As the end of a teaching term approaches, and grant proposal season in most fields is not yet upon us, faculty members could make no wiser choice for a reading break than Paul Axelrod's brief, but stimulating survey of the history, present situation and possible future of liberal education in Canada. Nor is this study useful only for those who work in the humanities, arts or social sciences. It is important reading for anyone who cares about colleges and universities in this country.

We all need to reflect on how our own special interests, whether they are in the sciences, the liberal arts, or a professional school such as education or engineering, are embedded in and affected by the larger university and, especially, how our universities themselves are embroiled in - and may be transformed by - the economic and cultural forces ever swirling around them.

Values in Conflict captures much that we need to know about these matters. And no one could be in a better position to inform us than Paul Axelrod. A leading historian of 20th century higher education who has served York University in several administrative capacities, Axelrod brings much knowledge, a sharp intelligence and extensive practical experience to his task.

Values in Conflict explores many themes, providing important background information for ongoing discussions of what we, as individuals, and our departments, faculties and universities should be doing to defend liberal education in these perilous times. First its author gives us a birds-eye view of the history of the liberal arts, demonstrating that, contrary to what economic fundamentalists may think, from its medieval origins a liberal arts training has always been practical and oriented to future employment.

Although the author might have made more of this, even the supposedly "ornamental" education offered in 19th century women's colleges and academies was designed to train graduates who needed to earn their livings to teach art, music and modern languages. Thousands of Canadian women were grateful for the remunerative employment such higher education made possible for them.

Nor did this practical orientation stop when women entered universities. Contrary to the stereotype that 20th century women attended chiefly to find husbands or busy themselves for a few years before marriage, access to interesting and remunerative work has always fuelled women's desire for higher learning, just as it has men's. The point is that liberal education has fulfilled this desire for both sexes.

Pointing out that employers have always appreciated and continue to appreciate liberally educat-ed graduates, Axelrod cites contemporary statistics to prove his point, showing that liberal arts graduates and professional specialists gain employment in similar proportions. In 1995, for example, the unemployment rate for graduates in humanities was exactly the same as it was for graduates in agriculture and the biological sciences. Social science graduates had a somewhat lower unemployment rate, but no lower than that of graduates in mathematics and the physical sciences.

Axelrod then takes a critical and well-documented look at how supposed economic imperatives are undermining liberal arts in our universities and, undoubtedly, the independence of the sciences and professional education as well. He documents the costly, inappropriate and undesirable use of tools like "performance indicators," drawing on examples in Britain and the United States as well as in Canada, to show just how ineffective and damaging these tools are.

Like so much educational reform in the past, the resultant filling out of forms and paying of bureaucrats to design or deal with them seems once again to have become the order of the day - a method described by one researcher as the "garbage can model of rationality." Bureaucratic requirements generate reams of data that no one has time to read.

Axelrod also shows how corporate interference can undermine freedom of research, as it so notoriously did in the Dr. Nancy Olivieri case, and how new commercially-oriented private universities threaten to undermine the funding of our public institutions.

Values in Conflict presents a lucid account of what a liberal education has traditionally been, what threatens it in our present world, and what, in a better world, it might become. A thoughtful final chapter suggests how university teachers sometimes undermine the future of their own universities through their inattention to whom their students are, where they are coming from, and what might be useful and educational for them. Attention to gender, ethnicity, racial and religious backgrounds or sexual orientations of students mean accepting that Canadian university populations are now fascinatingly diverse. University teaching that was acceptable to the predominantly male, white, Anglo-Saxon and Christian students of the now distant past is no longer viable.

Universities have always needed to be relevant; in order to be relevant they have always had to adapt and change. What we don't want, Axelrod reminds us, is to allow decision-making about how to adapt and change to be taken over by the marketplace and by individuals who know little or nothing about what universities have done in the past or might do in the future if given the chance to direct their own course.

We need to work hard to regain and defend universities' rights to determine their future directions, rights we stand increasingly to lose as global corporate interests gain more and more influence over the conduct of our institutions of higher education. And, unless we work hard to understand our students and teach them effectively, we may have little support from them for this cause.

The worst case scenario is that we will endlessly complain about our university administrators, our students, the new technologies, or about faculty members whose interests differ from our own - but do nothing about the underlying causes of our current malaise. Axelrod's exploration of what is going wrong and what we might do about it deserves our attention.

Alison Prentice taught for most of her career at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. She is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria.