Office Hours One Academic Life [Paperback]

A personal look inside the black box of American higher education.

Even a cursory glance at todays headlines reveals that higher education is in crisis. Tuition outpaces inflation, states slash budgets, graduation rates decline, and technology threatens to reshape everything. Universities continue to crank out new PhDs, but many will become poorly paid members of a secondary, adjunct labor force teaching most of todays college courses. Scholars lucky enough to be on the tenure track must publish more and more, while students at large universities sit in ever larger lectures, seldom interacting with professors.

Yet every year, thousands of applicants from the world over apply to Americas most prestigious colleges and universities, and students and their families continue to spend huge sums on college.

What are colleges and universities really likefrom the inside? What do we do wrong, and what are we doing right? What is it like to be a professor and administrator at one of Americas prestigious educational institutions? This memoir asks these questions, in a very personal way.

This is the story of a serious scholar finding his vocation, his students and his gratifications, amidst the near-impossibility of such discoveries in higher education today. The writing is beautiful and the accounts of times, places and institutions are alternatively moving, penetrating and provocative.
 Wendy Brown
Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley

Written in lyrical and sparkling prose, Harry Hirschs Office Hours is, on the one hand, an intimate and insightful memoir of a Jewish gay mans trajectory from a Chicago boyhood to Princeton, Harvard, and beyond. On the other hand, its a penetrating critical analysis of college and university approaches to education by an accomplished professor and dean (and dedicated teacher) who knows of what he speaks. Office HourlC(