Seems that everywhere you turn you are likely to either read or hear about someone bemoaning the crises facing American universities and higher education in general. While this topic is far from being original, it always manages to revitalize and reinvent itself periodically with a list of grievances directed toward the ivory tower.
On January 27, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni released a report entitled “Education or Reputation” that came to the conclusion that many liberal arts colleges and research universities are not providing their students with an “academically sufficient” enough education. Sound familiar?
Without going into heavy detail of all the arguments made in the report, some of the group’s main findings were that:
· Classical liberal arts education had been substituted by less rigorous scholarship.
· Too many professors do not teach enough compared to 50 years ago.
· Many teachers spend too much time researching narrow areas of scholarship.
· Scholarship on western civilization and Europe is often marginalized or ignored in favor of non-Western literature and History.
