Higher Education in America by Derek Bok (review)

Former Harvard president Derek Bok attempts in Higher Education in America to give a comprehensive account of the problems and possibilities currently facing American colleges and universities. Rather than dooming the system to failure or lamenting its collapse, Bok seeks to discern which criticisms are legitimate and to offer possible solutions. And, rather than discussing what governments or other institutions can offer universities, Bok focuses primarily on what universities can do in their own self-interest to help themselves (4). While Bok directs much of his discussion toward administrators, his book can be useful for faculty as well, insofar as he provides broad strokes analyses of challenges such as preserving academic freedom, evaluating pedagogical strategies, developing effective outcomes assessments, and training graduate students.

In the book’s first major section, “The Context,” Bok outlines the prominent types of American colleges and universities, their purposes, and their methods of governance. Due to the broad scope of his writing, he acknowledges several problems—such as increasing faculty workloads and the difficulties in staffing effective leadership positions—that he does not have space to fully address. Ultimately, Bok asserts that all colleges and universities are held together by a common set of goals and values. While most of these shared values remain unwritten, administrators should be expected to maintain important, generally agreed upon standards of academic freedom, fair admittance processes, and shared governance. Faculty, Bok adds, are also expected to value dedication to student learning, avoidance of abuses of power, the importance of service work, and high standards of academic honesty (72–3). He argues that because of the competitive disposition of higher education, universities often risk conceding these values, and that such concessions may ultimately erode our educational standards altogether. Bok challenges administrators and faculty to actively maintain their academic values, stating that failure to do so will lead to an ultimate devaluing of academic institutions and their work (74).

In his second major section, “Undergraduate Education,” Bok poses two central challenges facing undergraduate education: first, how do we increase graduation rates? And, second, how do we improve the quality of university education? (79–80). Through his discussion of the second challenge, Bok offers much that can be of use to faculty, arguing that it is in the interest of faculty and administrators to reexamine their curriculums and pedagogical strategies, and to formulate new outcomes assessments that are aimed toward improving student learning.

During his tenure at Harvard (1972–1998), Bok created a new core curriculum that emphasized general education, and consistent with those efforts, he argues that universities can improve educational quality by reexamining whether the curriculum actually helps them achieve their institutional goals. Additionally, he notes that many popular undergraduate majors tend to undermine the goals of general education, citing a study by Alexander Astin, which found that “majoring in engineering was associated with declines in writing ability, cultural awareness, and civic participation; that education majors became less proficient in problem solving, critical thinking, and general knowledge; and that science majors wrote less well as seniors than they had as freshmen and were less inclined to participate in civic affairs” (171–72). While it is often tacitly assumed that majoring in any discipline will increase students’ proficiencies in critical thinking and problem solving, Astin’s study suggests that may not be the case. With the support of these findings, Bok hopes that faculties will begin to discuss whether their curriculums adequately serve their students’ educational needs.

Bok also claims curriculum requirements are not solely to blame: many commonly used teaching methods are poorly designed to achieve their apparent goals. Bok draws on a study by Linda DeAngelo and Sylvia Hurtado, who conclude that a vast majority of college professors believe that the primary aim of undergraduate education is improving students’ critical thinking (187). Yet, as Bok argues, most professors continue to use a lecture format in their classrooms, considered to be one of the least effective methods for developing students’ critical thinking. In...