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Cracks in the Ivory Tower : The Moral Mess of Higher Education
Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education  Jason Brennan
Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education
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Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education
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Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education
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(OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS) CRACKS IN THE IVORY TOWER : The Moral Mess Of Higher Education

Jason Brennan, Phillip Magness
LIKE NEW, HARDCOVER
Jason Brennan, Phillip Magness
LIKE NEW, HARDCOVER

RM35.00

An Extraordinary Analysis That Tackles The Problems Besetting The World Of Higher Education.

ISBN 9780190846282
Book Condition LIKE NEW
Format HARDCOVER
Publisher Oxford University Press
Publication Date 27/06/2019
Pages 240
Weight 0.65 kg
Dimension 23.5 × 16.5 × 3 cm
Retail Price RM132.89
Availability: 1 in stock

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★★ Provides a comprehensive account of why American academia is dysfunctional ★★
★★ Offers evidence that most academic marketing is deeply immoral ★★
★★ Examines at length what promises universities make and finds overwhelming evidence they fail to deliver★★
 
Ideally, universities are centers of learning, in which great researchers dispassionately search for truth, no matter how unpopular those truths must be. The marketplace of ideas assures that truth wins out against bias and prejudice. Yet many people worry that there’s rot in the heart of the higher education business.


Academics extol high-minded ideals, such as serving the common good and promoting social justice. Universities aim to be centers of learning that find the best and brightest students, treat them fairly, and equip them with the knowledge they need to lead better lives.
 
This book reveals the problems are even worse than anyone suspects. Marshalling an array of data, the authors systematically show how contemporary American universities fall short of these ideals and how bad incentives make faculty, administrators, and students act unethically. The main lesson of the book is that the main problems of academia are not caused by bad people but by out of whack incentives for faculty, administrators, and students.
 
Jason Brennan and Philip Magness present a clear and very readable critique of higher education. Having followed their work online for a while, there wasn’t a lot new to me. However, these are important criticisms with which many may not be familiar (or they are not familiar with the research that backs up the criticisms).
 
But as Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness show in Cracks in the Ivory Tower, American universities fall far short of this ideal. At almost every level, they find that students, professors, and administrators are guided by self-interest rather than ethical concerns. College bureaucratic structures also often incentivize and reward bad behavior, while disincentivizing and even punishing good behavior. Most students, faculty, and administrators are out to serve themselves and pass their costs onto others.
 
The problems are deep and pervasive: most academic marketing and advertising is semi-fraudulent. To justify their own pay raises and higher budgets, administrators hire expensive and unnecessary staff. Faculty exploit students for tuition dollars through gen-ed requirements. Students hardly learn anything and cheating is pervasive. At every level, academics disguise their pursuit of self-interest with high-faluting moral language.
 
Marshaling an array of data, Brennan and Magness expose many of the ethical failings of academia and in turn reshape our understanding of how such high power institutions run their business. Everyone knows academia is dysfunctional. Brennan and Magness show the problems are worse than anyone realized. Academics have only themselves to blame.
 
The problems they focus on are: universities make lots of claims about supposed benefits that they don’t actually deliver on; student evaluations are an invalid and harmful way of evaluating teaching effectiveness; grades and GPAs are too inconsistent to be meaningful; general education requirements don’t work and are just ways for departments to get students (and money); and universities produce too many PhDs and do so primarily for their (and the professors) own standing and reputation; and lastly, students learn very little but cheat a lot. For each of these, there are incentives for otherwise well-meaning individuals to act in ways that make higher education worse.
 
While universities may at times excel at identifying and calling out injustice outside their gates, the text contends that individuals within them are primarily guided by self-interest at every level. It finds that the problems are deep and pervasive: Most academic marketing and advertising are semi-fraudulent; colleges and individual departments regularly make promises they do not and cannot keep; and most students cheat a little, while many cheat a lot.
 
