Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus 117 albeit partially developed south of the border. And yes, there are as yet no perfect single or multiple instruments or solutions; and yes, we cannot measure everything at this time. But, The Evidence for Quality issues a "call to act on what we already know" (p. 185). It posits that "improved impact on our students and our institutions is possible with the knowledge we have at hand now" (p. 185). Or is it that "the teeth are there, but the bite is oftentimes missing" (P- 62)? Throughout the book, the reader will encounter the following notions to be associated with the quest for quality in higher education: enthusiasm, emotion, passion, caring, daring, commitment, competence, perseverance, risk, community building, adventure in decision, discovery and renewal, courage, and magnificent obsession. Who would dispute that this is the very essence of what colleges and universities should be constantly and diligently trying to instill in their students? In the Canadian postsecondary education context, this easily readable book provides needed information on quality assessment and should give ample food for thought to friends and critics alike. In this reviewer's opinion, the entire book or parts thereof is a most appropriate and valid reply to recent wellpublicized media reports on the rating of Canadian colleges and universities. Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Idea of the University: A Re-examination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, x and 197 pages. Reviewed by Patricia Kennedy Arlin, Professor & Head, Department of Educational Psychology, University of British Columbia. Early in Pelikan's The Idea of the University: A Re-examination, Pelikan acknowledges that his book is in "some ways a personal essay." It is about how he defines his vocation as a professor, about how he defines the university, and about the university as he has experienced it. Though personal, his definitions and experiences are not atypical. Pelikan takes his title from John Henry Cardinal Newman's Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated (I. Nine discourses delivered to the Catholics of Dublin (1852); and II. Occasional lectures and essays addressed to members of the Catholic University (1858), edited with an introduction and notes by I.T. Ker, Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). What is remarkable about the work of Newman and this new work by Pelikan is the ease with which Newman's vision of the university in the nineteenth century and Pelikan's idea of the university on the Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus 118 verge of the twenty-first century complement and interact each with the other. There is a timelessness and a timeliness to this re-examination of the idea of the university for North American universities generally and for Canadian universities in particular. Among the themes inspired by Newman and re-examined by Pelikan are utilitarian attacks on traditional university curriculum, "first principles," and the necessity of a common core (the importance of the liberal arts for all university students), the crises of confidence in and the credibility of the university, the "business" of the university, the role of professional schools, the university as a place for teaching, and the idea of "self-reformation." Each of these themes highlights one or more of the fundamental questions Canadian academics are asking or ought to be asking themselves. They were questions that Newman raised in what has been called by Pelikan and others the most important treatise on the idea of the university ever written in any language. Central to Pelikan's thesis is Newman's assertion that knowledge is an end in itself. Pelikan offers the corollary that basic research is a primary mission of the university. In Newman's time, as in Pelikan's, there was and is a press to eliminate from the curriculum and from the university traditional fields of inquiry that cannot be justified on the ground of their usefulness. It is of particular interest that Pelikan dedicates his book to the University of Chicago, where this notion of knowledge for its own sake is often debated. There is a story told that shortly after the 1967 Middle East War, the then president of the University of Chicago was asked to address the business community of the city of Chicago on the importance (and relevance) of the university for the city. He is said to have responded that the greatest contribution the University of Chicago can make to the city was in the translation of the Assyrian dictionary! Is this not another way of stating "knowledge is its own end?" Pelikan emphasizes the theme that research which initially appears to have no practical application often results in fundamental change. Pelikan uses as an example the nine folio columns devoted to the topic of the "Delian League" in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he read in his youth. He contrasts these with the two columns in the same edition on the topic of "Uranium," and the separate entry on the researches of Albert Einstein which were still considered to be in their preliminary stages. Pelikan concludes his example by commenting that "It is not exaggeration to say that the practical consequences of those investigations of uranium and of relativity have remade the world." Basic research he considers fundamental to the idea of the university- Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus 119 The interrelation between knowledge and utility or applicability to the real world is one of several "first principles" (Newman, I. vii. 4) which both Newman and Pelikan believe the university must address. The problem of what they call the "intellectual virtues" and the "nature of the university as a community" are considered to be of similar importance. Pelikan makes an impassioned plea for the university to come to some consensus as to what constitutes the intellectual virtues to which it should subscribe. He decries what he calls a type of "a priori relativism" versus an "ex post facto relativism." The former he accuses of substituting relativism itself as a first principle which results, from his point-of-view, in a bankruptcy of the entire intellectual enterprise. "Ex post facto relativism" is, by his definition, an admission that after scholars have done their best to be honest in the production of their results, these results will "still be flawed and will bear the marks of the time and place and personality in which they have arisen." In this discussion of relativism and first principles, while the argument is situated in the prose and concerns of Newman, the fine line between Newman's thought and Pelikan's translation to the modern university often becomes blurred. This is not necessarily a flaw because the reader, through a careful rereading, can