How professors play the cat guarding the cream

Parents groan as college tuition rises faster than the rate of inflation. Students wonder where the distinguished professors are hiding as inexperienced graduate students take over the classroom. Business executives, straining to increase employee output, question how faculty productivity is measured. Alumni suspect the trustees of their alma mater are not exacting accountability for administrative performance. The public is concerned that "political correctness" is warping the curriculum. Taxpayers ask whether they are getting their money's worth on state-supported campuses. Richard Huber addresses these issues in a book that is both entertaining to read and striking in its insights. Tuition rises faster than the rate of inflation in part because universities enhance their academic reputations by hiring high-salaried scholars with low teaching loads. Undergraduate teaching is often terrible because professors are trained as researchers and rewarded as scholars, not teachers. Faculty output is measured by crude instruments which encourage goofing off as a masquerade for productive work. Trustees fail to enforce accountability because they are typically not familiar with the academic world and are confused by a university culture so totally different from their own corporate culture. The current brawl over the curriculum is not just an ivory tower dispute over race and ethnicity but a challenge to what kind of place America is to be. Taxpayers are not getting their money's worth because research and doctoral-granting universities, the focus of this book, are locked into outmoded personnel practices that assume all tenured professors will be productive scholars. Huber concludes with realistic reforms to improve the teaching of undergraduates and reduce the cost of higher education. And that would be a win-win prescription for the nation as well as the universities.