Roger Soder 

Wayne C. Booth. 
The Vocation of a Teacher: Rhe-
torical Occasions, 1967-1988. 
Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 1988, 353 pp. 

As suggested by the title, we have here 
for delight and instruction some two decades' 
worth of speeches, articles, and journal en-
tries. Some of the nineteen selections are ad-
dressed particularly to students and teachers; 
others have as their audience university ad-
ministrators, journalists, that amorphous "gen-
eral public," or, as with the journal entries, the 
author himself. The questions to which Booth 
returns, one way or another, are the perennial 
ones. What does it mean to be a teacher? 
What are our obligations as teachers? What 
should we know? How are we to talk about 
the idea of a university? There is much to 
mine here in this consistently high-quality col-
lection. 

Sheila Slaughter. 
The Higher Learning and High 
Technology: Dynamics of Higher 
Education Polley Formation. 
Albany: State University of New 
York Press, 1990, 293 pp. 

The title is a bit misleading. We are not 
talking about high-tech in the sense of lasers 
and levitating trains. The focus here is on the 
workings and impact of the Business-Higher 
Education Forum, the collection of chief exec-
utive officers and presidents of major re-
search universities, mostly American Associa-
tion of University Administrators (AAUA), that 
has since 1978 influenced higher education 
policy. Although most of the attention is nec-
essarily focused on the dynamics and politics 
of Fortune 500 businesses and a limited num-
ber of universities, the lessons and cautionary 
insights that can be gleaned from this analysis 
of high-level joint ventures can be useful for 
those concerned about what is sometimes un-
witting and sometimes unwarranted and al-

ways problematic intrusion in all types of 
higher education institutions. 

William D. Schaefer. 
Education Without Compromise. 
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 
1990, 153 pp. 

Although the author is a professor of En-
glish at a major research university and for-
mer executive director of the Modern Lan-
guage Association, his observations on 
problems of higher education in this short vol-
ume apply to all types of institutions and dis-
ciplines. He joins the discussion on .such mat-
ters as the nature of liberal education; 
publishing versus perishing and the variants 
thereof; specialization; and the teaching of 
writing and the teaching of the humanities in 
nine nontechnical essays, all of which gently, 
but firmly, poke and prod. There is little em-
phasis on new sets of clever answers; rather, 
Schaefer prefers to remind us what the ques-
tions ought to be. 

Thomas Cleary, ed. and trans. 
The Tao of Politics. 
Boston: Shambhala, 1990, 101 pp. 
(paper) 

Selections are included here from sec-
ond-century B.C.E. discourses by eight Taoist 
masters on the arts of leadership, statecraft, 
and politics, conducted during a time of na-
tional reconstruction following centuries of 
warfare. The observations of the sages reso-
nate across the ages. To wit: "If you stretch 
out a net where birds will fly by, it is only one 
eye of the net that catches a bird, but if you 
make a net of one eye, you'll never catch the 
bird." "Cultivated people fear loss of justice; 
infantile people fear loss of material advan-
tages. By observing what they fear, you can 
tell their differences." "No one stumbles over a 
mountain, but people do trip over anthills." 
Shrewd, insightful, and sure to jar all but the 
most jaded. 


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