As I write this review The Globe and Mail's John Ibbitson reports on the Ontario government's new initiative, the "Investing in Students Task Force." The article reports Premier Mike Harris' views that universities, particularly those which devote themselves to unproductive programs in the humanities and social sciences are "wastefully blind to market forces." Funding is being directed to schools which comply with the government's goals of establishing joint degree-diplomas that heavily emphasize market-competitive skills.

The arguments Aronowitz puts forward are unfortunately all too familiar to academics in Canada. Universities in the United States, as he describes them, are "educational bureaucracies that might justify their collective existence." (p.123) The process of universities becoming handmaidens to corporate interests in research, as well as in what is taught students is not news to our ears. Neither is the description of the erosion of working conditions in the universities.

The U.S. in this respect is more "advanced" than Canada. With far fewer universities unionized, the working conditions of faculty at second- and third-rung universities make it very difficult to create an atmosphere in which learning can occur. Without a process supported by collective bargaining, there are no controls on the arbitrariness of the system.

Aronowitz argues that "there is little that would qualify as higher learning in the United States." This he defines as critical exposure to the "legacy of Western Intellectual culture and to those of the Southern hemisphere." He distinguishes between learning, education and training. Education he calls the process of adapting to the prevailing social order with its values and beliefs; training as acquiring a particular set of skills. Real learning, he says, is synonymous with "the process by which a student is motivated to participate in, even challenge, established intellectual authority." (p.143)

A college education is becoming increasingly important and, Aronowitz tells us, a necessary, if not sufficient condition for the acquisition of cultural capital. The consequences of not acquiring this are grave if students hope to have any success in the job market. What needs to be learned, however, is not what one might think. As the author describes it: "From their (the employer's) perspective, the B.A. signifies that the candidate can tolerate boredom, and knows how to follow rules, probably the most important lesson in post-secondary education." (p.10)

Aronowitz's description is of a curriculum governed by "the production of useful knowledge" -- a knowledge machine, which in the early post World War II period was an adjunct to the military economy of the Cold War and is now geared to assisting corporations through research and patent connections with private sector companies. (p. 44)

He describes how governance of the university itself has changed, with universities pressured to adopt the corporate hierarchical structures necessary for rapid decision making without the annoyance of faculty recalcitrance. He outlines the attack on tenure and criticizes the tenure process itself which stacks the cards heavily against candidates who are not part of the "old boys club," white mainstream researchers with the appropriate political skills. He also describes the intensification of academic work itself as professors are required to teach larger classes and supervise more students.

Faculty are becoming increasingly proletarianized as the old intellectual culture of the sciences, humanities and the arts is supplanted by the pressure to direct scholarship and research to the pots of gold in research grants. Students and parents, panicked by the downsizing and the contraction of opportunities for well paid, full-time jobs join the corporate clamour for an emphasis on "useful" knowledge which will provide job readiness. Thus, the older notion of a liberal arts university which will provide a general background for students is lost.

What would Aronowitz like to see? His university as a site for learning involves a curriculum which returns to the classics, but is not quite synonymous with what conservative critics of the university such as Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind have in mind. For Bloom, the thinkers within the last two centuries such as Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Heidegger who questioned eternal "values" and reason lead us to our current state of intellectual disarray. Aronowitz's vision is guided by John Dewey's concept of "education for democracy and democracy in education" (p.162), a place where students grapple with and challenge received wisdom from earlier periods and other civilizations. He acknowledges this "seems beyond a possibility" for the time being. With the transformation of a community of scholars to a collection of individual entrepreneurs or employees of an enclosed bureaucracy, faculty prerogatives to academic government have become quite limited, with the resulting dilution of curriculum.

After this proviso on the relationship between governance structures and what is taught, Aronowitz spells out in some detail what his ideal curriculum would look like. His approach concentrates on the study of four key knowledge domains: history, literature, science and philosophy. All domains would be drawn upon to explore specific historical periods to examine how each sphere influences and is influenced by the others as well as to discover relationships with other cultures and contexts. He concludes the book with a list of current exceptions to his critique of what is now being produced in the universities and mentions scholars who have critically looked at science and technology as they are embedded within a social and cultural context.

The final few pages are a detailed curriculum proposal that is fairly wide-ranging from Hegel's Philosophy of History to Aristotle's Physics, selections from the Koran, Dante, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Descartes, Dubois and for a little feminist input, Simone de Beauvoir.

The critique is wide-ranging and makes important connections between politics, economics, history and curriculum offerings. He spells out in some detail what a rigorous curriculum involves and explains how it is possible to engage students in teaching this material. In making this his conclusion however, the main theme of the book gets lost, which is dismantling the corporate university and creating true higher learning as the subtitle promises.

Aronowitz has a compelling way with words. Although I felt the end was not the strongest part of the book, presenting his vision rather than just a critique of what currently exists and reminding us of what we need to do to get there is worthwhile.

As I sit in faculty meetings amidst what sometimes feels like a tidal wave transforming the university into a place for profit, for corporate training, for seducing corporate donors into buying yet another piece of it, I reflect on what Aronowitz has to say. At the moment it seems the struggle to remember just what "true higher learning" is, and to keep alive the possibility that the university will one day see that as an important goal is itself a full-time project.

Ester Reiter is associate professor of social science and women's studies at York University.