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Big Man on Campus: A University President Speaks Out on Higher Education, by Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
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An eye-opening and at times controversial insider's look at the current state of higher education in America, from one of the nation's most distinguished and down-to-earth university presidents.
At a time when daily news headlines scream of competitive college enrollments, skyrocketing tuition, campus violence, alcohol and drug abuse, and other campus scandals, the former president of The George Washington University tells it like it really is.
Educated at Columbia, Yale, and Harvard universities, with a membership in Phi Beta Kappa, more than fifteen honorary doctorates, four books, and numerous published articles, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg is one of the leading voices in American higher education. Here he brings his thirty years of experience, wisdom, and wit to reveal what goes on behind the scenes in the difficult and rewarding challenge of running a university. Using wonderful anecdotes from his own life, Trachtenberg explains with compassion and his trademark humor the insight he has gained from the halls of learning.
For parents who will write big checks to send their sons and daughters to college, for businesspeople of all kinds looking for leadership lessons, and for anyone invested in America's system of higher education, this book is a major work about the importance of sustaining our nation's natural brain trust.
- Sales Rank: #1185911 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Touchstone
- Published on: 2008-06-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .98" h x 6.22" w x 9.50" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Currently President Emeritus of The George Washington University (after 19 years as president), author Trachtenberg (Reflections on Higher Education) looks back on his years of work at GW, the University of Hartford (where he was president for 11 years) and Boston University to assess the current state of higher education. Each chapter focuses on a different subject-town/gown relations, fundraising, the rules of an effective university president-with a grounded, friendly tone and a wealth of personal anecdotes. Much of the work, however, concerns weighty matters such as defining the scope of various undergraduate curricula in the United States and parsing out the essentials of study: "It makes little sense to learn about another culture while remaining ignorant about one's own." Refreshingly honest and conversational, whether tackling the changes he's observed in students over the years or the influence of his parents, professors and colleagues, this will make extremely interesting reading for those in the education industry, and should be of general interest as well.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
News reports of campus shootings, rising tuition, misdeeds by student athletes, or misuse of university funds have brought unwanted attention to college presidents. In this engaging book, Trachtenberg, former president of George Washington University, candidly explores his 19-year tenure and total 30 years, experience heading a major educational institution. Educated at Columbia, Yale, and Harvard Universities, Trachtenberg is quite familiar with the culture of universities, the tension between operating a corporation and a school, and how the job of president has evolved, particularly at elite institutions. Among the issues he and other presidents daily tackle: campus violence, unionization, affirmative action, drinking and drugs, and military recruitment on campus. University presidents can now run afoul of faculty, students, the media, and even Congress as it becomes more concerned about the tax-exempt status of institutions with huge endowments. At times drawing on speeches and correspondence, he recalls personal and professional highs and low, lessons and regrets, throughout his life and career. A loving portrait of a challenging career and an inside look at the complexities of a modern American university. --Vanessa Bush
Review
"Big Man on Campus is an engaging, wise, and candid memoir -- the story of a successful leader whose love for his job infused his career at every point. It is hard to imagine a better picture of the daily life of a university president or a more telling examination of the challenges facing higher education."-- Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of No Ordinary Time and Team of Rivals
"There are few university presidents like Stephen Joel Trachtenberg -- at once knowledgeable, creative, commonsensical, likable, and aggressive (indeed, relentless, even outrageous) in the pursuit of institutional uplift and excellence. There is nothing here remotely akin to the platitudinous outpourings of the usual suspects described as 'statesmen of higher education.' Big Man on Campus is a refreshingly candid, humorous, and readable portrait of American higher education and its discontents."-- Jose A. Cabranes, U.S. Circuit Judge (New York) and trustee of Columbia University; former trustee of Yale University and Colgate University
"The least sheepish man ever to hand out a sheepskin serves up a prescriptive memoir that is everything most higher education books never manage to be: brash, confessional, thought provoking, and fun." -- Thomas Mallon, author of Henry and Clara and Fellow Traveler
"Stephen Joel Trachtenberg is not only among the wisest of university presidents, he is clearly among the most amusing and readable of writers about academia. There is nothing stuffy about this big man on campus. Trachtenberg educates, criticizes, prods, complains, and tickles the funny bone all at the same time. If you have a kid in college or contribute to one, you must read this book. Even if you don't, just read it for fun."-- Professor Alan M. Dershowitz, author of Reversal of Fortune and Finding Jefferson
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Understanding the University
By KReiser
What do Cal Ripken, Houdini, Edison, J. Pierpont Morgan, Churchill, Bismarck and Job have in common? Their qualities, combined, are what Steve Trachtenberg tells us are essential equipment for a university president. He shows why this is so in a book filled with wisdom, humor and numerous ideas about what university education means, needs, and gives back to students, their parents, and society. It's a graceful and fascinating work about one of our greatest American institutions.
