Mark C. Taylor

On his book Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities

Cover Interview of October 10, 2010

In a nutshell

Our current system of higher education is financially, curricularly and institutionally unsustainable.

And there is no easy answer to a problem this complex.

But I wrote Crisis on Campus because no significant progress can be made until we recognize that our higher education’s problems are structural and systemic.

The American higher education landscape is vast and diverse. When considering its problems, it is necessary to understand the important role that institutions ranging from community colleges and liberal arts schools to research universities and for-profit enterprises are playing.

We must also understand that these problems are global.

One of the major hurdles to improving higher education is the American mania for ratings. That leads institutions into costly and unproductive competition.

Individual colleges and universities cannot and should not address the present crisis by themselves. Rather, they should be cooperating and collaborating from the local and state to the national and global levels.

New network technologies are one key theme in the plan I propose. These technologies now make it possible for such cooperation to no longer be limited by geographical proximity.

polemics / academia / united states / economics / economic crisis / higher education / debt / graduate study /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009