Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

by Jason Brennan (Author), Phillip Magness (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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ISBN-13: 978-0197608272

ISBN-10: 0197608272

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Academics extol high-minded ideals, such as serving the common good and promoting social justice. Universities aim to be centers of learning that find the best and brightest students, treat them fairly, and equip them with the knowledge they need to lead better lives.

But as Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness show in Cracks in the Ivory Tower, American universities fall far short of this ideal. At almost every level, they find that students, professors, and administrators are guided by self-interest rather than ethical concerns. College bureaucratic structures also often incentivize and reward bad behavior, while disincentivizing and even punishing good behavior. Most students, faculty, and administrators are out to serve themselves and pass their costs onto others.

The problems are deep and pervasive: most academic marketing and advertising is semi-fraudulent. To justify their own pay raises and higher budgets, administrators hire expensive and unnecessary staff. Faculty exploit students for tuition dollars through gen-ed requirements. Students hardly learn anything and cheating is pervasive. At every level, academics disguise their pursuit of self-interest with high-faluting moral language.

Marshaling an array of data, Brennan and Magness expose many of the ethical failings of academia and in turn reshape our understanding of how such high power institutions run their business. Everyone knows academia is dysfunctional. Brennan and Magness show the problems are worse than anyone realized. Academics have only themselves to blame.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jason Brennan is the Flanagan Family Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of ten books, including When All Else Fails and In Defense of Openness.

Phillip W. Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He is the author of two books and over a dozen scholarly articles on a diverse array of topics, including the economics of slavery, the history of international trade,
federal tax policy, economic inequality, and the economic dimensions of higher education.
--This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07NYT5P7C
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 1st edition (April 1, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 1, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2709 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 330 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0197608272
Lending ‏ : ‎ Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #804,762 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #256 in Non-US Legal Systems (Kindle Store)
- #481 in Business Education
- #499 in Education Philosophy & Social Aspects

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46 ratings

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Jason Brennan

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Jason Brennan (Ph.D., 2007) is Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business, and by courtesy, Professor of Philosophy, at Georgetown University. He specializes in issues at the intersection of politics, philosophy, and economics.

He is the author of ten books, including Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Bad Business of Higher Ed (Oxford 2019), with Phil Magness; When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice (Princeton 2018); In Defense of Openness: Why Global Freedom is the Humane Solution to Global Poverty (Oxford 2018), with Bas van der Vossen; Against Democracy (Princeton 2016); and Markets without Limits (Routledge 2016). He is currently writing, with Chris Surprenant, Injustice for All: How Financial Incentives Created America's Dysfunctional Criminal Justice System and How to Fix It, for Routledge Press.

Customer reviews

5 star		68%
4 star		17%
3 star		6%
2 star		4%
1 star		4%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Vladimir Antimonov

Too many repetitions, should have been 2 times shorter

Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2019

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Interesting book about how academia works and what drives decision-making there (short answer: established incentive structure for faculty/administrators/students and rational self interest of senior faculty/administrators not to change these incentives).

The book is easy to read but highly repetitive and has too much filler (from Chapter 3 onwards). The same ideas and even examples are brought up again and again as if for the first time, sometimes almost verbatim. I do not remember another book where I felt compelled to turn pages that fast because it was mostly a reiteration of what was said before. Some phrases are overused too: “glut of (PhD’s / job seekers)” is used 13 times throughout the book. “Voodoo math/calculus” 4 times in 6 consecutive pages.

Multiple repetitions soon dull the attention, maybe that’s the reason why the editors soothed through the place where water is said to boil at 100 degrees _Fahrenheit_.

One random comment on where I remember I disagreed with the authors. To buttress the proposition that students are generally not good at applying what they learned in classroom to real-life situations, the authors write: “... if the majority of students needing psychological counseling have poor dietary habits, does it follow that these same students should eat better? This is a softball question. The correct answer is no, not necessarily. It could be that a poor diet causes psychological problems. But, alternatively, it could be that suffering from a psychological problem causes people to eat badly. It could be that psychological issues and poor eating habits have a common cause.” Then, mocking the typical student’s response, they write: “totally ignoring the need for comparison groups and control of third variables, subjects responded to the “diet” example with statements such as “It can’t hurt to eat well.”

