I haven’t read This Republic of Suffering but everyone seems to think it’s very good and that Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust is an exceptional scholar. So perhaps she’s just out her element in the short essay form and that explains the incoherence of this piece in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, where Faust argues that…well, I’m not sure what she’s arguing. It reads like she sat down for a couple of hours with a stack of recent higher education critiques and decided to just name-check them all on the way to a series of generalized questions and observations. This in particular is bothersome:
As the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism, should universities — in their research, teaching and writing — have made greater efforts to expose the patterns of risk and denial? Should universities have presented a firmer counterweight to economic irresponsibility? Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve?
As “the world” indulged? Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t Harvard indulge the bubble of false prosperity as much as anyone, with various catastrophic results? And doesn’t being president of Harvard give you the standing and authority to replace the question marks with periods while transposing the words “Should” and “universities” in the second sentence and “Have” and “universities in the third? After all, you were there! You tell me! And if that’s the case, what are you going to do about it? It’s not like someone else is in a better position to fix these problems.
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5/11/2012 | Kevin Carey talks to Salon about the government's role in rising student debt.
5/8/2012 | Kevin Carey discusses the problem of rising tuition and student loan interest rates with The Nation. 
5/4/2012 | Stephen Burd talks to Education Week about student loan debt and help from Congress.
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I see why you’re dissatisfied with the reviews of the myriad books she discusses, but I’m not sure what your problem is with the above paragraph. I think she’s implying that universities indulged in the “bubble of false prosperity” as well. And I think there’s value to raising questions. The last line of the preceding paragraph reads “universities might well ask if they have in fact done enough to raise the deep and unsettling questions necessary to any society”.
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