All the Essential Half-Truths about Higher Education (review)

George Dennis O'Brien. (1998). All the Essential Half-Truths about Higher Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 243 pp. $19.95 paperback.

A certain distrust of institutions permeates our society. Such distrust inheres in our foundation as a nation dedicated to individual liberty, and is directed particularly to once "elite" institutions such as universities. And university faculty are especially prone to distrust their own institutions. Not only are many of today's tenured faculty products of the academic atmosphere of the 60's, we are also intellectually oriented to our disciplines, which are far broader than the institutions we work in, and which command our deepest loyalties.

This distrust of institutions is at once a vital component of a university's intellectual life, and also sometimes a source of counterproductive animosity between faculty and administration.

A colleague at a near-by university recently summed up the need for a new attitude in an email:

. . . one could say that [University X] is maturing as a university and that brings out new complexities and problems. The benefits of our new university growth are legion. We do, therefore, need a more mature functioning--not everything top/down, and perhaps a faculty senate so that our own behavior might get more mature too so--that we would actually have more of a governance role.

That college and university faculty and administrators need to develop better ways of working together is one of the underlying points of George Dennis O'Brien's All the Essential Half-Truths About Higher Education. To do so will require new structures, a new intellectual orientation, and a clearer understanding of the issues. To some extent, an adversarial relationship between faculty and administration is to the good. As O'Brien writes, "American higher education has an inner dynamic; it reforms itself--at least in some aspects--through the pull and tug between faculty and administrators" (p. xiii). But unless faculty and administration begin to work together, the entire enterprise of higher education in the United States is in serious jeopardy.

The purpose of O'Brien's book is to protect, perhaps even to save, what is arguably the best system of higher education in the world: "Even as a muddle, American higher education remains the world leader--far eclipsing other distinguished and ancient university systems. That it suffers from serious financial and philosophical problems is the price paid for its virtue" (p. xxi). In order to strengthen American higher education by directing its energies into beneficial, constructive reform, O'Brien dissects a large number of "half-truths" that have become common currency among academics and that prevent open-minded inquiry into what ails us. He addresses all people connected with universities--which includes the public that votes, pays taxes, and entrusts its daughters and sons to us.

O'Brien's book is especially addressed to faculty and administrators for whom these half-truths will be extremely familiar. The ultimate question is: are we meeting our responsibilities to our students, to scholarship, and to the nation? And who will begin to take responsibility for universities as institutions and to work to establish partnerships between faculty and administration to enable constructive decision-making and cohesive institutional governance?

O'Brien has been a university president twice, and his perspective is more presidential than faculty-oriented. He has clearly spent more hours than he cares to recall in conferences and meetings discussing higher education issues, and he brings a sometimes trenchant ironic bite to his depiction of the hard lot of university presidents. O'Brien is also a philosopher, who has taught and published on Hegel, and something of an iconoclast. He understands the frustrations of faculty who are prevented by the Supreme Court's 1980 decision in NLRB v. Yeshiva University from unionizing because they are "management," even as they feel themselves excluded from decision-making processes and treated as "employees" back on...