Since his early days at the University of California, Berkeley, when he was fired for
refusing to sign a loyalty oath during the Red Scare, Charles Muscatine has been a dedicated teacher
and higher education reformer. Upon his reinstatement at Berkeley, he founded "Strawberry Creek
College," a six-year experiment using full professors and small classes to teach
lower-division students. Drawing on this belief in undergraduate teaching, Muscatine's new
book now offers a radical new design for American college education.Muscatine begins with
the observation that the mediocre undergraduate curriculum offered by most colleges and universities
today is based on outdated ideas of what should be taught and what constitutes good teaching.
Although Muscatine is himself a well-established research scholar, he contends that the
publish-or-perish "research religion" of college and university faculties has
seriously damaged undergraduate education. He offers a clear distinction between publishable
research and the scholarship necessary for good teaching. Furthermore, he recommends major changes
in the education of professors, including reconsidering both the requirement of the book-length
dissertation and the current organization of graduate departments. Fixing College
Education predicts new roles for students and faculty, redefines educational breadth and
depth, and calls for deeper assessment of learning and teaching. Muscatine highlights the
outstanding colleges and universities, including Harvard, Boston University's University
Professor's Program, Evergreen State College, and Fairhaven College at Western Washington
University, that have already remade their curricula successfully or adopted features like the ones
he proposes. Muscatine argues that the new curriculum is better able than the old to produce good
scholars and good citizens for the twenty-first century.
