Oh, the Humanities!

As Woodrow Wilson once put it, “Changing a university curriculum is like moving a graveyard. You don’t know how many friends the dead have until you try to move them.” Quoting the former president, of the United States as well as of Princeton University, is a chancy way to open a book on how to change Canadian universities, especially when the author goes on to claim that “this book examines the current state of the graveyard and how it might be moved.”

The author is Harvey Weingarten, himself no slouch in the university game, having served as a provost (i.e., chief hatchetman) at McMaster University, in Hamilton, before moving on to the University of Calgary as president and vice-chancellor (i.e., vacillator and compromiser-in-chief). After that, he took on a lower-profile but probably more demanding and frustrating position as president and CEO of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.

Weingarten is as straight-shooting, sensible, and...