STUDENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION SHOULD MASTER RESEARCH TO SOLVE THE GREAT SOCIETAL PROBLEMS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Research—as Cathy N. Davidson succinctly defines it above—is one of many crucial topics in her compelling new book The New Education. Looking at the literature and data on American universities Davidson describes in her study, I venture that new research could contribute to the public good as long as research universities continue to advance democracy. Theoretical and practical notions of democracy, of course, have evolved remarkably since America's founding, oscillating between the ideological poles of “liberalism” and “illiberalism,” as some pundits have recently put it (Deneen 155–59). For the sense of American democracy anchoring my essay, I have in mind a “deliberative form of politics” that calls on “the demos to reflect upon itself and judge [the efforts of] laws, institutions, and leaders” to maintain the equality of social rights and privileges (Urbinati 16). The democratic prosperity of American society requires an increasingly diverse range of students to conduct new research on behalf of the intellectual and scholarly contributions of universities to the public good.

The university, an eldritch progeny of medieval Christianity and conglomerate capitalism, can feel like a gristmill to graduate students and junior scholars. We must produce acceptable articles and monographs after years of research. We must compete for a few good jobs, and we do this by teaching extra classes, submitting essays for publication, presenting papers at conferences. But we must also be beyond this world, needing neither food nor money, subsisting solely on ideas and conversation and self-promotion. he authors of these essays, all of us at the beginning of our careers as scholars, are not fooled by a system that masks its cold corporatist heart with the vestments of the liberal arts. We know that the university intends to make of our bodies machines that produce ideas and disseminate them; machines that round off the rough edges of our students and prepare them to be good, centrist, white-collar workers; machines that perpetuate the idea of the university. We know that we are disposable within the structure of the academy. Nevertheless, we are clear-eyed as we try to make a living in the knowledge industry. We believe, earnestly, that critique and research and thought experiments and the slow study of minutiae are worth fighting for.

Surprise best seller fails to capture the triumph of azar nafisi's reading lolita in tehran (2003). This “memoir in books” recounting the cultural politics of postrevolutionary Iran—not exactly the subject matter that typically sends a book to the top of the literary charts—turned out to be “a bookseller's dream” (Burwell 143). It sold millions, was translated into thirty-two languages, and—perhaps most impressively—generated a critical lovefest that united neocon hawks like Bernard Lewis with progressive luminaries like Margaret Atwood. Far less surprising, however, was the familiar canard of “Oriental darkness” dominating the book's mainstream reception: the idea that non-Westerners have no literature of their own and know nothing about the Western canon. Many commentators refused to consider the radical possibility that Iranians may have already been acquainted with some canonical occidental texts. Nowhere to be found in this discussion was the name Ibrahim Younisi (1926-2012), whose fifty-year career in literary translation underscores that Iranians have long been avid readers and enthusiastic translators of world literature. Sadly, this ignorance is not limited to mainstream literary publications; John O. Jordan and Nirshan Perera's Global Dickens fails to mention that Charles Dickens's works have been in widespread circulation in Iran since the 1960s. Decades before Nafisi supposedly led her students to Western literary civilization, Younisi had translated not just Dickens but also Thomas Hardy, Henry Fielding, Shakespeare, and George Eliot. By the time of his death, Younisi's résumé included more than seventy translations, encompassing literary texts, criticism, memoir, and historical scholarship.

Oscar wilde's only novel, the picture of dorian gray, first appeared in the july 1890 issue of the american periodical lippin- cott's Monthly Magazine? While the sometimes acrimonious reception of the novel in Britain has been routinely noted, less scholarly attention has been paid to the reception of Dorian Gray in the United States. Even when scholars allude to the reaction of the press there, they do so almost always as an afterthought—as a way of juxtaposing the novel's censorious reception in Britain with its supposedly more positive reception across the Atlantic. Thus, in the introduction to his definitive edition of Dorian Gray for Oxford University Press, Joseph Bristow comments in a footnote that he has “found no evidence of outright hostility towards The Picture of Dorian Gray in the American press,” before outlining “the trouncing that Wilde … experienced” in Britain“ (ln101). Similarly, in his general introduction to the ”uncensored“ Dorian Gray for Harvard University Press, Nicholas Frankel notes of the novel, ”To be sure, appreciative and sensitive reviews appeared in Britain and America, but a significant segment of the British press reacted with outright hostility, condemning the novel as ‘vulgar,’ ‘unclean,’ ‘poisonous,’ ‘discreditable,’ and ‘a sham’“ (5). In her contribution on Wilde in the series Bloom's How to Write about Literature, Amy Watkin is even more Manichaean: ”Americans loved it,“ she declares. ”English reviewers did not“ (129).

