Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money

Overview & Synopsis

"Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money" is a critique of the pernicious syndrome set in motion when the means and concomitant benefits of higher education--money and prestige, in particular--became increasingly accepted as its most important and fundamental ends. The book contends, on the basis of extensive evidence and documentation, that such a distorted perception of the functions of higher education became far more widespread in the last decades of the twentieth century than ever before historically, and that its influence has continued to accelerate. In this article, the authors argue that the "entelechy" of higher education, the web of interlocking goals that join to compose the total function and purpose of higher education, is capable of answering all reasonable demands placed on the system. The authors contends that within that entelechy is room for colleges and universities to make education an instrumental economic good, an instrumental social good, and an instrumental civic and political good. All of these goods are obtainable within the entelechy of higher education and are reasonable to expect--so long as people remember to cherish and protect what undergirds and precedes them all.