Stephen Joel Trachtenberg - Reflections on Higher Education

Cover

Page a-1

STEPHEN JOEL TRACHTENBERG

Page a-2

Thinking Out Loud:

10 Years of Commentaries on Higher Education

(American Council on Education/Oryx Press, 1998)

Speaking His Mind:

5 Years of Commentaries on Higher Education

(American Council on Education/Oryx Press, 1994)

The Art of Hiring in Americas Colleges & Universities

(Prometheus Books, 1993)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Copyright 2002
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg

Published by The Oryx Press
88 Post Road West
Westport, CT 06881

An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.oryxpress.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number

ISBN: 1-57356-571-7

Published simultaneously in Canada

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be produced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission
in writing from The Oryx Press.

Printed and Bound in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information SciencePermanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48, 1984.

The United States in the 21st Century is reprinted with permission from The World & I, November 2001.

Great Expectations is reprinted with permission from The Presidency, Fall 2001, American Council on Education.

Page i

Page ii

Page iii

This book is dedicated with the deepest appreciation and gratitude to Helene Interlandi, my assistant of 23 years, and to the members of The George Washington University Class of 2006.

Page iv

This page intentionally left blank.

Page 1

MANY YEARS AFTER he had published A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift read it over and exclaimed, What a genius I had when I wrote that book! As I reviewed the speeches I have given in the last three years, I confess that I was not moved to a similar exclamation. While reading a few of them. I made a note to remind myself that sometimes silence is golden. In most cases, however, I was pleased with what I had to say and how I said it, but the observations I made on those occasionslike some very good winesjust wouldnt travel, and so they are not included here. There were some speeches I thought had some endurance and continuing interest, and the speeches in this collection come from that batch.

Those speeches, indeed like the others, were given to small and fairly specialized audiencesa group of experts in educational testing, for example, a Rotary Club, a seminar on leadership and management. But if I truly believed they still had something to say to a broader audience, then I thought it would be reasonable to collect several of them, edit them so they play a bit better to the eye of a reader than to the ear of a listener, and offer them to all comers. Hence, this little book.

As I looked over the speeches I had selected, it was obvious that, with two exceptions, they had a common themehigher education in at least one of its incarnations or functionsand even the exceptions

Page 2

deal with public education or with education in general as a partial solution to the problem at hand. But something else caught me unawarespecifically, and just as obviously, a second theme I had not consciously intended. That theme is the differences between then and now or, to put it bluntly, change. Life and learning in the academy and elsewhere in our society are not what they used to be and in some cases not what we had in mind or ever could have imagined.