Gone for Good: Tales of University Life after the Golden Age by Stuart Rojstaczer (PDF)

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Amid the clamorous debates on political correctness, the Western canon, and alcohol abuse on campus, many observers have failed to notice the most radical change in the American University: the Golden Age of massive government funding is gone. And, as Stuart Rojstaczer points out in this incisive look at higher education, the consequences are affecting virtually every aspect of university life.Laced with humorous and insightful anecdotes, Gone for Good is a highly personal tour of the university system as it has evolved from the glory days of phenomenal post-WWII growth to the financial stresses that now beset it. Stuart Rojstaczer, professor of Hydrology at Duke, shows how almost unlimited funding during the Cold War years encouraged universities to become unwieldy behemoths–with ever-enlarging faculties and administrative staffs, an explosion of new buildings that are proving costly to maintain, and a parade of programs designed largely to impress other universities. Rojstaczer asserts that despite the scarcity of new funding sources, universities continue to strive for unlimited growth–with disastrous results: skyrocketing tuition (well over $20,000 per year at top tier schools); desperate attempts to increase enrollments (lower standards, inflated grades, and new majors in some rather implausible areas of study); and increasing pressure on faculty who already spendmore time researching than teaching to raise more money through research grants. The time has come, Rojstaczer argues, to abandon an outmoded idea of growth and create a leaner university system more beneficial to both students and society.For parents, students, and anyone interested higher education, Gone for Good offers a vivid account of the crossroads where universities now stand–and a compelling argument about which path they should take.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From Booklist University life would be wonderful–if only it weren’t for the students. Teaching takes time away from important research, which, according to Rojstaczer, seems to be the real reason Ph.D.’s take their appointments. That’s the feeling one gets from his analysis of higher education. During the “golden age,” research money flowed freely. But the end of the cold war reduced competition within the international research community and government dollars diminished correspondingly, forcing schools to seek funding elsewhere. These days, Rojstaczer writes, overburdened professors must deal with making their courses easier for students (who seem more interested in heading out into the job market than in getting a quality education), which in turn increases the teachers’ popularity and assures future full classes. The educators must also contend with writing grant proposals, student athletes, and campus politics. Rojstaczer’s is not a pretty picture, but Gone for Good is an important book that suggests that the halls of ivy are not as green and fresh as one might hope. Ron Kaplan From Kirkus Reviews A serious, although informal, introduction to the realities of the university world today. A scientist who writes about a university is about as rare as a duck in a tree. Most recent reflections on changes in the academic world have come from humanists and social scientists and most of them have been disgruntled, many bitter. Rojstaczer, a geologist and environmental engineer (Duke), shares their concerns but, by contrast, is refreshingly balanced and calm. His chatty style never betrays anger or despair. He humanizes his subject where others have often parodied it. He recognizes that a brief postwar “golden age,” perhaps a third of a century long, in universities’ wealth, confidence, and freedom from accountability is forever gone. He doesn’t like many qualities of today’s research institutions: grade inflation, a reduction in course loads and requirements for the major, students who won’t work hard, universities’ failure to live within their means, the corruption of athletic programs, the dependence upon fund-raising, and the difficulties of attracting graduate students and getting research grants. But who does like them? If his concerns about intellectual fashions, faculty politics, and lazy students are scarcely unique, what is distinctive is Rojstaczer’s refusal to succumb to nostalgia and his recognition that today’s universities face realities that didn’t exist in the 1960s. Yet his book would have been improved by more extended reflections about what has in fact improved in American higher education since the 1960s its greater diversity of students, faculty members, and concerns, and its greater openness to ideas chief among them even if these improvements have exacted their costs. An anecdotal yet insightful tour of American universities by an insider. — Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Review “Donald Kennedy and Henry Rosovsky have recently given us views of the modern university as seen from the top down. Rojstaczer tells us what it looks like from the inside out. His description is usually entertaining, occasionally depressing, and always deadly accurate. If you care at all about academic life in America, you’ll have trouble putting this book down.”―David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Cal Tech University”All parents of prospective applicants to selective universities would benefit from reading this book; for that matter so would the applicants and the faculty who may teach them. Stuart writes quite well, especially compared against most academicians today. You will enjoy the book, and you might even learn a thing a thing or two.”―Malcom Gillis, President of Rice University”Rojstaczer’s is not a pretty picture, but Gone for Good is an important book that suggests that the halls of ivy are not as green and fresh as one might hope.”―Booklist”A serious, although informal, introduction to the realities of the university world today.”―Kirkus Reviews About the Author Stuart Rojstaczer is Associate Professor of Geology, Environment and Engineering, and Director, Center for Hydrologic Science at Duke University. