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Big Man on Campus: A University President Speaks Out on Higher Education | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Publisher: Touchstone
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 331357
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.7 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 1416557199
Dewey Decimal Number: 378.73
EAN: 9781416557197
ASIN: 1416557199
Publication Date: June 3, 2008
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Product Description
An eye-opening and at times controversial insider's look at the current state of higher education in America, from one of the nation's most distinguished and down-to-earth university presidents. At a time when daily news headlines scream of competitive college enrollments, skyrocketing tuition, campus violence, alcohol and drug abuse, and other campus scandals, the former president of The George Washington University tells it like it really is. Educated at Columbia, Yale, and Harvard universities, with a membership in Phi Beta Kappa, more than fifteen honorary doctorates, four books, and numerous published articles, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg is one of the leading voices in American higher education. Here he brings his thirty years of experience, wisdom, and wit to reveal what goes on behind the scenes in the difficult and rewarding challenge of running a university. Using wonderful anecdotes from his own life, Trachtenberg explains with compassion and his trademark humor the insight he has gained from the halls of learning. For parents who will write big checks to send their sons and daughters to college, for businesspeople of all kinds looking for leadership lessons, and for anyone invested in America's system of higher education, this book is a major work about the importance of sustaining our nation's natural brain trust.
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 Ego and Enthusiasm September 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
University presidents are notoriously egotistical. Trachtenberg is no exception. Granted, he is likable in a grandfatherly kind of way and he seems more grounded in everyday realities and common concerns and a folksy kind of wisdom than most university presidents and so he has the ability to articulate the challenges facing higher education to a general public better than most. But like most university presidents he is assigned the unenviable task of having to defend an institution that is becoming more and more difficult to defend.
If there was such a thing as disinterested knowledge then the university would not have to defend itself but knowledge is political and so the university's mission is a politicized one. The traditional university was a place where students were versed in a tradition-bound curriculum; the clearly defined mission of the university was to create an educated class to assume leadership for a clearly defined society with clearly defined values and objectives. But as the world becomes more democratized/liberalized/globalized it also becomes less unified, and common values and objectives can no longer be assumed.
Trachtenberg thinks of himself as a social and political liberal, but he, like many university presidents, is a cultural conservative. He defends the tradition-bound idea of the university. What he doesn't see is that in defending its traditions, he is also defending a certain set of practices that have traditionally served a certain social class: his social class. His anecdotes are amusing but also telling. He received his values from an upper middle-class father and his educational life was not an interruption so much as an extension of that upbringing. Situated as he is in a position to benefit from these practices, he sees no reason to alter them or adjust them to new social and political realities. Trachtenberg is very fond of the fact that the university has a 700 year old history and that it remains one of the few constants in a changing world. But to remain relevant the university has to be responsive to social and political change and any institutional history will show that the university is not only a place that registers and critiques social and political change but a place that periodically undergoes changes of its own. The biggest change in the university in the last one hundred years is that scholars no longer conceive of knowledges as fixed things, rather scholars conceive of knowledges as flexible and evolving entities in rapidly evolving times.
Cultural conservatives, like Trachtenberg, want to slow that evolution and preserve tradition as long as they can. To the Trachtenbergian cultural conservative, multiculturalism and pluralism are only viable once one has mastered ones own culture; but to the progressive "mastery" is more of an ideal than a reality, and a suspicious one at that.
In may seem to a cultural conservative that the wisdom of the ages never goes out of style; but to the progressive one man's wisdom is another man's hokum.
Another significant change that has occurred is that the university is no longer seen to be the sanctuary that it once was (Robert Frost once said of college that it was a refuge from hasty judgement). Nowadays, the university is seen to be a socially enmeshed institution and one just as susceptible to error and misjudgement as any other social institution. This demystification of the university is a healthy thing. For too long the university has flattered itself with utopian fantasies of its own exceptionalism, but it seems that now more and more students see university professors/researchers/scholars not as magnanimous beings hovering over the rest of us but as socially enmeshed players with biases who defend their positions and status with rhetoric, much like lawyers and politicians.
Ideally, the university should be a place that fosters the highest level of social, political, and cultural debate. And universities do, on occasion, host evenhanded debates on lively issues (what counts as knowledge?, who has the right to create knowledge? who has the right to create and distribute information?, does globalization mean westernization?, is it tenable or morally right to divide the world up into western/nonwestern or first world/third world?), but in this democratic age its getting harder and harder for a university to institutionally accredit, legitimize, and defend some positions and not others.
Trachtenberg may think that it is possible to be fair about these things and reasonable, but Trachtenberg speaks with a confidence befitting a man who has always been an insider. Institutional privilege certainly looks different to the outsider, to those excluded from the game. There are new thinkers in the game who do not conceive of the university as a haven of good sense, but as a place that arbitrarly confers status and privilege upon those who can successfully negotiate the codes of this (until recently) closed and secretive community.
And, of course, if one is born male, white, and to the upper middle-class one has much more access to these codes than those not born male, white, and upper middle-class. Not surprisingly, The Big Man on Campus is almost always (there are a few exceptions) a Trachtenberg.
University presidents are certainly not the intellectual luminaries that they once were. Today the university president talks and acts like a CEO concerned more with the bottom line than with the higher aims of the university. As university presidents re-structure their institutions to reduce cost and maximize profits the first thing to go is job security. Trachtenberg has come down on both sides of the tenure issue: on the one hand he is for job security and safety nets, and on the other he thinks that some academics are overpaid and that others should not have received their tenured positions. Throughout the book Trachtenberg does not attempt to hide his disdain for faculty and faculty organizations.
Conclusion: He's a company man.
At 72, Trachtenberg remains enthusiastic, even if he doesn't ultimately offer anything particularly vital or groundbreaking to the discussion of the future of the institutional humanities. Like many senior professors he seems to be sustained by ego alone (Trachtenberg offered his speechwriting services to Colin Powell a few years back, and his next book, which is a continuation of these meditations on educational matters, is addressed to the president of the USA). He's a talker alright, but like many elder academic statesmen faced with an uncertain future he has little more to offer than the usual conservative prescription: retrenchment.
The world may become more diversified everyday but, if Trachtenberg has his way, the university will stay just the way it is for another 700 years.
 With endorsements like these! July 21, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I can't wait to read this book. With the imprimatur of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Alan Dershowitz, it's a can't-miss!
Understanding the University June 18, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
What do Cal Ripken, Houdini, Edison, J. Pierpont Morgan, Churchill, Bismarck and Job have in common? Their qualities, combined, are what Steve Trachtenberg tells us are essential equipment for a university president. He shows why this is so in a book filled with wisdom, humor and numerous ideas about what university education means, needs, and gives back to students, their parents, and society. It's a graceful and fascinating work about one of our greatest American institutions.
Particularly enjoyable are the autobiographical elements of Trachtenberg's upbringing and experiences, which are skillfully interwoven with his discussion of the figures and problems, joys and perplexities of university life and governance. His candor about himself, and his insights into the basic issues faced by universities, give this book an authenticity and reach that will make reading it a valuable and memorable experience.
For parents who want to know for what they're paying a university, for students who want to know why they should spend important years of their lives there, and for everyone who wants an authentic view of what a university is like from the inside, and also to learn from and be amused by encounters of an interesting person with the world, this is a splendid book.
Katharyn and Stanley Reiser
Big Man on Campus Is Outstanding June 6, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is one of the most outstanding volumes on higher education I have read in quite some time. Dr. Trachtenberg's perspectives from his years in the business are quite enlightening. I highly recommend this highly readable and entertaining book.
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