SOURCE: “Jacques Barzun's American University,” in Society, Vol. 30, No. 4, May-June, 1993, pp. 71-82.

In the following essay, London reconsiders the decline of contemporary university education a quarter century after the publication of Barzun's The American University.

Jacques Barzun's work The American University, published in 1968, still stands as one of the most lucid, informative statements on the subject of the university ever written. With keen insights, he describes the university and its quintessential features, demarcating the ancestral, perhaps more congenial, university from the one that emerged in his day as teacher and administrator in the 1960s. Presciently he walks the reader through the mine fields of sixties “reform,” ever hopeful for the future of an institution to which he has devoted his professional life. But despite his admirable vision and power of analysis, even Barzun did not fully foresee then the extremes that emerged from the noisy radicalism of the...