Campus Navel Gazing

In any area of public policy one cares to mention, there will almost certainly be a book published this year decrying its present state. Publishers, for obvious commercial reasons, tend to focus on policy tomes that foretell some form of imminent doom. The actual subject matter is barely relevant: cities, hospitals, schools—all of them have their own books suggesting that things are going to hell in a handbasket.

Higher education is no different in most respects, except that where other institutions have allegedly disinterested outsiders chronicling their decline, the chroniclers of universities’ decline are almost all insiders. With the exception of critics of the Dinesh D’Souza variety, one almost never sees journalists or other outsiders writing critically about the state of higher education. Rather, it is professors, deans and presidents doing the bewailing, and the self-interested nature of these Cassandras does much to undermine the credibility of these...