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. It is the second week of August 1990. The U.S. government is determining how to respond to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. On a less serious front, the Oakland Athletics, my beloved A’s, are comfortably in first place in the American League Western Division and are playing with confidence. But I am far from Oakland, having just arrived at the airport of my new address, Durham, North Carolina, where I have taken a position as a not-so-young assistant professor of geology at Duke University. I have been here twice before, once for my job interview and the second time to buy a house with my family. School will start in a week, my wife and six-year-old daughter will arrive in a few days from my in-laws’ house in Chicago, and students, mostly from Duke, are filling the airport on the way to their dormitories. For me, having lived in much larger cities almost all of my life, the airport seems like a miniature version of the real thing. I look at all of the students in the airport who, like me, are waiting for their luggage to arrive. I have spent the last several years working in a government research lab where almost everyone was at least a decade older than I. The era of the well-funded government research lab was coming to a close, so I decided to find a job as a university professor. After those years in the government, the sight of all of these young people is foreign. Bernard Baruch, the financier, once said “Old age is fifteen years older than I currently am.” If this is a universal truth, then I must look old to many of these students. Conversely, many of them look to me like they should still be in high school. The male students tend to be long of limb and absent of embellishing muscles. The female students tend to be slimmer and their voices are a little more high pitched than I am used to. They are all college bound, some of them will graduate this coming year, and they are my audience for as long as I keep or am allowed to keep my position (tenure is granted to about 40 percent of those who enter as assistant professors at Duke University). I think about what it will be like to teach these students. They seem to be serious – there are minimal amounts of laughter even though they form a critical mass – but maybe they are just nervous and preoccupied. I know that, according to test scores, they are close to the upper echelon of students in this country. Several years before 1990, U.S. News and World Report began rating the relative merits of colleges much like the Associated Press rates college football teams. By 1990, Duke had established itself in the top ten in these rankings. Despite the dubious value of this type of evaluation, many students and parents of students seem to make use of it in their selection of colleges and, as a result, the quality of the applicants and number of applicants at my university have risen with its ranking. The college guides that I browsed through in the Palo Alto, California, bookstore that was within walking distance from my home suggested that Duke is a place for the smarter children of suburban, upper middle-class and upper-class families to spend their undergraduate years before they go on to professional school. This profile didn’t sound a whole lot different from most expensive, selective liberal arts colleges and universities. At the time, I guessed that these students were almost on a par with Stanford (where I received my Ph.D.) students, but given their eastern and southern upbringing, were somewhat less adventurous. I will be reminded of my preconception of our students at the end of my first school year when I will, for obscure reasons, be in Philadelphia looking for a hotel in which to spend a night. Wearing a Duke University T-shirt I will walk into a dumpy hotel and ask the desk clerk for the daily rate. He will quote me a rate of sixty-five dollars. I will pause for about ten seconds and he will look at my shirt and say, “Look, Mr. Duke University, you ain’t gonna stay here. A Motel 6 would be cleaner and cheaper. If you were from Harvard you’d already be out the door.” Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐this is written by a student who went to university and grad school in the golden age. my time (cornell ’51) was just after WW II when much of the student body was made of vets, who drove much of the feelings about university life for all the rest of us who were there. my grad school (u. of rochester ’57)was as a vet myself who had the goal of preparing to enter the real world. at both times i learned lessons that have stood me in good stead for the rest of my life, along with those i had learned in the military.the book ‘gone for good’ tells me what happened from the years of my studies to the time, 1999, the book was published. it ain’t a pretty sight, especially because duke and cornell are so much alike.in this present day, almost 2009, we find the universities, who had changed from the task of training future citizens to becoming adjuncts of the financial world, suffering the ills they did not see whan they made that change. business has suddenly been turned on its ear and these nontaxpaying institutions find themselves endlessly calling their alumni to help bail them out while at the same time attempting to increase their tuition and fees for a population that is suffering far more from the financial collapse and depression than the universities. they are beginning to know how this affects them also. here we have institutions who though they have lost little in their endowment funds perceive the present day value as being a calamity. but except those who had invested in the collapsed mortgage market or have been hit by the large madoff ponzi scheme, they have lost only perceived value, which will eventually return over time as our finances slowly get better and we recover from this depression.the universities, for all the expertise within their walls, have found they are no better than the financial mavens of wall street in protecting themselves against crooks, many of whom sit on their board of directors (i know at least one at cornell).the universities, leaving their prime purpose behind, have turned instead to become big businesses and now know they are not insulated from either the vagaries of the market or the thieves therein.it has been difficult to watch this all happen and stuart rojstaczer explains the result in easy to read and entertaining fashion, entertaining if one does not know what life was like during the golden age. for anyone with children now going to university or with those who will attend in future, it is a course in what their children will face and for what they will pay outrageous amounts of money for the privilege.there is hope that schools will learn there is a time to use the endowments for the benefit of the students and that deficit spending is at times needed, just as our government is now beginning to understand.other reviews listed tell one about the book. here is a review that i hope will tell you what it means and has meant.