Particularly enjoyable are the autobiographical elements of Trachtenberg's upbringing and experiences, which are skillfully interwoven with his discussion of the figures and problems, joys and perplexities of university life and governance. His candor about himself, and his insights into the basic issues faced by universities, give this book an authenticity and reach that will make reading it a valuable and memorable experience.
For parents who want to know for what they're paying a university, for students who want to know why they should spend important years of their lives there, and for everyone who wants an authentic view of what a university is like from the inside, and also to learn from and be amused by encounters of an interesting person with the world, this is a splendid book.
Katharyn and Stanley Reiser
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Insightful, Witty, and Disappointing!
By Loyd Eskildson
"BMOC" offers several helpful suggestions for university leaders (also hospital administrators): 1)You shouldn't make everyone mad at you at the same time. 2)Your message should be uplifting rather than blatantly critical. 3)Avoid introducing more than one idea at a time. 4)Try to build a community constituency. 5)Improving the overall image of a place is important. 6)Maintaining perspective can be important.
He also openly admits to some frustrating weaknesses in university administration - eg. faculty ability to premptorily veto change (eg. schedules allowing faster graduation, hiring competent, but contrary scholars) - especially those in the arts and humanities; tenure; lack of an enforceable retirement age.
Trachtenberg, however, fails to face the biggest problem in America's colleges and universities - rapidly rising costs. He's aware of the opportunity to save money through increased class size, but weakly supports it. Research offers important contributions to both students and the world. However, Trachtenberg fails to mention that most is worthless - eg. how useful is the nth analysis of a literary work, hair-splitting analysis of factors affecting business success that pale in comparison to successful strategy, continual reinventing the wheel in public education while promising improvements that never materialize, etc.? Then there's increases in administration, decreases in teaching hours, shortening the school year, high dropout rates, and the approximately 50% of graduates unable to find jobs that require a college education.
Finally, there's the problem of erroneous content. Part of the problem involves the previously referenced worthless research. Similarly, higher educators promulgate an infinity of unfounded personal biases - eg. an Ivy-League professor telling new congressmen and senators on TV that the Smoot-Hawley tariffs signifanctly worsened the Great Depression. (Look at the data!)
8 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Ego and Enthusiasm
By Doug Anderson
University presidents are notoriously egotistical. Trachtenberg is no exception. Granted, he is likable in a grandfatherly kind of way and he seems more grounded in everyday realities and common concerns and a folksy kind of wisdom than most university presidents and so he has the ability to articulate the challenges facing higher education to a general public better than most. But like most university presidents he is assigned the unenviable task of having to defend an institution that is becoming more and more difficult to defend.
If there was such a thing as disinterested knowledge then the university would not have to defend itself but knowledge is political and so the university's mission is a politicized one. The traditional university was a place where students were versed in a tradition-bound curriculum; the clearly defined mission of the university was to create an educated class to assume leadership for a clearly defined society with clearly defined values and objectives. But as the world becomes more democratized/liberalized/globalized it also becomes less unified, and common values and objectives can no longer be assumed.