Cathy N. davidson'S the new education: how to revolutionize the university to prepare students for a world in flux challenges us to address nonacademics, and to update our teaching, by focusing on the big picture. She calls on us to rise above departmental politics and the tribalism of disciplinary debates. Instead of engaging in those familiar struggles, we should be talking with our neighbors and our elected representatives about the advantages of eliminating letter grades; the virtues of pedagogies that are learner-centered, collaborative, and project-based; the perils of specialization; the damage that departments do by stifling change; the promise of educational technology if divorced from the profit motive; the myth that STEM degrees lead directly to career success; and, of course, the need for public reinvestment in higher education. Each of these talking points draws energy from Davidson's contention that digital media have rendered industrial models of education obsolete.

In september 1941, shortly before the united states entered world war ii, the british writer sylvia townsend warner wrote a note to the American poet Genevieve Taggard, thanking her for sending a poem. An epistolary relationship developed between the two writers, though Taggard also sent material gifts of spices, tea, rice, and seeds to alleviate the deprivations that Warner and her partner, Valentine Ackland, faced in war-battered England. Eighteen letters, all from Warner to Taggard, remain of this correspondence, which ended with Taggard's death in 1948. They are housed in Taggard's papers at the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. Although Taggard's letters to Warner have been lost, Warner's letters to Taggard reveal a literary friendship that is at once partisan and poetic. These private letters, like the public “Letter from London” columns by Warner's fellow New Yorker contributor Mollie Panter-Downes, vividly portray the English home front to an American audience.

Cathy N. Davidson's core claim in the new education is fundamentally important: the university system in the united states is undermining itself with a factory-production model that wasn't great in the twentieth century and is dysfunctional in the twenty-first. Whenever they come under political fire, nonelite colleges and universities proclaim their eagerness to Taylorize student learning—make it more efficient with tighter process control— through the more rigorous application of output measures like cost per unit and time to degree. hey regulate learning with grades and bell curves, which we now know do not neutrally measure learning but systematically favor some types of students over other types. Even worse, they apply stock forms of evaluation that not only mismeasure learning but actively reduce it. Whatever money standardization saves in the short run is lost many times over in the long run through limited learning and reduced creativity in the millions of graduates cranked out by this restricted and outdated system.

For cathy n. davidson, university education is equivalent to job preparation, which is not to say that she is talking about vocational training in the usual sense—the training, say, of medical technicians or park rangers, computer programmers or hotel personnel. On the contrary, her “new education” is designed as broadly as possible to be a replacement of the old liberal arts paradigm. The soaring cost of college education, she argues, will not decrease until public officials can be convinced that four (or even two) years of “university” training “can provide exactly the analytical and cross-cutting interdisciplinary thinking and communication skills that are most in demand in a complex workplace” (185). Goodbye, accordingly, to the traditional curriculum that has been in force for over a hundred years, goodbye to “passive, hierarchical models of teaching and learning” (103), to individual majors (and minors) like English, history, economics, or chemistry, with their lecture courses and discussion sessions, their final exams and pop quizzes, and welcome to the new world of “student-centered,” “project-based” “learning,” to the classroom “where students learn how to learn” (263).

Cathy N. Davidson's the new education: how to revolutionize the university to prepare students for a world in flux joins a rapidly growing genre that calls on society and its leaders to revolutionize education at all levels to prepare children and young adults for a fast-changing world. his genre includes the former Harvard University president Derek Bok's The Struggle to Reform Our Colleges (2017) and the Northeastern University president Joseph E. Aoun's Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017). But whereas Bok focuses on why so little has changed in education despite the pressing need for radical transformation and Aoun introduces the new discipline of “humanics” as a means for higher education to prepare students for an era when professions are rapidly disappearing, Davidson highlights the widening gap between a rapidly changing society and an educational system that has not kept pace. Davidson supports her theoretical arguments with case studies of programs from institutions that are paving the way for a new education.