Introduction

Duderstadt reviews two past interventions by the federal government. These policies worked astoundingly well, and Duderstadt writes with a combination of wistfulness and cautious hope that something on a comparable scale might happen again. Peter Brooks, on the other hand, puts his focus squarely on humanistic education (he barely mentions research, humanistic or otherwise) as equally fundamental to the past and, he hopes, future, mission of the American university. Brooks regards this aspect of higher education as devalued, misunderstood, and besieged at a time when the prevailing concern of policymakers inside and outside academia is with measuring "outcomes" and defining the "value-added" benefit conferred by universities on their students.