Even as American universities are recognized as the best in the world in conducting research and educating new generations of scientists and scholars, they are under attack as never before, politically and economically, from both ends of the political spectrum and by just about every constituent group. What accounts for this contradiction? Will the pressures being exerted on institutions of higher education diminish their quality and turn America's national treasure into an endangered species? How can universities cope with the often conflicting needs and demands of students, faculties and the outside world?

These questions are examined in The American University, published this year by Cornell University Press in honor of Frank H.T. Rhodes, Cornell president emeritus. The volume contains revisions of presentations by five current and emeritus university presidents, the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and others at a symposium convened as part of events marking Rhodes' retirement in May 1995. The symposium was sponsored by the dean of the faculty and the University Faculty Council of Representatives. A commentary by Rhodes is included in the book.

Editor of the book is Ronald G. Ehrenberg, vice president for academic programs, planning and budgeting and the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell. He gives credit for the idea for and the development of the symposium program to Peter C. Stein, professor of physics and dean of the Cornell faculty, who also contributed the foreword to the book.

In the opening essay, Ehrenberg asks, "Will America's great research universities make the hard choices that will be necessary if they are to prosper in the years ahead?" After delineating challenges facing universities today, he concludes, "Our research universities will prosper in the years ahead only if they 'grow by substitution.' Resources to support new and emerging fields will be found only if institutions cut back on some of their activities ... [and are] selective in what they seek to accomplish."

Excerpts from each of the book's essays follow:

• William G. Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and president emeritus of Princeton University, "No Limits": "A college or university, and its admissions staff, must also consider the longer-term benefits to the society at large that come from educating talented students from many races and backgrounds. A principal job of these institutions is to build human capital, for the long-term benefit of society at large ... They cannot escape the obligation to make hard decisions that transcend the immediate interests of particular individuals. If the admissions/learning process in fact contributes to building a more civilized world, everyone will benefit, including the hypothetical rejected white student and his or her children. Admission to selective colleges and universities is not a zero-sum game."
• Charles M. Vest, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Research Universities: Overextended, Underfocused; Overstressed, Underfunded": "Universities must reinvigorate a commitment to excellence in our society. This nation has lost its will to excel. Perhaps this is a natural response in a relatively peaceful era in which our economy has been weak, but it creates an atmosphere that has permitted a rise in various forms of populism that do not value institutions and that question anything having the appearance of elitism or privilege. Analyzing or explaining away our predicament does not change the situation, however. America has to stop wallowing in negative journalism and visionless politics."
• Harold T. Shapiro, president of Princeton University, "Cognition, Character, and Culture in Undergraduate Education: Rhetoric and Reality": "The university should continue to play a role in helping us give our lives meaning and moral significance, in helping us understand the important contemporary lessons of 'the golden rule' (taking other people's interests into account), and in teaching us to accept the inevitable anxiety that characterizes a moral and pluralistic society committed to democracy and change ... It is the responsibility of the contemporary university to ensure that the great questions of human existence are before us for our students and faculty to wrestle with. Further, faculty, staff, and administrators must try to exhibit in both word and deed an exemplary commitment to ethically informed principles, and a commitment not only to their privileges but to their informing values and responsibilities."
• Marye Anne Fox, vice president for research at the University of Texas at Austin, "Graduate Students: Too Many and Too Narrow?": "When the academy fails to teach learning to learn as the goal of higher education, it cheats at least some of its students, who erroneously accept the premise that their highest intellectual goal is to become a replica of their teacher. Such graduates reproduce their teachers' jobs, and often their professors' own thesis research problems, in a new environment, striving under adverse circumstances to come up with incremental advances. Such replication is tolerable when what is needed is geometric expansion of the personnel working in a given area; it fails miserably when there is a flat or declining academic base ... perhaps [educators] should not even think about whether there should be fewer graduate students but rather how to provide a new continuum of options for graduate and postgraduate programs."
• Hanna H. Gray, president emeritus of the University of Chicago, "Prospect for the Humanities": "Universities have the dual function of conserving, renewing, and rethinking knowledge of the past and its inherited traditions, while at the same time questioning the ideas and the assumptions that are taken for granted and engaging in the potentially innovative work of new discovery and fresh, often revisionist, interpretation ... there have been instances of lost causes and trendy errors, as there have been many episodes of inbred resistance to the intellectually innovative and impatient disregard for the continuing vitality of the substantive accomplishments of predecessors."
• Neal Lane, NSF director, "Prospects for Science and Technology": "... the research community has generally lived an independent and somewhat isolated existence within American society. That is no longer tenable. Informed debate on public policy, high-value jobs, competition in global markets, and the education of current and future generations require that science become a more integral part of our national fabric. This does not mean that basic research will be any less important in the future than it has been in the past. But it does imply some change in behavior, in values, and in focus."
• Urie Bronfenbrenner, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor, Human Development and Family Studies, at Cornell: "Prospect for the Social Sciences in the Land Grant University": "The progressive disarray of many of our most basic social institutions and in the society at large imperils the quality of life and the competence and character not only of the present generation but, perhaps even more, of generations to come ... the social sciences today face a special challenge and responsibility -- that is, to inform the future leaders of our society about the nature, extent, and consequences of the social problems confronting the nation and to engage them in a common effort to address these problems in a responsible and disciplined way, not only in the classroom but in real-life settings outside the university."
• Frank H.T. Rhodes, president emeritus, Cornell University, "The American University: National Treasure or Endangered Species?": "... the greatest perils lie not from dangers without, but from weaknesses within universities ... They require bold, decisive, and visionary leadership ... effective and imaginative management of resources ... a new commitment to clients (students, alumni and society at large) ... a more general willingness to come to terms with new expectations, unacknowledged issues ... the restoration of community ... [and] new patterns of governance."