All the Essential Half-Truths About Higher Education.

This lively, engaging and richly suggestive book, the fruit of a distinguished career of professorial, deanly, and presidential service at several of the nation's leading colleges and universities, reflects the encounter of a sharp philosophical mind and an irrepressibly contrasuggestible temperament with the gritty realities of life as it is lived in the administrative trenches of American higher education in the late-twentieth century. That encounter, let it be said, is at once both provocative and intriguing.

Arguing that the advent a century ago of the modern research university has had a transformative impact upon the whole enterprise of American higher education, O'Brien emphasizes the "tectonic shift" which occurred when the modern university, dominated by faculty interests, assumed the flagship role once proudly filled by the older, presidentially dominated and religiously inspired colleges. In particular, he focuses on the marked degree of tension generated between the research ethos among our contemporary faculty and the "historical 'hang-over' of moral mission" inherited from the collegiate past and still, willy-nilly, part and parcel of public expectations concerning what a university is all about. Discussion of such matters, he believes, has been vitiated - "anywhere from misplaced to mistaken" - because it has persistently addressed the idea rather than the institution of higher education. It is, therefore, to the realm of institutionalization, the treacherous transit "from absolute ideal to concrete reality," that he directs his attention. And although the strength of the book lies, I would judge, in its theoretical clout, he is at least nudged in the direction of attending to matters of history and tradition.

In pursuit of his exploration of such matters, and as the book's title itself signals, O'Brien sets out to organize his reflections by relating them to a somewhat disparate series of "half-truths" about higher education - not myths or falsehoods, he insists, but "highly valuable and essential" pronouncements that have assumed the status of accepted cliches. Of these he lists eight, ranging from the assertion that "the faculty is the university," or that "tenure is a necessary condition of academic freedom," to the claim that "teaching is the primary task of higher education," or that "the university is the axial institution of modern society." To each of these he devotes a chapter before turning, in the last two chapters of the book, to "synthetic solutions" to some of the problems raised, and then easing, by way of conclusion, into a statement of educational ideals and a hazarding of predictions about the future.

This choice of a segmented, somewhat episodic, approach brings with it some real advantages. It encourages in O'Brien an easy and admirable pithiness and provides him with a ready-made vehicle for advancing a very broad array of important and quite disparate points, most of which do indeed deserve to be emphasized and driven home. Some of them are points familiar enough to those of us in the business but persistently missed by the public and journalists. They are the sort of point that it is the cruel fate of college presidents to have endlessly to make. That it is necessary, for example, to avoid confusing the price charged for a student's education (tuition) with the institutional cost incurred in providing it. Public and private institutions of comparable quality incur much the same cost but, courtesy of the taxpayer, the public institution can afford to pass along to the consumer in the form of price/tuition a much lower percentage of that cost.

Other points O'Brien makes concern the sort of thing more often noted and discussed within the academy than without. That contemporary faculty bodies, for example, are far better equipped to veto proposals relating to the overall direction of their institutions than to initiate them. Or again, that the distinction between public and private sectors of higher education is already in a state of advanced erosion, with state funding of the public universities constituting a smallish and steadily dwindling fraction of their overall revenues. And some of O'Brien's points, finally, are ones which certainly deserve to be made, though they would not necessarily command general agreement even within the academy. That university faculty, for example, are oddly but characteristically uninterested in and ignorant about "the history and structure of the very institutions in which they live and have their academic being (thus, more professorial monographs on Shiloh than on Siwash)."

And so on. All of this is very much to the good. It has to be noted, however, that O'Brien's segmented "half-truths" approach also brings with it some disadvantages. I sense, for example, that the episodic nature of that approach encourages in him a certain breeziness of rhetorical formulation ("Distribution requirements have replaced beanies: the academic equivalent of freshman hazing"), as well as a somewhat regrettably undisciplined weakness for alliteration (curricular concentration, cohorting, continuity, connection, commitment, conversation) that serves less to catch one's attention than to divert it from the seriousness, let alone the density, direction, and destination of his discourse! It may also help explain the genial dishevelment with which he advances generalizations that are essentially empirical in nature. When David Breneman (whose authority O'Brien invokes) analyzed the curricular practices of American liberal arts colleges, the standard Carnegie listings indicated that there were fewer than 600 such colleges in the country, not the "near a thousand" that O'Brien casually mentions. Nor did Breneman's analysis quite suggest that "very few actually practice the curricula of their claims." Instead (and more precisely), it suggested the desirability of reclassifying some three hundred of them as "comprehensive colleges" partly on the grounds that less than 40 percent of their students were graduating with degrees in liberal arts subjects.

Somewhat more worryingly, the episodic way in which O'Brien organizes his book strikes me as an impediment to the delivery of his most important and compelling message. That message concerns the moral mission of the university and, institutional and historical preoccupations notwithstanding, it is fundamentally philosophical in nature. Having rightly stressed the continuing tension between the dominant research ethos and the subdominant and residual commitment to the moral formation of students, he goes on correctly to insist that the modern research university simply "cannot escape certain inner 'moral' structures and clues both positive and negative." Not least among these are "the moral implications" stemming from its "mission 'to discover truth.'" And O'Brien goes on to probe, in stimulating and illuminating fashion, the neuralgic moments embedded in that recognition. That his statement of the problem is clearer than his exploration of its resolution is only to be expected. The issues involved are exceedingly intricate and tantalizingly subtle ones. But lurking in his abbreviated reflections on those issues here is the promise of a fuller treatment and the shadowy outline of a badly needed, timely, and much more sharply focused book. He should not hesitate to write it.

Francis Oakley is Edward Dorr Griffin Professor of the History of Ideas at Williams College and president emeritus of the college. His most recent books are Omnipotence, Covenant and Order and Community of Learning: The American College and the Liberal Arts Tradition.