After defining what they mean by telic reforms Grant and Reisman flesh out their three ideal types of telic reforms in three subsequent chapters. In chapter three they explore the neo-classical great books programme at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland (and to a lesser extent at the campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico) with its we want to create the carriers and bearers of Western civilisation at its heart. In chapter four Grant and Reisman explore the communal-expressive ideal type of reform using Kresge College which was, at the time, part of the new University of California Santa Cruz, as its example. Kresge, according to Grant and Reisman, adopted their reform model of change me and I can change my world from social psychologist Carl Rogers. In chapter five Grant and Reisman explore the activist-radical type of telic reform using Audrey Cohen’s The College for Human Services (now the Metropolitan College of New York), as its prime example. The College for Human Services adopted a type of reform whose battle call was change the student and he or she can change the world making it a much better place in the process.
In later chapters Grant and Reisman explore similar reform attempts at and in other colleges and universities across the United States, all of which sought to bring engaged faculty and engaged students together in engaged and engaging interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary colleges and universities. Chapter seven focuses on New College in Sarasota, Florida. Chapter eight focuses on the colleges at the University of California of Santa Cruz. Chapter nine focuses on the two new colleges, at the time, in the university system of the state of New Jersey, Ramapo College and Stockton State College (now Stockton University).
I quite enjoyed Grant's and Reisman’s book. I was somewhat familiar with attempts to reform American undergraduate higher education but The Perpetual Dream added immensely to my previous knowledge of attempts to reform American undergraduate education. There were a number of things I found interesting about the book. I think that Grant and Reisman were correct in arguing that one of the central things these reforms wanted to do was to create a sense of community. I liked that Grant and Reisman took a historical, sociological, and ethnographic approach to higher education reforms. I liked that The Perpetual Dream was in large part ethnographic in that Grant and Reisman individually and collectively spent time interviewing those at colleges and in schools undertaking telic reforms.
One of the disappointments I had with the book is that Grant and Reisman aren't as explicit in tying these reforms to the economic, political, cultural, and demographic change the US was going through in the 20th century. That said, one gets the sense that Grant and Reisman are arguing that the ideal type reforms they explore were attempts to counter the anomie unleashed by modernity. In this context I found it interesting and, in hindsight, obvious, that money, economics, was central to these experiments in American higher education. Monies seem to be an eternal problem for experimenting colleges particularly of the private variety. They aren’t mainstream after all. They are more akin to institutionalised bohemias. Antioch College, for example, perhaps the example of the activist-radical type, seems to have been almost always be cash strapped. The Metropolitan College of New York is facing financial problems as I type.
Political realities have also impacted the longevity of American reform colleges and reform within colleges and universities. Recently New College has been in the news thanks to the successful attempt of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his merry men to remake the college in their own politically and ideologically correct image. They want to make it, they have said, the HIllsdale College of the South. Hillsdale is a favoured college of some segments of the American right What is happening to New College reflects the broader reality that since the administration of Richard Nixon in the late 1960s and early 1970s the US has become increasingly dominated by neo-liberalism and right wing populism. Note of interest, one of the other telic colleges of the countercultural era, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, agreed to accept New College students who did not wish to attend the Hillsdale of the South. Paradoxically Hampshire has recently decided to close because of economic difficulties.
There were other things I found less troubling about the book. I found, for example, Grant’s and Reisman’s contention that unionisation efforts by faculty in American universities added a layer of centralisation and bureaucratisation to American colleges and universities spot on but wondered why they did not pay as much attention to something else that added centralisation and bureaucratisation to American universities, the increase in administrative staff. From the vantage point of 2026 it is clear that not only has there been an exponential increase in administrative bureaucrats in American universities since the time Grant and Reisman wrote, but that these bureaucrats, because they are addicted to federal dollars and the ties of research dollars to college and university rankings, are undercutting faculty co-governance and faculty freedom of speech and research. Perhaps the faculty unionisation efforts Grant and Reisman criticise, were a necessary countervailing force even if it has proved to be ineffective in pushing back against increasing administrative authoritarianism in America's major research universities.
Grant and Reisman rightly note that the increasingly consumerist model of American higher education and its need for student consumers has impacted reform efforts. It is, as they also note, not easy to convince students who have an increasingly I go to school so I can get a job mentality that a liberal arts reform college or programme is worth their while. Needless to say, many of the business types that serve on college and university boards of governance have a similar "pragmatic" attitutde.
Finally, I was intrigued by the fact that one might possibly and profitably apply another Weberian proposition to the reform movements in American higher education, namely, Weber's conception of authority. Many if not most of these reform efforts began with a charismatic reform figure and, increasingly, over time, became tradition bound and bureaucratic after the charismatic figure leaves or dies. At St. John’s, for instance, Scott Buchanan eventually came to the conclusion that books, including books outside the Western canon, needed to be added to the great books reading list. By that time, however, he had left St. John’s and St. John’s curriculum had been fossilised and sanctified, had been, in other words, turned into a tradition by those who followed in his wake and any effort to change that tradition was seen as a profanation.
As Grant and Reisman note academic reform is a perpetual dream, something that never ends and something that is often grounded in and founded on utopian ideologies. In my academic life I have been privy to several attempts to reform the curriculum all of which involved the reinvention of the metaphoric wheel. When I was at the University of Albany, for instance, there was Project Renaissance, an attempt to develop a living-learning interdisciplinary programme for selected students at the University (Grant and Reisman ignore these living learning reform efforts). It was actually hardly interdisciplinary at all. It was comparative. When I was at RPI there was an attempt to create an interdisciplinary curriculum with classes of over one hundred students, something hardly likely, in my opinion, to create a sense of community let alone a helpful learning environment. That "reform" effort seems to have ended as well. And so it goes and so it will likely continue to go.
