Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (review)

In his introduction, Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, suggests that a good news/bad news scenario is operating when it comes to what undergraduates learn in college. The good news, he insists, is that what is not currently working can be fixed if we are willing to do the hard work that is necessary. The bad news, however, is that these problems will not be addressed until those responsible for teaching and learning on college campuses understand what the problems are and what they need to do to fix them. While it becomes increasingly clear to the reader who Bok thinks is best positioned to make the changes necessary, it is not until the last chapter that he makes it explicit who his primary audience is—namely, current and aspiring academic administrators. As a result, scholars of higher education, especially those whose scholarship focuses on the learning and developmental outcomes of undergraduates, are not likely to learn anything that they do not already know in reading Bok's book. However, as a translation document for those who do not know this scholarship and as a primer for current and/or aspiring academic leaders, Bok provides a good summary (relying heavily on the work of Alexander Astin, Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini, and George Kuh) and review of what we know about undergraduate learning and the conditions that foster it.

In his first three chapters, Bok lays the foundation for his discussion and analyses of the current status of undergraduate education, detailed in Chapters 4–11. In Chapter 1, Bok provides a quick primer on the history of higher education and its evolution in the United States, with a special focus on the roles and purposes of undergraduate education. For those who do not know this history, the chapter will be helpful.

In the second chapter, Bok describes six faculty-held perspectives that make it difficult to reach consensus on the purposes of undergraduate education and how to achieve these purposes. They include the divergent views held by students and faculty on the role of universities and the domain of undergraduate education, the barriers to effective collaboration that result from faculty and departmental autonomy, the inability of faculty members to determine the purposes of undergraduate education, the tendency to focus too much on general education programs, the neglect of discussions of pedagogy and effective teaching, and faculty failure to consider the impact of out-of-class experiences on students' learning and development.

In Chapter 3, Bok offers his recommendations on what the purposes of undergraduate education should be. He then devotes a chapter to each of the eight aims of undergraduate education that he finds critically important: the ability to communicate, critical thinking, moral reasoning, citizen preparation, living with diversity, living in a more global society, developing a breadth of interests, and preparing for work. In each, Bok assesses how well he thinks colleges are doing currently in achieving each of these eight purposes, the obstacles to achieving them, and what faculty members and academic leaders can do to successfully realize that particular purpose.

While I found the discussion and analyses in each chapter generally helpful and informative, especially considering the targeted audience for the book, I was disappointed in the chapter on campus diversity, where Bok's discussion is limited in a number of ways. First, the discussion tends to focus primarily on how colleges can shape students' attitudes toward diverse others. Second, this discussion focuses only on Black/White and men/women relationships.

Given the rich diversity within our society and the many challenges and opportunities that this diversity presents, a broader discussion is clearly warranted. Finally, this chapter largely ignores the impact that engagement with diversity in college can have on a variety of important learning and developmental outcomes, including many of those...