While Americans love their universities, they also love to criticize them. Parents and citizens see the university or college as a provider of culture and values, and they worry endlessly that these institutions may not provide the right values and culture to their students. The public worries that universities cost too much, operate inefficiently, or fail to provide adequate intellectual or practical content.

This week's readings highlight some of the issues and provide a quick tour of the endless litany of complaint about American universities. Most observers are long on complaint and short on solution. The complexity and variety of universities offer endless opportunities for critical displeasure. Something, somewhere will incite the ire of this or that observer. Additional classics in the literature of complaint do not exist in online form, but the items in the appropriate sections of our Eclectic Bibliography will entertain and enlighten. Anyone interested in university management should sample this literature.

While it is easy to reject the critics as irresponsible, as many are, it is not so easy to reject some of the fundamental themes of the critical literature. Universities do need to pay attention to cost and accountability. Institutions do need to understand the content of their curricula, and they must recognize the dangers of seeking benefit from the marketplace.

Two major themes dominate this conversation. The first seeks to reform existing universities, make them better, and improve their operation. This perspective, often pursued by those who believe the university is fundamentally sound, speaks to tradition and values and attempts to adjust those to the practical realities of contemporary economic circumstances. The items by Lombardi in the readings belong in this category.

The second theme sees universities and many colleges as beyond repair in their current form or at least in serious crisis. In developing this theme, critics tend to see the institutional and faculty values of the traditional university as corrupt and self-serving, destructive of good moral and intellectual values, and generally debased from some ideal archetype. Depending on the spirit of the observer, these critics either seek the replacement of existing university structures with much different learning organizations, or else they propose radical or reformist proposals that would clean house, change standards, and impose new ones. Often they come from a profoundly conservative perspective that seeks to create in the university an engine for the promotion of values and attitudes believed to have been current in a more glorious past. Sometimes they come from a profoundly radical perspective that seeks to create a different future by deconstructing the university's fundamental texts.

Orrill's introduction to a multi-author discussion of the change in the sprit of liberal education offers a balanced perspective on these never-ending conversations. Johnstone provides a wide-ranging set of prescriptions, some more practical than others, designed to make universities and colleges more efficient in producing learning as an appropriate response to the many criticisms of higher education that he reviews. Engle and Dangerfield sound the alarm for the end of the humanities in universities that operate in accord with what they identify as a market-driven model and provide a fine example of the elegant literature of complaint. The Lombardi pieces offer a perspective on these issues driven by the practical demands of institutional improvement within the national competitive context. The explosion of literature generated by governmental commissions tends to mark the state of debate, as the most recent and still continuing discussion surrounding the Spelling Commission and its many commentators.

Many critics, of whatever persuasion, offer remarkably few practical suggestions. Often, the complaints score debating points but the remedies, when suggested at all, prove impossible, impractical, or prohibitively expensive.

• What criticisms of American universities do you find most valid?
• How would you propose to resolve the issues raised by critics if you had to pay for the cost of the change?
• To what extent should all American colleges and universities support similar cultural values?
• What is the relationship between values and money in the university?
• How do you explain the anomaly of a public that believes a college education essential to the good life and seeks aggressively to enroll its children while at the same time endlessly criticizing and complaining about these same, much sought after, institutions?
• What problems does the corporate structure of private and public American universities solve that the academic guild structure proves poorly equipped to handle?
• Where, in the modern university, does the power and authority for change reside?

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