⭐The writer… excellent book… great sense of humor.. it’s like being in the journey. Looking for more books from this writer.

⭐Stuart Rojstaczer provides an insiders’ view into the workings of major research universities. Anybody considering a career in academia, particularly in the physical sciences, ought to do themselves a favor and read this to temper expectations.

⭐This book provides a fast fun tour of the evolution (fall?) of funded research in America. The trends described continue unabated into the twenty-teens.

⭐This is an incisive, readable assessment of the present American research university. Gone (and probably for good) is the growth of federal funding to universities beginning shortly after WWII, spurred by Sputnik in 1957, and continuing almost unabated until the end of the cold war. Although the benefits of this funding are undeniable, the inevitable shift of priorities has had an impact — not entirely positive — on almost every aspect of American universities. Those in academia will find this familiar territory. Others, e.g., tuition-paying parents or aspiring academics, will find many aspects of university life described with clarity, wit, and candor: faculty hiring and tenuring, the scramble for external funds, the influence of sports programs, research and graduate education, to name just a few. Chapters on grade inflation (no, the students aren’t getting smarter) and on why women are underrepresented in faculty ranks (no, it’s not just a “pipeline” problem) are especially perceptive.Rojstaczer, an environmental geologist at Duke, begins each chapter with a personal anecdote or reflection, adding interest and credibility. The book is without rancor; the academic system has worked well for the author, and much about American universities is admirable. In the chapter “Why Research?” the author emphasizes he loves it, has been successful at it, and is a better teacher because of it. But he is critical of the pressure to publish every bit of minutia or to publish work quickly even before the work is complete. The chapter “Getting Tenure” contains excellent advice for the untenured, and closes with this revealing comment: “…the book you are reading would never have been written by the author if he didn’t have tenure.” But his success within the system has not clouded his vision to those current priorities at odds with education and learning, and some of which are a direct result of the golden age of federal funding. “Gone for Good” should be of interest to anyone with a stake in higher education.

⭐I’m just beginning my PhD in molecular biology, and a friend gave me this book for xmas, knowing my intent to eventually become a professor. It was an eye-opening, fresh perspective of life in academia. It isn’t always pretty, but it is a frank and honest account. How do you balance your personal expectations for college students’ performance in class with the reality that many of them turn away from the more rigorous and demanding courses? How do you survive college politics? By answering these questions, and others, the author provides helpful information for current and prospective academicians.

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