Joseph A. Soares

The Decline of Privilege: The Modernization of Oxford University

Introduction: the Oxford myth Part I. The Transformation of Oxford: 1. Academic autonomy and money matters: Oxford goes public 2. The making of Oxford as a middle-class institution: admissions controversies 3. Oxford moves into the natural sciences 4. St. Catherines College: renewal of the collegiate tradition Part II. Oxford Embattled: 5. Labour politics and the high tide of internal reform: academia challenged 6. Thatcher politics: academia dethroned Conclusion 7. Dilemmas of academic authority Notes References Index.

The Future of College Admissions: Discussion

Selective admissions to college are an American paradox: They matter less, and more, than many think. They matter less because they directly impact a fraction of college-age youths. William Bowen and Derek Bok (1998) estimated that out of the more than 2,700 four-year bachelor degree colleges in the United States, “about 20 to 30 percent” are in the selective category (p. 15). They matter more because their criteria sit at the center of our collective beliefs on what counts as merit in education, which in turn opens doors to white-collar occupations. In controversies on admissions, the whole meritocratic ethos of the professional managerial class is put on the line (Lemann, 1999; Soares, 2007). Our core concepts of excellence and opportunity are at stake along with the institutional practices that embody them. The fact that selective admissions have for nearly a century been tied to the SAT/ACT plays not a trivial role in the pervasion of the whole of K–12 education by the heavy metric of standardized test scores. We seem in danger of losing sight of education as more than just cramming a student’s brain for an exam. The articles in this special issue are crucial contributions to our rethinking of selective admissions, but their significance does not end there; they challenge us to reexamine teaching and learning in higher education, as well. They call attention to the need for admissions to be realigned with the broad mission of colleges to educate youths to flourish in a world beyond the classroom. Our visions of admissions have been too often blinkered by numbers with dubious diagnostic value. As Bowen and Bok (1998) noted in their book on race and selective admissions, “prior grades and numeric test scores . . . are easily complied and compared. But what do they really tell us and what are we trying to predict?” (p. xxi). The articles presented here ask: Are we striving to select and to educate creative, cultural omnivores, active citizens, and ethical contributors to our world? Or are we looking for and rewarding the consummate multiple-choice test taker? Do we want youths who excel at “gaming” the system (Bound,

Dancing with the Behemoth

allow customized book searching and buying. Or access by anyone. Authors, publishers, and step further into the electronic world: There are booksellers will all become content providers, now two electronic book devices on the market, and portals and search engines will shape our some journals andpublishershave turned to onS reading habits even more than the shelving line publishing, and a new generation of scholS practices of booksellers do today. arship is posted on the Web for virtually free

Universities and Innovation Economies: The Creative Wasteland of Post-Industrial Society

Peter Murphy, head of the School of Creative Arts at James Cook University, has written a polemical tome declaring that our creativity and capacity for cultural and scientific innovation is exhausted. The post-industrial era is at an end; and its key institution, the modern university, has utterly failed to deliver scientific, technological, and cultural progress. This is because of the self-defeating expansion of tertiary education, which went hand in hand with its bureaucratization (p. 1). These ‘‘meritocratic dystopias’’ have been orchestrated by ‘‘over-professionalized ghouls’’ (p. 13) and by left-liberal ‘‘social engineering [that has] decimated the ecology and media of the imagination both in universities and in the larger society’’ (p. 12). Murphy pronounces that ‘‘While the global economy is wealthier today than in the nineteenth century, its creative energy is not’’ (p. 2). The downfall for creativity began in 1970 (p. 16); or maybe it was earlier. He writes, ‘‘OECD countries in 2008 were less creative and less proficient in the arts and sciences than they were in 1908’’ (p. 11). Or maybe we have been in decline for centuries. Murphy writes, ‘‘ the peak of creative work in the core natural sciences occurs at the end of the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century; in mathematics it is the late-sixteenth and the seventeenth century; in medicine the nineteenth century; in technology the key period is from the mideighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century’’ (pp. 51–2). Murphy is not shy about embracing clichés or any publication that purports to show a correlation between IQ, freewheeling unaccountable genius, serendipity, and creativity. He treats us to a list of questionable social laws that apply to all of higher education in all post-industrial societies: for example, university expansion cannot outpace population growth; and only 16 percent of youths are capable of doing university-level work, of which half might be creative while the noncreative other half might benefit from university as preparation for employment in the liberal professions. The best predictor of success in life is extracurricular performance; the best predictor of success in the academy is publishing as an undergraduate. The SAT is an IQ test whose validity in predicting top performers is rock solid. Low SATscores predict high odds of dropping out of college; high SAT scores correlate with high odds of finishing college. He does not cite Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson’s work (2009), where the real main reason for failing to complete college is economic and the best academic predictor of getting a degree is high school grades, not the SAT. Murphy does not discuss any work that challenges the predictive virtues of IQ or SAT/ACT tests. His work is sort of a Bell Curve revisited, but with creative sterility not cognitive stratification as our dystopian fate. In sum, Murphy argues that the size of modern tertiary education exceeds the limits payable by the public purse, and in place of the false promises of populist politicians and empire-building bureaucrats who have combined to mislead the public into thinking that the Multi University should be for most, if not all, we need to cut back, drastically. If university systems were half the size they are now in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, and if universities were small freewheeling communities where perhaps 16 percent of the youth cohort and 8 percent of our current faculty were allowed to roam unencumbered by any bureaucratic accountability, then you’d better buckle your seat belt because creativity would really take off. It might leave the vast majority of the middle and working class behind, and the economy might suffer along with incomes and social mobility, but we would have ‘‘cultural creativity’’ as our consolation prize. This book might be an entertaining read for fans of the decline-and-fall genre, but for all others your time would be better spent reading Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz’s The Race between Education and Technology (2008) and Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (2010). 772 Reviews

