NYU professor trapped in own niche when analyzing education
The dustier back shelves of the few bookstores that remain are well-supplied with high-minded books about the ideals that a great university should pursue and about the best ways to foster a fine education. What more can be said? Is there really anything new under the sun? Well, John Sexton thinks so.
Mr. Sexton is an eminent law professor at NYU who formerly served as university president and law school dean. Even more impressively, he’s written a New York Times bestseller titled “Baseball as a Road to God.” Now, that probably would have been an interesting book to review.
But let’s talk education. Mr. Sexton has authored “Standing for Reason:The University in a Dogmatic Age.” This slim volume is exquisitely well written. The author plainly is a person of great compassion, humanity and erudition. The work is really three short books.
The first discusses the need for civic (and civil) discourse and the role of the university as a “sacred space” for promoting and protecting such discourse. Thesecond, which uses NYU as Exhibit A, presents the idea of the university as an international, interconnected network of campuses and communities that bring faculty and students together as part of what Mr. Sexton hopes will be “an ecumenical world.” The third tackles the issue of access to higher education and the challenges that confront those who hope to broaden university opportunities, not only throughout the nation but across the globe.
Any one of these could be (and has been) the subject of several lengthy books. But Mr. Sexton is trying to knit these points together, and to do so engagingly and economically. On the first subject, tackling dogmatism and the challenges it poses on the college campus, Mr. Sexton is articulate, but ultimately predictable and sufficiently politically correct. He bemoans intolerance, but nonetheless defends — or at least expresses undue gentility or sympathy for — campus speech codes, “safe spaces,” and the other types of coddled, entitled nonsense that now proliferate at elite institutions like his.
In the second part of his book, Mr. Sexton rolls out the NYU model, which is an elaborate and massive threelegged stool standing on NYU New York (the main campus) and its two younger sisters : NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai. Mr. Sexton is justifiably proud of what he and his colleagues have built and accomplished, literally spanning the globe with high quality institutions offering American university experiences not only to Americans but to people of many nationalities. Left entirely opaque and unknown to the reader is the financial detail behind the inevitably massive investments by Emirati sheikdoms and Chinese government-approved funders.
There is mutual backscratching, to be sure. It’s probably no accident that the UAE and the PRC were picked for these campuses. These governments cannot be mistaken for anything remotely resembling democracies, but they do offer lots and lots of cash, and they are eager for not only the mindexpanding opportunities of an American university but also for the legitimizing and scrubbing potential that such a prestigious affiliation provides.
Wouldn’t it be nice to learn more about what the feudal dynastic rulers of the various Emirati clans have to say about admissions, about endowments, about programming, about compromises? Ditto for the Communist Party rulers in China. Hong Kong is not free, and so very, very much less so is Shanghai. This is not at all to doubt the sincerity of Mr. Sexton and his colleagues nor the eagerness of so many faculty and students in the Emirates and China to teach and to learn. But it is to say that a book that aspires to frankness and candor should concede that the venues chosen have challenges all their own.
The last part of Mr. Sexton’s book is perhaps the most impressive. Here, he wrestles with the problem of access to a quality university education. He does more than wail about privilege and the lack of it. He presents ideas for addressing the problem of student debt that are interesting, especially along the lines of income-based repayment plans that would scale back student obligations according to realistic percentages of what those students are earning in the years after college.
But here, too, Mr. Sexton is a prisoner of his niche. He defends the insufferable and inexcusable administrative bloat at universities (you know —- the deputy assistant provosts for student life, the associate deans for campus engagement, and the like), partly blaming government reporting and compliance obligations for the proliferation of these generously paid and largely superfluous bureaucracies. And he does not even mention — not even for a moment — the increasingly and outrageously massive (re: multimillion dollar) salary and benefits packages hauled in by the presidents of elite universities: the great big check, the magnificent bennies, the residence, the staff, the wining and dining.
It’s good to be King.