The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Issues of Our Time)

"In this book, Louis Menand argues that although the demographics, the mission, and the scale of American higher education have all changed dramatically, its institutional structure and educational philosophy have remained relatively static for the last hundred years. In examining the origins of the university in the nineteenth century, and how it evolved in the twentieth, The Marketplace of Ideas uncovers the anachronisms and anomalies in twenty-first-century higher education, and separates what is worth preserving from what we might be better off without." "Along the way, Menand explains when the liberal arts became segregated from professional education, how general education programs developed in response to social change and world events, and why "interdisciplinary" has become a buzzword among professors, deans, and graduate students. He examines how the professoriate became professionalized, what happened to the humanities disciplines after the 1960s, and why, although a person can get a law degree in three years and a medical degree in four years, the median time to a PhD in English is nine years." "More fundamentally, he asks whether we are training professors to do the things we are now asking them to do - to teach to people outside their own specialties, to connect their subject matter to issues that will concern their students after they graduate, and to collaborate in teaching and research with professors in other disciplines. Is trying to reform the contemporary university like trying to get on the Internet with a typewriter?" --Book Jacket.