The Eclipse of Excellence: A Critique of American Higher Education

It is...a refreshing and promising event when an accomplished young philosopher and dedicated teacher like Prof. Cahn turns his mind to the present crisis in higher education and concentrates on some home truths. Prof. Cahn has his eye on the future not the past. He is as full of divine discontent as contemporaries of his who have acquired a certain flash fame and he has much more humility. But most important of all he is concentrating in this wise and unpretentious little book on the staple realities of teaching and liberal learning rather than on labels packaging cant slogans and messianic expectations. Here is a book which it is a pleasure to commend as a restorative of common sense and hopefully of a sense of common educational purposes. Charles Frankel in the Foreword.