Trenchant and wide-ranging, the text elucidates the many ways in which faculty and students alike have every incentive to make teaching and learning secondary.
 
Jason Brennan and Phil Magness’s book Cracks in the Ivory Tower is a must‐​read for all academics. I don’t say that as hyperbole – everyone who participates in higher ed (administrators as well as faculty) really needs to read this impressive (and depressing) analysis of the problems besetting our profession in order to better understand the things we frequently complain about.
 
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Review From New York Journal Of Books :
 
Those who live and work in academia are usually well aware of the problems of that world, but the general public is quite often not so involved. Cracks in the Ivory Tower serves as an eye-opening description of the realities of academic life. This book pulls no punches in its description of the problems besetting higher education. The authors are not “outsiders” with some agenda; they are fully involved in the academic world and provide a valuable insider’s perspective.
 
Jason Brennan is the Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He is the author of 10 books, including When All Else Fails and In Defense of Openness.
 
Phillip W. Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He is the author of two books and over a dozen scholarly articles on a diverse array of topics, including the economics of slavery, the history of international trade, federal tax policy, economic inequality, and the economic dimensions of higher education.
 
Brennan and Magness delineate four areas that are problematic. They feel most marketing of a university is dishonest, staffing and budgets for administrators are excessive and often not needed, faculty are not really interested or committed to teaching, and students are lazy and dishonest.
 
With their grounding in business, it is not surprising that Brennan and Magness often take a cost/benefit approach to their analysis of campus problems. The cost of expensive facilities that only benefit a small number of students is compared to the number of students who could benefit from the financial aid that would arise from this expenditure. Often the facility is built mainly to make the university look good, not because there is actual enhancement of learning.
 
High on the list of faculty issues are two topics: adjunct faculty and tenure. At many institutions, adjunct faculty carry a large share of the total teaching load. These faculty are not tenured, have no job security from one semester to the next, and are paid much less that full-time faculty.
 
Tenured and tenure-track faculty are more interested in doing research, since publication brings tenure, prestige, and grants. As a result, the students often are not taught by a prominent faculty member, but by an adjunct or graduate student. Teaching is generally not valued or rewarded; the prize goes to those who publish and bring in grants.
 
In no area of the campus is personnel inflation more obvious than in the administration. Today we see provosts, deans, associate deans, assistant associate deans for (fill in the blank). The authors offer the opinion that the major function of administrators is to attend meetings where little or nothing is accomplished. Perhaps a harsh assessment, but often very true.
 
Students are singled out for being lazy and for cheating. In addition, they usually come out of the higher education system with little or no useful skills. They have great difficulty in constructing a logical, coherent argument and cannot communicate using proper grammar and spelling. We know that the prefrontal cortex (responsible for higher-level functions that include decision-making and problem solving) may not be fully developed until the mid-twenties. As a result, they are very easily influenced by faculty who have their own agendas.
 
The authors are not alone in their assessment of the problems in higher education. A number of blogs routinely point out the poor decisions made by administrators, the laws violated (especially with regard to hiring and due process), the irrelevant courses offered by faculty and their advocacy of issues (generally left or far-left in nature), and the lack of genuine education on the part of students, coupled with their inability to do any critical thinking about issues.
 
Publications such as “Accuracy in Academia,” “The College Fix,” and “Quillette” provide regular documentation of the ills associated with university life.
 
The book has an extensive set of notes and a bibliography that documents the issues covered. Cracks in the Ivory Tower is a sometimes harsh, but honest indictment of the current state of higher education in the U.S. It should be required reading for everyone interested in involvement in and improvement of this educational system.
 

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About the Authors:
 
Jason Brennan is the Flanagan Family Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of ten books, including When All Else Fails and In Defense of Openness.
 
Phillip W. Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He is the author of two books and over a dozen scholarly articles on a diverse array of topics, including the economics of slavery, the history of international trade,
federal tax policy, economic inequality, and the economic dimensions of higher education.

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