The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower: Campus Crime as a Social Problem

to hide parents from the police. Other mothers were ‘‘frantic’’ when arrested prior to their children arriving home and scrambled to find care for them. Siegel also cites provocative work describing the ambivalence of social workers to intervene solely in the case of parental arrest. All of this raises the very real question of whether and how to intervene in the case of parental incarceration— a situation in which children have done no wrong and where entry into the social service maze is admittedly fraught with peril. Still, the isolation and neglect of children of incarcerated mothers so evident throughout Siegel’s book suggests that, if nothing else, maternal incarceration is a reliable indicator of the most vulnerable of children. Yet the vivid descriptions of children of incarcerated parents provided in the book also suggest that the criminal justice system is precisely the last place to help either the children or their mothers. Disrupted Childhoods is in many ways a book about the most isolated and disadvantaged of children and not a book about the effects of maternal incarceration. Indeed, the work is at its best when Siegel reliably sticks to her goal of ‘‘putting a parent’s incarceration in context with the rest of the child’s life’’ (p. 11) and the results may be most surprising to those who do not study parental incarceration specifically. The work is less compelling when the circumstances of incarceration take over that which came before and offers little in the way of concrete policy implications. It is also at times difficult to keep track of which sample (pre-incarceration or post-incarceration) is being discussed when and, therefore, the work at times oversells the longitudinal component of the design because much of the discussion relies on retrospective reports. These are minor quibbles, however, and Siegel is to be commended for amassing such rich data on so hard a population to reach and in the caution she brings to her interpretations. The work is also notable for its accessibility and would be suitable for undergraduates but also should interest scholars of social work, inequality, poverty, violence, and the family more generally. The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower: Campus Crime as a Social Problem, by John J. Sloan III and Bonnie S. Fisher. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 211pp.

Critical Visions: New Directions in Social TheoryCritical Visions: New Directions in Social Theory, by ElliottAnthony. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. 221 pp.

26.99 paper. ISBN: 9780521124058.

79.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-7425-2689-5.

This volume is part of a series edited by Charles Lemert that includes substantial contributions by distinguished sociologists such as Tilly, Gans, Garfinkel, and W. J. Wilson. On the back cover, Lemert informs us that Elliott is “among the rising stars in the early morning sky of social theory.” After reading this monograph, Lemert’s image did not spring to mind as much as the message of a Billy Bragg song in which a luckless lover wishes on a falling star that turns out to be a satellite. (In keeping with the conventions of this book, I should identify Bragg as a British urbane-folk bard, who sings about post-proletarian transgression.) Elliott’s volume is a collection of papers, lectures, and revised articles that orbit around theory stars, such as Lacan, to transmit messages of crisis and reconstruction in social theory. We are, once again, confronted by “the declining fortunes of the discipline as a whole . . . and [by] the wholesale collapse of sociology’s traditional audience” (p. 2). We face the challenge of a new “world . . . in which the precepts of twentieth-century social science are simply unable to comprehend . . . contemporary social process” (p. 2). “For ours is the era of globalization, reflexive metamodernism, and postmodernization” (p. 152). To assist in our rescue, this book draws “selectively” from “a conceptual cocktail of poststructuralist, postmodern interdisciplinary discourses” (p. 3), to offer us “critical readings” on Beck, Castoriadis, Giddens, Habermas, Kristeva, Lacan, and others. Elliott apparently admires “razor sharp . . . critique . . . that takes few hostages” (p. 110). And, in full critical form, he offers several, as he admits, “snide remarks” on other theorists as he brushes away “pseudointellectual [sic] theorizing, or what . . . Turner and . . . Rojek term ‘decorative sociology’” (p. 4). Elliott’s infectious sarcasm and name/label dropping prose aside, students could find worse introductions to some of these authors, Habermas, Kristeva, Lacan, and Chodorow in particular. And, on a few occasions, his exegesis approaches a Giddensesque standard of clarity and compression. Not that the world is without a rich secondary literature on all of these authors, but Elliott can bring a metamodern dash to spice up, for example, a discussion of Habermas’ ultra-rational, discourse-in-Kant’s parlor ideal. If Elliott displays considerable exegetical skill, his conclusions or recommendations for further discussion disappoint. Not since multidimensionality was heralded by Jeff Alexander’s 1982 Theoretical Logic in Sociology, have we been subjected to such a laborious tour of theorists in order to arrive at such an underwhelming destination. For example, after a discussion of Castoriadis, we are left with these words: “I believe that it is only through further inquiry into the radical imagination of the individual and the social imaginary of society that illumination of alternative political futures will begin to unravel” (p. 104). Elliott’s critical theoretical reconstruction in the first five chapters of the book is followed by four chapters that promise to apply his hard won intellectual lessons to the issues of sexuality, citizenship, politics, and ethics. These topical chapters, however, turn out to be less substantive inquiries than just more critical summaries of what others have written on the subject. His chapter on sexuality, among the best in the book, glosses, in this order, Marcuse, Lacan, Foucault, Chodorow, Irigaray, Kristeva, Butler, Giddens, Weeks, Fuss, and Sedgwick. One empirical study does make a guest appearance, Amato and Booth’s 2000 A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval, in order to provide a foil for Elliott’s “rather obvious criticisms” of the family breakdown thesis (p. 145). Again, the concluding reflections in these chapters are less than original contributions that one would expect other scholars to cite. There is a candid moment when