 Recommended Reading
Impostors in the TempleMartin Anderson challenges the corruption in academe
By Jon SandersOctober 01, 1996 • Impostors in the Temple: A Blueprint for Improving Higher Education in America; Martin Anderson; Hoover Press; 256 pages.
Now four years after its first printing, Martin Anderson’s book is still a clarion call for change in higher education. Now in paperback, the book briskly enumerates the problems of higher education, leaving no stone unturned in a juggernaut of facts, statistics, practices and anecdotes. It also offers dramatic proposals for sweeping reform.
Anderson’s charges against higher education are devastating because he knows the system intimately. He holds a Ph.D. from MIT and was a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business before becoming a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Anderson cites the enrollment explosion from 1960-75, which saw an eight million increase in students, as having “caused much of the institutional trauma that plagues the university to this day.” Anderson says universities had to expand their faculty quickly to respond to the surge in enrollment, a practice that decreased the average performance of the faculty.
Next Anderson focuses on the problem of teaching. “There is a widespread contempt for teaching among teachers,” he writes. Because of that contempt, he says, universities have handed over teaching responsibilities to students, especially graduate students.
This practice, which Anderson calls “the shame of academic intellectuals,” has caused a host of problems. First among these is that universities are misleading the parents and students, who expect education from expert faculty. Other problems include the exploitation of (graduate) students, the potential for these students striking and thereby stymieing teaching, the glorification of specialized scholarly pursuits by faculty unfettered by teaching and the likelihood that these students are poor communicators (especially foreign students).
From students teaching Anderson moves to the problems of grade inflation, video classrooms, the likelihood of taking five years or more to earn a degree and the “medieval gild system” of the Ph.D. process.
Next Anderson talks about the problem of scholarship replacing teaching. Of course that issue is related to the issue of tenure. Anderson wants the practice of granting tenure stopped because it protects poor teachers and is structured to reward publishing over teaching.
Many other problems come under Anderson’s scrutiny, too many to list here. Anderson proposes several changes that are so sweeping they could be effected only in a time of crisis. According to Anderson, that time is now.
The prime responsibility for making these changes, he argues, belongs to the universities’ governing boards. They are, he says, the only ones able to make these changes, and they have presided over the decline in the first place.
Anderson provides a list of much-needed actions for these boards to follow. It includes prohibiting student teaching, changing the Ph.D. process, reorganizing faculty titles and responsibilities, returning to the four-year bachelor’s degree, and several other reforms.
In just four years, however, Anderson has seen signs of the sea change higher education must make to survive. In an upbeat, hopeful epilogue new to the paperback edition, Anderson writes of improvement taking place at bellwether universities such as Stanford and Dartmouth. Universities are placing new emphasis on teaching, stopping grade inflation and earnestly seeking ways to improve. According to Anderson, many universities “have quietly stopped pretending that all is well and have set about the task of restoring their intellectual integrity.”
There is of course still a long way to go, and while there is, Impostors in the Temple will remain the authoritative challenge to the state of academe today. Its delineation of the problems of higher education is thorough and withering, and its proposed solutions merit serious debate.
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