Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska, is the latest in a long line of books that address the wayward nature of the American academy, stretching back to Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind. What makes Academically Adrift stand out is that it is not just an anecdotal portrait of the limited academic efforts in America, but that it is backed up by hard evidence – in the form of a survey of 2,300 students across 24 American colleges and universities. This has made the authors’ conclusions difficult to ignore.
