Word: benders
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Occasionally, Bender drops his guard and lets loose with lines like this one from the prologue, which describes the writings of an 18th-century New Yorker, Adam Furguson...
Using these lives as a capacious data base, Bender claims that New York is America's only possible intellectual salvation. Only a large, bustling and--most important--creative metropolis can lure professors back to the People. Only New York City, he argues for 300-plus pages, can sully the pristine Ivory tower and in the process end higher education's self-satisfaction and utter irrelevence...
...Bender has little interest with college towns, which are ultimately dismissed as the 99-pound-weaklings of urban America. The heart of the book, rather, is a discussion of the three major schools in New York--the elite Columbia (founded in 1754 as Kings College), the alternative New York University (founded in 1831), and the public City College (founded in 1866)--and how each tried to balance the academy against the unavoidable democratic influences of the city around...
...Bender follows Columbia's history, he tells a tale of how, in the late 1800s, higher education became more important to society but never capitulated to the code of the surrounding streets. Change would have meant a more open admissions policy and a more independent faculty, but Columbia resisted change. It's an incredible story, albeit a disheartening...
Through it all, Bender's history is gripping because it is replete with good guys and bad guys, good universities and bad universities and, ultimately, good democrats and bad aristocrats...