The Modern University and Its Discontents: The Fate of Newman's Legacies in Britain and America.

By Sheldon Rothblatt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiv plus 461pp. $59.95).

The Modern University and Its Discontents is a series of essays, most of which have been previously published in different forms. Rothblatt relates these essays, more and less successfully, with recurring references to John Henry Newman. As Rothblatt notes in his preface, the book is not about Newman. Instead, the essays are about the changes in Oxford and Cambridge that shaped Newman's idea of a university, and the development of universities that are, in Rothblatt's view, the antithesis of Newman's idea.

The core of the book is a series of essays that trace changes at Cambridge and Oxford over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In "Consult the Genius of the Place," Rothblatt illuminates the importance Newman placed on the college as a physical space. He examines how associationist aesthetic theories provided a basis for a new romantic ideal of the college in the nineteenth century. According to this romantic pedagogy, setting was essential to the personal transformation that was increasingly seen as the aim of a university education.

Related to the nineteenth-century romantic ideal was a series of changes in student life that Rothblatt explores in "The First Undergraduates, Recognizable as Such." This wide ranging essay details the confluence of a number of changes in student life, including the aging of students, growing numbers of students, the establishment of enduring student clubs, the increasing luxury of students' lives, the growing importance of their friendships, and new kinds of disciplinary problems. These disciplinary problems spurred the transformation from disputations to examinations. The success of examinations as a form of discipline and their impact on students' experiences is the subject of a subsequent essay, "Failure." In an essay on "The Awkward Interval," Rothblatt relates these changes in student life to new ideas about child rearing and development that emerged in the late eighteenth century. He places the reformation of Oxbridge in the second half of the nineteenth century against the backdrop of educational experimentation and flux in the first half of the century.

The second major concern of the volume is higher education that does not approximate Newman's idea. Here American higher education features prominently. In the first essay of the volume, "The Idea of the University and Its Antithesis," Rothblatt presents American higher education as doubly removed from Newman's vision. Despite American educators' propensity for quoting Newman to support the search for new knowledge, Rothblatt argues that Newman saw the university as essentially a teaching institution. More importantly, Rothblatt sees American higher education as basically anti-essentialistic - its lacks a core defining purpose, rejects the very idea that universities need an "Idea." Throughout the volume, Rothblatt reflects on the implications of this anti-essentialism. For example, in "Consult the Genius of the Place," he discusses the architectural chaos at large American universities. Although Rothblatt sees the multiversity as quintessentially America, he does not see it as uniquely American. In "The Market and the University of London," Rothblatt suggests only half in jest that the University of London should be considered the first multiversity.

A third theme of the book is the tension between market-oriented institutions and those that are insulated from market demands. Rothblatt wisely recognizes that market orientation is more of a continuum rather than a question of two opposing types. He also points out that those institutions that can afford to be independent of the market are often dependent on some other institution - in the case of England, first the Church, and then in the twentieth century, the State. This theme, more so than John Henry Newman, successfully links the essays in the book. Market demands and institutional controls are the mechanisms that Rothblatt employs to chart and explain the transformation of higher education over the past two centuries.

Readers will find these essays both rewarding and frustrating. Rothblatt's command of primary sources and secondary scholarship is clearly evident. He makes wonderful use of individual examples, drawing out the larger meaning of the small details. He connects the history of universities with intellectual and social history in challenging and fruitful ways. Within individual essays, readers will find excellent historical accounts of particular subjects, such as the "federal principle" in English universities or the development of examinations at Oxford and Cambridge. But in a number of cases, the essays do not cohere well as a whole. The non-specialist, in particular, will find some of the essays unnecessarily obscure. In several cases, the chronological development is difficult to follow and the details overwhelm the larger picture. Some of these difficulties are inherent in the task he set for himself, but others could have been rectified with more careful editing.

Julie Reuben Harvard University