Trachtenberg thinks of himself as a social and political liberal, but he, like many university presidents, is a cultural conservative. He defends the tradition-bound idea of the university. What he doesn't see is that in defending its traditions, he is also defending a certain set of practices that have traditionally served a certain social class: his social class. His anecdotes are amusing but also telling. He received his values from an upper middle-class father and his educational life was not an interruption so much as an extension of that upbringing. Situated as he is in a position to benefit from these practices, he sees no reason to alter them or adjust them to new social and political realities. Trachtenberg is very fond of the fact that the university has a 700 year old history and that it remains one of the few constants in a changing world. But to remain relevant the university has to be responsive to social and political change and any institutional history will show that the university is not only a place that registers and critiques social and political change but a place that periodically undergoes changes of its own. The biggest change in the university in the last one hundred years is that scholars no longer conceive of knowledges as fixed things, rather scholars conceive of knowledges as flexible and evolving entities in rapidly evolving times.
Cultural conservatives, like Trachtenberg, want to slow that evolution and preserve tradition as long as they can. To the Trachtenbergian cultural conservative, multiculturalism and pluralism are only viable once one has mastered ones own culture; but to the progressive "mastery" is more of an ideal than a reality, and a suspicious one at that.
In may seem to a cultural conservative that the wisdom of the ages never goes out of style; but to the progressive one man's wisdom is another man's hokum.
Another significant change that has occurred is that the university is no longer seen to be the sanctuary that it once was (Robert Frost once said of college that it was a refuge from hasty judgement). Nowadays, the university is seen to be a socially enmeshed institution and one just as susceptible to error and misjudgement as any other social institution. This demystification of the university is a healthy thing. For too long the university has flattered itself with utopian fantasies of its own exceptionalism, but it seems that now more and more students see university professors/researchers/scholars not as magnanimous beings hovering over the rest of us but as socially enmeshed players with biases who defend their positions and status with rhetoric, much like lawyers and politicians.
Ideally, the university should be a place that fosters the highest level of social, political, and cultural debate. And universities do, on occasion, host evenhanded debates on lively issues (what counts as knowledge?, who has the right to create knowledge? who has the right to create and distribute information?, does globalization mean westernization?, is it tenable or morally right to divide the world up into western/nonwestern or first world/third world?), but in this democratic age its getting harder and harder for a university to institutionally accredit, legitimize, and defend some positions and not others.
Trachtenberg may think that it is possible to be fair about these things and reasonable, but Trachtenberg speaks with a confidence befitting a man who has always been an insider. Institutional privilege certainly looks different to the outsider, to those excluded from the game. There are new thinkers in the game who do not conceive of the university as a haven of good sense, but as a place that arbitrarly confers status and privilege upon those who can successfully negotiate the codes of this (until recently) closed and secretive community.
And, of course, if one is born male, white, and to the upper middle-class one has much more access to these codes than those not born male, white, and upper middle-class. Not surprisingly, The Big Man on Campus is almost always (there are a few exceptions) a Trachtenberg.
University presidents are certainly not the intellectual luminaries that they once were. Today the university president talks and acts like a CEO concerned more with the bottom line than with the higher aims of the university. As university presidents re-structure their institutions to reduce cost and maximize profits the first thing to go is job security. Trachtenberg has come down on both sides of the tenure issue: on the one hand he is for job security and safety nets, and on the other he thinks that some academics are overpaid and that others should not have received their tenured positions. Throughout the book Trachtenberg does not attempt to hide his disdain for faculty and faculty organizations.
Conclusion: He's a company man.
At 72, Trachtenberg remains enthusiastic, even if he doesn't ultimately offer anything particularly vital or groundbreaking to the discussion of the future of the institutional humanities. Like many senior professors he seems to be sustained by ego alone (Trachtenberg offered his speechwriting services to Colin Powell a few years back, and his next book, which is a continuation of these meditations on educational matters, is addressed to the president of the USA). He's a talker alright, but like many elder academic statesmen faced with an uncertain future he has little more to offer than the usual conservative prescription: retrenchment.
The world may become more diversified everyday but, if Trachtenberg has his way, the university will stay just the way it is for another 700 years.
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