Universities and the Future of AmericaDuke University Press, 1990 - 135 pagina's Since World War II, says the author, industrialized nations have come to depend so heavily on expert knowledge, scientific discovery, and highly trained personnel that universities have become "the central institution in postindustrial society." "If universities are so important to society and if ours are so superior, one might have thought that America would be flourishing in comparison to other industrialized countries of the world. Yet this is plainly not the case. . . . Our economic position in the world has deteriorated [and] we have climbed to the top, or near the top, of all advanced countries in the percentage of population who live in poverty, commit crimes, become addicted to drugs, have illegitimate children, or are classified as functionally illiterate." In light of these results, "it is fair to ask whether our universities are doing all they can and should to help America surmount the obstacles that sap our economic strength and blight the lives of millions of our people." Having posed this question, Derek Bok reviews what science can do to bring about greater productivity, what professional schools can do to improve the effectiveness of corporations, government, and public education, and what all parts of the university are doing to help students acquire higher levels of ethical and social responsibility. He concludes that Universities are contributing much less than the should to help the nation address its most urgent social problems. "A century after the death of Cardinal Newman, many university officials and faculty members continue to feel ambivalent about deliberate efforts to address practical problems of society. And though competition drives university leaders and their faculties to unremitting effort, what competition rewards is chiefly success in fields that command academic prestige rather than success in responding to important social needs." Bok urges academic leaders, trustees, foundations, and government agencies to work together to help universities realign their priorities "so that they will be ready to make their full contribution when the nation turns its attention again to the broad agenda of reform. . . . Observing our difficulties competing abroad, our millions of people in poverty, our drug-ridden communities, our disintegrating families, our ineffective schools, those who help to shape our universities have reason to ask whether they too have any time to lose." |
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Pagina 64 - Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
Pagina 15 - Our universities today simply cannot respond to society's expectations for them or discharge their national responsibilities in research and education without substantially increased support.
Pagina 66 - The president's manuscript was opened and the well known a-Tiem was the signal for all to be ready and for the work of the hour to begin. He read slowly and the class copied, each member following his own method, some using shorthand, others abbreviating words, or omitting some altogether. All were intent to catch the thought, at any rate, and the exact phraseology, if possible. The lecture was written out in full by the»students at their rooms. What one failed to catch ho gathered from another...
Pagina 63 - But if you ask what is the good of education in general, the answer is easy — that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly, and conquer their enemies in battle, because they are good.
Pagina 81 - The hardest job of the first year is to lop off your common sense, to knock your ethics into temporary anesthesia. Your view of social policy, your sense of justice — to knock these out of you along with woozy thinking, along with ideas all fuzzed along their edges.
Pagina 70 - Rather, we assert that the best way to infect the student with the zest for intellectual integrity is to put him near a teacher who is himself selflessly devoted to the truth; so that a spark from the teacher will, so to speak, leap across the desk into the classroom, kindling within the student the flame of intellectual integrity, which will thereafter sustain itself.
Pagina 105 - Armed with the security of tenure and the time to study the world with care, professors would appear to have a unique opportunity to act as society's scouts to signal impending problems long before they are visible to others. Yet rarely have members of the academy succeeded in discovering emerging issues and bringing them vividly to the attention of the public.
Pagina 15 - The health of US society is uniquely coupled to that of its universities. To a greater degree than any other country this Nation looks to its universities both for new knowledge and for young trained minds prepared to use it effectively. But just at a time when much is expected of our universities, after more than a decade of retrenchment and belt tightening, they find themselves with obsolete equipment, aging facilities, and growing shortages of both faculty members and students in many important...
Pagina 105 - What Rachel Carson did for risks to the environment, Ralph Nader for consumer protection, Michael Harrington for problems of poverty, Betty Friedan for women's rights, they did as independent critics, not as members of a faculty.
Pagina 64 - To hold the. student to minute fidelity in little things is an enforcement of one of the most significant maxims of the Gospel.