Mark C. Taylor is a Professor of Religion, Chair of the Department of Religion and Co-Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University; Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Union Theological Seminary; and Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Williams College. He received his B.A. from Wesleyan University, Ph.D. from Harvard University and was the first foreigner to be award a Doktorgrad in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen. His many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the University of Helsinki’s Rector’s Medal and Wesleyan University’s Distinguished Alumni award. In 1995, the Carnegie Foundation named Mark Taylor the National Professor of the Year for his use of technology to advance higher education. Besides the books featured in his Rorotoko interviews (Field Notes from Elsewhere and Crisis on Campus), his most recent books include After God, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption, and Mystic Bones.
Our current system of higher education is financially, curricularly and institutionally unsustainable.And there is no easy answer to a problem this complex.But I wrote Crisis on Campus because no significant progress can be made until we recognize that our higher education’s problems are structural and systemic.The American higher education landscape is vast and diverse. When considering its problems, it is necessary to understand the important role that institutions ranging from community colleges and liberal arts schools to research universities and for-profit enterprises are playing.We must also understand that these problems are global.One of the major hurdles to improving higher education is the American mania for ratings. That leads institutions into costly and unproductive competition.Individual colleges and universities cannot and should not address the present crisis by themselves. Rather, they should be cooperating and collaborating from the local and state to the national and global levels.New network technologies are one key theme in the plan I propose. These technologies now make it possible for such cooperation to no longer be limited by geographical proximity.
Mark C. Taylor Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities Alfred A. Knopf256 pages, 5 x 71/2 inches ISBN 978 0307593290
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