According to many scholars and experts, higher education in America is in crisis. Often, we see that crisis played out in the lives of students. College campuses have become perpetual parties and many people blame the students themselves, suggesting that this generation is lazy, entertainment driven and doesn’t care about anything other than themselves. That might be true, pop culture is pervasive, shaping teens to think that “Spring Break” is the “good life,” but Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College, wants to make sure the institutions of higher learning themselves get some, if not all, of the blame.

In his insightful book, Excellence Without A Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future? (PublicAffairs, 2006, ISBN# 978-158648-501-6), Lewis looks at the state of higher education in America through the story of Harvard College. For better or worse, Harvard is looked to as one of the premier colleges in America and around the world. As Harvard goes, so will much of higher learning around the globe. According to Lewis, colleges in America (Harvard included), “have forgotten that the fundamental job of undergraduate education is to turn” teenagers into adults, “to help them grow up, to learn who they are, to search for a larger purpose for their lives, and to leave college as better human beings.”

Lewis believes that because colleges have failed to offer students reasons for education—which forces students to wrestle with deeper questions of meaning and purpose—they are failing students and a country that desperately needs a well-educated citizenry. Lewis pleads with colleges and universities to not be afraid to talk about truth, meaning, purpose and what it means to be human.

This is a helpful book for anyone desiring to know the state of higher education in America. Parents should especially be interested as they ask what their child will be learning in college?

—Derek Melleby  

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