What do you get when you cross Don Quixote and a former university president? A book, evidently, in the form of Higher Education in the Digital Age, by William G. Bowen. A former president of Princeton University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Bowen is founding chairman of ITHAKA, a nonprofit that promotes digital technology in academia.
This book is not destined to enhance Bowen’s reputation, but as an attempt by one of America’s most celebrated educational leaders to give a measured assessment of how higher education is adapting to the digital age, it deserves some attention.
According to his wife, whom Bowen cites in his opening sentence, he has a “tendency to flail away at windmills” and “take on topics” the fainter-hearted might leave untouched. But what can he say?—“my DNA is what it is”—he is drawn to
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