Peter Sacks worked as a professional journalist before joining a large suburban community college faculty. He wanted to try something different. He looked for and expected a challenge. But Sacks found his students didn't think learning anything mattered:

"Scattered mostly in the back and far side rows were young males with professional sports baseball caps, often worn backwards. Completing the uniform . . . was usually a pair of baggy shorts, a team T-shirt, and an ample attitude. Slumped in their chairs, they stared at me with looks of disdain and boredom, as if to say, 'Who in hell cares . . . ? Say something to amuse me.' I would encounter this look and The Attitude often . . . a look of utter disengagement."

Sacks was more than willing to go back into journalism, but he decided to stay and study the situation. He found that neither the students, their teachers, nor the administrators seemed to care about learning or standards. The administrators just wanted the students to be content. Other faculty members advised him to teach to the evaluations. His chairman suggested he take an acting course to improve his class-pleasing ability.

"Part One" of the book is a recounting of his experiences in the classroom and "The Sandbox Experiment." In this, he went along to see if he could get tenure and praise by ignoring standards and "pandering, usually in the form of grades." Where he started out expecting the students to read a book a week, he finished believing their anonymous "evaluations" of their instructors led to grade inflation and their disrespect of everyone. He felt that teachers must keep the students sufficiently amused and entertained.

Henry Bauer (reviewer #1) also has students who won't study. 75% of his freshman chemistry students used to do better on their final than on daily quizzes. Now 70% do much worse. (They can study the quizzes to prepare for the final.) Nationally, students study less and are bored more than ever before. (34% of high school seniors are bored and 35% spend less than 6 hours per week on homework plus study.) Bauer asks,"How can colleges suddenly get them to spend lots of time memorizing and working problems and thinking?"

"Part Two" of Sacks' book is "Education in Postmodern America." He found the idea that the customer-consumer is king was pervasive. "How hard should a consumer have to work at buying something?" Their buying habits are similar to their elders. "The largest single section in our bookstores consists of best-selling works on angels, UFO's, paranormal phenomena, etc." "Students have been conditioned by an overly nurturing, hand-holding educational system not to take responsibility for their own actions." Sacks attacks customer-driven education and enrollment-maximizing administrators rather than the students.

Reviewer Henry Bauer says other reports are similar, suggesting the following:

• Oscar Handlin's "A Career at Harvard" in American Scholar, Winter, 1996.
• Paul Trout's "What Students Want: a Meditation on Course Evaluations," Montana Professor, Fall 1996.
• John Stone's "Inflated Grades, Inflated Enrollment, and Inflated Budgets . . ." Education Policy Analysis Archives (http://sea monkey.ed.asu.edu/epaa/abs3.html)
• John Damron's "Instructor Personality and the Politics of the Classroom" (http://vax1. mankato.msus.edu/~pkbrandon/Damron_pol itics.html).
• Larry Crumbley and Patrick Moore of the Society for a Return to Academic Standards (http://www.tamu.edu:8000/~cr umble/sfrtas.html) and (http://www.ualt. edu/~epmoo re/index.html).
• John Schommer's "A Fable of Reform," American Mathematical Monthly, February, 1996.
• Henry Bauer's "The New Generations: Students Who Don't Study," forthcoming in the Journal of AOAC International.