College and Research Libraries


Recent Publications 
BOOK REVIEWS 

Rosovsky, Harry. The University: An Own­
er's Manual. New York: W.W. Norton, 
1990. 309p. $19.95 (ISBN0-393-02782-1). 
LC 89-9466. 

Trumpbour, John, ed. How Harvard Rules: 
Reason in the Service of Empire. Boston, 
Mass.: South End Press, 1989. 450p. $35 
(ISBN 0-89608-284-9). Paperback, $16 
(ISBN 0-89608-283-0). LC 89-6206. 
In the past several years, academic li­

brarians and our faculty colleagues have 
witnessed an increased concern about 
American higher education, reflected in a 
multitude of publications addressing such 
issues as "cultural literacy," tenure, and 
the neglect of undergraduate education. 
The university has been besieged from 
without by conservative cultural critics 
and probed from within by academics dis­
quieted by the shift in disciplines and 
values-from the social and spiritual to the 
scientific and specialized (or sometimes 
vice versa); from the aim to foster "fully 
developed human beings," in Wendell 
Berry's words, to careerism and commer­
cialism. Debates rage about the political, 
economic, and moral problematics of the 
tenure system; the implications and obli­
gations for academe posed by the chang­
ing demographics of our society; the im­
pact and relevance of issues of race and 
gender (or racism and sexism to be more 
blunt). These forces affect not only stu­
dent recruitment and faculty hiring, pro­
motion and tenure, but also call into ques­
tion the fundamental character, aims, and 
values of the university and of higher edu­
cation. 

If there is an epitome and ostensible 

ideal of the American university, it is Har­
vard. Harvard's influential power­
political and economic, ideological and 
pragmatic-casts so wide a net that it has 
been labeled ''the Harvard factor.'' The 
exaltation of Harvard and its pervasive in­
fluence make the review of two recent 
books, each an investigation of higher ed­
ucation placing Harvard at the center, all 
the more relevant for anyone working in 
academia. 

In the first, Henry Rosovsky, Dean of 
Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences 
from 1973 to 1984, presents an optimistic 
defense of life in a major research univer­
sity. Drawing upon his love for automo­
biles, he takes as his model the owner's 
manual and aims to present a guide to the 
university as an unfamiliar object which, 
in order to operate successfully, one must 
understand and learn to negotiate. Librar­
ians will find this a highly readable guide 
to university administration and govern­
ance, the tenure system, graduate train­
ing, and core curriculum, enlivened by 
humorous anecdotes and Rosovsky's ob- .­
vious personal passion for the Mercedes 
and BMWs of higher education. 

Readers seeking an investigation of the 
particular challenges facing our campuses 
as we approach the twenty-first century, 
however, may be sorely disappointed. 
Fundamental questions about the pur­
pose and availability of education and the 
very nature of research find no forum 
here. Rosovsky' s enthusiasm for Harvard 
blinds him to the multiple implications of 
power and privilege embedded in the re­
search university. He accepts exclusivity 

561 



562 College & Research Libraries 

and hierarchy as fundamental precepts: 
early on, his self-introduction admonishes 
us to "remember that universities are in­
stitutions that love hierarchies and dis­
tinctions at least as much as the military.'' 
He has little patience, for instance, with 
the student movements of the 1960s (he 
was only too happy to get out of Berkeley) 
and glibly refers to ''the near classlessness 
of our society.'' Occasional references to 
women and minorities provide cosmetic 
touch-ups to the fundamentally sexist and 
elitist viewpoint, revealed in such pre­
sumably well-meaning yet unreflective 
statements as 11 All of us will have to 
adapt, and flexibility is particularly essen­
tial for women, because they are likely to 
wish or be forced to combine career and 
family.'' (Through parthenogenesis? one 
might ask.) 

In sum, Rosovsky champions the status 
quo, tossing platitudes of 11 excellence" 
and "objective standards" to legitimate 
the prevailing social order, demonstrating 
little regard for the social responsibility of 
the university to the disenfranchised, let 
alone to the ''just reordering of the 
world," to borrow an apt Jewish phrase. 
His self-congratulatory tone in a time 
when over two-thirds of the world's pop­
ulation is illiterate tests one's patience. In 
a postscript he dismisses as peripheral 
other such critical, social, and political is­
sues as affirmative action, minorities, and 
university relations with the government, 
private sector, and community. More­
over, he skims the topic of sexual harass­
ment and claims that ''current negative at­
titudes toward higher education are 
related to the student revolt of the 1960s, 
our defeat in Vietnam, the decline in U.S. 
competitiveness, and similar national 
sources of unhappiness.'' 

