Book Re vie ws/Comptes Rendus 136 professional colleagues; the topics we choose for our research and scholarship; and how we faculty use our discretionary time. (p. 435) Astin's research supports his arguments and suggests that the quality of higher education will only improve when policy makers, especially those in government, recognize the need to pay attention to values. If this happens, Astin's book will be invaluable to those faculty and administrators charged with making the changes necessary to improve quality. Meanwhile this is an interesting book that contributes to an understanding of student development, has implications for educational theory and practice, and also identifies many topics for further research. Bromwich, David. Politics By Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Price: $39.50 U.S. (cloth). Reviewed by Glen A. Jones, Faculty of Education, Brock University. In thinking back over events within the academic world of the 1980s, it is difficult to ignore the irony that while most of the public policy agenda concerning higher education focused on science and technology, the most controversial debates within academe focused on and emanated from the humanities. At the same time as the "Star Wars" initiative was being sold as the technological panacea of the cold war and "technology transfer" was fast becoming a cliché as governments sought ways of linking university science and engineering with private industry, large segments of the academic community wrestled with such notions as core curriculum, "Great Books," postmodernism, relativism, "political correctness," eurocentrism, and deconstruction. The town believed that technology was the answer while the gown viewed epistemology as the question. In m a n y respects, David B r o m w i c h ' s recent book, Politics By Other Means, is only a minor contribution to the established epistemological debate. Readers of B l o o m and D ' S o u s a will find similar basic a r g u m e n t s within Bromwich's critique of contemporary, professionalist, scholarly theory. Readers familiar with the literature from the far left of the debate will recognize many elements of B r o m w i c h ' s critique of the far right, his attack on those, like Bloom, who essentially argue that there is only one way of knowing. The strength of Bromwich's work is his ability to push aside each of the established sides of the debate in order to clear a middle path for independent thought and liberal education. He rebukes both the left and the right for viewing education Book Re vie ws/Comptes Rendus 137 as a form of cultural indoctrination and argues that true education lies in critical t h i n k i n g and i n d e p e n d e n c e of m i n d , a view he t r a c e s b a c k t h r o u g h Wollstonecraft, Mill, and such secular moralists as Hume and Burke. From the latter part of the eighteenth century to the start of the twentieth, a few moral philosophers, together with poets and novelists and psychologists, developed the historical and evolutionary idea of tradition which associates morality with reflection on customs and practices. ...The subject matter for moral reflection becomes, first, the continuity between past and present which makes a given society what it is, and, second, the continuity between present and future which helps it to survive as a particular adaptation of human nature. It follows that a morality shaped by the knowledge of a tradition must give peculiar force to my thought of myself as a survival of some past. It will give the same force to my thought of the future as a survival of the moment that I now represent by my thinking and acting, (pp. 133-134) Bromwich essentially argues that this view of liberalism and tradition is now ignored or dismissed by both of the major camps in the ongoing debate: by the right through emphasizing only one tradition, by the left through redefining tradition as a form of political indoctrination. This view of tradition is only one component of his thesis, however. The thought-provoking argument which Bromwich develops and weaves through the book involves an attempt to explain the relationship between the politicized epistemological debates within the humanities and the broader political arena. This complex argument begins with the premise that the university has now come to be viewed as a microcosm of the community in which it is situated; and this notion, combined with the lack of meaningful public debate of political issues in the broader society and the view from the left that all actions, including teaching and scholarship, are essentially political, has created an environment in which political action within the classroom and the laboratory has become a replacement for real politics: "learning itself may have become nothing but a pursuit of political power by other means..." (p. 231). This phenomenon, according to Bromwich, was strongly reinforced by the intellectual vacuum of the Reagan presidency and his attacks on that era are both stimulating and spirited. In an insightful essay entitled "Moral Education in the Age of Reagan," he uses the writings of Edmund Burke and others to critique the arguments articulated by the quasi-intellectual apologists of the Book Re vie ws/Comptes Rendus 138 "Reagan doctrine," especially George Will and William Bennet. Particular attention is given to the former, and Bromwich critiques the common themes that emerge from Will's writings, ranging from his doctoral dissertation to his published collections of essays and newspaper columns, especially the premise that "culture can save a society from itself' (p. 57). The apologists, however, provided nothing more than an intellectual screen for the true impact of the Reagan presidency: ...there is an unprecedented danger that a generation of Americans will be made permanently cynical, and overlook the things that have been more admirable in our social arrangements, all because an ethic of greed, which they rightly associate with Ronald Reagan, has absorbed or else repelled them but in any case has relieved them of the obligation to think. When they watched that president on television and saw him gift-wrap lies..., dissolve facts..., smile and forge ahead, they could hardly still rely on presuppositions and predispositions for guidance. In such circumstances the leading question becomes, whether this man will succeed in educating all of us down to his level... (pp. 67-68) The book is actually a collection of five critical essays and a short conclusion. The central argument is developed in an almost cyclical fashion; each essay provides a contribution to the broader theme, though Bromwich often leads the reader off the linear pathway to explore a tangential issue or question. Given Bromwich's dense writing style and the loose coupling of ideas within the organizational structure of the book, one would have hoped for a strong concluding essay to assist in pulling the various ideas together. Instead, the reader is provided with a basic attempt to reinforce the importance of the argument in light of the media interest in academic politics towards the end of the decade. Rather than synthesize the various components of the complex argument, the concluding passages of the book actually highlight a major flaw. Much of the argument appears to have been constructed in the mid to late 1980s and there has been little attempt to revise or extend the discussion in light of later events. There are only two minor references to George Bush and one wonders how Bromwich might have described the Bush presidency within the context of his thesis. He can certainly be excused for failing to anticipate the Clinton win of 1992, and the reader can only speculate as to whether the events leading up to and immediately following the election might have forced Bromwich to rework his parting observation: Book Re vie ws/Comptes Rendus 139 The experiment of allowing politicians to educate us down to their level has been tried. On the whole, it was worked out badly...There will be no end to the unreal politics of the academy until we have again a real politics outside the academy. It cannot come too soon. (p. 236) Aside from its flaws, and there are certainly a plethora of ideas and concepts within the text that can and should be questioned, Bromwich has crafted a major work of criticism which illuminates a way of interpreting the relationship between the politics of the gown and of the town during the Reagan era. Scholars of higher education who seek to understand and analyze the events of this period should consider and debate his intriguing thesis. Jarvis, Donald K. Junior Faculty Development: A Handbook. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1991. Price: $39.50 U.S. (cloth). Reviewed by Janet Donald, Director, Centre for University Teaching and Learning, McGill University. This small book is premised on the fact that since universities invest over one million dollars in each faculty member during a thirty-five year career, faculty development programs, which enhance the return on investment, are not only humane and practical, but wise economically. The author is a humanities professor whose administrative responsibilities made him aware that nearly half the members at his university would need to be replaced in the next fifteen years. Realizing the need to help a large influx of junior professors, he interviewed over 100 influential faculty members (teachers, researchers, and administrators) at eight representative American universities and colleges to uncover their views of teaching and faculty development. He also visited institutions which had faculty development programs and interviewed persons responsible for teaching fellowship programs. The result is an easy-to-read book which argues provocatively for aiding the junior faculty, discusses evaluation and reward methods, and examines how programs can be organized to improve junior faculty research, teaching, and service. The book provides perspective on how faculty are and should be rewarded. Since rewards indicate the institution's actual, as opposed to stated, value system, Jarvis suggests that standards for promotion, tenure, and merit raises should embody the goals of the academic unit and reward those who work toward them. He points out that emphasis on research is a relatively recent