By Martin Goldstein, Santa Monica College
You will like this book.
It confirms many things we already know – that most college teaching is done by people like us, adjuncts and other non-tenured professors, and that tenure , sabbaticals, low teaching loads and the emphasis on research all have conspired to make the actual teaching of undergraduates [...]
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We recently saw of a review of “Higher Education?” that we thought really “got it” about our book. We’re reproducing it here and suggest that you go to the blog, “Graduate Student Stories” for more. The reviewer is Sanford Williams.
You’re a new assistant professor, or a postdoc, or an ABD graduate student. You don’t have [...]
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Please contact Stephanie Hargadon, Senior Publicist, St. Martins/Griffin,
Stephanie.Hargadon@Stmartins.com,
175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, New York 10011,
Phone: 646 307 5569
Academics seeking examination copies and bookstores interested in bulk purchases or author appearances, please reach out to:
Joseph Goldschein, Associate Marketing Director,
St.Martins/Griffin Books
Joseph.Goldschein@Stmartins.com
Phone: 646 307 5656
Jodi Solomon of Jodi Solomon Speakers Bureau in Boston will be helping organize appearances for both Claudia and Andrew.
If your interested in having them speak at your school or organization, please connect with Jodi at:
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Claudia with Aung San Suu Kyi
Claudia at AAAS
Claudia speaking at IAS
(c)Tequila Minsky
Claudia with the late Christopher Reeve at Hunter College for the AARP
Andrew with former New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum at Queens College
(c)Tequila Minsky
Claudia with Hugh Downs and Lucy Hawking at Arizona State University
Claudia with the Rose planetarium's Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Claudia with journalist Julia Cass, checking out the festivities before a football game at Ole Miss.
Andrew with Rebecca Chopp, president of Swarthmore University
Claudia with Rebecca Chopp
Claudia listening to Mark Yudof, then President of the University of Texas
Claudia with the Chancellor of the University of California, Davis
Andrew at Yeshiva University
Cartoon of Andrew by David Levine from the New York Review of Books
Claudia named "Honorary Lifetime Member" of Sigma Xi
Andrew and Claudia
Claudia
(c)Tequila Minsky
Claudia with Rainer Glaiser, Prof. of Chemistry, University of Missouri, Dr. Penny Gilmer, Florida State University, Harriy Kroto, Nobel Prize winner, Chemistry
Where are you from?
Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus are native New Yorkers who've spent their lives working in journalism and higher education. Andrew grew up around Columbia University, where his father was a Dean. Claudia now teaches at Columbia University.
That's the physical place we're from.
(C) Tequila Minsky
Who are your favorite writers?
Claudia: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who I once interviewed for Playboy, Doris Lessing, the middle period when she wrote realistically about art and politics, Tracy Kidder because he writes so cleanly—his book about Paul Farmer changed the world; Gay Talese, who I still teach from—no one ever did non-fiction better; I use him to teach about writing and observing details; Carl Hiassen because he's devilishly funny about serious stuff.
Andrew: I read all around the block. I read a mystery story a week and am lost in admiration for the masters of that genre from Arthur Conan Doyle to James Patterson. I love that we're being published by his publishers.
Which book/books have had the biggest influence on your writing?
Claudia: This book that we are producing, Higher Education?, is being written as an homage to some of the great popularizing social scientific writers of the 1950s and 1960s—C. Wright Mills, John Kenneth Galbraith, David Reisman, William H. Whyte, Jr., Jane Jacobs and Jessica Mitford. And to hark back to an earlier era, Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell.
Andrew: We don't write like them. And yet we admire the way they were able to write about tremendously serious subjects and still get a popular audience. You don't see that kind of muckraking/social inquiry often these days—Barbara Ehrenreich' s Nickled and Dimed, is one of the rare exceptions. In our own way, with Higher Education? we hope to replicate what they did.
What are your hobbies and outside interests?
Claudia: I'm afraid I have none. There's no difference between my life and my work. That's true for Andrew, too.
Andrew: Indiscriminate movie going.
Claudia: That's true. He will sit through the most unbelievable stuff! I can't do it. He and a former student of his from Cornell go to junkie movies once a week together.
What is the single best piece of advice anyone ever gave you?
Andrew: Clinton Rossiter once told me that when you begin writing and find an audience, your academic colleagues will start sneering behind your back. "Just feel sorry for them," he said.
Claudia: "To go to a certain party at Cynthia and Howard Epstein's house ten years ago, where I became reacquainted with Andrew Hacker. We had met in 1967, in Detroit. He was a young professor and I was a student activist-leader sort of person and we were speaking a conference on (!) university reform. We were both on the same panel. We didn't meet again until 1999 and it's been a brainy love story ever since.
What is your favorite quote?
Claudia: "Life is what happens when you're making other plans," John Lennon sang it.
Andrew: I can't recall one. Oh wait...Woody Allen, "Nine tenths of success is showing up."
What is the question most commonly asked by your readers?
When people hear that Andrew and I are writing a critical book about American higher education, they ask, "When is it going to be published. We NEED this book?"
Click here to continue reading the interview.
Cornell seemed too far, too big and too cold, but two things lured me there: the prospects of working on the student newspaper and of being taught by Andrew Hacker.
I had heard of Professor Hacker while I was still in high school. His contrarian essays periodically punctuated The New York Times Magazine (a forum, he later mused, that seemed so packed with frilly advertisements that his words seemed destined to sell women's underwear more than to influence public policy). I'm sure I was distracted by the ads, but I was also engrossed by his essays. After the Kennedy assassination -- the first one -- he confronted instead of comforted, pointing out, for example, that most Americans ''assume that liberty is for those who are not suspected of abusing it.'' He once questioned the hand-wringing over nonvoters by warning that if they were corralled into voting they would choose ''on grounds which are neither premeditated nor rational.
When his unconventional statements appeared in print, I had no reason to question his complete sincerity. Not until I attended Cornell. There, as he paced before our political science class in a large lecture hall, the twinkle in his eyes revealed what I took to be a healthy skepticism and irreverence not merely to the opinions of others but sometimes even to his own. He punctured our conformist high school curriculums. Behind his modest proposals was the idea that facts are means to intellectual ends not necessarily ends in themselves. It's a fact, he would slyly state, that there are woefully few black dentists, a fact that neither I nor my classmates had noticed, much less contemplated. Then, vividly transforming abstract social theory into a relevant object lesson, he would postulate that although white Americans are willing to be helped with their luggage or restaurant meals or even by nurses, most weren't ready for black hands being thrust into their throats.
Click here to continue reading the article.
The Self-Exam That Higher Education Would Rather Not Conduct: Commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education
August 7, 2011By Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus
We’d like to think we’re not naïve. Although our book, Higher Education?, mentioned much that needed fixing, we didn’t expect universal agreement, let alone concerted action. Indeed, anyone who publishes a work that criticizes indifferent teaching, unconscionable costs, abuse of contingent faculty, and the sacrosanct status of tenure ought to [...]