Reaffirming Higher Education

The newspaper is to the twentieth century what the novel was for the nineteenth century: the expression of popular sentiment. In the first of a three-volume study of journalism and what it has meant as a source of knowledge and as a mechanism for orchestrating mass ideology, Melvin J. Lasky provides a major overview. His research runs the gamut of material found in newspapers, from the trivial to the profound, from pseudo-science to habits of solid investigation.The volume is divided into four parts. The first attacks deficiencies in grammar and syntax with examples from newspapers and magazines drawn from the German as well as English-language press. The second examines the key issues of journalism: accuracy and authenticity. Lasky provides an especially acute account of differences between active literacy and passive viewing, or the relationship of word and picture in defining authenticity.The third part emphasizes the problem of bias in everything from racial reporting to cultural correctness. This is the first systematic attempt to study racial nomenclature, identity-labeling, and literary discrimination. Lasky follows closely the model set by George Orwell a half century earlier. The final section of the work covers the competition between popular media and the redefinition of pornography and its language. The volume closes with an examination of how the popular culture both influenced and was influential upon literary titans like Hemingway, Lawrence, and Tynan.

How should universities balance the requirements of teaching with those of scholarship? The consensus that scholarship counts first and teaching comes second has lost its hold, for in an academic world in which few publish (95 percent of publications come from 5 percent of the professors), insisting on the priority of scholarship rings hollow. The American college and university today must assess what difference scholarship makes to teaching and what teaching means to scholarship. Reaffirming Higher Education asks who teaches, what, to whom, and why.The authors maintain that what matters in higher learning is learning, while denying that scholarship detracts from teaching. Chapter 1 discusses who should teach in a university and touches upon such topics as tenure and teaching. Chapter 2 defines what universities should teach, and the mutuality of scholarship, research, and teaching. Chapter 3 answers who should go to college and why. Chapter 4 assesses the future of higher education in the American university and what is at stake on campus. William Scott Green places into perspective the authors'' observations and ideals about higher education and what it means to make one''s major field of study, the "major," into a primary path to a liberal education.In this intelligent and insightful volume, the authors outline reform and renewal for both'' the institutional and personal dimensions of higher learning that would encompass the ideal of the academic ethic. This book should be read by all those who strive to make universities more humane, educators, parents, and students alike.