Stanley Aronowitz is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Long involved in the labor movement and in education, he is founder of the Center for Worker Education at the City
College of New York. The author of over eighteen books, including From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and
America's Future, he lives in New York City.
Review
"The book's real contribution lies in Aronowitz's ability to pull together the dismaying history of a national
failure."
--Renee Tursi, The New York Times Book Review
"Aronowitz should be commended for the high seriousness of his endeavor, which sidesteps the comparatively
petty canon wars to ask: What is the true purpose of higher education and how can we restructure our universities
to achieve it?"
--Publishers Weekly
"One of the most important books written on higher education in the last fifty years."
--Henry A. Giroux, author of The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence
"Bold, brassy, and provocative."
--Michelle Fine, coauthor of The Unknown City: Lives of Poor and Working-Class Young Adults
Beacon Press Web Site, August, 2001
Summary
Americans can't get a good education for love or money, argues Stanley Aronowitz in this groundbreaking look
at the structure and curriculum of higher education. Moving beyond the canon wars begun in Allan Bloom's The Closing
of the American Mind, Aronowitz offers a vision for true higher learning that places a well-rounded education back
at the center of the university's mission.
