In the Bok view, American colleges and universities are victims of their own success: they answer to so many constituencies and are expected to serve so many ends that no one can agree on even a few common goals, and in the meantime they have grown complacent. Few people have studied how much college students really learn and improve, Mr. Bok says, but the data that exist aren't very encouraging. [Which is why people like UD think an exit exam wouldn’t be a bad idea.]

In some cases, students actually appear to regress.

Among the findings he cites: over four years, students in science and engineering tend to get worse at writing, not better, and students not in science or engineering experience a similar decline in quantitative reasoning. [The absence of a required core of serious courses will do that to you.] Students tend to improve at critical thinking, but not by much, and the very process of fulfilling the requirements for a major can sometimes have a dumbing-down effect. [Paging Creative Writing.] A great many majors, Mr. Bok says, impose a lot of requirements without really teaching a student how to think deeply about a subject. [And some subjects - Communications, Psychology - aren’t deep.]

Meanwhile, studies show that the number of students enrolling in foreign language courses has steadily declined, and so has the level of literacy that most of them achieve. In fact, no one really knows the best way of teaching a foreign language, Mr. Bok says, just as no one knows which of the various schemes for teaching writing makes the most sense. The only thing certain is that senior professors won't be taking on the chore of teaching either of these classes, which will be farmed out to adjuncts and grad students. [Efforts to get senior professors at UD’s university to teach “Writing in the Disciplines” courses have been modestly successful. UD does it and enjoys it.]

When it comes to apportioning blame for this state of affairs, Mr. Bok does not exclude college presidents. As a group, presidents have so bungled the problem of college athletics, he says, that the system is now unfixably corrupt and hypocritical. [Note: Unfixably.] And their lousy track record, he adds, should make trustees want to keep an eye on their presidents when it comes to negotiating other big money deals.

But he also suggests that administrators are close to powerless when dealing with the one faction of the university that by and large has a stake in poor undergraduate education, or at least in not doing much to improve it: the faculty, many of whom are more concerned with advancing their own careers than with spending time in the classroom. As Mr. Bok ruefully writes, "success in increasing student learning is seldom rewarded." It's easier for college presidents to raise money and build buildings.