The Assenting Academy

If books about the university continue to appear at the present rate, we may have to establish one of those new interdisciplinary fields that many of their authors favor—academiology: the study of higher education and its pedagogical, philosophical, social, and cultural implications. There are plenty of classic and semi-classic texts, from Plato to Paul Goodman, and staggering quantities of information and opinion about the contemporary scene. Already, the bibliography of Berkeley and its troubles is big enough to be mined for Ph.D. theses; and the continuing stories of Columbia and Paris will undoubtedly inspire comparable collections of narratives, interpretations, and polemics.

It is not the fault of Jencks and Riesman that the title of their book may lead readers to expect an account of campus apocalypse in the 1960’s. The Academic Revolution must have been already in the press when the eruptions at San Francisco State demonstrated that there was to •be nothing...