Impostors in the Temple: The Decline of the American University

Some of Allan Bloom's concerns (in The Closing of the American Mind) are updated by Martin Anderson's Impostors in the Temple: American Intellectuals are Destroying Our Universities and Cheating Our Students of Their Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, c. 1992). Anderson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and served as an adviser to both presidents Nixon and Reagan. One of Anderson's contentions is that two groups of intellectuals exist in America, but they rarely interact. One the one hand there are "academic intellectuals," unanimously "liberal" on most issues, protected by tenure and accountable to virtually no one. Their only constituency is fellow professors, who largely share their worldview. For example, at the University of Colorado, less than 7% of the professors in the College of Arts and Sciences are Republicans; no Republicans have been hired in the past decade, and the English department, with 57 professors, has no Republican at all! So much for the vaunted "pluralism" of today's university! On the other hand are "professional intellectuals," working in various media, government agencies, private think tanks, etc., far more equitably balanced between liberal and conservative. Primarily, Anderson argues, academicians should teach. In fact, they don't! Ernest Boyer's 1990 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching report, "Scholarship Reconsidered," indicts professors for failing to profess, failing to give students what they should get, scholarly instruction. Teaching, counseling, grading papers all take time. Time invested in such is time wasted for academic intellectuals tracking tenure via "scholarly" publications--virtually none of which are read, even by others "scholars" in the same discipline. Taking the professors' place in the classrooms are graduate students who serve as "teaching assistants." In elite schools such as U.C. Berkeley, such "assistants" teach upwards of 75% of all clas¬ses. The same graduate students frequently must do the research their professors use to advance their own careers. Thus the Ph.D. degree, which should take three or four years to obtain, now takes many graduate students five to ten years. Anderson urges the universities to radically revise their priorities and programs. "The main business of higher education should be teaching and learning" (p. 121). Teaching, not research, should be lauded and rewarded. To this end he urges the abolition of both teaching assistants and tenure, plus serious action to curtail such things as sexual harassment, political discrimination, and corruption in athletics and finances.

Martin Anderson serves up a long-overdue, superbly written account on how today's elite universities have gone astray from their originally intended ideals. Hidden amid all of their self-congratulatory statements of embracing diversity, Anderson asserts that today's leading academic institutions have become extremely un-diverse and downright intolerant when it comes to diversity of opinion regarding the vast majority of political and social issues of today. After an articulate and compelling description of the problem, the author proposes a variety of steps that need to be taken to improve the situation. A must-read for anyone who cares about resuscitating the hallowed notion of a truly liberal education.