THREE of the chapters in this book originated as the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, which I had the honor and pleasure of giving in February 2008. I am grateful to my excellent hosts in Virginia—Charles Mathewes, Tal Brewer, and Aaron Wall—and to the members of the university community who came to the talks, made challenging and useful interventions, and generally showed me a really good time. Chapter two was published, in a different form, as an occasional paper by the American Council of Learned Societies, through the kindness of the late John D’Arms; an earlier version appeared in The New York Review of Books. The Page-Barbour Lectures are by custom published by the University of Virginia Press. I thank the committee and the press for agreeing to let me have them published elsewhere. Elsewhere is W. W. Norton, and I am grateful to Roby Harrington and Robert Weil for their long-term interest in this project and for their editorial hands-on. And thanks to Skip Gates for making it all possible. I did some of the work on this book when I was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. The director of the center, Jean Strouse, and her staff provided an unusually collegial working environment.
I have been giving talks about and participating in conferences on higher education for many years, and a list of all the places where I have had a chance to share my ideas and to learn from colleagues in the academic world would be impractical. Academics love shoptalk at least as much as anyone else. I have visited dozens of schools and organizations, and I always found terrific people to talk to, but I do want to acknowledge several individuals who gave me special opportunities to speak, write, and learn about higher education and its problems: Jesse Ausubel, of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Richard Lounsbery Foundation; Peter Brooks, of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale; William Kelly, of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; Alvin Kernan, of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Paul Kjellberg, of Whittier College; Gerald Marzorati, of Harper’s and the New York Times Magazine; Robert Orrill, of the College Board; Linda Ray Pratt, of the American Association of University Professors; Robert Scholes, of the Modern Language Association; David Wiggins and Alan Ryan, of New College, Oxford; and a longtime and generous interlocutor on academic life, Jeffrey Williams, of Carnegie Mellon University.
I was fortunate when I came to Harvard to be invited to participate in a reform of the undergraduate curriculum undertaken at the direction of the president, Lawrence Summers, and the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, William Kirby. I learned a lot from them, and from many colleagues, during my involvement in that enterprise. I thank especially, for their friendship and our work together, Evelynn Hammonds, Andrew Knoll, Charles Maier, Steven Pinker, Michael Sandel, Kay Shelemay, Diana Sorensen, and Maria Tatar. The road was longer and rockier than anyone probably anticipated, but reforms were accomplished. I was lucky to be in the game to the end, and to work with Derek Bok, Drew Faust, David Fithian, Dick Gross, and Jeremy Knowles. They taught me a great deal about how universities actually work, and much of what is in this book, not to mention the urge to write it, is informed by our collective experience. Above and beyond all else, I salute, in gratitude, the six intrepid souls to whom the book is dedicated: Stephanie Kenen, Stephen Kosslyn, David Liu, David Pilbeam, Alison Simmons, and Mary Waters.