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3.25 AVERAGE
3.25 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
slow-paced
Some interesting aspects but all too often this felt a little like a Very Short Introduction to Oxford University rather than universities as a whole. And the discussion of students themselves seemed unfortunately to be faintly contemptuous: students today being more concerned about alcohol and the unfairness of fees rather than making the world a better place as apparently was their only motivation back the halcyon days of the 1960s. Disappointing.
The very short introduction is a difficult genre. Authors are challenges to boil a complex topic down to its essentials, given enough particular facts while also pointing out avenues the reader can follow to investigate certain topics in more depth.
Two immediate shortcomings to this volume is its insistence on reminding the audience of how hard it is to summarize a complex topic (we know; that's the point) and the tendency to mention ideas and names that are salient to a discussion without giving much in terms of context for how those topics interact with the discussion. For example, the authors tend to mention alternative ways of structuring universities in passing, as if saying their names were sufficient to introducing them, but then wave them off as being too hard to explain for people that mostly worked in the US and UK anyway.
There's some good material on the history of the university as an institution. But more often than not the text will simply posit differences of opinion on the state of colleges and say that both camps make good points. Or the authors will ask questions for paragraphs at a time without making much effort to delve deeper into which answers are more likely than others.
The best short introductions clarify exactly what they want to talk about and don't spend much time explaining why they don't have room to talk about everything outside their scope. The authors here were clearly inhibited by the format and it feels like they were only able to get started by the time the page limit hit.
Two immediate shortcomings to this volume is its insistence on reminding the audience of how hard it is to summarize a complex topic (we know; that's the point) and the tendency to mention ideas and names that are salient to a discussion without giving much in terms of context for how those topics interact with the discussion. For example, the authors tend to mention alternative ways of structuring universities in passing, as if saying their names were sufficient to introducing them, but then wave them off as being too hard to explain for people that mostly worked in the US and UK anyway.
There's some good material on the history of the university as an institution. But more often than not the text will simply posit differences of opinion on the state of colleges and say that both camps make good points. Or the authors will ask questions for paragraphs at a time without making much effort to delve deeper into which answers are more likely than others.
The best short introductions clarify exactly what they want to talk about and don't spend much time explaining why they don't have room to talk about everything outside their scope. The authors here were clearly inhibited by the format and it feels like they were only able to get started by the time the page limit hit.