Academic Duty - Hardcover

Kennedy, Donald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674002229 ISBN 13: 9780674002227

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1997

Synopsis

The university today is under attack from all sides. Parents and students resent the escalating costs of education and wonder where the money is being spent. Aspiring scholars feel betrayed by an institution that prepares them for nonexistent jobs. Critics on the right condemn the teachers who neglect "the canon" while critics on the left condemn the creeping corporatism on campus. Politicians seek greater control over the conduct of research and add new conditions to the use of government funds. Worst of all, the academics are increasingly uneasy in an environment that fosters competition, discourages cooperation, and has made "publish or perish" a condition of survival.

Donald Kennedy, the former president of Stanford University and currently a member of its faculty, has been at the front lines of the issues confounding the academy today. In this important new book, he brings his experience and concern to bear on the present state of the university. He examines teaching, graduate training, research, and their ethical context in the research university. Aware of the numerous pressures that academics face, from the pursuit of open inquiry in the midst of culture wars, to confusion and controversy over the ownership of ideas, to the scramble for declining research funds and facilities, he explores the whys and wherefores of academic misconduct, be it scholarly, financial, or personal.

Kennedy suggests that meaningful reform cannot take place until more rigorous standards of academic responsibility--to students, the university, and the public--are embraced by both faculty and the administration. With vision and compassion, he offers an important antidote to recent attacks from without that decry the university and the professoriate, and calls upon the college community to counter those attacks by looking within and fulfilling its duties.

About this title

Review:

Caught between the Scylla of diminishing funding and the Charybdis of market forces, the American university today finds itself at a watershed of institutional change. Critics point to personal scandals and financial conflicts of interest as evidence for drastic reform, while scholars themselves often defend academic freedom at the price of academic responsibility. In his visionary new book Academic Duty, Donald Kennedy examines many of the troubling issues facing higher education. A former president of Stanford University and no stranger to the culture wars, Kennedy explores the larger forces at work behind academic misconduct. It's a sympathetic account that nonetheless illustrates the ethical problems modern-day academia faces, from the conflict between teaching and research to the troublesome financial links between business, government, and the academy, including those private profit-making ventures that sometimes grow from academic research. Illuminating the often-contradictory goals and values of the modern university, Kennedy urges academics to move beyond politics in this resounding call for personal and institutional responsibility.

From the Back Cover:

An immensely impressive tour of the American university by a guide who has lived what he describes. [Kennedy] speaks with admirable objectivity and fairness of the world he knows so well. He describes with even-handed candor the problems the universities face, and shows how they might meet the challenges ahead. Academic Duty will take its place on the very short list of classic works on the American university.-John W. Gardner, former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, and founder of Common Cause

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0674002229
• ISBN 13: 9780674002227
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320