I like a good viewing-with-alarm as much as anybody, and like most people in academia, I think it has plenty of shortcomings. I looked forward to reading this book, and especially to learning something new about my profession and its difficulties. The possibility of hearing some good suggestions for remedying the failures of American higher education was another attraction, of course.

Sadly Smith's book is a disappointment. He has the appropriate reformist credentials; a former Congressman and elected state official from Vermont, e founded and led the Community College of Vermont and is now the founding president of California State University-Monterey Bay. This is an institution that has developed a good reputation for serving the needs of nontraditional and disadvantaged students.

The crisis is stated in strong terms:

Our current record as "the best higher education system ever" isn't good enough for the world we live in. America is headed for a social, civic, and economic disaster if we are not successful in graduating a far higher percentage of our population from high school and college while bringing increasing numbers of working Americans back to finish their degrees.

There are three major points set out in the preface which serve as an overview of Smith's analysis of the current crisis:

Our current "success" rates are confused, misleading, and misunderstood. Here he is mostly concerned to point out the wide disparities between rates of college completion among prosperous whites and minorities and poor people, and to recognize that, with most population growth predicted among the portion of the population that isn't white, the group we don't serve very well, this can only get worse.

Schools stifle learning. "We continue to substitute the traditional moden of education for an informed, professionally based educational process."

Technology is part of the solution.

Indeed the author quickly follows this manifesto with the acknowledgement that these "three tenets are not news to any knowledgeable reader. We have studied them, discussed them, and written about them." This is certainly true.
What follows is too often just as familiar. The support for the second point--schools stifle learning--will be familiar to anyone who has been reading about the shift from a teaching to a learning paradigm in higher education. Other ideas here include credit for life experiences, the community rather than the campus becoming the learning center, more use of computer technology to deliver instruction, sensitivity to disparate learning styles. Among his unsurprising suggestions: 'Develop specific learning outcomes for the general education program and each major and minor."

More troubling, at least to me, is the suggestion that liberal education may be a luxury we cannot afford and what we need is "workforce preparation." His reification of the bachelor's degree as if it a degree is synonymous with an education (or, for that matter, preparation to enter a workforce) is naïve. And Smith's broad interests in education at all levels, not just college, must explain a complaint like this one: "Meanwhile, teachers don't know the latest information about the students in front of them, from their learning style to a head's-up from a colleague that Jimmy is having a bad day because he didn't get breakfast again." Do university faculty really want notification that a university student has skipped breakfast? I know I don't.

Peter Smith is a good phrasemaker and spokesman for powerful general ideas. It's true that "American has a historic confusion between academic access, academic quality, prestige, and status"; it's inspiring to read that "Higher education must move from a position in American society that is justified by tradition to one that is characterized by value." It's just that the explanation of how we get there has too few suggestions that are both specific and new.

Merritt Moseley
UNC Asheville