Fail U. : the false promise of higher education /

*Starred Review* Looking back on his years as president of Ohio State University, E. Gordon Gee frankly acknowledged, I didn't think a lot about costs. However, with tuition skyrocketing, students and their parents do think about the staggering costs, and about the benefits they hope to receive for bearing these costs. As he did in The Hollow Men (1990) and ProfScam (1988), Sykes here poses hard questions about the quality and substance of what the nation's universities now deliver. Too often, Sykes concludes, colleges give their students little but debt to show for their years on campus. As they visit a wide range of schools, readers see how administrators lavish resources on impressive buildings, on powerhouse athletic programs, and on aloof professors who dodge students so they can write unreadable and unread tomes of research. With telling statistics and piquant anecdotes, Sykes indicts higher educators for teaching students little about the humanities, mathematics, or the sciences, while indoctrinating them in rigid new political orthodoxies. Laying out a bold agenda for reform, Sykes calls for a university system smaller and less dependent on government largesse, less politically correct, and more open to online instruction than the one now bankrupting many students and their families. Certain to stimulate a much-needed debate.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2016 Booklist

Sykes (senior fellow, Wisconsin Policy Research Inst.) here effectively harnesses the acerbic tone of his 1988 sensational take-down of higher education Profscam to make a case for change along more free-market lines. Professors come in for the harshest criticism, as Sykes portrays them as a bunch of tweed-wearing layabouts who care less about teaching than padding their resumes with "timewasting drivel" (the author's uncharitable term for academic research). Much of Sykes's narrative will have a familiar ring, as he examines already widely covered issues such as unsustainable student debt burdens and accumulating evidence that most students learn relatively little during their college years, as well as more controversial subjects such as rape culture on college campuses and classroom "trigger warnings." Sykes presents several recommendations for how to put higher education back on the right track, including asking professors to "spend more time with students" and holding universities accountable for student learning and graduation rates. Readers who do not subscribe to Sykes's contrarian views may be put off by this volume's strident and snarky tone (e.g., in a chapter devoted to campus rape, he dismisses rules attempting to codify sexual consent as "a conflation of High Victorian prudery and radical feminist theory"). -VERDICT Not recommended.-Seth Kershner, Northwestern Connecticut Community Coll. Lib., Winsted © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.