A College Guide with a Difference
Only the good people at ISI would take seriously Kirk's critique from half a century ago and apply it today. “MSU symbolized to Kirk all that was wrong with the modern multiversity: the abandonment of liberal learning for the pursuit of narrow utilitarian programs and ideological agendas,” says the ISI guide. Unfortunately, “there seems to be no sign of the trend's reversal.”
This is a college guide with a difference. Now in a revised and expanded second edition, Choosing the Right College ditches all the normal college-guide conventions. There is no unthinking acceptance of what higher education has become, as opposed to what it once was or might be. There are no bland passages of dubious accuracy on “student life.” And there are no rankings based on silly premises. (As editor Winfield J. C. Myers notes in his introduction, “There is something fatuous about ranking institutions of higher learning, as if such an exercise was as easy as measuring fish. No surprise that these rankings begin to resemble fish tales.”)
Instead, Choosing the Right College features little essays on more than one hundred colleges and universities. Sure, there's plenty on “student life” here, but much else besides. The guide asks and answers all the right questions for anybody interested in pursuing a serious education in the liberal arts and humanities: What are the best departments? Who are the best professors? How bad (or not so bad) are the campus politics? Is freshman orientation really a ill-conceived indoctrination program?
Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth About America's Top Schools, edited by Winfield J.C. Myers, with an introduction by William J. Bennett (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 762 pp., $25)
(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)
A Michigan Review
One of the most refreshing features of Choosing the Right College is that it isn't afraid to name names. High-school seniors browsing through its pages will find the book helpful not only in selecting a college or university, but also after they matriculate. There's good information here about how to survive and flourish. The guide is perhaps a bit weak on the sciences, but it's hard to believe there's a better resource available for young men and women thinking about majoring in English, history, political science, languages, or related fields.
One of the problems with reviewing a college guide, of course, is that no single author is likely to know a lot about more than a mere couple of the schools it rates. I'm an expert (or think I'm an expert) in only one: the University of Michigan (just down the road from Russell Kirk's dreaded MSU) where I spent four years about a decade ago. This means two things. First, I enjoy dumping on our friendly rivals at MSU as much as possible. (Did I forget to mention that our football team beat theirs last year?) Second, I have a lot of opinions about the big school in Ann Arbor.
The entry is solid, even as it begins poorly. The very first sentence is a total disaster: “Founded in 1855, twenty years before the state of Michigan officially came into existence, the University of Michigan…” Actually, the university was founded in 1817 — twenty years before Michigan became a state, in 1837.
But things quickly improve. My sense of the University of Michigan always has been that it's possible to receive a first-rate education there, but the problem is that the school doesn't make students receive one. Because there is no core curriculum, students are left with a massive smorgasbord of choices that many 18 year-olds simply aren't prepared to make. So they wind up majoring in psychology. As a student, I wrote a batch of articles and editorials on this subject for the Michigan Review. I'm heartened to see the unnamed author of this entry seem to concur: “The university's curriculum plan [such as it is] is a double-edged sword, one that allows a thoughtful student to receive a traditional, old-style education along any number of paths, but also avails the possibility of cutting oneself on the sharp and glinting blade of modernity.” That's nicely put, too. Here's another thing readers will enjoy about Choosing the Right College: better writing than what appears in most of its competition.
That Critical First Opinion
The guide recommends nearly two dozen of Michigan's professors as “outstanding.” I read Homer, studied Milton, learned Latin, and probed the Bible under four of them. Each is well picked, and deserves individual praise. The guide also has fun quoting from some of the more ridiculous offerings listed in the university's course catalog, an amusing habit it employs with many of the other schools examined here, even if it winds up accentuating the negative a bit more than necessary.
In all, Choosing the Right College is an excellent guide for students and parents — and probably the best available for a certain kind of student and parent. It's worth getting second and third opinions on colleges and universities under serious consideration, but that's true of any endeavor of such huge importance in a person's life. For that critical first opinion, though, there may not be a better place to go.
