college for?" immediately gets replaced by "what's college IN THE U.S. for?", as if college/university education, elsewhere, past or present, were nonexistent, or were totally irrelevant to the situation in the US.

* The author too easily goes from observing that something is true of the discipline of history in the US (he's a history professor), to assuming it's true of all academic discplines. Sometimes this works, but often it /really really/ doesn't.

* And there's some production problems -- lack of basic fact checking (producing no fewer than three imaginative ways to misspell "Cal State Northridge"), and an endnotes section that's unnecessarily hard to work and is riddled with stupid typos.

But the greatest failing of this book is that it spends too much time on questions other that what I think is the most important one: what do undergrads want/expect out of college? (And to an extent, what does society want them to want from it?) Karabell doesn't /avoid/ this question by any means -- it's what the book starts out (chs 1 and 2) discussing, and what it basically ends with (ch 9). But too much of what's inbetween is too long while contributing too little to answering the larger question in the title (notably Ch 8, "History Standards", which could have been completely deleted without detracting from the rest of the book at all).

Chapter 9, "Society in Higher Education" is so /very/ good, but so very short, that my only reaction to it was that all of the book before it should have been shelved, and replaced with more of what was in chapter 9 -- the asking of questions like: WHY do Americans think college is right for /everyone/? (In fact, do they think this?) WHY do Americans think college is necessary background for so many jobs where it's plainly not? Why do Americans get the willies at the term "vocational education", and yet flock to majors that are not basically just preparatory to the work force -- comp sci, business, accounting? Or, in fact, is this the case? I'd agree, I guess, that a business degree is basically vocational education, but is that really true of, say, comp sci degrees in general? How about medicine? Chemistry? Applied physics? Statistics? I, for one, would like to know /how many/ people are majoring in solidly academic things (Classics, say), how many people are majoring in what Karabell sees as vocational education (business), and how many people are in the grey area. And I'd like to know why they're going to school (at great expense of time and money) and why they're majoring in what they're majoring in -- i.e., how each undergrad student answers for himself the question "what is college for?".

I wish to give this small work the highest possible rating in honor merely for being the most potent work of irony I've seen in some time. What's wrong with college? What's college for? Such nonsense as this. A postmodern work critiquing the postmodern world with sweeping generalizations and a thesis straight from the mind of Oscar Wilde.

This is a terrible book. Given it's content, the title should be: "What's wrong with the history department?" Karabell cites history faculty stories without ever noticing that his scope is so limited that he misses his entire point. There is a lot more to college than the humanities or history. They're critical but not the whole story. He is dismissive of any other discipline, especially "applied" disciplines, but reading this book you'd never know that colleges teach chemistry, biology, or any topic outside the humanities.

According to Karabell, any criticism of the way history faculty operate comes from the mouths of conservatives. He finds many of the history professors he cites to be left-leaning, lesbian or activist, but he dare not call them liberal, Marxist or communist. The concept of political correctness needs his attention. He can't recognize that the out-of-touch left are part of the problem or, as Pogo said: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Karabell is blind to the problem of the selfish overproduction of doctorates in history, so blind to accept a dismissive note from one of those complacent, tenured types who claims that employement for the graduates of his program is not his concern. The same departments who whine about poor job prospects are the ones who produce needless graduates. And asking a specialist to teach a survey course -- what an insult!

College is meant to prepare students for life. To suggest that an education in history is sufficient is just plain wrong. A college education includes the life of the mind as well as the life of work. Understanding history but not understanding economics, markets and the "theory of life" is a formula for failure. A good college educates students who become self-perpetuating learning systems and good, informed, engaged citizens. A liberal arts education includes the study of economics, the sciences, and psychology, among other subjects, and not just history.