Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities

Citation

Gorman, G.E. (2012), "Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities", Online Information Review, Vol. 36 No. 2, pp. 320-321. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521211240216

The US has a long tradition of navel‐gazing with regard to higher education and the intellectual enterprise, often with provocative and insightful results. This work by Richard DeMillo is no exception, although a frustrating read all the same.

The publisher's blurb sub‐subtitles this book “How institutions of higher learning can rescue themselves from irrelevance and marginalization in the age of iTunes U and YouTube EDU”, and for once the publisher has about got it right. DeMillo focuses on “middle‐range” universities and colleges in the USA, discussing how they have reached their present state, and what is likely to happen if they do not wake up, grasp the challenge of irrelevance and move into new, untested and exciting domains. (This domain I would call a classic liberal education, with bite.)

The book's title, Abelard to Apple, suggests how DeMillo approaches his topic – in a rambling historical sequence from C12 to C21 for the most part. This in itself is fine, and quite understandable; but the writing style of the historically sequential chapters is not – like historical fiction populated with interesting characters and odd events, it does not lend itself to academic reading, and really must be read from beginning to end in order to be understood. DeMillo himsef states that it should be “read like a novel”. Perhaps it is this reviewer's particular perspective as an academic, but this approach is frustrating in a book with so much to offer, but that is hidden in unnecessary verbosity and colourful descriptions. In defence of the author, he does state at the outset that he has written for a more general audience of stakeholders in higher education, a commendable focus, but in the process I suggest that he has lost one of his key stakeholder audiences, the academic institutions and those who populate them.

All of that said, I do recommend that one persevere with reading what is a work of stimulating, highly defensible and provocative arguments of how tertiary education has managed to dig itself into a hole of irrelevance on the one hand and knee‐jerk reaction to the latest fads and fancies on the other. And this is not limited to the US, but extends to every country in which I have first‐hand academic experience – Canada, the UK, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia […]. DeMillo's thesis is universal: that higher education institutions are on a “path to marginal roles in a much different worlds than they are designed for”. His novel discussion, often story‐based around personalities within his circle of acquaintences, shows how we have moved to this state over the centuries. He offers insights into how universities and academics function, how introducing change into higher education is like trying to make an elephant change its course, and how these institutions consistently fail to see the blindingly obvious.

His insights are at once frightening and entertaining, and “a jolly good read” as they say. The discussion is replete with magnificent word bites, such as universities functioning as “training grounds and not venues for independent inquiry”. Such pithy statements often lead one into unexpected speculation; what if universities did away with the “training ground” approach that churns out accountants, librarians, IT specialists and the rest and returned to being an academy for experimentation, thought and discussion, the pre‐Abelard Greek ideal? As one of my colleagues frequently opines, “it makes you think”. This is perhaps the great contribution that DeMillo brings to the debate, encouragement to reflect on the turbulence facing higher education.

But what of his thoughtful suggestions for a way out of the maze? This is less clear, and often difficult to determine in his stories. The closest we come to a vade mecum for saving higher education is in DeMillo's final chapter, Rules for the Twenty‐first Century, in which he offers two sets of principles, titled Define Your Value and Become an Architect respectively. Here he draws together ideas that have wandered in and out of the preceding chapters, presenting them less as prescriptions and more as points for reflection. We are unlikely to take heed, of course, but there are ideas here that will spark discussion for years to come.