Well, unlike the authors, I think that it’s a very reasonable answer to this question. Given that their dietary habits are _poor_, they _should_ eat better / it won’t hurt to eat better, whether it will help with psychological issues or not. If, instead of “should eat better” the question ended with “will get better psychologically if they improve their diet”, then it becomes a question on logic and not on morality, and I think that students' responses would have been very different indeed.

Probably the most interesting fact that I learned from this book is that ratings of instructors’ optimism by students show an impressive .84 correlation with end-of-term course evaluations by other students. In other words, lecturer’s optimism alone may explain up to 84% of the score the students gave him at the end of the course! (yes, yes, correlation is not causation, and there are other correlations mentioned too, thus "may explain" and not "explains").

Overall I liked the book, but the authors could have and should have made it shorter and tighter, saving thousands of hours for their readers without leaving out anything important. Would have given the book five stars had the authors resisted the temptation to go beyond the short book format. I found it somewhat ironic that while advocating for parsimony in higher education, the authors did not extend that same value to writing this book.

31 people found this helpful

Helpful

Mike Tolhurst

A new take on the challenges of higher education

Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2019

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The book is helpful at applying a different theoretical lens, public choice, to the challenges of higher education. That is, do features of the university begin to "make sense" if we theoretically assume that the actors within the system are on the whole more self-interested than not, and look to improve their own situation?

It turns out that much does. Students have incentives to pursue degrees rather than education, professors have incentives to pursue those activities (research) that reward them professionally and financially, and administrators also look to increase their resources and authority. Thus, we have a system in which grades are not an accurate representation of student learning (assuming students learn), administrative costs grow steadily, and there are too many PhDs minted for too few academic jobs.

Compared with other books on higher education this book leads with its structural interpretation and then examines whether it is consistent with presently observed data. In this way the authors aren't conducting their own empirical work but rather suggesting "previous theories haven't explained the observed phenomena, does ours do better?" Even if critics suspect Magness and Brennan are wrong, they will need to design the survey instruments and gather the data that would prove them wrong.

That said, there is one main gap still left with the reader.

Much is made of the incentives for research, but there is not much discussion about the value or use of this research. Presumably misplaced incentives that have plagued other areas of the academia are also at play in this domain. (How, for example, might the authors tackle the challenge of replicability, assess the pros and cons of peer review, or the academic publishing industry?)

11 people found this helpful

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S. Hayward

Data rich, and highly readable.

Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2019

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This book combines rigorous data analysis with clear, vivid prose that make it a delight to read. Sure to provoke many readers, it is brimming with original takes on the contentious higher education scene, along with some original and highly counter-intuitive findings about what is really taking places in higher education today.

Maybe the most fun chapter is the authors' argument that collgees and universities would be busted by the government for false advertising if it were any other business.

13 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

ArtichokesForAll

Disappointing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 7, 2019

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

I was hoping that this book would be an interesting and insightful discussion of the problems with the higher education system, but unfortunately have found it not quite what I expected.

I had been prepared for the fact that the book is written from an entirely American perspective, which is fine, as it is an area in which the problems from that part of the world are definitely similar to those in the UK. However, rather than a learned discourse, what we really have is two academics bemoaning the younger generations and harking back to the good old days, without seemingly recognising the world, and with it students, has moved on. Disappointing.

JMB1779

Too much administration, too little learning

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 21, 2019

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

A well reasoned, and rather serious in tone, analysis of the current American system where differing incentives have led to less learning and too much administration. The authors come up with suggestions for how to resolve it, but whether we will see a clean up any time soon is questionable.
I would say the tone and detail makes it a book for people with real interest in the subject and not for laypeople.

Mother of Dragonflies

Somewhat grumpy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 26, 2019

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

Two US male university lecturers having a good old moan about the state of things, especially woke policies. Will suit male university lecturers who want to seek vomfort in moaning about the state of things. Reads well, but, guys, get a life.

Flickering Ember

Excellent.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 9, 2021

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

Really well written and researched. A really interesting and informative read.