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Alfred a Knopf
September 2010
On Sale: August 31, 2010
256 pages
ISBN: 0307593290
EAN: 9780307593290
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A provocative look at the troubled present state of American
higher education and a passionately argued and learned
manifesto for its future. In Crisis on Campus, Mark C. Taylor—chair of the Department
of Religion at Columbia University and a former professor at
Williams College—expands on and refines the ideas presented
in his widely read and hugely controversial 2009 New York
Times op-ed. His suggestions for the ivory tower are both
thought-provoking and rigorous: End tenure. Restructure
departments to encourage greater cooperation among existing
disciplines. Emphasize teaching rather than increasingly
rarefied research. And bring that teaching to new domains,
using emergent online networks to connect students worldwide. As a nation, he argues, we fail to make such necessary and
sweeping changes at our peril. Taylor shows us the
already-rampant consequences of decades of organizational
neglect. We see promising graduate students in a distinctly
unpromising job market, relegated—if they’re lucky—to
positions that take little advantage of their training and
talent. We see recent undergraduates with massive burdens of
debt, and anxious parents anticipating the inflated tuitions
we will see in ten or twenty years. We also see students at
all levels chafing under the restrictions of traditional
higher education, from the structures of assignments to
limits on courses of study. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Accommodating the students of today and anticipating those
of tomorrow, attuned to schools’ financial woes and the
skyrocketing cost of education, Taylor imagines a new
system—one as improvisational, as responsive to new
technologies and as innovative as are the young members of
the iPod and Facebook generation. In Crisis on Campus, we have an iconoclastic, necessary
catalyst for a national debate long overdue.
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