ABSTRACT
This is a statement I very much wanted to make. The American University, published in 1968, still stands as one of the most lucidly informative statements about the subject ever written. With keen insights Jacques Barzun has described the university and its quintessential features. He demarcates the ancestral, perhaps more congenial, university from the one emerging in his day as teacher and administrator in the 1960s. Presciently he walks the reader through the minefields of sixties “reform,” ever hopeful about the future of an institution to which he has devoted his professional life. I greatly admire his vision and his power of analysis. But even Barzun did not fully foresee the extremes that emerged from the noisy radicalism of the 1960s. Even he could not imagine the corrosive influence of an all-embracing orthodoxy on campus.
