Books, Arts & Manners: Pelikan’s School Daze

The Idea of the University: A Reexamination, by Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale, 238 pp., $30)

JAROSLAV Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, is an eminent and much-honored scholar. His numerous books on theology and the history of Christianity exhibit a depth of erudition rarely seen. In addition, he has done time in administration, as dean of Yale’s graduate school. So, who better to address the crisis in American higher education? That Pelikan dares to address that crisis (his own word for it) through a meditation on Cardinal Newman’s famous essay “The Idea of a University,” is an additional reason to hope that this is the book we’ve been waiting for. Alas, it is less a prescription for a cure than another symptom of the disease.

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Thomas Short

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The Idea of the University: A Reexamination, by Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale, 238 pp., $30)

JAROSLAV Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, is an eminent and much-honored scholar. His numerous books on theology and the history of Christianity exhibit a depth of erudition rarely seen. In addition, he has done time in administration, as dean of Yale’s graduate school. So, who better to address the crisis in American higher education? That Pelikan dares to address that crisis (his own word for it) through a meditation on Cardinal Newman’s famous essay “The Idea of a University,” is an additional reason to hope that this is the book we’ve been waiting for. Alas, it is less a prescription for a cure than another symptom of the disease.