The Good of This Place: Values and Challenges in College Education

If you wish to be inspired to learn, read Dean Richard Brodhead's book. With a wry wit and enviable eloquence, Yale College's longtime dean trumpets the importance of liberal arts education and motivates the stoutest of hearts to break-free from staid camps of mutual agreement and explore unknown worlds of intellectual, social, and cultural variation. In short, Brodhead inspires his readers (and listeners, to those who were fortunate enough to hear him speak) to seek education. His life's work are the thousands of college students he has shepherded through Yale (and soon Duke), but his lessons apply well to everyone. If you are a student or a parent of student about to head off to college, I highly suggest reading this book. Brodhead gives college life high meaning and grand purpose far beyond the parochial concerns of careerism. And for those over-achievers, he serves a special warning, enunciated most clearly in his speech, "The Hazards of Success," given to the Yale College Class of 2003. He warns that an addiction to academic achievement can lead to a larger failure. A student too used to the top spot will be unwilling to venture out of well-tread paths of triumph; fear of imperfection will lead to educational limitation, and the unknown will remain as such because the student refrains from actually having to learn something, least they not excel at it immediately.There are many other nuggets of wisdom in these pages, so I'll just commend the rest of the book. As a reader can quickly tell, Brodhead is one of the greatest spokesmen for university education of his time. I would not be surprised if he publishes a second volume in a few years' time.