ABSTRACT
For the past year the author has been studying American Education. Thorstein Veblen's far more famous book on the same subject, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, brilliant as it is, rests on a thin empirical base compared with Upton Sinclair's. Sinclair, indifferent to academic politics and unafraid of the people who ran the "higher learning," reported exactly what he discovered without the hedges and hesitations that dull the edge of ordinary academic writing. Sinclair's The Goose-Step is nearly 500 pages long, therefore defying capsulization. The contemporary version of Sinclair's book, though wrung from a much thinner empirical base, and without systematic interviewing across the country, is Ben Ginsberg's The Fall of the Faculty. Ginsberg concludes with "What is To Be Done", and one suggestion—that faculty become members of Boards of Trustees—sounds particularly useful.