For academic libraries, faced with dra­
matic demographic changes on our cam­
puses, increasingly politicized informa­
tion policies and access, the advancing 
corporatization of the university, the myo­
pic vision of the university in service of the 
few "owners" appears at best to be 
caught in a time warp which ill-serves 
both our present and future. His claim 
that the ''owners'' of the university, Har­
vard included, are multiple-students and 

November 1990 

their families, alumni, faculty, donors, 
trustees, the press, and the general 
public-comes under closer scrutiny in 
How Harvard Rules. Here, John Trump­
hour, a Harvard Ph.D. student in history, 
aims to produce ''a work of demystifica­
tion, '' to deconstruct the myth of Harvard 
as an independent, liberal-left institution, 
and to unmask "Harvard's contribution 
to ethnocentrism and the 'superiority' of 
the West." Trumpbour himself authors 
seven of the twenty-six essays, and the 
other contributors, mostly Harvard pro­
fessors or graduates, include such notable 
scholars as Stephen Jay Gould, Ruth Hub­
bard, and Chester Hartman. 

Following no particular party line, the 
authors examine a panoply of topics (cor­
porate governance, urban development, 
labor struggles, sociobiology, racism, ten­
ure, professional schools, core curriculum, 
and divestment) to expose "reason in the 
service of empire." Librarians will find the 
ten pieces in the section ''Education, Ideol­
ogy and Social Control" of particular inter­
est. Here issues, such as undergraduate 
curriculum, law school education, and cri­
teria for tenure, provide the material for 
challenging arguments that recur in differ­
ent variations throughout the volume. Uni­
versities are first and foremost corpora­
tions: exploitative employers, wealthy real 
estate conglomerates oblivious to neigh­
boring communities, profit-seeking institu­
tions ignoring the conflicts of interest when 
faculty sell legal advice to multinational 
corporations or start their own multi­
million dollar businesses. Tenure denials 
are rationalized as "necessary to uphold 
'standards,' " but the standards upheld 
prove to be ideological, not intellectual. In­
dividuals and movements that attempt to 
analyze meanings and curricula in a social 
context and within the framework of 
power relations, which act to transformed­
ucation in the service of social reconstruc­
tion, find themselves quashed by hege­
monic elites in collusion with external 
corporate power. Even the recent efforts at 
core curriculum reform represent, at bot­
tom, intellectual management strategies 
designed to retain centralized intellectual 
production, defuse threats from the mar­
gins, and demobilize the disorderly at­



Recent Publications 563 

tempts to democratize education. 
In each of these arenas, Harvard is un­

der the microscope, but the description of 
the university's intellectual buttress to 
conservative social order, corporate 
power, and the national security state 
could be applied to many institutions, 
both private and public, my own among 
them. Some readers may be put off by the 
obvious negative bias and frequently po­
lemical tone of these essays, yet consider­
ing the extensive footnotes and source ci­
tations provided by the authors for this 
litany of ills, one is hard-pressed to dis­
miss these arguments out of hand, vexing 
though they may be. 

This impressive documentation (always 
appreciated by librarians) stands in 
marked contrast to Rosovsky' s often glib 
assertions. If Rosovsky projects a Pollyan­
naish myopia, Trumpbour, for his part, 
fails to extend his analysis to constructive 
suggestions for either reform or revolu­
tion. While he wildly denigrates potential 
allies who, he charges, are "Gucci Bolshe­
viks" or practice "a safe brand of femi­
nism,'' he offers no coherent strategies for 
building coalitions for progressive 
change. 

In our busy and often demanding lives, 
librarians frequently do not think they 
have the time to stop and look beyond the 
day's activities in the library and consider 
the institutions in which we work. Or, like 
me, we sometimes may fall prey to a cer­
tain smug satisfaction that, because (we 
think) we don't work directly for the war 
industry or are immune from the profit 
motive, we have "clean," socially impor­
tant jobs. These books, particularly in 
combination, help us to understand better 
the modern research university and may 
encourage us to reassess our roles. They 
will have particular resonance for librari­
ans in research institutions, but all read­
ers, whatever their sense of ownership of 
the university or philosophy of service, 
will find provocative questions here . The 

· reader may agree more with one than the 
other, but the two in dialogue frame the 
context and the debates that shape the 
conditions-challenging and contradic­
tory-of our work.-Joan Ariel, University 
of California, Irvine. 

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