Although the period of student protests of the 1960s and 1970s
has long passed, Alain Touraine argues, in this wide-ranging and
vigorous essay, that the period's problems remain with us. Higher
degrees have become less and less valuable on the labor market and
the demand for academic reform has become more intense. Community
colleges still try to provide equal educational opportunities for
the poor and the minorities, without much success. And the
university has not yet resolved the conflict between being the home
of impartial inquiry and research and serving constituent
interests.
Touraine views American higher education as a system within a
definite, though changing, social context. He compares U.S. student
movements with those of other countries. He is skeptical about the
way Americans view the relationships between the university and
what he regards as the ruling forces of the society, between
knowledge and power, between production and education. He offers no
facile solutions, but he presents an exciting, nontraditional
analysis of the social and political forces that have shaped the
modern history of higher education.
In the new introduction, Clark Kerr contrasts his own views as
an American observer to those of Touraine as a French intellectual.
He asserts that the family, not higher education, is the most
important "school" in the process of reproducing society. Kerr
places more emphasis than does Touraine on the labor market, on the
production functions (training of skills and advancing technology)
of the vast nonelite segments of American higher education, on the
long-term impacts of science in changing society, and on scholarly
criticism in affecting transformations, and places less emphasis on
sporadic political protests by faculty and students.
He agrees with Touraine however, in his two great themes: (1)
that you cannot understand the academic system unless you first
understand society; and (2) that the rise of the university must be
understood to understand modern society, where "knowledge is
power." This volume will be important to all those interested in
higher education, whether as participants or observers.
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