In her Sunday post on pedagogy and U.S. intellectual history, Lauren linked to Louis Menand’s recent New Yorker piece on “why we have college,” and asked what we thought of it. The Menand piece is thoughtful, interesting, and very much worth reading (like most of what Menand writes IMO).  In the course of reviewing two books on the (eternal) Crisis in American Higher Education®–Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift and Professor X’s In the Basement of the Ivory Tower–Menand considers some of the reasons we might (and do) give for why students ought to have a college education. Menand Read more