Charles J. Sykes has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators. The most-rated is The Hollow Men.
Fail U.
Summary
The cost of a college degree has increased by 1,125% since 1978 - four times the rate of inflation. Total student debt is $1.3 trillion. Many private universities charge tuitions ranging from $60-70,000 per year. Nearly 2/3 of all college students must borrow to study, and the average student graduates with more than $30,000 in debt. 53% of college graduates under 25 years old are unemployed or underemployed (working part-time or in low-paying jobs that do not require college degrees). Professors - remember them? They rarely teach undergraduates at many major universities. Seventy-six percent of all university classes are taught by part-time, untenured faculty. In Fail U., Charles J. Sykes asks, "Is it worth it?" With chapters exploring the staggering costs of a college education, the sharp decline in tenured faculty and teaching loads, the explosion of administrator jobs, the grandiose building plans (gyms, food courts, student recreation centers), and the hysteria surrounding the "epidemic" of campus rapes, "triggers", "micro-aggressions", and other forms of alleged trauma, Fail U. concludes by offering a different vision of higher education - one that is affordable, more productive, and better-suited to meet the needs of a diverse range of students. Provocative, persuasive, clear-eyed, and even amusing, Fail U. strips the academic emperor of its clothes to reveal the American university system as it really is - and how it must change.
©2016 Charles J. Sykes (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
The Hollow Men
Summary
College curriculums that were once centered on instruction in the classics of Western civilization have become smorgasbords where almost anything qualifies as a course in the liberal arts and where political conformity is enforced by professors. Stanford University, caving in to demands from the Black Student Union (“We don’t want to read any more dead white guys”), removed Homer, Dante, Luther, Darwin, and Freud from its course on Western civilization. At Dartmouth, a professor of women’s studies describes the goal of her program as, simply, “the reconstruction of reality.” Sykes calls the abandonment of the great books a “startling triumph for unreason” and shows how American higher education is turning out hollow men and women––apathetic, ignorant, and empty of the civilizational patrimony that should be theirs.
©1990 Charles J. Sykes (P)1991 Blackstone Audio, Inc.