Paul Axelrod. Values in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace, and the Trials of Liberal Education. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Pp. 203.

When picking up a book on the crisis in the university these days, I too often make it only about half-way through. I read the Introduction and two or three chapters, assume I’ve got the point and toss the book aside. In contrast, reading Values in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace, and the Trials of Liberal Education, by Paul Axelrod, professor and dean of the Faculty of Education, York University, a leading historian of Canadian education, author of The Promise of Schooling: Education in Canada, 1800-1914 (1997), and Making a Middle Class: Student Life in English Canada During the Thirties (1990), I felt challenged from the start. As I read Values in Conflict through – it is compressed, about 200 pages, including an Introduction, Conclusion, Notes, Bibliography, Index, and five thematic chapters in the centre of the book – I found myself filling its margins with notes. Although I wanted to quarrel with several points, that was part of the challenge. There is no space in a short review even to list the topics for contention Values in Conflict generates, but one can point at least to a few of them. (Beyond the scope of this review but worth mentioning even briefly is that we benefit from Axelrod’s broadening the historical lens from Canada to include some comparative study of the university in the United States, Britain, and Australia).

In the past there was a unified pattern to higher education, an essential, core, defining idea or vision of what a liberal education ought to be, whether articulated in terms of balance and harmony, religion, science, the well-rounded Christian gentleman, Mathew Arnold’s "the best that is known and thought in the world," or what the late Bill Readings called the "university of culture." Axelrod discusses these traditions in his first chapter, "Roots and Branches of Liberal Education." This is Axelrod’s terrain, the history of the idea of liberal education, but reading the chapter to the end, I began to wonder if Axelrod was fully aware of how historicist an impression it leaves. Axelrod makes no transcendental or foundational claims for any one tradition. What readers may take away from his excavation of the past, then, is that particular traditions of liberal education were good only for particular times and particular places; all are provisional, contingent, evanescent. The tradition of liberal education is revealed as historically compromised, laden with the cultural assumptions of a particular historical moment. All traditions were adaptive in their time and all were revised in light of changing conditions. To be sure, Axelrod carries on within the general tradition of liberal education but he does not seem to be especially attached to any one of the "roots" or "branches" of that tradition. At any rate, Axelrod’s point is that now liberal education has to be rethought again, for our time.

Axelrod subsequently puts forward a vision of a liberal education for our time: "Liberal education in the university refers to activities that are designed to cultivate intellectual creativity, autonomy and resilience; critical thinking; a combination of intellectual breadth and specialized knowledge; the comprehension and tolerance of diverse ideas and experiences; informed participation in community life; and effective communication skills" (pp. 34-35). Now the question is: how should all this be viewed? Are we to assume that Axelrod’s vision of liberal education is good only for our "time," then; its sell-by date today, or one year from today? Also, perhaps there can no longer be a unity of spirit and purpose in higher education, but still one would like some sense of priorities among Axelrod’s multiple and competing missions for liberal education. For example, one would like to know Axelrod’s answer to Herbert Spencer’s grounding question: "What knowledge is of most worth"? And doesn’t Axelrod’s capacious definition of liberal education point to one source of the current crisis of the university, implying as it does uncertainty about priorities and central tasks?

Axelrod warns that liberal education in the Canadian university is at risk. He identifies the source of the most serious threat to liberal education – globalization, commercialization, and market forces; universities have come to resemble large corporations. The corporatization of the university is aided and abetted by government funding policies that "privilege certain academic endeavours over others, namely, applied science, high technology, business, selected professions, and mission-oriented research, all at the expense of the social sciences and humanities, the fine arts, and basic scholarly inquiry" (p. 86). Axelrod protests that universities are not equipped to lead or save economies, if that is the rationale for market-driven policies. In fact, government policies that focus on economic performance and targeted research actually imperil the university’s ability to generate the discovery of new knowledge that might actually have some long-term economic benefits. Axelrod says the greatest contribution universities can make to society is to ensure that liberal education thrives.

Throughout Values in Conflict, I felt that I was in the presence of an author who is learned, thoughtful, and deeply caring about the fate of liberal education. Axelrod eschews any of the overheated tropes of warfare currently employed in depictions of the university: "Crisis in the Academy," "Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe," "The Battle of the Books," "Petrified Campus," "The University in Ruins." His is a quieter inquiry, a "market correction," if I may employ such terminology here. There is an occasional swipe at postmodernism, "dogmatic and intolerant" academics, marketplace jargon, and the "growing culture of entrepreneurialism" in the academy, but Axelrod devotes little space to polemics. (The most pugnacious thing about Values in Conflict is the title).

An alternate current of optimism and disheartenment about the state of Canadian higher education runs through the book. But I would say mostly optimism; Axelrod is an educator and cannot help suggesting some steps for the renewal of liberal education. Axelrod’s endorsement of what should be, but alas is not, the most banal of truisms – the need for greater openness and transparency in academic-corporate links, intellectual autonomy, critical thinking, creative pedagogy, collegiality, and civility in discourse – is welcome. At a time when universities are under severe pressure, these are things that need to be said and Axelrod says them well.

By temperament, Axelrod is not a culture warrior. He approaches his study in the spirit of John Henry Newman’s ideal of the liberal mind (The Idea of a University) – the spirit of "equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom." And that is the problem, isn’t it? Axelrod is not angry enough, not outraged enough. Values in Conflict is put forward by Axelrod as a call for a national debate on the current direction of the university and it deserves a wide readership. But, since so many in academe in Canada, and in North America generally nowadays, hanker to engage in political and culture warfare, who will read so judicious and moderate a work besides me and thee, Professor Axelrod?

Sol Cohen
UCLA