Though many people know that American universities now offer an inadequate and incoherent education from a leftist viewpoint that excludes moderate and conservative ideas, few people understand how ...much this matters, how it happened, how bad it is, or what can be done about it. In The University We Need, Professor Warren Treadgold shows the crucial role of universities in American culture and politics, the causes of their decline in administrative bloat and inept academic hiring, the effects of the decline on teaching and research, and some possible ways of reversing the downward trend. He explains that one suggested reform, the abolition of tenure, would further increase the power of administrators, further decrease the quality of professors, and make universities even more doctrinaire and intolerant. Instead, he proposes federal legislation to monitor the quality and honesty of professors and to limit spending on administration to no more than 20 percent of university budgets (Harvard now spends 40 percent). Finally, he offers a specific proposal for the founding of a new leading university that could seriously challenge the dominance of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley and attract conservative and moderate faculty and students now isolated in universities and colleges that are either leftist or mediocre. While agreeing with conservative critics that universities are in severe crisis, Treadgold believes that the universities' problems largely transcend ideology and have grown worse partly because disputants on both sides of the academic debate have misunderstood the methods and goals of higher education.
The history of Nicetas Choniates records events in Byzantium from the death of Alexius I Comnenus in 1118 to the aftermath of the capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Born around ...1156, Nicetas held a series of increasingly important offices until he became the highest-ranking minister in the Byzantine bureaucracy. After 1204 he eventually took refuge with the Byzantine government in exile at Nicaea, where he revised and continued the history he had already produced in an earlier version. Though usually and rightly considered one of the half-dozen greatest Byzantine histories, it received relatively little scholarly attention until the Dutch scholar Jan-Louis van Dieten published several major studies on it, including the first modern edition in 1975. The American scholar Harry Magoulias published an English translation in 1984, and a comprehensive monograph by Alicia Simpson appeared in 2013. Now, just five years later, we have a second monograph by Theresa Urbainczyk, author of two useful monographs on the early Byzantine histories of Socrates of Constantinople and Theodoret of Cyrrhus.
A worldwide trend toward democracy is surely one of the more remarkable phenomena of our times, even if the movement twoard that goal may often be haphazard and elusive. Past history will provide a ...healthy skepticism concerning the likelihood of democracy being reached in the near future in many parts of the world, as well as a preparedness for the possibility that many countries apparently close to the "institutional divide" are going to slip back rather than cross it soon. Nevertheless, the past 2600 years, or even 5000, yield the reassuring message that during that long period freedom has improved its extent significantly, with respect both to geographical breadth and institutional depth.This book is the first to attempt to describe the history of the growth of freedom on a world scale within one single set of covers. It sets out not to redefine freedom nor to discvoer freedom where no one else has, nor to argue that freedom is the proud possession of one country or tradition or people. Its purpose instead is to show how certain elements of free society made their appearance in an amazing variety of places, from ancient Sumeria and China to medieval Japan, modern Czechoslovakia and Costa Rica, in areas both inside and outside of the Western European and North American tradition that will probably be familiar to most readers of the English language edition of this book.The whole story, with its fits and starts, triumphs and tragedies, deserves the thoughtful reflection of everyone who in the wish to establish and protect freedom would avoid needless disappointment and despair and desires to act intelligently to attain the attainable. But even for the quietest, the person who has no faith in human action to improve man's lot, the story is worth pondering, for along with failure and misery it holds much that is noble and uplifting, tells of much gain for humanity through patient suffering and self-sacrifice, and catches a vision of liberty for all in the present an dpossible future that was inconceivable at the dawn of history.
A Reply to a recent review Treadgold, Warren
Byzantinische Zeitschrift,
04/2003, Letnik:
96, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In replying to Dr. Wolfram Brandes' review of my History of the Byzantine State and Society and Concise History of Byzantium in BZ 95 (2002), pp. 716–25, I shall confine myself to correcting what I ...consider distortions of fact, and pass over my differences with the reviewer about theory, which cannot be usefully discussed until those distortions are corrected.
