Crisis on Campus ─ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities

"Sure to provoke heated debate, this book convincingly tells us what we don't want to hear: our colleges and universities are no longer sustainable---either financially or programmatically. Mark Taylor provocatively calls for big changes, both in how we use technology to help deliver educational services and in the role of professors. We should pay attention, or we will pay an enormous price."---Joel Klein, Chancellor, New York City Department of Education

"Mark Taylor---a deeply original scholar and nationally celebrated teacher---sees American higher education as a bubble about to burst. For your students' sake, your teachers' sake, your children's sake and your country's sake, read this book while there is still time."---Jack Miles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of God: A Biography

"This is a book that needed to be written and one that must be read. Mark Taylor not only reveals an unclothed emperor; he also provides guidance to those of us who would properly serve as weavers. The only thing better than reading this book would be to have written it."---E. Gordon Gee, President, The Ohio State University

"One of the jobs of a public intellectual is to warn'us when he sees a fast-approaching freight train bearing down on us. In Crisis on Campus, Mark Taylor does that and much more. He offers specific and often radical suggestions about how to make higher education more fulfilling for students and more relevant to the networked world of the twenty-first century."---Bill Bradley

A provocative look at the troubled present state of American higher education and a passionately argued and learned manifesto for its future.

In Crisis on Campus, Mark C. Taylor---chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University and a former professor at Williams College---expands on and refines the ideas presented in his widely read and hugely controversial 2009 New York Times op-ed. His suggestions for the ivory tower are both thought-provoking and rigorous: End tenure. Restructure departments to encourage greater cooperation among existing disciplines. Emphasize teaching rather than increasingly rarefied research. And bring that teaching to new domains, using emergent online networks to connect students worldwide.

As a nation, he argues, we fail to make such necessary and sweeping changes at our peril. Taylor shows us the already-rampant consequences of decades of organizational neglect. We see promising graduate students in a distinctly unpromising job market, relegated---if they're lucky---to positions that take little advantage of their training and talent. We see recent undergraduates with massive burdens of debt, and anxious parents anticipating the inflated tuitions we will see in ten or twenty years. We also see students at all levels chafing under the restrictions of traditional higher education, from the structures of assignments to limits on courses of study. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Accommodating the students of today and anticipating those of tomorrow, attuned to schools' financial woes and the skyrocketing cost of education, Taylor imagines a new system---one as improvisational, as responsive to new technologies and as innovative as are the young members of the iPod and Facebook generation.

In Crisis on Campus, we have an iconoclastic, necessary catalyst for a national debate long overdue.

Mark C. Taylor is chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Union Theological Seminary and Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Williams College. His many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Foundation National Professor of the Year award. He is a frequent contributor to the op-ed page of the New York Times and has also written for the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and New York City.