Minority Student Retention: The Best of the Journal of College: Research, Theory, and Practice (review)

In this section, Fallis discusses four ideas that have shaped the evolution of the “Anglo-American” university (i.e., those in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada), and which are being challenged by politico-economic forces which he explains in Part 2. They are (a) the idea of undergraduate liberal education, (b) the idea of professional schools, (c) the idea of graduate education, research, and pure science, and (d) the idea of undergraduate accessibility and applied science. The “multiversity” is a combination of all of these ideas; it is thus a creature of modernity, and its prominence results from the ascendance of the welfare state.I think this firstsection is the strongest part of the book. Not only does Fallis do a nice job of identifying the “bundle of ideas” that led to what we know as a multiversity, but he does so in a very engaging and easily accessible style. Indeed, the whole book is like this. While supporting the arguments with a wide range of literature from multiple fieldsand addressing very complicated phenomena (e.g., the economics of higher educa-tion and international trade agreements), Fallis’s writing is always accessible to even a minimally college-educated audience, thus being true to one of his key arguments that academics must make their work accessible to the general (albeit educated) public.In Part 2, “The Character of Our Age,” Fallis addresses fivepolitico-economic forces that have made the multiversity a crucial institution of our times but which also threaten its core ideas and put it at risk of undermining democracy. These forces are (a) the constraining of the welfare state’s commitment to higher education as a public good, (b) the predominance of information technology in redefiningresearch and teaching, (c) the emer-gence of postmodern thought in questioning the tenets of modernity—which are, after all, the tenets of the university; (d) the commercialization of knowledge and research, and (e) the globalization and internationalization of the university.I found his arguments about the welfare state, commercialism, globalism, and information tech-nology a balanced account of the benefits and con-sequences of these forces. He does, however, align himself with their critics. These politico-economic forces do lead to a new idea of the multiversity; but that idea sees the multiversity as (and perhaps only as) an instrument of the economy. The result is to convert higher education into a private good, force universities to seek alternative sources of funding, lead them away from a commitment to democracy and disinterested inquiry, and make them pander to the private interests of their new funders.Fallis, however, is less convincing when he dis-cusses the preeminence of what he calls postmod-ern thought, which he argues leads to a relativism that threatens the university’s core values of reason and democracy. What he calls postmodern thought certainly questions and historicizes the presump-tiveness of the tenets of modernity, but one need not conclude from this questioning that one is left with no commitments to reason (which might now be understood diversely and, thus, democratically, rather than authoritatively), or even to democracy itself, which might now be expanded to include other individuals and discourses traditionally left out of the discussion of what constitutes “reason.” Despite this concern, this part of the book takes a hard but meliorist look at the problems constrain-ing the traditional ideas of the university.Part 3,“Renewing the Social Contract,” seemed the weakest for me, although it is where Fallis pro-poses his solution to what ails the university. He argues that the university and its faculty should be-gin to see themselves as instrumental to democracy and to the liberal education that will guarantee it. Some of his specificconclusions include: (a) The university must take an active role in addressing the key social issues and in sponsoring debate about them; (b) Professors must begin to see themselves as public intellectuals, and (c) Under-graduate students must be given the opportunity to obtain a minor in liberal education.I find such arguments merely derivatives of those made by many others which essentially adhere to Newman’s idea of the university and so rather uninteresting, perhaps even naive. But Fallis recognizes the problem ailing the university as inherently a power struggle over ideas, and in this vein he is quite right in arguing for particular ideas of the university. I may not agree with his ideas, but I think it is crucial to have them and to question them, for I think he would agree with me that the crux of the problem in the university is that we have stopped espousing and questioning ideas in the face of seemingly overwhelming global forces. As a result, we blindly pursue the directions expected of us by these forces, thus making our being in the academy rather meaningless.