separate the two. Pelikan concludes that "it is an unjustifiable capitulation to intellectual and moral relativism to conclude ... that a consensus about what seem almost unavoidably to be called 'values' is beyond our grasp, and therefore that the university cannot draw on any such consensus to shape the decisions that affect its common life." Pelikan suggests that efforts expended to tease out "such presuppositions and values from the concrete life of the university in today's world," are essential if the university is to transcend a type of cynicism and relativism and ultimately define a set of "intellectual virtues." Mission statements of universities imply some remaining desire to define and redefine these virtues or, at the very least, acknowledge their existence. Essential to both Newman's and Pelikan's view is the university's responsibility to transmit, cultivate, and criticize a common core of learning in the undergraduate program. The absence of this core raises, in Pelikan's view, "grave questions for the future of scholarly research." These questions arise because Pelikan believes that the general preparation of scholars in fields other than their own is a distinguishing characteristic between good and great scholarship. He believes that it is the sine qua non in helping students make connections. It is Pelikan's view that the "absence of a common body of learning also raises grave questions for the future of scholarly research." The press toward specialization within a single discipline in Canadian universities might well be scrutinized in this light. Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus 120 It is precisely this interaction with a common core of studies and in relation to the arts and sciences that both Newman and Pelikan offer as the rationale for professional schools to be integral parts of the university. There has been and there remains a tension between the professional schools and the "academic" departments. Pelikan goes so far as to suggest that "to qualify as a 'profession,' an occupation or activity must involve some tradition of critical philosophical reflection, and probably the existence of a body of scholarly literature in which such reflection has been developed and debated." Given this qualification, the university becomes for Pelikan the only possible setting where such professional training can be carried on in its "full intellectual context." Pelikan becomes most impassioned when he speaks of the university as a community. Part of this sense of the university as a community is in Newman's own argument that the university is first and foremost a place of teaching. Drawing on this idea of the university as a place of teaching, Pelikan argues that it is essential that the university be a free and responsible community of scholars in its teaching. Because the university is a community, one of the moral principles which Pelikan believes should be at work within it is a "recognition of the various levels at which persons stand and a concern for them as persons ... Any definition of the university that does not incorporate this dimension of personal caring betrays the deepest traditions and highest ideas of the university and is woefully inadequate." Here, too, each Canadian university should pause and reflect on the sense of community which does or does not exist within its walls. The university as a place of teaching is a reoccurring theme for both Newman and Pelikan. To be a teacher in a university is not simply for the purpose of implanting knowledge or filling the students' minds with facts. It is rather "to permit knowledge that was already there to come to light." Pelikan believes that a fundamental principle should be that in the university "the teachers who 'extend' knowledge to students should also be investigators who 'advance' the knowledge." Accompanying this view of teaching is a parallel view of the learning process. The learning process does not "mean or does not mean only, learning the WHAT of existing knowledge but learning the HOW of as yet unknown knowledge." The power and the passion of Newman's words, often couched in Victorian and Ecclesiastical language, and their translation to a reexamination of the idea of the university on the very of the Twenty-first Century, is masterfully done by Pelikan. But Pelikan's work is not mere translation and modernization. It is in part a reinterpretation. If Pelikan deviates at all from Newman, it is to revise Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus 121 Newman's introduction to the idea of the university. That introduction could be misinterpreted to suggest that the university is not about the advancement of knowledge. Through a careful analysis of many of Newman's essays and lectures Pelikan suggests that the components of a definition of the university should include: "advancement of knowledge through research; extension of knowledge through undergraduate and graduate teaching; training that involves both knowledge and professional skill in the professional programs or schools of the university; preservation of knowledge in libraries, galleries, and museums; and diffusion of knowledge through scholarly publication." This book is provocative and each of its chapters defines a theme which North American universities should ponder as they recreate or formulate themselves for tomorrow's world. It should be required reading for the first Faculty or Senate meeting of the academic year. Neave, Guy, and Van Vught, Frans A. (eds.). Prometheus Bound: The Changing Relationship Between Government and Higher Education in Western Europe. Pergamon Press, 1991, 255 pages. Reviewed by Kjell Rubenson, Centre for Policy Studies in Education, University of British Columbia. This book provides an efficient introduction to the general policy and operational issues affecting the relationship since 1950 of governments in Western Europe with their respective systems of "higher" education, with emphasis on actions and trends over the past decade. Australia and U.S.A. commentaries are included as significant referents. The introduction by Neave proposes the thesis that relationships of governments to their university systems since World War Two can be characterized by three phases. The first two are proposed as "facilitatory government" (the great quantitative expansion of the 1950s and 1960s), and "interventionist government" (the period of attempts during the 1970s and '80s to control costs and to manage the social, political, and economic impact of the expansion). A third, relatively recent phase, is referred to as "evaluative government" and is accompanied by the rhetoric of supply side economics and the "market." It is the notion of dealing with higher education indirectly, through reduced block financing, conditional research funding, performance and expectation management, and marginal contracting.