Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education by James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar (review)

The central arguments in this book focus on the notion of a disengagement compact between students and faculty within Canadian universities. Students have become disengaged from the educational experience and are missing out on the transformative possibilities of a high-quality liberal education. They are poorly prepared by secondary schools, and once they enter university only a minority devote the time necessary to prepare for classes. Grade inflation in schools and universities has reduced the standards of our educational system and decreased the role that grades have historically played in rewarding ability and hard work. The disengagement compact is the tacit agreement that students will do the minimum necessary to successfully complete their degree programs, and faculty will teach with low expectations of their underprepared students and award good grades for mediocre work.

The authors, sociologists from the University of Western Ontario, have produced a thoughtful, well-written critique of the state of liberal education in Canadian universities. Their discussion of student disengagement, drawing on their analysis of a major survey administered to a large sample of Canadian and American students, is both revealing and, for those of us who truly care about liberal education, downright scary. The authors have presented a provocative picture of a higher education system that has come to confuse training with education, that makes decisions that are distanced from the direct experience of the classroom, and that is gradually replacing a liberal education with pseudo-vocationalism.

While the authors raise important issues, the image of the university that underscores their analysis is surprisingly simplistic and incomplete. They discuss the ‘idea of the university,’ but in their review it is an idea that is untouched by Humboldt and the creation of the research university at Berlin or by Flexner’s influential views on the modern university. The question of how universities balance their teaching and research functions and the possibility that the increasing importance being placed on knowledge creation may have had negative implications on university education are never raised. Canadian university faculty are presented as overworked, highly stressed, and underpaid, an image that is somewhat different than the picture that has emerged from recent comparative studies of the academic profession which suggest that Canadian university faculty, at least compared with professors in some other countries, are hard-working, reasonably remunerated, productive researchers and teachers with high levels of job satisfaction. Given the objectives of this volume, I was particularly surprised that there was so little discussion of the increasing use of part-time contract faculty and the implications of this trend on the sort of undergraduate student experience the authors are looking for.

Despite its shortcomings, Lowering Higher Education is a thoughtful, stimulating contribution to the growing body of literature critiquing the current state of liberal education and the quality of undergraduate studies in Canadian universities.