Poisoning the ivy

by Michael Lewis

"This is a dirty book about higher education." So begins Michael Lewis's provocative new book, one that calls into question the conventional wisdom and about the excellence of American higher education. Lewis argues that teaching and research on America's campuses are plagued by mis- and malfeasance. He further argues that these troubles are the paradoxical implications of professorial self-conceptions. The academic claim of moral and ethical specialness, according to Lewis, unexpectedly creates an environment where hack work or even no work at all is tolerated and in some cases actually rewarded. Through his chapters on "The Seven Pedagogical Sins" and "The Bad Joke of Scholarship," the author traces the trajectory of the effects of collective denial on the quality of education in America. In his final chapter, Lewis offers a series of reforms intended to reverse faculty permissiveness.