Academic Duty

The university today is under attack from all sides. Parents and students resent the escalating costs of education and wonder where the money is being spent. Aspiring scholars feel betrayed by an institution that prepares them for nonexistent jobs. Critics on the right condemn the teachers who neglect "the canon" while critics on the left condemn the creeping corporatism on campus. Politicians seek greater control over the conduct of research and add new conditions to the use of government funds. Worst of all, the academics are increasingly uneasy in an environment that fosters competition, discourages cooperation, and has made "publish or perish" a condition of survival.Donald Kennedy, the former president of Stanford University and currently a member of its faculty, has been at the front lines of the issues confounding the academy today. In this important new book, he brings his experience and concern to bear on the present state of the university. He examines teaching, graduate training, research, and their ethical context in the research university. Aware of the numerous pressures that academics face, from the pursuit of open inquiry in the midst of culture wars, to confusion and controversy over the ownership of ideas, to the scramble for declining research funds and facilities, he explores the whys and wherefores of academic misconduct, be it scholarly, financial, or personal.Kennedy suggests that meaningful reform cannot take place until more rigorous standards of academic responsibility--to students, the university, and the public--are embraced by both faculty and the administration. With vision and compassion, he offers an important antidote to recent attacks from without that decry the university and the professoriate, and calls upon the college community to counter those attacks by looking within and fulfilling its duties.

For anyone interested in the future of higher education in this country, Donald Kennedy's important new book, Academic Duty, is the place to start...Much has been written about academic freedom, little about academic responsibility. Kennedy's account of the multiple demands on scholars to publish, to teach well, to mentor, to serve the university, to reach beyond the walls of academe and to risk change captures both the pleasures and pitfalls awaiting those entering the profession. His analysis also dispels many of the myths about what professors do that have undermined popular confidence in the academic world...As Kennedy makes clear, the future of research universities is bound up in their tangled partnership with both government and industry; how universities will define their role in this partnership remains to be seen., Academic Duty is a stimulating book...The main arguments have been tested in a seminar Kennedy organised for senior doctoral students at Stanford, and part of his purpose in writing the book is to offer advice and guidance to those about to enter university professions. He is good at identifying problems...[Kennedy's approach] is bracing and the book is a good read. [He] puts his case forcefully, drawing generously on his own experiences and pulling no punches on issues that matter to him, such as the definition and maintenance of a core curriculum, the dangers of policies of positive discrimination, or of giving way to fashionable fads., [A] thorough and deeply informed review of the assorted intellectual, political, and financial problems confronting an elite university today., The best sections of [Academic Duty] concern government regulations about university scientists. Mr. Kennedy served as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration during the Carter Administration and thus knows quite a bit about regulation. He is also good on the issue of plagiarism, and is surprisingly firm in his call to universities to resist the efforts of animal rights activists to restrict the use of animals in research., Academic Duty is a chatty, elegantly written book offering an inside view of university by someone who knows: Donald Kennedy...It's a good primer for would-be presidents or outsiders who think they have a new model for the university. One of its great virtues is that it recognizes the vast and irreducible array of competing claims and purposes that a university must fulfill...Unlike so much of the literature on the university, this book strives to be fair, balanced and non-ideological, preferring to find a middle ground on thorny issues of tenure, research and publication, ownership of ideas, performance measurement and that popular campus buzz term 'total quality management.

Donald Kennedy is President Emeritus and Bing Professor of Environmental Science, Emeritus, at Stanford University.