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Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America. By Page Smith. New York: Viking. 1990. xvii +316 pp.
Killing the Spirit belongs on the shelf next to Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals and Charles Sykes's ProfScam--or perhaps one shelf higher. Page Smith comments somewhat favorably on Sykes, Allan Bloom, William Bennett, and the Nation Association of Scholars, and is probably best described as a "cultural conservative." However, Killing the Spirit is more humane and less strident than other recent conservative critiques of higher education.
In fact, most of Smith's book is not a critique of the present-day university, but rather a history of American higher education and academic disciplines. As history, Killing the Spirit is generally convincing and even-handed, and deserves to be read by all who care about liberal education.
As a work about the present, Killing the Spirit is unsatisfying. Smith, a former history professor and administrator, last worked at a university 15 years prior to writing the book. His comments about the status quo at universities must therefore be taken as the observations of an outsider, albeit an outsider with years of teaching experience, primarily at elite schools.
The main point about which I would disagree with Smith is his assumption that professors run the universities and are therefore to blame for the decline of higher education (a decline which, by the way, is not persuasively demonstrated). Smith stops short of...