The New Idea of a University

Excerpt There is nothing more interesting to academics than their reflections on their own professional identities. And their identities are intimately bound up with the institutions that pay their salaries. Thus the publishing industry has seen a new genre develop in the past few years, those that focus on the state of the academy. Usually the authors of these books take a rather dismal view of the state of higher education in the United States. Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education by Charles Sykes and TenuredRadicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education by Roger Kimball are just a couple of representative examples that come to mind. Sometimes the diagnosis is that the professorate has become too politicized, usually in terms of being too left-leaning. Other times the problem is formulated in terms of institutions of higher learning adopting a commercial or business model and seeing themselves as producers of commodities traded in a competitive market place. Maskell and Robinson’s New Idea of a University adopts a bit of both of these views and applies them to the situation of higher education in Great Britain