Washington Post
"Uncommonly balanced and lucid inquiry . . . into how the campus differs from the rest of the world, most particularly the business world. . . . Huber argues that the university is disorganized, inefficient, internally contradictory and, so far as its teaching mission is concerned, unaccountable to anyone."
From the Publisher
Parents groan as college tuition rises faster than the rate of inflation. Students wonder where the distinguished professors are hiding as inexperienced graduate students take over the classroom. Business executives, straining to increase employee output, question how faculty productivity is measured. Alumni suspect the trustees of their alma mater are not exacting accountability for administrative performance. The public is concerned that "political correctness" is warping the curriculum. Taxpayers ask whether they are getting their money's worth on statesupported campuses. Richard Huber addresses these issues in a book that is both entertaining to read and striking in its insights. Tuition rises faster than the rate of inflation in part because universities enhance their academic reputations by hiring highsalaried scholars with low teaching loads. The market value of a degree is increased, not by an improvement in the education of undergraduates, but by the faculty’s enhanced reputation for scholarship. Undergraduate teaching is often terrible because professors are trained as researchers and rewarded as scholars, not teachers. Faculty output is measured by crude instruments which encourage goofing off as a masquerade for productive work. Trustees fail to enforce accountability because they are typically not familiar with the academic world and are confused by a university culture so totally different from their own corporate culture. The current brawl over the curriculum is not just an ivory tower dispute over race and ethnicity but a challenge to what kind of place America is to be. Taxpayers are not getting their money's worth because research and doctoralgranting universities, the focus of this book, are locked into outmoded personnel practices that assume all tenured professors will be productive scholars. Huber concludes with realistic reforms to improve the teaching of undergraduates and reduce the cost of higher education. And that would be a winwin prescription for the nation as well as the universities.
Publisher's Weekly
In this timely and incisive critique of university culture, a former administrator at the City University of New York addresses the ironies he has observed in the process of delivering higher education in America. Outstanding among these is evidence that ``university teaching is the only profession in which you can become a success without satisfying the client.''...Huber advances seven practical reforms relating to teacher productivity and accountability and to institutional fiscal responsibility. With a light touch and an iconoclastic viewpoint, he speaks for and to the constituents who have stakes in the university parents, students, trustees, alumni, legislators and taxpayersin this challenge to the current status of higher education.
Gresham M. Sykes, University of Virginia
Both fair and accurate . . . . His wide experience in higher education provides a solid basis for his frank analysis and sensible remedies.
Washington Times
Huber has written a delightfully wry, clear headed critique of the values of academics.
