Liberal Education and the Public Interest

Rating:
Summary: A complete lie, or just a partial one?
Review: "Liberal Education" initially appeared promising. After an interesting chapter on the history of college presidents, Freedman discusses the current and future states of higher education. As expected he passionately defends liberal education and intellectualism. I was stunned, however, when in the middle of the second chapter (p. 42), he defends tenured faculty by drawing on the following statistics: there are perhaps "200,000 faculty members" at significant research universities and colleges in the United States, a country of "280 million people." He concludes that such faculty "make up less than .0001 percent of the nation's population." He repeats this assertion in the following paragraph, indicating that this was not simply a typo. He makes no small mistake: it is the equivalent of standing in Chicago and stating that Boston is about a mile away. Freedman attempts to mislead the reader (he uses these numbers to argue for academic freedom for a small proportion of the population); as my expertise is limited, I cannot tell if he has made other such mispresentations of facts, but one such significant mistake is enough to make me distrust the remainder of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Fine Advocacy by Leading Liberal Academic
Review: Exquisitely written, this book is superbly articulate advocacy in defense of the fundamental components of traditional liberal education. This advocacy of 'tradition' is all the more special coming from one of academe's leading true Liberals. As President of Dartmouth Universty, Freedman took on the hate-speech of Dartmouth's right-wing journal and made it stick. He held a similar position at the sometimes underrated University of Iowa, and was ombudsman and also law dean at the Universtiy of Pennsylvania. He truly knows whereof he speaks, and our policy makers would do well to heed his exhortations.

Rating:
Summary: Fine Advocacy by Leading Liberal Academic
Review: Exquisitely written, this book is superbly articulate advocacy in defense of the fundamental components of traditional liberal education. This advocacy of 'tradition' is all the more special coming from one of academe's leading true Liberals. As President of Dartmouth Universty, Freedman took on the hate-speech of Dartmouth's right-wing journal and made it stick. He held a similar position at the sometimes underrated University of Iowa, and was ombudsman and also law dean at the Universtiy of Pennsylvania. He truly knows whereof he speaks, and our policy makers would do well to heed his exhortations.