Killing the Spirit - Hardcover

Smith, Page

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670828173 ISBN 13: 9780670828173

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1990

Synopsis

Addressing the current state and future of education, this comprehensive survey of higher education in America traces its origins and development, examines such issues as tenure and academic fundamentalism, and calls for radical changes in the system

About this title

From Library Journal:

Historian Smith is the author of the eight-volume "People's History of the United States." Here he has produced an excellent general history of American higher education, beginning with a discussion of its current problems. Smith's insights and controversial comments have the potential for upsetting those wedded to the status quo in higher education in the same fashion that A Nation at Risk did for K-12 public education. Approximately one third of the book deals with the "sacred cows," foibles, and fallacies of higher education: tenure; graduate assistants teaching instead of faculty; the publish or perish syndrome; women's studies; the nonscientific social sciences; and the inhumanity of the humanities. One oversight of the book is the lack of mention of the community/junior college movement. For eductors, administrators, and others concerned with the future of higher education. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/89.
- Scott Johnson, Meridian Community Coll. Lib., Miss.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

To the continuing debate about the ills of American higher education, Smith, founding provost of UC Santa Cruz, contributes probing, provocative insights. With a tribute to his undergraduate mentor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Harvard social philosophy professor and often disparaged radical thinker, the author sets about "mapping the desert" of contemporary higher education. After a lucid traverse of the development of education in the U.S., he sums up its present state as "Academic fundamentalism. . . the stubborn refusal of the academy to acknowledge any truth that does not conform to professorial dogmas." In Smith's view, a meld of the classical Christian traditions with secular democracy may restore the modern university as a true "academic community." 30,000 first printing; author tour.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0670828173
• ISBN 13: 9780670828173
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352