With a title like Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – and What We Can Do About It, you might assume this is another screed by a thirty-something with an axe to grind. But the authors – Andrew Hacker of Queen’s College and New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus – are anything but the usual suspects for ritual denunciations of higher learning.

What Hacker and Dreifus have managed is to fuse together a number of very different critiques of higher ed into a single, relatively slim volume. There are what some might say are “left-wing” (in the U.S., anyway) complaints about the academy: education is “too vocational” (basically a John Dewey critique of education, which says Liberal Arts are “real” education, and everything else in an ideal world would be banished to “mere” trade schools), too much is spent on intercollegiate athletics, etc. Then there is the “right-wing” critique: tenure, over-generous professorial compensation and teaching are being sacrificed at the altar of research. Finally, there are the critiques that don’t have a political home: too many non-academic staff, skyrocketing presidential salaries and the ludicrousness of the university committee system. Hacker and Dreifus combine the three fairly seamlessly into a single, pointed indictment.

It’s a nice book in that the authors manage to make solid points without the over-the-top accusatory style that American publishers seem to like so much these days. The section on administrative sprawl is particularly deft, respecting the good intentions behind the creation of positions like “residential communications co-ordinator,” “co-ordinator for lifetime fitness”, etc., while calmly pointing out that these are, essentially, frills that substantially raise the cost of education.

The book’s back-flap, with contains rather effusive praise from darlings of the American left such as Barbara Ehrenreich and Joseph Stiglitz, is also a bit of an eye-raiser. In Canada, making similar points about research vs. teaching or professorial pay tends to provoke (from faculty unions, mostly) accusations of being some kind of foaming reactionary. Apparently, in the U.S., the debate has at least progressed to the point where there is cross-party agreement that there are reasonable conversations to be had about institutional priorities and spending habits.

Large chunks of this book aren’t particularly relevant to Canadian higher education and the Dewey fundamentalism is a bit irritating. But the basics of the argument about pay and tenure will definitely be reverberating here over the next few years, and so the book is probably worth reading for that alone. You might not disagree with the authors, but we can only a hope that future debates on higher ed policy are conducted with as much tact and good grace as Hacker and Dreifus have mustered here.