Lee Shulman's is one of the distinguished voices in higher education in America today. He has been president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching since 1997, succeeding Ernest Boyer. His concern for America's education is broad and deep. Simultaneous with the publication of Teaching as Community Property, Jossey-Bass has also brought out The Wisdom of Practice, a collection of his thoughts about elementary-secondary teaching. There is considerable overlap between these two areas of his interest, not only because teaching has certain common aims and foundations, whatever the age of the students, but also because higher education has the responsibility of preparing the teachers for the lower grades. Thus, this volume contains chapters like "Learning to Teach," a 1987 address about teacher preparation.

Most of the book's contents consist of addresses delivered at important meetings-the annual convention of the American Association for Higher Education, or the Association of American Colleges and Universities, or more focused meetings on teacher preparation or problem-based learning.

Reading these at one sitting promotes several reactions. One is that Lee Shulman gives good value for groups that invite him to be a keynoter. Nothing in this book is formulaic; each address is thoughtful, provocative, detailed. The other reflection is that, probably inevitably, he repeats himself. The difficulty, for an English teacher, of teaching what a "theme" is; the persistence of belief in Lamarckianism; these and a few other ideas recur more than would be expected in a book that was not a collection of Shulman's speeches and, in a way, an act of reverence toward him.

He has many ideas that should stir anybody interested in teaching. One of these is about professionalism-that being a professor of the liberal arts should be a real profession. He argues that liberal education isn't professional enough, and, following his definition of a profession, it is hard to disagree. He characterizes it this way:

• A profession has a goal of service
• A profession is "a practice rooted in bodies of knowledge that are created, tested, elaborated, refuted, transformed, and reconstituted in colleges, universities, laboratories, libraries, and museums."
• Professional knowledge is enacted in "the field."
• Professions interpose judgment between knowledge and application.
• Professionals learn from experience.
• Professions "are inherently public and communal."

His understanding of liberal teaching as a profession accompanies a strong emphasis on the scholarship of teaching (one of the features of Boyer's influential Scholarship Reconsidered). It also enables him to argue for activity, and he makes a good case for requiring students engaged in liberal learning to do something. This helps to explain problem-based learning; but he elsewhere suggests that every liberally educated student should be expected to teach something to somebody else.

In another chapter Shulman diagnoses what can happen when students don't learn well, identifying three pathologies: amnesia, fantasia, and inertia. In amnesia, students forget what they have learned; in fantasia, they wrongly believe they understand something; in inertia students have mastered facts but are unable to do anything with them: the "ideas"--if that is the right term-remain inert. And too often the faculty response to this non-learning or mislearning is nostalgia--a yearning for the old days or the traditional ways.

Lee Shulman is a wise, thoughtful and deeply informed man. Every reader will find more interest in some chapters than in others; for instance, I am not much interested in taxonomies. But reading him is stimulating in the best sense. He is equally worth reading on broad philosophical matters and on more practical ones-as in his piece on how to analyze a syllabus.

The title of the book alludes to one of the chapters, originally delivered to the AAHE as an address called "Teaching as Community Property: Putting an End to Pedagogical Solitude." In it he declares that

the reason teaching is not more valued in the academy is because the way we treat teaching removes it from the community of scholars. It is not that universities diminish the importance of teaching because they devalue the act itself; it is not that research is seen as having more intrinsic value than teaching. Rather, we celebrate those aspects of our lives and work that can become, as we say in California, "community property."

He provides several good suggestions for changing this state of affairs, and this book itself, by focusing on teaching as a professional activity of college and university faculty members, is another step in that direction.

Merritt Moseley
University of North Carolina at Asheville