In the Company of Scholars
The Struggle for the Soul of Higher Education
-
- USD 29.99
-
- USD 29.99
Descripción editorial
“I began this book to articulate my sense of disappointment and alienation from the status I had fought so hard to achieve.” A remarkable admission from an alumnus of Harvard Law School who has held tenured professorships in the law schools of Yale and Stanford and has taught in the law schools of Harvard and Chicago.
In this personal reflection on the status of higher education, Julius Getman probes the tensions between status and meaning, elitism and egalitarianism, that challenge the academy and academics today. He shows how higher education creates a shared intellectual community among people of varied races and classes—while simultaneously dividing people on the basis of education and status.
In the course of his explorations, Getman touches on many of the most current issues in higher education today, including the conflict between teaching and research, challenges to academic freedom, the struggle over multiculturalism, and the impact of minority and feminist activism. Getman presents these issues through relevant, often humorous anecdotes, using his own and others’ experiences in coping with the constantly changing academic landscape.
Written from a liberal perspective, the book offers another side of the story told in such works as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
His tone is dignified, but Getman--a University of Texas law professor and a former president of the American Association of University Professors--gets down in the dirt for this disquisition on our halls of ivy. Many academics are sneering, posturing, mind-wandering, lazy, turf-fighting snobs and liars, he avers, naming names while making confessions of his own. With this assortment of pensees, anecdotes and memories of his efforts as labor negotiator of academic disputes, Getman claims a loftier goal than expose. He intends to reveal how elitism and teaching in higher education are competing impulses--which he does make clear, though with some meanderings off course. Interviews with other academics illustrate his observation that the term ``academic community'' is a misnomer, with Stanford University appearing as a place of feverish scholarly territoriality. Getman cunningly skewers academic snobbery and pretense, but he offers few suggestions for reform.
