COLD SPRING SHOPS.

COMING UNGLUED. This site has previously commented on "Declining by Degrees" on television and on related work in The Atlantic. I have finished Declining by Degrees and open Book Review No. 14 with the old observation, "the movie is nothing like the book." That's not to slight the book, or the movie. The book is a collection of essays from assorted observers of the academic scene. My paperback version has a foreword by Tom Wolfe, who, true to form, focuses on the superficialities, although his observation that undergraduates dress like nine year olds addresses a dimension of growing up in the United States that has not yet been fully explored: that nine year olds lead so programmed an existence that it's only in college that they're free to be kids, from the ball caps and sneakers to the bean bag tournaments. The primary focus of the book is the tradeoffs higher education faces. Indiana's Murray Sperber sums up the problem as higher education going from the Roaring Twenties (the Welfare State University of the early 1960s) to a permanent Depression (this despite historically high premiums for college degrees, particularly in technical and quantitative fields.) He suggests the emphasis on research prestige has led professors to slight their undergraduates and proposes new promotion tracks with a teaching emphasis. Columbia Teachers' Arthur Levine contemplates the consumer mentality of students while noting that faculty are also consumers, albeit of a different variety of services (laboratories rather than climbing walls, no Friday classes rather than no Friday classes.) Sports Illustrated's Frank Deford is quite candid about the "peculiar institution" that intercollegiate athletics has become. I have left out a number of other contributors, each of whom I can concur with in part and dissent from in part. Again, no contributor has tackled the connection between academic and parental positional arms races (which the book treats conventionally as U.S. News rankings- and research prestige- driven) and open-access at the less famous or less-highly-ranked institutions.