Description
This carefully reasoned book presents an alternative to those current views of higher education that regard it principally either as a leisure activity unconnected with the rest of life or as a special means for the advancement of the economy. Instead, the author asserts, higher education constitutes a primary social means for the forming of selves capable of participating widely and effectively in the affairs of a modern, complex world. What basic policy choices, then, should higher education make? The aim of this book is to locate the grounds on which American institutions of higher education might best decide among some of the major policy alternatives pressed on them by their commitments and the cirucmstances of their civilization, and then to appraise and judge those alternatives.
The author reacts against two primary tendencies in the history of higher education in the United States. The first he terms as "intellectualistic" education that turns colleges and universities into instruments for restricted class of potential connoisseurs of certain rare and marvelous objects; higher education's problem here is to determine the objects best deserving appreciation. The university need not concern itself with providing its students with experiences available in a democratic society, because they will have them in any event.
The second tendency is probably more prevalent today. Production tends to concern us more than refined consumption, and higher education cooperates by devoting itself to forming people who may be useful in a market economy. Education becomes investment, and bits and pieces of an intellectualistic education are more or less acceptable on the periphery - provided there is money for them.
The author recommends the furthering of self-interest of those who do the job of education - the students and faculty - as a principle of choice, and he suggests that taking the self-interest of students and faculty seriously and centrally may throw light on the relation of higher education to the ethical conduct of life.
He further suggests an "opening of the university" beyond its traditional limits toward the exchange of labor, toward the provision of exercises outside the system of exchange, toward the performance of the arts, toward the absorption or integration of politics within university practice and tradition, and, most important, toward an integration of ethics into policy and performance. The author sees persons disposed to ethical values as more valuable to society than either cultured minds or technological and business whizzes.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the following original edition:
Title Toward an ethic of higher education
Author Mortimer Raymond Kadish
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1991
ISBN 0804718830, 9780804718837
Length 205 pages
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Tags:
stanford university, press, liberal education, cation, Abraham Edel, Protagoras, John Dewey, Sidney Hook, positional interests, Allan Bloom, Jacques Barzun, profes, multiversity, Plato, C. S. Peirce, Socrates, liberal arts, regressive tax, self-interest, John Stuart Mill, high culture, Alexis de Tocqueville 
