Menand, Louis. "The PHD Problem." HARVARD MAGAZINE (November-December 2009).

Menand, Louis. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. New York: Norton, 2010. Bass professor of English Louis Menand is a literary critic and intellectual and cultural historian—author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He is also a scholar of his discipline (he co-edited the modernism volume in the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism) and of the very notion of the academy itself (Menand edited The Future of Academic Freedom, 1997). His new book, The Marketplace of Ideas, to be published in December by W.W. Norton, is informed in part by his recent service as faculty co-leader in the development of Harvard College’s new General Education curriculum, introduced this fall (the book is dedicated to his colleagues in that protracted task). In this work, Menand examines general education, the state of the humanities, the tensions between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, and, in chapter four, “Why Do Professors All Think Alike?” The following excerpts, from the third and fourth chapters and his conclusion, probe the professionalization of a research-oriented professoriate and the practice and consequences of contemporary doctoral education, and the resulting implications for liberal-arts colleges, universities, and the wider society. . . . Read the rest here: http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy. See also:

• "Author Menand on Reforming American Universities." National Public Radio January 18, 2010 (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122702647);
• Lewis-Kraus, Gideon. "The Opening of the Academic Mind: How to Rescue the Professoriate from Professionalisation." Slate January 17, 2010 (http://www.slate.com/id/2241555/);
• McClay, Wilfred M. "The Conundrum on Campus." Wall Street Journal January 14, 2010 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575003251630833606.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion).