In Pursuit of Knowledge: Scholars, Status, and Academic Culture (review)

In Pursuit of Knowledge unfortunately misses the mark in informing the debate about ways that higher education can be more effective and reach excellence. While it is well written, its ideas are unoriginal, the recommendations oversimplified and disconnected from the analysis, and the scope narrow—crippling to its goal.

Like many before it, this book examines why American higher education has apparently been diverted from its central role of teaching and learning by the pursuit of prestige—research, status, and money. Since Kerr's The Multiversity, critics have been arguing that the pursuit of research and prestige have drawn higher education away from its core mission. Rhode believes her contribution is to present a more balanced perspective of the criticisms lodged against higher education while still being critical and suggesting needed changes. She believes hyperbole from critics and supporters detract from real change as the dialogue become more polarized. I certainly appreciated her more balanced approach but found that her review offered almost no new insights, repeating the same message presented in many recent texts. I could find little here to recommend reading it.

The book is organized into chapters that review literature about scholarship, teaching, administration and service, and the public intellectual. Each section reviews criticisms such as jargon-filled, insignificant, and poorly written research; inept committee structures; lack of attention to undergraduate teaching; conflicts of interest; lack of assessment of teaching; service being done primarily by women and minorities, etc.

After reviewing the many criticisms and weaknesses of American higher education (balanced with the good work going on), she offers two solutions: greater accountability and matching rewards to the core mission and activities. These are hardly novel recommendations, and they are also not related to the actual problems she identifies. In other words, there is no logical connection between poorly written research and accountability or rewards. Writing conventions are an issue of faculty socialization, but solutions like this—matched to the problem—never emerge. Rhode appears to believe that every problem can be solved with more accountability and different reward structures—an oversimplified solution at best, and perhaps even a dangerous one if applied by people who lack understanding.

There are a few good observations—the rising costs of higher education, the myth of the goodness of growth, the problems of commercialization, the need for more and better assessment, and recent misuses of academic freedom, for example. But they are all drawn from other recent texts (e.g., Bok, 2003; Brewer, Gates, & Goldman, 2002; Zemsky, Wegner, & Massey, 2005) and are not the author's insights.

In addition to offering no new insights, Rhode makes several choices that limit the text's perspective and value. Like so many texts before it, the author limits her analysis to the research universities—the very problem that leads to the dilemma she highlights in the book. If the problem with American higher education is the pursuit of prestige—which is typically led by the research institutions—focusing once again only on this group reinforces their status and centrality, ignoring the good teaching and learning that are occurring in small private colleges and community colleges. Why should they set the standards, especially if they do not mirror the desired values? What we need is a book that focuses on what research universities can learn from other sectors, so that the pursuit of prestige can be curbed. We need to stop holding up the research university as the model.

The book also ignores the changing working conditions of faculty. Faculty must deal with ever-increasing teaching loads, administrative demands, and diminishing state funding. They are pressured to pursue grants, adapt to technology, and the like. But Rhode seems unaware of the very real pressures that divert faculty from the luxury of spending time with students and reaching the level of excellence and quality desired. Our systems and structures are strained to the point that quality is hard to...