A thoughtful review of the movie "Ivory Tower"

June 19, 2014 Chronicle of Higher Education

The Miseducation of America

While I was watching Ivory Tower, a documentary about the state of college in America that appears in select theaters this month (the movie also airs on CNN this fall), it occurred to me that of the many problems with higher education these days, not the least concerns the way we talk about it. "Efficiency," "art-history majors," "kids who graduate with $100,000 in debt," "the college bubble," the whole rhetoric of crisis and collapse: The public discourse is dominated by sound bites, one-liners, hearsay, horror stories, and a very great deal of misinformation.

Higher ed is not unique in this respect, of course, but it is particularly bad. College, as the movie points out, was always treated as a black box: 18-year-olds were inserted at one end, 22-year-olds came out the other, and as long as the system appeared to be working, no one bothered to inquire what happened in between. Americans, as a result, have very little understanding of what college is about—how it works, what it’s for, what larger social benefits it offers—and those employed in higher education have had very little practice in explaining it to them. The debate has been left to the politicians, the pundits, and increasingly, the hustlers and ideologues. Few who talk about college in public understand it, and few who understand it talk about it.

Ivory Tower, for the most part, is an honorable exception...

No, yours truly hasn't seen the movie (currently at the Laemmle Royal).  But the full review is at:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Miseducation-of-America/147227/

Towards the end of the review, the author gets a bit carried away with thoughts about free tuition, etc.  But overall, the essay is of interest.  Thanks to Bette Billet for spotting this article.