humanities 97 Humanities Paul Axelrod. Values in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace, and the Trials of Liberal Education McGill-Queen=s University Press. xii, 204. $65.00, $24.95 This is a useful book that argues sensibly in support of the values of liberal education in the current Canadian context B and describes the threats to those values. Paul Axelrod=s central thesis is that >[t]he cultivation of intellect, long a central objective of university life, is threatened by political and economic pressures that are redefining and reshaping the functions of higher learning.= The most crucial role of universities, according to Axelrod, is that of nourishing intellectual life, and yet >a variety of forces has conspired to shrink the space that the university provides for fostering the life of the mind. More than ever, higher education is expected to cater directly, quickly, and continually to the demands of the marketplace.= Axelrod argues that the qualities of mind traditionally associated with liberal education are valuable in themselves as goals of postsecondary education and also appropriate for many of the market-driven needs (employability) seen as essential by government and parents alike. The accepted values associated with an inquiring mind are, so his argument goes, ideally suited for both democratic citizenship at large and the performing of market-related tasks. There is nothing new to this argument, but Axelrod=s strength is the lucidity with which he establishes the context both for the emergence, over the centuries, of a belief in liberal education and for the current demand by government and public alike for skills-related postsecondary education aimed at employment and the acquisition of measurable economic advantage. Values in Conflict is not an impassioned work, and one does not get that sense of excitement and insight one gets in reading Martha Nussbaum=s Cultivating Humanity, for instance. But one seldom disagrees with Axelrod except, perhaps, for his dispassionate, low-key approach. His analysis of the current vogue by government (both external to the university and B in some cases B internal to it) for indicators and measurement of success makes sensible points and provides useful data, but his very lack of indignation (contempt?) for the absurdity of the widespread use of often irrelevant >indicators= gives a kind of blandness to what is a well-argued analysis of http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/utq.73.1.97 - Friday, June 30, 2017 12:02:07 PM IP Address:104.249.224.143 both the prevalence of a belief in performance indicators and the limitations of such a practice. In his opening chapter Axelrod sets out to describe the history of belief in education, arguing that what was meant in the past by education was often what we now mean by the term >liberal education,= and goes on to place those values and practices in the contemporary Canadian context in which university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 98 letters in canada 2002 >in the eyes of many, economic performance, not intellectual enlightenment, is the university=s preeminent raison d=être.= He then explains the extensive current emphasis on educating students for employability and on sponsoring university research that targets economic issues. Again, he is dispassionate in this analysis, although programs such as the Ontario Access to Opportunities Program (ATOP) that offered universities an economic stimulus for increasing enrolment in engineering and computer-science programs deserve a more spirited treatment B at least in the opinion of this reviewer. The program was intended to alleviate the allegedly insatiable demand (by high-tech firms in their heyday) for trained employees, and was instituted just before the high- tech meltdown and subsequent laying off of thousands of trained workers. Axelrod comments sagely: >The boom and bust experience of high-tech companies on the stock market beginning in the latter half of 2000 was but one indication of the field=s endemic volatility. The reduction of its workforce by some 50,000 employees (half the workforce) by the Canadian high-tech giant, Nortel, throughout 2001 was another.= ATOP is still in existence. The very absence of passion that I have pointed to does give Values in Conflict a seriousness and integrity. As a guide both to what is happening to the way Canadians regard university education and to the history of West- ern belief in higher education generally, it is useful and articulate. And it shows B implicitly B that universities frequently acquiesce in the use of market-driven judgments and indicators of performance. (ROWLAND SMITH) Tom Pocklington and Allan Tupper. No Place to Learn: Why Universities Aren=t Working University of British Columbia Press. 224. $85.00, $24.95 This is a timely book that delivers fully on the polemical promise of its main title but only intermittently and unevenly on the explanatory promise of its subtitle. As befits two political scientists, the authors have a strong sense of public policy and the public interest, but their common discipline also skews their analysis and findings at times (especially, perhaps, in their deeply uninformed disparagement of >postmodernists=). However, their book is worth reading for its shortcomings as well as its accomplishments, especially at a time when the government of Canada claims to be substan- tially reinvesting in postsecondary education and enabling the provinces to http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/utq.73.1.97 - Friday, June 30, 2017 12:02:07 PM IP Address:104.249.224.143 do likewise, and when the response from the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada to the federal Innovation Agenda seems far more enthusiastic than that from the Canadian Association of University Teachers. For those who have lived through waves of hostility to universities from university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 humanities 99 governments, business, and (other) special-interest groups, including the Canadian Citizens Coalition with its annual deriding of SSHRC-sponsored projects with >funny= titles or >plainly= fatuous objectives, it may be hard to recognize their places of work in the following key claim: >Universities, more so than other powerful Canadian institutions, sail on seas of unwarranted deference.= For those who have contested university policies and priorities from the inside as critical or dissident faculty, the university as the recipient of unrivalled deference may be equally unrecognizable. Tom Pocklington and Allan Tupper seem at times to ignore the powerfully anti-deferential dimensions of collegial processes, the ongoing exercise of academic freedom, and the critiquing of everything from differential and socially divisive tuition fees to unduly directive contract research. We are not the saps and scoundrels they occasionally suggest we are; nor are we so dependent on American academic self-critique as they imply. That said, there remains an important element of truth in the authors= insistence that large areas of university motivation and practice have been virtually exempted from criticism from insiders or outsiders. Campuses can host truisms as readily as can boardrooms or union halls; conversely, universi- ties have no monopoly on searching inquiry and candid disclosure. If universities are less sacrosanct than the authors allege, they are surely capable of being as smugly corruptible as they try to show. No Place to Learn is impelled by the belief that >modern Canadian universities wrongly and seriously devalue the education of undergraduate students.= The authors argue that this crisis of values is fed by the overvaluing of highly specialized research >often far removed from the needs of undergraduate students,= and by the undertaking of substantial amounts of such research as a consequence of >increasingly close links between universities, governments, and large corporations.= This displace- ment of the broad public interest by the particular agendas of elites is made possible in significant measure by the most prevalent and sanctified illusion in Canadian academe, namely that >teaching and research are mutually reinforcing activities.= To believe this is to claim benefits for undergraduates where there may be only damage or benevolent neglect; it is also to mistake research careerism for a desire to teach all students better, and to see sponsored or contract research as part of the process of building a better pedagogue and bringing relevant knowledge promptly and productively back to the classroom and the curriculum. Add to these mutually aggravating tendencies the fact that universities more than any other http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/utq.73.1.97 - Friday, June 30, 2017 12:02:07 PM IP Address:104.249.224.143 workplace are dominated by >jealousy and a sense of oppression,= and we seem to have a recipe for inevitable disaster. Fear not, however. Pocklington and Tupper figure that universities have still sufficient autonomy, faculty have still enough control of the academic agenda, to xxxxxxxx university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 100 letters in canada 2002 provide the conditions for necessary and effective >reform.= Many of the mistakes are of our own making, and the remedies are within our grasp. No Place to Learn concludes with >Real Problems, Real Solutions,= deriving the latter from the bond between >teaching and reflective inquiry.= Excellence must begin in the undergraduate classroom but need not end there. And this fundamental truth must be reflected in the estimation of professorial performance, and the distribution of incentives and rewards for faculty. Meanwhile, graduate education must change to produce a less anxious and narrow next generation of teacher-scholars who value (and are valued for) teaching introductory as well as advanced classes and are more intent on the quality than on the quantity of their research and publication. The fault lies not with benighted leaders or naïve techno-utopians but with ourselves, that faculty are working so hard while universities are not working as they ought to.