Remaking the American University: Market Smart and Mission Centered (review)

In Remaking the American University: Market Smart and Mission Centered, Robert Zemsky, Gregory Wegner, and William Massy cover well-traveled ground in an odd manner. The 232-page book has 12 chapters on various problems that have confronted academe for the last generation. The reader learns, for example, about the diminishing resources that universities receive from public coffers; an "arms race" of sorts has been going on for the best students; who owns teaching is contested; faculty prefer to do research rather than to teach; and racial diversity is a problem in American colleges and universities.

In many respects, these various chapters are simply rewritten articles, a "greatest hits" compendium of Policy Perspectives, a newsletter the authors produced in the 1980s and 1990s. For the academic Rip van Winkles amongst us, Remaking the American University will be a useful perspective on the challenges and hurdles that have confronted academe over the last 20 years. One wonders, however, if anyone versed about the current state of higher education will find anything new or newsworthy in this book, especially given its tone. The authors write with a particular hubris and overstatement that one normally finds jarring and unnecessary in an academic text. The reader learns, for example, that Policy Perspectives "had become higher education's principal catalog of changing circumstances" (p. 1). The authors developed their articles with higher education's "movers and shakers" (p. 1), whom they describe as "poohbahs in waiting" (p. 1). We learn on page 122 and then again on page 149 that the authors "count ourselves among the pragmatists"; presumably everyone else is either ill-informed or a utopian—or both.

If one read only this book after having been asleep for a generation, the reader might believe that these fellows single-handedly discovered problems and proposed level-headed solutions that were beyond the thinking of normal mortal researchers. And yet, it is unsettling, for example, to have questions posed such as "Can universities, at this late date, still choose to be places of public purpose?" (p. 9), and to have no mention of the work of thoughtful scholars such as Brian Pusser (Pusser & Doane, 2001) or Adrianna Kezar (Kezar, Chambers, & Burkhardt, 2005). The authors trivialize the commercialization of the academy as faculty being grumpy because they do not have as many resources as they once had (p. 52), but they entirely overlook the work of Slaughter and Leslie (1997), Slaughter and Rhoades (2004), and Marginson and Considine (2000). They critique the concept of an educational pipeline as if it is news (p. 170), but they seem either to be unaware or to ignore that Michael Olivas raised this point in 1979. They suggest that faculty are no longer tied as tightly to their campuses as they are to their disciplines (p. 28), but Burton Clark (1987) and Tony Becher (1989) noted that over a generation ago. Indeed, even I could have written "Each campus must define its fundamental values in the framework of its own culture and traditions" (p. 100). In fact, I did—in 1988 (Tierney, 1988).

Simply that these fellows have followed in others' footsteps and have overlooked or ignored the field about which they write might be a problem for a graduate student writing a dissertation, but if the text is data-rich, then the reader might forgive them. Who amongst us has not done research and found what others have found? True, a standard procedure in an academic text is to acknowledge how one's work is embedded in the field rather than paint it as a singular masterpiece, and yet, one might forgive the authors their penchant for self-promotion if the text is a cornucopia of data.

Unfortunately, the book is short on data and long on anecdote and overstatement. The reader learns, for example, about how one author's daughter applied to college in the 1980s (p. 33). Ray...