The Beleaguered College: Essays on Educational Reform.(Review)

The Beleaguered College: Essays on Educational Reform, by Joseph Tussman. Berkeley: University of California, Institute of Governmental Studies Press, 1997, 208 pp., $14.95 paperback.

It is a jubilee year in educational writing when a book appears that is distinguished by personal passion, pedagogic wisdom, circumstantial pathos, and pleasantly pungent prose, all at once. The collection of essays by Joseph Tussman, the founder of a promising but short-lived reform program for undergraduates, is of this sort. Although its five pieces are not all new or previously unpublished, there is nothing dated or redundant about them; the thinking is still fresh and the essays together make a whole. Tussman's book should certainly be on the education shelves of every university library, but it also makes gripping reading for the laity.

That said, I should confess to a bias of interest. As a forty-three-year-long tutor at St. John's College, I follow with avid engagement the fate of kindred programs, and as Tussman's friendly references to St. John's show, he would acknowledge the kinship. Not only is there always something to be learned along practical lines, but with each advent of such a program, there stirs the hope that one tide may float all our boats, and with each demise the fear that there, but for the grace of God, go we.

The reference to luck and to circumstance is not idle. Tussman's first essay, so far withheld from publication, deals with the causes of the failure of his Experimental College. "Failure" is really the wrong word. The college didn't survive; the program was discontinued--by Tussman's own decision--after four years and two cycles of graduates (1965-1969). The failed programs I know of have usually been half-measures, not so much misconceived as unconceived, born of ungrounded longing for a better way married with timid compromise. But Tussman is right in ending the essay defiantly: "These convictions, with which I began, survive in me unimpaired, although shadowed now by frustration and defeat." His program was a principled plan, a radical departure from the standard ways of universities, a good and a practicable conception. I am thoroughly persuaded that it was done in by recalcitrant conditions and unlucky circumstances. His college was indeed beleaguered from its inception.

Tussman did well to put his account of the end of the Experimental College first, where friendly observers, who have long wondered what the inside story really was, would quickly become absorbed in it. Yet it might be more helpful to the reader to say something first about the Tussman program (and, incidentally, similarly conceived programs).