Education Without Impact: How Our Universities Fail the Young

``Liberal education is a difficult and delicate plant to keep under cultivation,'' writes Douglas, English professor at the University of Illinois, in this probing analysis of the problems faced by the American university. Charging the university establishment with failure to provide a genuine liberal education, Douglas examines factors at cross purposes to that mission. Among these are the publication treadmill that cripples the classroom teaching of professors in large research universities and the lack of opportunity for meaningful relationships to develop between students and teachers in mega classrooms. Suggestions for overhauling the current system include the return to smallness and to a method of Socratic interchange somewhat like the Oxford-Cambridge model. Douglas's arguments, readable and reasonable, pose a serious challenge to the academic establishment. (Oct.)