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  • Cool Hand Luke in the Marketplace of No Ideas
  • Douglas Greenberg (bio)
Louis Menand . The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. Index. xii + 176 pp. $24.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).

If academic writers were baseball players, Louis "Luke" Menand would be a center fielder. Picked up in the free-agent market by Harvard after a series of all-star seasons at CUNY, Menand is a switch hitter: he writes with equal skill for academic and general audiences. He has one bases-clearing homer to his credit, The Metaphysical Club (2001), but his main strengths are his consistency and reliably precise prose. In a world of stale and ugly academic writing and overblown popular nonfiction, Menand "hits' em where they ain't." He has great range, and can throw a strike from a great distance to make a play that one would have suspected was beyond him. He makes the occasional spectacular catch, but he is not a showboat. He is a good base runner too, but he can occasionally be caught leaning the wrong way. And that is what has happened in his widely reviewed recent book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, a book that fails to score.

The Marketplace of Ideas contains four essays bound, at least superficially, by subjects of current concern to the popular press and to the higher-education community. The first is about the always-fluctuating issue of general education, the second concerns the endlessly overwrought topic of the humanities, the third touches on the tiresome subject of interdisciplinarity, and the fourth (which really does not belong with the other three) addresses the humdrum question of why academics seem to think alike about politics. Throughout, Menand reveals his characteristically keen eye for the illuminating detail. For example, his brief section on the Bakke decision is alone worth the price of admission, and there are many other vignettes of comparable acuity throughout the book.

Yet, unless this volume is intended as satire, it is also disturbingly off-base because it is so inaccurately titled. Menand fails actually to recognize how our system of higher education has become a marketplace, and there is scant evidence in this book that anyone in a position of leadership in higher education [End Page 393] has any ideas. As for reform and resistance, there is plenty of evidence here of resistance but precious little of reform. Although Menand himself has some challenging, if idiosyncratic, notions about reform, there is scant evidence that anyone else does. Resistance, on the other hand, seems to be the principal response of just about everyone to just about any idea.

In addition, this book is not really about the American university at all. It is about an infinitesimal sliver of a tiny fraction of a small part of American higher education: the wealthy private universities—and only just a few of those. Considering that the vast majority of American undergraduates (between 70 and 80 percent, depending upon whom you ask) attend public institutions, a book that focuses mainly on developments at Harvard and Columbia, with some elite liberal arts colleges thrown in here and there, can hardly be said to be a book about higher education. Not that anyone would want to ignore developments at Harvard and Columbia, of course! But some perspective on their significance might be useful. Not even the University of Chicago seems to make it into Menand's pantheon. Moreover, some reflection is called for not only on the public universities, but also on such aggressive and innovative privates as USC, Northwestern, and NYU, which are rapidly eclipsing more venerable institutions with new, more market-driven programs that are both creative and disturbing.

For a literary critic, however, Menand is not a bad historian. The brief history of the growth of American higher education in the post-World War II era included here is just fine. Menand attributes this growth and its direction not only to the postwar baby boom, the most obvious explanation, but also to the Cold War. The Cold War drove American competiveness across the disciplines, but especially in the sciences...

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