… Derek Bok’s Higher Education in America.
If you clicked on its dullsville title, you saw the cover of this hard, thick tome, done up in a style UD calls INSTANT VENERABLE.
UD has read a bit of it — she has not yet brought it home from her office because she has other big books (Ulysses, by James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, for starters) to bring home — but she can report that it is judicious, thorough, and (well, read the intro yourself) dull.
If UD had been president of Harvard, and she were writing a book about universities that she wanted a lot of people to read, she wouldn’t put sentences like this in her introduction:
Parents feel that tuitions are too high and that too little is done to hold down costs.
Parents feel… They feel… They don’t think, or believe, or argue… Even though we all know that …
Well, as I say, if I were the king of the forest… I’d write something like this:
Imagine my shock on taking the presidency of Harvard to discover that while our endowment has so many billions of dollars in it we can afford to charge zero tuition to students until the sun collapses into a white dwarf, we still charge almost everyone hundreds of thousands of dollars for a Harvard education. Since I left the school’s presidency, I’ve watched in horror as its endowment has grown to close to forty billion dollars. FORTY FUCKING BILLION DOLLARS! The moral discomfort I felt then must be as nothing to what Harvard’s current president feels as she surveys the state of the world and wonders why she and her small university have simply planted their asses on all that money.
September 8th, 2013 at 4:35PM
I must admit, that’s an intro, by Bok, I would have enjoyed seeing. But even as your fantasy for him, it’s pretty great.
September 8th, 2013 at 4:45PM
Greg: Thanks.
September 8th, 2013 at 5:29PM
Yeah, the cover is instantly venerable enough, but without photogenic teen vampires on the front, or an awesome movie adaptation, how does Bok plan to sell this book to anyone–especially the all-important snot-nosed millenial brat demographic which I represent?
Enter Breaking Bok, a riveting TV series adaptation of this book, ideal for binge-watching on Netflix. Bobby Bok is the venerable president of a venerable institution that suddenly finds its endowment laid low by the mistakes of some highly compensated, coked-up hedge fund guys who serve on the investment management committee. With the university’s bills mounting, he decides to make up for the shortfall the only way he can: by setting up an adderall super-lab in the chemistry department, which sells its product to a network of understimulated college kids around the country who need that extra pick-me-up to balance their studying and active social lives. Everything goes according to plan–that is, until the new president of the Board of Trustees, who is also the CEO of a powerful pharma company that produces amphetamines designed for and marketed to the college market, invokes the need for “strategic dynamism” in leadership and threatens to oust Bok–permanently.
Rated TV-MA for language, fraternity violence, and graphic depictions of undergraduates twerking.
September 8th, 2013 at 6:59PM
tamade: Spectacular.
Street name for the drug: Bok Choy.