While there is an entire sub-genre of academic literature devoted to jeremiads about the perils facing higher education, I found Musto's work to be a valuable contribution to the existing body of work. The attacks on higher learning from forces of neoliberalism and corporatization are not new, but Musto's historical parallelism with the dissolution of the monasteries was an interesting comparison. I also greatly appreciated the author's historical contextualization of the role of the university historically, as well as its development into it's modern form

Attack on Higher Education reviews the history of the role of higher education in America and the current threats and controversies surrounding colleges and universities. It attempts to use The Dissolution of Monasteries by Henry VIII as a comparison point for some analogies in terms of what happened to get them to the point where they could be dismantled without much antagonism and what happened to the institution after. In addition, the book attempts to provide a history of the university overall focussing particularly on where they originated from in the Middle Ages and how they flourished in the time directly after. As you can see, this short book tried to do a lot, all while focusing on American higher education and how it got to its current ‘maligned’ status. Therefore, most of the book talked about the scandals for the past 50 years going through the brutal responses to some student protests in the 1960s that demonstrated the less than idyllic nature of campus life then leaning into a long section on the admissions, Title IX, campus assault, diversity, and free speech controversies of modern times, which I found pretty interesting to see in a collated form with some connections between these problems.

The author’s worst arguments in favor of the university come whenever he discusses money. He seems to ignore the basic idea that if no one wants to go a university, it should close. While there is some loss to the community when they close, it seems like a waste of resources if they continue being funded for an ever smaller group of students. It’s almost comical to read from the perspective of somebody who so passionately believes in the university and the abilities of the faculty and administration such that he can claim that spending 1/3 of university money on faculty as being a low percent of expenditure or that spending thousands a dollars a year on tuition as not that expensive. I understand he means in the long term it pays off, but it’s still a large upfront cost. There’s always the idea present that people associated with the university deep down love it, but that ignores how many people will just continue going to school to get their degree over with, no matter what happens to them on campus. There's a weird criticism about the level of pedagogy at university, where he complains that people no longer learn from books, when STEM for example is not a book based field or one you could learn about purely from original research. There was a focus on the death of the humanities at a lot of universities, understandable given the author specialty, but still a factor to consider for those coming from a more scientific department. When science-related stuff is mentioned, there's definitely some misunderstanding of the way pure science influences engineering.

The writing for this book is almost surprisingly balanced. The author tried to lean away from the craziest voices on either side of the controversy in favor of charting a middle ground, even for some of the ick-ier discussions of faculty-student relationships. He accomplishes this by providing copious quotations from both sides, almost to the point of losing his own voice. The faculty-type bias is pretty strong, as he oft claims they are the most prominent members of the university, when as a whole, it really is the student body that drives the school's existence and prestige along with the alumni, who are former students. It's not like many faculty spend much time focussing on their teaching and improving how they do it.

Where the book falters most is in its focus and cohesiveness. The author did not really do much to tie the chapters on the Dissolution of Monasteries to the modern university. At times chapters would go by without a mention, and most of the relationships shown seemed halfhearted, included out of a premise that doesn’t really work for the type of book the author wanted to write.

Honestly, the main value in this book is as a compendium of different college scandals and overall issues, though the presentation wasn't ideal in the sense that it mostly relies on case studies and random quotes. The connection with the Dissolution of Monasteries was a pretty inconsistent conceit, but I was interested enough in both topics to make it through all the sections.

Ronald G. Musto utilizes the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII in England in the 1530s as a working metaphor for the current challenges faced by higher education in the United States. As in the 1530s, the current assault on higher education is spurred as much by ideological considerations as it is by changing economic and technological realities. Increasingly, right-wing pundits depict universities as corrupt, costly, irrelevant, and morally depraved. This anti-intellectual narrative, with its roots in English Puritanism and American Evangelism, is far from new; however, in the wake of the 2008 recession and the growing polarized political landscape, it has gained momentum. The effects on higher education have been devastating. For example, states have drastically cut funding for higher education leading universities to compensate by increasing tuition fees, replacing tenured faculty with contingent faculty, and consolidating or eliminating departments/programs. These austerity budget cuts, driven by market-based thinking that sees education as a commodity, have particularly affected the liberal arts and humanities.

Conservatives argue that education in the humanities and social sciences is unnecessary, wasteful, and even ideologically dangerous. In 2018, Charlie Kirk, the founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, described the liberal arts as "ornamental" and alleged that liberal arts programs propagated "anti-Western" and "anti-American" ideas. This ideological and political attack is usually accompanied by the claim that an education in the liberal arts does not equip students with the skillsets that current employers need. Worse yet, universities inadvertently contributed to this marketplace approach; although joint projects with government agencies and business corporations can be traced to the immediate post-WWII era, this trend accelerated as universities sought to maintain the reputation of their brands in the face of austerity budgeting. Shortfalls in funding also led to critical changes in the make-up of university boards and presidents. These new boards, often drawn from, and in alliance with corporate interests, are more concerned with the economic bottom line, than with student or faculty welfare.

Tenured faculty are being replaced with contingent faculty, who lack job security and are paid by the course. In some liberal arts programs, such as history, contingent faculty account for almost seventy percent of all faculty in the field. In January 2014, the US House of Representatives published a report that indicated that the majority of contingent faculty lived below the official US poverty line. In 2015, one quarter of contingent faculty (adjuncts) relied on public assistance programs to survive. Although the author does note the negative impact that this situation has on quality of education students receive, he fails to consider how low pay contributes to the devaluing of higher education. After all, if universities do not value the degrees that they confer enough to pay a living wage, how can they expect any government official, politician, business executive, or concerned citizen to value those degrees? Not to mention low wages and a shrinking academic job market have led many persons with post-graduate degrees to advise others not to follow in their path. These disillusioned PhDs find themselves in debt and with few good-paying prospects; rightly, they feel that the universities they attended threw them under the bus. Thus, the very persons who normally would champion higher education, instead suffer from buyers' remorse.

Yet, this oversight does not detract from what is otherwise an excellent comparative analysis of the current crisis in higher education and the historic crisis of monasticism in the 1530s. The author ends with a series of recommendations for reform, including tightening regulation and oversight of corporate boards of universities; increase faculty and student involvement in university governance; encourage the unionization of tenured and contingent faculty to increase their collective bargaining power, and increase funding for Federal student grant and loan programs.

It is with some trepidation that I requested an ARC of "The Attack on Higher Education: The Dissolution of the American University," written by Ronald G. Musto and being published by Cambridge University Press. My trepidation came from my own career in Higher Education and my consequent familiarity with many of the issues that this ponderous volume touches upon. At the text's heart is an analogy between the present disarray in American Higher Education and events surrounding Henry VIII's Dissolution of the monasteries during his revolt against the Pope's authority in the 16th Century. The text is well documented and makes a number of interesting points, none of which anyone familiar with recent events in Higher Education would be unacquainted with. Unfortunately, the author tends to wear his ideological purity as a kind of badge of honor, frequently jumping to conclusions that are commonplace on the political left but are arguable as assertions of fact nonetheless. On the whole I found the text unconvincing largely because of this. Still, those unfamiliar with the controversies surrounding American Higher Education might take this as one of many starting points to begin to try to understand the issues involved. Allow yourself time as you approach this text as it reads like a dissertation. My advice would be to take the research for what it is worth and come to your own conclusions bearing in mind the author's obvious political agenda.