May-June 2007

Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America. Donald N. Levine. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, 256 pages, $39.00 hardcover.

Making Teaching and Learning Visible: Course Portfolios and the Peer Review of Teaching. Daniel Bernstein, Amy Nelson Burnett, Amy Goodburn, and Paul Savory. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, Inc., 2006, 252 pages, $39.95 hardcover.


What would it take to build a culture of educational experimentation in higher education today? This question, which has a long pedigree, is once again in the air, spurred by such high-profile interventions as last year’s Spellings Commission Report and Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges, as well as by many powerful (if less-publicized) initiatives to improve teaching, strengthen undergraduate education, and enrich educational discourse. I suspect it would be hard to find educators now who do not think colleges and universities should raise real questions, worthy of serious inquiry and debate, about curricula, pedagogy, and assessment. But what would such a debate look like? And how could it be encouraged, given that it goes against the grain of so much in academic culture?  

The two books reviewed here provide provocative answers. Donald Levine’s Powers of Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America finds a vision of the possible in the glory days of the University of Chicago, when towering figures made the education of undergraduates central to the College’s intellectual community and scholarly life. In Making Teaching and Learning Visible: Course Portfolios and the Peer Review of Teaching, Daniel Bernstein, Amy Nelson Burnett, Amy
Goodburn, and Paul Savory propose a way to enliven discourse about teaching in the more prosaic times that academics inhabit today.

Donald Levine, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and dean of its undergraduate college from 1982 to 1987, has written an engaging if unconventional account of the University of Chicago’s distinctive history of curricular and pedagogical innovation. Levine recognizes that Chicago was a special case—especially during the presidency of Robert Maynard Hutchins (1929-1951), when its general-education curriculum focused on developing the “powers of the mind.” Levine explains that outstanding leadership by a series of presidents and deans, a tradition of faculty concern with liberal education, and an unusual organization that gave responsibility for undergraduate teaching to a special group of faculty made the university stand out “for sustaining a multigenerational matrix of generative ideas about the reinvention of liberal learning” (p. 183).  

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