The Creation of the Future by Frank Rhodes,
Cornell University Press, $29.95, ISBN 080143937X
WHAT has been society鈥檚 most significant creation in the past thousand years?
The university, says Frank Rhodes. With that supremely confident statement, this
Cornell University emeritus president begins his comprehensive review of the
future of American research universities. They are, he says, crucibles in which
the future is forged.
He praises their success at promoting research and teaching, which he
believes is a consequence of those two activities being pursued in the same
places by the same people. But there鈥檚 acres of room for improvement. Rhodes
suggests ways of reducing the perceived high cost of degrees in the US. He also
wants to stop the absurd grade inflation that allows some people to graduate
without being able to read competently. In the US, 15 per cent of graduates are
thought to be functionally illiterate.
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Rhodes passionately wants to see a renewal of the universities鈥� community
values, which have been so diminished by the growth in student numbers and in
professional specialisation of academics. Online learning obviously has huge
potential鈥攕omething that鈥檚 often appreciated more by the increasingly
influential accountants than by some conservative academics.
The author agrees that his vision of the future of research universities is
only cautiously ambitious. My bet is that, at the beginning of the third
millennium his conservative book will be seen not as a far-sighted manifesto but
as a charming exhibit in some e-museum of academic nostalgia.