The Mockers And Mocked;Conparative Perspectives On Differentation, Convergence And Diversity In Higher Education Book

Recycled tripe published every 8-10 years since the 1970s by higher education scholars...I have _Higher Education in American Society_ (1981), edited by Philip G. Altbach and Robert O. Berdahl, on my bookshelf as well. There is little difference between the two volumes as if the twentieth (1981) and twenty-first (2011) centuries do not differ. Well, the "authors" change. In 1981, T. R. McConnell is attributed for "Autonomy and Accountability" (Chapter 3). In 2011, Frank A. Schmidtlein and Robert O. Berdahl are attributed for "Autonomy and Accountability" (Chapter 3). The subtitles of Chapter 3 change, but the underlying text/outline in both articles is nearly the same. Compare the top of page 40 (1981) to page 69 (2011): "If a college or university is to effectively define its goals and select or invent the means of attaining them, it must have a high degree of" independence (1981) / autonomy (2011). The sentence is identical with the exception of independence/autonomy. McConnell (1981) cites no other scholar for this profound (?) insight, while Schmidtlein and Berdahl (2011) cite a work (without placing the identical text in quotations) by Howard R. Bowen from 1977 as if McConnell is one who first plagiarized these words! (I recall I found a similar sentence in a work from earlier in the 1970s but could not verify for this impetuous review...) Unfortunately, higher education students have been asked to read this ideological trash as if it is disciplinary canon for nearly 50 years now. For tenured scholars, the words appear to be some sort of worldly wisdom to be passed on, memorized, scribed (copied), and unquestioned by their graduate school pupils. Oh, wait, how do I know this? I wrote a book about the history of higher education scholarship, focusing on the use and abuses of "institutional autonomy" since the 1950s (_Honors of Inequality_).