A Good Book: The Creation of the Future: The Role of the American University
by Frank H.T. Rhodes

The Creation of the Future: The Role of the American University made the list of recommended readings for our University of Cincinnati academic planning process because its author provides a striking mix of history, examination of the issues crucial to the survival of American universities, and recommendations for the future.

The author, Frank H.T. Rhodes, is a higher education veteran who served 18 years as the president of Cornell University, one of our nation’s premier research institutions. Now a president emeritus, he can speak with a unique distance and closeness to the issues.

While Rhodes champions a new relevance for the future of the American research university, he also gives the reader a thorough understanding of the university’s heritage and development. While the first American university formed in 1636 along the Charles River across from Boston in Cambridge, Mass., it was Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1876 that set forth the model of a university dedicated to advanced scholarship, scientific research and graduate study, in addition to undergraduate education.

In addition to his analysis of the American university and how it got here, Rhodes tackles the thorny issue of where it must head in the 21st century – in the face of competition not only for resources and students, but also from for-profit entities and on-line learning opportunities. He takes on the prickly issues so many in higher education prefer to gloss over or dismiss without even debating them – creating post-tenure review of professors, evolving meaningful variations for workload, establishing continuity in grading standards, strengthening university governance and leadership, and integrating the curricula of professional schools and the liberal arts.

The author also suggests that the best, “imperfect” solution to tuition increases is that they can be held near the level of inflation if university administrators establish clear priorities and have the willpower to pursue them. He suggests that the budgeting process should be a strategic planning process that involves all constituencies, on and off campus.

And finally, Rhodes also puts forth a call for the return of community in universities, an issue that strikes a poignant chord for more universities because of their “silo” culture. He writes: “If I were allowed only one word to describe the distinctive method by which the university pursues its multiple tasks of learning, discovery and service, it would be the word ‘community.’ Without community, knowledge becomes idiosyncratic: The lone learner, studying in isolation, is vulnerable to narrowness, dogmatism, and untested assumption, and learning misses out on being expansive and informed, contested by opposing interpretations, leavened by differing experience, and refined by alternative viewpoints.”

I highly recommend this thought-provoking examination of the national and international treasure known as the American university.

  -- President Nancy L. Zimpher

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“A Good Book” features a favorite book of a member of the UC community.

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